Assembly Hall

As the topic says this is my idea to fix mining.

First off asteroid belts shouldn't be little crescents that a couple of hulks and an orca can sit in the middle and macro mine. It should be a bit wider so miners have to navigate the field with the lesser value rocks on the outside. Not all the rocks should be good to mine either. Insert a few ores from mining missions in there as well as some of the rocks that you can't mine from other mission sites. Also asteroids should have various valued ore not based off its name. An example of this would be that 2 rocks of veldspar are being mined, one will yield 20 units of regular veldspar as well as 2 units of concentrated veldspar, and 13 units of dense veldspar. The other will yield 3 units of regular veldspar, 10 units of concentrated veldspar and 40 units of dense veldspar, but without a survey scanner the miner couldn't tell which rock was better.

This does a couple of things;
1) It puts miners in the middle of the field and more difficult to warp out if in danger, but increased risk for increased reward. The safer areas are filled with lesser valued ore.
2) Possibly the use of jet canning mining with more agile cruisers with orca support tractoring the cans in.
3) Increases asteroid scanner use to find the better rocks to mine, or for higher fleet efficiency a scout scan and tag rocks.

Planetary rings should became mine-able with maybe 4 'belts' to mine in around them depending on the size of the planet. They should also generally be smaller rocks, with the larger rock formations in place of the normal asteroid belts.

I think this will help make mining more tactical and overall funner to do. Pilots can still mine the old way, but they don't get the increased reward from doing a bit more work.

Cuss and discuss

I agree 100% that the rings around the planets should actually be asteroid belts! Right now they are "just rings", but literally, that's what those rings are supposed to be. Sometimes they're gas, and sometimes they're rock. We should definitely be able to mine these.

I would also like to see mining get a bit more interesting. Right now it's such a grind. Asteroid belts should be fricken scary! Rocks should be close together, difficult to navigate, maybe a little foggy. Crap should be moving all around you. I like the idea of changing the composition of rocks depending on ease of access. By all rights, you SHOULD have to scout for the good rocks. Asteroid belts should be massive, especially if they're encircling a planet. In turn, the yields would have to be worth the extra work somehow, like you said.

Any fix to the current mining system needs to address Bot miners. This is a cosmetic thing more than anything and possibly a PvPer's way to get easier hulk kills.

What if half of what you mined what unusable rock, it would make it worth your time to scan rocks to see which are worth mining and which aren't. The outside of a belt would have more polluted rocks (100 units of veldspar, 100 units of slag rock), but the rocks in the middle that are hard to get to would be more pure and more valuable to mine (180 units of veldspar, 20 units of slag rock)

Highsec would have more debris in it while lowsec would have nicer, purer belts, and nulsec would have the purest belts.

Bots not being able to navigate the belt without getting caught would have to stay on the outside of a belt mining the lowest valued ores making them much less profitable. It doesn't remove bots but it makes them half as effective, giving real players the advantage over them.

I did mention that to keep the inner belts hard to get to there is alot more junk *un-mineable* in them so a hulks mining lasers cant reach them with out bumping into rocks making it hard to get in and out.

Edit: So macros can't strip mine a whole belt and get the good stuff, without getting lots of slag, and still bumping into rocks holding them up.

I liked the idea of having different qualities of asteroids at first but, I don't like the idea of spreading them out any more than they already or putting the better ones in dangerous places or mining slag rock. None of this does anything to make mining more fun, it just add to the frustration of the chore. It's not going to stop the bot mining either. They'll just mine out everything and eject whatever they don't want. Real players will do the same thing so, having lots of jet cans floating around mining barges isn't going to help distinguish them.

I wouldnt mind seeing denser rocks like ice rocks for the reason that with multiple hulks on the field normal rocks pop way to fast. I wouldnt mind having an extra bit of effort to have to scan the rocks to find the best rocks (as long as I could somehow target paint them for the hulk fleet) as well as all for the idea of making them harder to navigate. However when I go mining I find a centralized spot or 2 that I work my way out from and mine everything. I am not so sure of the idea of still having rocks there after all the useful ore is gone. If someone could pitch it to me a different way I may be onboard.

Finally I DO NOT want it more difficult to warp out of. If I am multiboxing 7 accounts and a red enter system I squad warp them all out. There is no way I want to be dealing with having to individually position each hulk to be able to warp out. I understand the whole risk vs reward **** and all that but there is a line to be drawn.

I like this idea.

The random nature of the ores, the fact that you have to work more for them. This makes it feel that there is purpose to mining.

I would very much prefer the asteroids to actually move around, sometimes even going beyond the range of the strip miners in random directions so that the miners have to keep moving. On top of that, you are unable to align or keep at range with the rocks. This way, you have to manually position yourself every now and then to keep mining lest your rock moves out of range.

To make things more interesting, some special rocks should be added that don't generally have any ore but are there to actually deal some damage. If a rock hits your port side because you failed to move out of the way, then you suffer damage. The amount of the damage as well as the type of damage dealt onto your mining ship would be determined by the size and composition of the rock itself.

What do you guys think?

Would be nice if by cutting a roid a certain way etc with a few simply commands you could potential cut chunks of it out showing more rarer minerals inside, and have so there is a bit of unluck that you could potential hit a rather volatile mineral to break it up etc. It would add lock times to the strip miner cds etc.

Can make the process more interactive via warnings etc and stuff you can catch and alter coarse as needed, etc. I dunno, would be interesting to have Asteriods and Mine sweeper molded in, and for those who don't want it you can keep mining directly into the core as usual.

Nothing new here, useless rehash of things that won't happen and have been suggested again and again.