Player Features and Ideas Discussion

+1 Your Ideas seem like an improvement to me.

Note: decrease the overall yield a little to compensate in advance for pseudo-exploits, which we (for simplicity) should call here "clever efficient group tactics".

However i'd like to add something:
- have all the asteroids anywhere in movement. (the largest on grid or the "centerOfMass" is orbited by all others in keplerOrbits).
- rocks=shootable. when damaged enough, they break apart. ("scouts"/"prospectors" could "kill" the worthless junk... idk). (just hull, no resists)
- add bumping damage for all ships AND asteroids. % is signature dependend. asteroids break into smaller and change their trajectory. (armor barges might become a thing, if properly supported by ccp releasing one.) (also makes fighting in asteroid belts interesting. as seen in movies and other stories.)
- tracking modifier for mining lasers/stippers (lets you have to watch the transversal speed for more efficient mining)
- webs apply to asteroid speed. TP also might help.
- small, medium, large mining lasers with different tracking and stuff.
- mining drones are utility and pick up the smallest of rocks in the vicinity, carry and just put them into your cargo. they do not use lasers. (so that an algos i.e. is very usefull with his dronespeed bonus)

Effekts i see:
==> skillrange increases further, also lets you see some combat mechanix.
==> i could shoot the rocks that are mined by some highseccers, the rocks fall apart and i scoop them with my dominix (and as soon as i am full i get ganked by hate. lolz) ==> disruption/trolling of mining ops might be fun ==> more opportunity to outplay others
==> stupid mining gets you less yield ==> reward for cleverness!

I don't even care anymore.

Making mining more interactive would be great for the game. A lot of current mining is done my multiboxers and semi AFK miners. Mining has so little complexity that these are valid strategies, and the only real metrics toward profit are numbers, SP and time. This type of mining has flooded the market with raw materials, has driven prices down, and has dramaticly devalued mining as an activity to the point where it is almost completly inaccessible for new players, at least as a reasonable form of income.

If we have such a change, I don't think you should be able to opt out of it with no loss in efficiency, otherwise you just flood the market with even more cheap minerals, and mining would become even less worthwhile. Forcing players to scan rocks, optimize mining crystals, and tractor in stray pieces would create enough complexity to make multiboxing very difficult and AFK mining nearly impossible. This would probably lead to a spike it mineral prices as old, low involvement strategies fail to keep up with the complexity, then a reduction in prices as more people take up the now moderately lucrative profession of mining, and then finally a stablization of prices at a somewhat higher level than it is now.

A couple parts of your proposal that I think could use refinement (refinement, get it? Ok, that was a bad pun):

1. The concept of "rock". I don't want to constantly have to flush a waste material out of my ship. I think that should be done at the refining stage. A better solution may be to just increase the varience in ore quality. Ore could be as high as 90% pure down to as low as 10% pure, so being selective about what you mine would be important.

2. Mining crystal mechanics. This is just a logic thing for me. How are you grinding up a rock into ore that contains 2 materials and then rejecting a large % of the rocks than don't contain the ore you want, and once you've already ground it up, why would you want to do that? Maybe instead give crystals certain levels of efficiency for extracting certain materials. Obviously a veldspar cyrstal would be exceptional at extracting ore heavy in veldspar, but may be exceptionally poor at extracting biscot, and average at everything else. So for a rock that is 80% rich veldspar with 20% scordite, a veldspar crystal is the correct choice, but for a rock with 80% veldspar and 20% biscot, maybe not so much. It would add some complexity and thought process into what (if any) crystal you should use, and if it's even worth mining at all.

3. I don't like the idea of rock chips, in just seems gimicy to me.

However, overall I like the direction of your thought process. +1

In my opinion the best boost to active mining would be to leave current mining as is (those that do it generally like to for whatever reasons they have) and introduce an entirely new mining method for those who truly wish to actively mine. My preferred option is the regularly posted to comet mining idea already well discussed.. No need to change or rebalance existing and perfectly functional ships, just add a new environment for mining that requires truly active (preferably manual) flying, with better rewards for the higher end minerals/gas/moon-goo gathered.

Boring is not fine. The word you are looking for is "functional".



I've been living in Deklein for about two weeks now. Today I finally had a neutral in the same system as me and only because I decided to just hang out around a pos instead of moving one system over. I'm more worried in highsec than I am hanging out in null.



We're playing a game. Ultimately, it's all arbitrary. Why am I shooting spaceships instead of dragons or rainbow unicorns? Players should be at their keyboards when they have Eve up, not doing laundry.

I agree that we don't need something jarring - nothing that's a click fest or that requires flying through hoops. However, "mindless" should not be a description of things we do, yet it is one of the best descriptions of mining.



Slow down! That sounds dangerously like turning mining into some form of PvP in the name of "realism". If we make too great of a change all at once, that's going to cause way more havoc than anyone wants. About the only thing in that list that sounds like a small shift is the bit about mining drones, but can't drone boats already use mining drones?

Nerfing the Mackinaw and Skiff (+T1 versions) so they dont mine 95% of what Hulk does would go a long way.
Dont remember where but i think it was the old mining barge/exhumer rebalance thread the devs stated that they dont want anything to outmine the current hulk, so making new active mining is still limited to the same yield as the current hulk.

Having 90sec cycle time on strip miners makes easy to afk or multibox miners, its a pain to do with Hulk since you need to transfer ore for each cycle while the other miners can do for 10min as long as they dont pop the astroid.
This is why we need a yield nerf to Mackinaw (ore hold) and Skiff (tank) so that Hulk (yield) is not left miles behind on ore hold+tank while having slightly more max yield

This part of forum is for ideas. It's always good that when people get ideas they post them. I would make change as PvP player to mining, but it doesn't mean that I wouldn't have idea that might work. I expect miners to think about these and evaluate.

I trow few thoughts more to iterate around. These are just for the conversation. Maybe they help, maybe they don't.

What little I know about mining, scanning down 20-100 asteroids (locking, scanning, reading) would be horrible work. Maybe the survey scanner could scan all the asteroids and make estimates of the content based on the module quality and range of the asteroid. Alternatively keeping it running it would scan next asteroid. So after few minutes you would know all those 100 asteroids. Personally I would like more the estimate and it would make better reading by keeping the module online.

Other idea is around how to allow afk mining with new system. Maybe using auto targeting module (targets asteroids) that uses the scanning results and maybe scripts. Like Veldspar script for auto targeting which would prefer asteroids with veldspar content. The module should also activate the mining laser. This might be too much, but should be thought about.

When the big asteroid is broken in parts, the biggest chunk should be the original object, so the target lock is not broken.

Because 1Hz update rate, we can't have avoiding objects. It would be amazing to launch from Jita with freighter and just hit everyone.

Also. A big thing with this is that solo player has to do more work compared to group. As intel gathering is big part (what asteroid to mine) in this system, it wights solo players more as they need to do all the scanning them self. Maybe try to find idea how to make group mining more interactive., so we don't make same mistakes as with PvP (read about upcoming fleet warp changes and why those are coming). Mining in group should be like "you, mine that, you mine that" also it should be like something I could easily code program to do (bot). There needs to be some randomness (e.g. make choices based on what feels best). Basically something like hacking. Some cans contain loot, some don't.

This has some promise. Reminds me a bit of the PI heat map, where you get more accurate results the better your skills are.
Mind if I add this to the OP?



While I don't want to disturb the level of activity required in mining too much, I'm solidly against anything that makes it easier to afk anything. If you are logged in and out in space, you should be interested enough to be at the keyboard.



Reasonable



Well, in trying to think about how a group situation would work, we can take a moment to look at a PvP fleet.

In PvP, most of your pilots are flying dps. Be it six guys in Rifters or 500 Megathrons, dps is important. These feel like the equivalent to mining barges in a mining fleet. You need someone to shoot things, after all.

You have someone flying a boosting ship in both fleets already. One uses an Orca or Rorqual, the other a command ship or a T3 cruiser of some kind.

Usually you have some guys in smaller ships as scouts and fast tackle. Intys, hictors, dictors, and so on. With mining, I think this is something equivalent to having a guy in a fast ship checking rocks for you. He finds the good stuff, reports it to the fleet, and - if CCP implemented my prospecting idea - he extracts any rare ores he finds. In a mining fleet, these guys are probably in Ventures.

Sometimes PvP fleets bring along ewar ships. They might sensor damp, tracking disrupt, jam, or target paint, but the end result is they serve as a force multiplier - a way to make what you have more efficient. This sounds like having a Noctis or salvage destroyer around to wrangle stray rocks. It keeps the miners busy mining instead of slow boating as they chase down runaway rocks.

PvP fleets almost always have some number of logistics pilots, there to keep the dps working on chewing through the targets instead of exploding. Some have postulated that in modern PvP the number of logi pilots are what determines who wins and who loses, but they aren't exactly mandatory, especially for smaller groups. I'd say this is a lot like having industrial pilots to ship your ore back to station. They do all the warping so you don't lose time on target.

Are there other fleet roles that I'm forgetting that could have potential mirrors in a mining fleet?

We do not need to implement your idea these things already exist in mining fleets and if those mining fleets are in low or not buried deep in your corp/alliances safer nul area then there are combat components to mining fleet as well.

Not that it matters but in EvE rocks do not get lose and move away from you they are anchored in space an do not move.

im not going to waste two pages of commentary to respond to your posts directed at my posts.

If some crazy dictator orders the death of 100 thousand people you are saying his hands are clean because he didnt actually pull the trigger that killed them, even though he knew full well what his orders were going to result in, namely a lot of deaths

You admit your proposal would drive some miners out of their chosen form of game play but you want us to accept the your hands are clean of the result of your proposed change because "market forces" were the bad guys even though the only reason those forces developed was your suggestion. well it doesn't work that way. You forced miners out or their chosen profession because like that dictator you did care about them in the least.