Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Currently ice strip miners work on the principle that you need to have them complete a cycle, and if you fail to complete a cycle, the ice doesn't get picked up. This works because of the huge cubic space they take up, but I think regular old ore strip miners should work the same way.

Mining lasers that fit on any ship still should pick up partials, or even cycle at 5 seconds instead of 60 and have equally reduced cap usage for firing, so that they're far more useful for grabbing the small amounts of ore for tiny roids.

Strip miners should require a full cycle completion to get the ore, regardless of the cubic space per unit of the ore. This would encourage them to seek only the largest roids, and also prevents them from being efficient at depopulating a belt all on their own. Note they could still do it if they want to, but it would harm their ISK/hourly ratio.

What this would do is decrease the efficiency of mining ops, causing a slight reduction in availability of product, which the market will obviously compensate for, but it will encourage the desire of mining ops, corps, or even just casual buddy system to work together in mining since a strip miner is an absolutely fantastic machine.... as long as it's not hitting a nearly depleted asteroid.

Make the game more lucrative as a co-operative game again, like a real MMO, CCP. When things get worse, people will cooperate more, and you only have to read the history of mankind to see this basic truth. Mining barges would become "corp assets" once again rather than something every player finds desirable, if they have a limited usefulness role, but provide a very powerful bonus within that role. This change would go a long way towards this goal.


On a side note, mining drones should attach the the rocks again like they used to. That was cool. Them floating around it is kind of lame in comparison.

Ice and ore do not work the same way. An ice block is a fixed size, each cube has an integer number of blocks and bonuses apply to cycle time - a Skiff (before the most recent changes) could get pretty close to 30 second cycle with Orca boost. 6 loads per hour was a realistic goal. Make ore work that way and requiring full cycles is not unreasonable. The way it works now, most of the bonuses for ore mining are yield not cycle time so managing partial cycles is part of the gameplay if you want to mine efficiently - particularly in highsec where the rocks are small.