Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Let's get this out of the way: I don't mine. I did the mining tutorials, tried lasering some space rocks in lowsec, and decided that this kind of gameplay wasn't for me. Orbiting a rock for an hour was bland. If you can't stand to read ideas about mining that come from a non-miner, please don't comment.

Despite not mining, I consider mining to be fairly important to the game as a whole. I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about it. It's eventually the source of all the stuff that gets blown up in Eve. Despite it's importance, mining is essentially a robot activity - you click a few buttons every few minutes at most, a computer can be easily scripted to do the same thing, and you mostly do something else while the ore rolls in. This isn't exciting. It's not even mildly interesting. It's great if you need/want to do something else at the same time, not so great if you are wanting to spend your Eve time playing Eve.

This is going to be a sort of holistic change - each component idea would more than likely be terrible on its own - so please read everything before making a judgement on it. To begin, here's my goals with this idea:

• Leave existing miners able to do things mostly the same way as before and make comparable isk/hour
• Get more types of ships involved in a mining fleet
• Make mining more intellectually stimulating
• Enable new avenues of development for mining

The first thing to address is asteroid naming. Right now, you can see what sort of ore the asteroid has as soon as you are on grid with it. Instead of the current naming set, where we have Veldspar and Condensed Scordite and so on, we'd have more general types, such as "Carbonaceous Asteroid", "Metallic Asteroid", or "Silicaceous Asteroid". Essentially, these would be only a "surface" judgement of the asteroid.

Next, each general class of asteroids would have their own distribution of ore types. For example, Veldspar might be most commonly found in Metallic Asteroids while Plagioclase might be most commonly found in Silicaceous Asteroids. Alongside their ore content, asteroids would also have an amount of useless rock. Spawned asteroids could be entirely rock or entirely ore, but will most likely spawn with some amount of both. The distribution of ore types in any particular belt would remain based on the region of space and the security status of the system, but 'rare' spawns of higher value ores could probably be added as a sort of reward for good surveying. When mining from an asteroid, the laser pulls in a random distribution of materials split between the ore found in the asteroid and waste rock, but not exceeding the remaining amounts of either. The waste rock is automatically ejected back into space, so it doesn't actually take up space in the cargo hold and isn't actually a real item.

The Survey Scanner will have to change to accommodate this new ore system. While it will still inform you of the amount and type of ore present in nearby asteroids, it will no longer give perfect results. Instead, the closer the asteroid is to your ship and the better your sensor strength or scan resolution , the better the scan results would be. The scan errors would be randomly assigned to reduce the number of ways around getting close. The scan would also provide the amount of rock present for each asteroid in range and an estimate of the asteroid's instability..

What is instability? This would be a new trait for each asteroid and randomly generated. It would be the percent chance per mining laser cycle that the asteroid would fracture and split into chunks. The chunks would vary in size and all together would account for the old asteroid's ore and rock contents. I'd expect things to be weighted so that the asteroid fractured into either one or two larger pieces along with several smaller ones. Instability would have values inside of a range fixed by the particular belt the asteroids spawned within, with belts that spawn higher instability asteroids having better chances at high value ore.

The new asteroids resulting from a fracture would drift away with a fairly fixed momentum, so larger pieces would drift away slowly (slow enough a mining barge wouldn't have trouble keeping up) while the smaller pieces would go faster. Because of Eve's physics system, these asteroids would eventually slow and come to a stop. To counter some of this movement related difficulty, Tractor Beams would be able to target and move asteroids.

In order to give an appropriate level of choice to miners, Asteroid belts would probably need to increase in size and density. The asteroid field update mechanics would also probably need modified, so that every downtime that an asteroid isn't mined the total volume of the asteroid increases and some of its rock shifts to ore. That way useless asteroids don't eventually clog the most used belts.

That is as far as i got...

Might want to read farther. I'm not trying to displace the "old ways". I'm hoping this suggestion opens up more appeal for those who don't want to just laser space rocks and Fozziesov just made mining much more important to nullsec so there will soon be more demand for better mining gameplay.

I like salvaging stuff, but no one ever runs a salvage fleet. If there was a need for someone with a bunch of tractor beams to be in a mining fleet, I'd probably jump at the chance as long as the compensation was good.

Watching over a mining fleet is mostly boring and is largely pointless in highsec. Giving combat hulls some purpose when on grid with mining ships would help alleviate that boredom.

After all, Eve is a game and if I'm not interested in playing the game something is wrong.

Read most of it, and if miners that do as they do now earn about the same isk as they do now the new system can NOT give higher ore rewards or it would have negative impact on the overall ore price and therefor isk earned by "normal" mining.

Having to scan each asteroid is a massive increase in work to use mining crystals, compared to just targeting on the overview sorted name (or type, some time since i had asteroids on my overview :P)

What we are left with is either a system where "normal" miners are screwed for income, or a new system that bring nothing of value since normal miners mine as good

Want mining to be more fun in fleets? Do like my Alliance and mine together whilst drinking beer.

Let the good times roll.

And? You still have just one brain running. I'm trying to put a system together that will encourage people to get together and get them to stay at their keyboards. Sure, this system will allow you to multi-box your booster and hauler accounts for some increases in efficiency, but it won't be the same increase as ten people working together.



50% more work is still not a lot if the initial quantity of work is low. "Click-Click-Click" vs "Click-Click". I spend more effort navigating the forums than this would require.



The guy spotting asteroids for you would probably be in a frigate, not another mining barge. Probably a corp mate who helps out for a fee. That or just one more alt to go along with your booster alt and your hauler alt and your twelve miner alts.



You are confusing efficiency for volume. Less time spent getting the same amount of minerals can result in more minerals, but only if people use the extra time to access previously untapped resources. This is no more than what happens when new players join the game and decide that they like zapping space rocks for a living. The increase only seems shocking because this one would be along the efficiency axis instead of the manpower axis.

Again, any price fluctuations resulting from this will probably be slow. Further, markets are self-correcting. As mineral prices drop, the value of mining drops, some people quit mining because it no longer seems profitable enough compared to alternatives, the supply of minerals decreases, and the value of minerals stabilizes.

+1 to new ideas for mining.
-1 for your ideas.

Mining needs help, yet yours adds to much complexity.
EVE is an MMO and any major changes for mining need to be handled on the group level not so much the solo level.

Many miners are still looking for the Survey Scanner to report findings to the whole fleet - baked in Scan results to the overview instead of a separate window - reasons to put the bigger mining support ships in a belt while in low-null sec, etc.

And yes the current - lock-mine-haul mechanic of mining blows but it works.

I think you are being over-dramatic. "Into the toilet" isn't going to happen because of how market economies work. You will lose the less interested/dedicated miners first, their contributions to the mineral pool will stop coming, prices will stabilize.

You are right that CCP would want to wait for the recent changes to ore and to nullsec sov sort out before doing anything new to mining, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about future changes right now.



Actually, let's look at my actual words:


As you will note, I am merely stating the principles of a market economy. Those who will quit mining are those who mine because it's easy money, not because they enjoy mining. The miners who like mining will keep mining as less dedicated people drop out of the market.

As for what I do for money, I do PI, because I like logistics problems and industry. I do PI specifically because normal Industry has a high SP barrier to being profitable and because mining in its current form is boring to me. That said, I would welcome some love for Planetary Interaction, because the current state of PI is pretty simplistic and comes with an annoying UI.



I think you need to go re-read what I said. I was making a factual statement: Every new miner increases the pool of available minerals and puts downward pressure on mineral prices. You may be correct that most new pilots don't go into mining and so demand growth has usually increased at the same rate as supply growth, but doesn't that in itself point that changes are needed? If mining isn't an attractive profession to new players, it needs some work.



What problem do you think I'm trying to solve? I'm not trying to make mining more profitable for groups, I'm trying to make space for other types of players inside the mining profession. If you don't like chewing rocks like a space cow, there's not much room for you in most mining fleets.

To be continued . . .

[insert eve occupation] needs to be more interactive because [random reason]

put 'incursions' into the first field .. there will be screams of outrage and dummies bouncing off monitors across the land

mining is fine
boring, but fine

This.