Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ok so we all agree that this doesn't have a easy solution. It stills bugs me how it should be made, but I came with multiples "possibles" solutions to it while addressing the main issues that are:
-Too Easy & Repetitive (Bot Friendly)
-Boring (Lack of Required interaction)
-Not much rewarding experience (AFK friendly)
-Pretty Uniform (Same here as there)

SO here it comes:

Solution #1: The Minecraft/RL way
So how's real mine looks like? Just google the thing and you will see tunnels or BIG holes.
Big holes uh? humm. What if you make a big asteroid, and it have different compositions along its surface. It looks like PI. But PI only have the outside layer, its not like the big holes. OK then you add different layers to the asteroid until you hit a layer 0 called core... and if you make sections of the asteroid in all different layers and place a maximum limit to active mining lasers per sections you could make having something like those pictures... I mean, because if one guy do it he will end with a tunnel ah? Reminds me of Minecraft
If you get the train of thoughts then you end making
+Asteroids with multiples layers that could have different compositions and densities on it. The numbers of layers and composition could be ruled by sec index and location with the universe. In that case 0.0 asteroids could have like 10 layers making less but more BIGGER asteroids.
+A new survey mode where you could see the composition of the asteroid like in PI you see the richness of the planet.
+A new gameplay where its needed the coordination to mine effectively in group, depending on the size and complexity of the asteroid.

Difficulty to make: HARD
Fun to produce: WOW


Solution #2: The Cheap and bastard way
So how could you make mining more interactive with the mechanics and tools we already got? Using PVE as reference? Possible. What people do in PVE? Select targets and make sure they are hitting the targets. How? Checking that the guns got the correct ammo for the range and transversal velocity of the target. Nice there is the solution.
If you get the train of thoughts then you end making
+The amount of yield you get per cycle depends on the current range of the asteroid and its composition. So if you wanna mine veldespar, you should do it in max range with the fall off counting both ways (farther and closer). Kernite should be mined more closer to the asteroid and Arkonor be as close as 1200m to be effectively mined.
+It should affect t1 and t2 strip miners in one way and the rest of the mining lasers in another.

Difficulty to make: EASY
Fun to produce: MEH (at least its better that before, annoys more the bot farmers)


Solution #3: The mini-game way
So, what if your hud showed a new thing when you equip mining lasers or strip miners and it looks like the speed bar (the speed bar its more like a round thing but works more or less like a bar) and it glowed red until you put it in a position where it becomes blue. And what if I told you that you need to put it blue to get the maximum yield in the cycle? Makes mining more interesting ah? And what if I told you that the best minerals needs to be re-calibrated every # of cycles? And that every asteroid have a different calibration position? You could not being AFK for long.
If you get the train of thoughts then you end making
+A calibration bar where the user have to set to properly focus the mining laser to get the maximum yield possible. It changes in every asteroid and could change every # of cycles depending in the type of asteroid.
+Could have different sensitivities depending on the skills and type of miner (and crystal)

Difficulty to make: MEDIUM
Fun to produce: GOOD


Solution #4: The Rat Tap Map Trap way
Ok so stronger rats... I mean, incursion rats maybe? Well that just will force to have support right? Humm... So it just makes miners bring guns to protect them right? Well in high sec they are not so needed and in null sec they got it. Does it *fix* mining? Nah. Well what do miners do? Sit and make sure they getting the resources. Get resources. What if rats could affect the miners to get their resources? Like using something to cut your cycle before time? Like ECM and sensor dampers? Well just more reason to kill them. And what if they came, cut your cycle, ran away and they came again? Like guerrilla tactics. They would annoy the hell out people and dang more reason to stay sited in the game. Thats a solution. And to annoy more they could call reinforcements that could use that or again the guerrilla tactics. And if they kill your drones when chasing them
If you get the train of thoughts then you end making
+Rats that can affect the cycle of miners. They should use guerrilla tactics where they come, affect you and get away fast. Could be using ECM and sensor dampers to cut the cycle short and the turret dis to affect the striper.
+More variety of rats in re-spawns and maybe they could use the Sleepers/Incursions rat AI. Would be awesome to see them more in null sec freaking out the bastards. In high sec the "annoyers" rats could spawn more instead of good gangs. To keep the game balanced they should be still weak but more annoying, so it makes them necessary to engage at the right time.

Difficulty to make: EASY
Fun to produce: MEH (its makes you sit more, annoys more the bot farmers)

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This is a copy/paste

Some more copy/paste quotes
YEAH IT SUCKS

[Jafit McJafitson]Funny how other forms of resource gathering except for asteroid mining are automated, with the player's involvement just being setup and transport of materials...

Hey I know!

Anchorable mining structures deployable in belts and grav sites, harvests and stores ore, player transports it.

Refund everyone's mining skillpoints, or make those skills applicable to the effectiveness of the structure. Re-tool mining ships to do something more fun and useful, like station window cleaning.

The sad truth is that botters have it right, Eve just needs to accept and integrate it into the game. Any activity that is monotonous enough to be accomplished fully by a bot should just be automated in the first place. Or changed to the point where botting isn't practical, but that's aimed more towards the nullsec botting PvE Ravens and Tengus.[/quote]

[Tarn Kugisa]I would enjoy corp mining ops more if mining wasnt so damn boring[/quote]

[Mars Theran]I like an adapted version of the PI model. Boring holes in asteroids sounds server breaking though, and you could make it much simpler and more challenging.

Basically, you set it up so you have fewer and larger asteroids, and introduce a mining view much like the PI view. Initiate a scan on the asteroidand select a target point for your lasers from the shifting mass of ore density indicator hues then drop the mining view as your lasers start chugging away.

Now you are free to watch for pirates or players interested in ruining your day for awhile. At some pont, your density of ore is going to putter out and you'll have to reinitialize the mining view and reposition your lasers targeting point. I suppose you could also have multiple points based on number of lasers and visible density.

Ideally, to maximize your mining, you have to maintain the mining view and move your lasers as the density points shift and move along the surface of the asteroid. To make it more interesting, the asteroid shrinks by leaps and bounds as it is mined, until it is no more than a little lump of debris floating in space.

Botting difficulty: Extreme
Mining enjoyment Level: Theoretically fun
Fleet Support requirement for mining activities: A must.
Risk: Variable to high[/quote]


[HELLBOUNDMAN]

I'm gonna have to agree with ^this^

It might be kinda fun at first, but it would get very annoying and very tedious before too long.

My thought to fixing macros was to not allow asteroids to be targetable, but instead you would have to select the asteroid via overview or survey scan window, then you would have to trigger the miner and actually click the asteroid floating in space in order to mine it.

However, when you sit back and really think about things, are macro miners really that bad?

I mean, if it wasn't for them, wouldn't that hulk you're flying cost at least another 50 mil more, or 100 mil more? Hell, maybe even double.[/quote]

[Valei Khurelem]I like the idea of a mini-game PERHAPS, but it'd have to be done right, I wouldn't want this to be some crappy Everquest 2 type thing where you do a repetitive mini-game that only has four different variations.

This would definitely be a chance though if it was done like this to get CCP off their collective asses and design something fun and interactive to play, currently anything you do in EVE consists of point, click, wait for several hours and then repeat. Why not have some kind of puzzle game where it's a bit like bejeweled and when you activate the mining lasers a screen comes up and the more points you score, you get bonuses to the amount of ore that goes into your cargo hold and pretty skilled people can quickly make ISK at the beginning by putting their ore into the can while they progress through the puzzles?

Sure, it'd make no sense to the EVE universe, CCP could work on something that would, but at least it'd make mining more interesting and rewarding.

i'd love for us to do it like Minecraft or Miner wars but I doubt CCP would ever dare to do anything creative like that and unfortunately the rest of the stuff looks like it would only drive miners away because it seems to make it a bit more tedious than necessary.[/quote]

[Ines Tegator]Mining is NOT fine as it is. It's boring as all get-out, and the best thing going for it is that it lets you make money while afk or chatting it up. It should obviously be low key enough to allow the relaxing, but enough needs to be added to reward players that stay at their keyboard and play the game. A visual map mining kind of thing, like PI resources, would make bottingf much harder as well i'd imagine.[/quote]

[Gerrick Palivorn]Decent thought out suggestions.

Add to everyone that static belts are removed in favor of higher spawn rate, low density grav sites and I'll support fully.

Mining has always needed a boost and multiple options to choose from is a good thing.[/quote]

[Nestara Aldent]Problem is mining is as good as it need to be, and don't need to be improved. More difficult mining mechanics wouldn't decrease macro mining, or in fact it would just until new bots come around.

That wouldn't make mining more fun. What would make mining more fun are stronger rats that aren't a joke and are actual danger, so the miner is forced to manage targets and assign drones to them to be safe.

And about botting and cheating in games there is software to prevent that.[/quote]

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I just did what I have never done, almost move one thread to another

If I gathered enough support, I would consider it.

I like the OP and here is my input for making "mining more engaging".

The color-coded ore is great and should definitely be looked at by CCP's design team. It would be a serious revision of the 5% and 10% better ores currently available.

I have suggested this before, but one could also introduce "ship movement" during mining. As it is, you only need manage your mining ship while being stationery. What if you had to occasionally physically avoid a broken asteroid that you lasers broke in half? It does not have to destroy your ship or anything, but simply be avoidable by orbiting/moving out of the way otherwise it would bump your ship outside of mining range. You would be forced to either pick a new roid or slowboat/warp back to your spot. Also, being "too close" of an asteroid might get you caught in it's kinetic/explosive shattering which would be dangerous and possibly destroy your ship if you get hit multiple times in a row.

The following suggestions are easily manageable by being at the commands and not AFK. It adds value to the orca/rorqual's tractor beam's range. Just saying.

Great ideas OP. Haven't seen things this clever yet elegant in a long time.

No. Because then you just replace mining with Gun mining via reprocessing crap T1 modules. Mineral market would be annoyed. People just change theoir bots to Security Mission running bots, and earn even more ISK .

1/10. Only 1 cuz I couldn't help myself from vomiting frustratil over the keyboard

IDK, I still think that Scrapmetal Reprocessing should be required for reprocessing anything...

That is the thing though, Survey Scanners wouldn't become useless, they would still tell you exactly how many units of ore there were in all of the asteroids in range, they just wouldn't be able to tell you the quality of the ore. Instead of having Condensed Scordite, Massive Scordite and Scordite being separate categories of asteroid, all of it would be labeled Scordite and you wouldn't find out if you had pulled the 0.01%, 5% or 25% variant until you got back to refine it.

The only way you would be able to tell the difference between the variants before then is by looking for the pattern on the surface of the asteroids/spin rate or whatever visual cues CCP implemented to differentiate.

Oh! I had another thought.

Mining could use a bit more of a PvP aspect to it that may help with bots as well. One of the most annoying things in mining is when some troll comes along and intentionally mines every rock you're trying to mine, just to keep you from getting that ore. It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while I'll run across someone who wants to be a griefer like that.

Now, my suggestion for this, rather than install some sort of "rule" that the GM's have to get involved with in order to prevent this sort of griefing, I say you make it an act of piracy similar to can flipping.

So if I'm sitting in a belt and some Hulk comes along and starts mining the exact same rock I'm mining from, I get to shoot him. I think this would work for bots because every bot I've ever seen pays little attention to other miners and just starts mining the biggest rocks in the belt. So along comes a bot, unwittingly starts mining my rocks, and I get that gank-fitted Tornado I've got hiding in my Orca and pop his Hulk.

Now THAT would make mining more interesting and introduce a little extra risk to the profession.

Just a thought :)

Very nice post and ideas. It certainly got me thinking about the 95 / 5 - visual inspection - good vs slag roids.

How would these slag roids work. Mine them and get nothing? Still takes a bot one cycle to determine if they got anything.

So what if a slag roid gave you slag_ore. And good roids gave you ore. Still the same. A bot should be able to determine what is in the cargo hold. Get a slag_ore and you move on. In a large asteroid field best case is you get the 5% right the first time. Worst case is the good roids are the last 5% of the ones the bot tries. Still, if your botting… do you care? Maybe if the field is large enough. Say 100+ roids that are empty, that would take upwards of 300 minutes (5 hrs) to go through the slag to find the good roids. But will the 5% yield the same amount of ore as the previously designed field? If so, then that is upwards of 5 hrs wasted. But again, if I bot, do I care? Now of course the actual number of hours will statistically fall in the middle somewhere and that’s what a bot will count on. That they would only waste on average 2 to 3 hrs. Now we are back to a point where they probably don’t care.

Now, what if I add a % chance that either roid type can produce the slag or good version of ore? Now I don’t really know what kind of roid it is if on each cycle I could get slag_ore or ore. It would take at least 3 cycles at minimum before you could even attempt a guess as to the type (2 slag and 1 ore is probably slag roid… or 2 ore and 1 slag is probably good roid). Very weak sample set for sure to draw a conclusion but it is the minimum. Over many belts you would still get the majority of the good roids using this minimum sample. So for our 100 slag roid belt that means it will take upwards of 15 hrs with an average somewhere in 6 to 9 hrs on average. Now we are moving back towards the point where a bot no longer makes sense. Now we are talking about 3 belts per day if the bot gets on after downtime and lets it run for 23 hrs.

I realized if you bot a hulk and drop 3 miners on a roid you would be back down to 1 cycle to get that guess. Darn, back to the 2 to 3 hrs on average. Probably not a deterrent.

Now I started to think about what is being put in my cargo hold. The whole point of the above exercise depends on the ability to determine that I have slag_ore vs ore in my cargo hold. So what if you can’t? What if every item is just named ore. How would that work in the good vs slag model? Well the only real way would be to track every unit of ore and track that on the back end. So on the server side it’s really counting slag_ore and ore. Maybe ok to do if it was a guarantee that the ore was going to go right to a station where it could be split into the two real stacks “upon closer inspection in the bright lights of a station hanger”. But there is not a guarantee that will happen. Ships could get blown up… ore could be transferred to an orca or a can… ore could be given away, etc. Not likely to happen.

Additional tagging of the ore wouldn’t work either with some magic tag that follows the unit. WAY too much overhead and far to easy to figure out if you inspect data types or data streams. Even with a hash or security model that would be far too much to track. Every cycle of every mining module would generate thousands of unique tagged items. No way. Just not going to happen.

So how can you detach the ore type from the issues of managing the ore? Change the mechanics!

Create a skill deposits the ore to a station and in your cargo hold you get a claim ticket (well, it’s probably a stack of paperwork that takes 0.25m3). All that ore is held in the station and allocated to one of two stacks, slag_ore and ore. The claim ticket is a pointer to the record in the station. And you can’t see what’s in the station until you redeem your claim ticket. No way to bot that. In fact, slice it up into 50,000 units of ore mined per claim ticket. That way, if you do get blown up some of your claim tickets will drop. You can trade or sell them (buyer beware!!) or drop them in the orca or contract them to your mining director, etc. etc. Once you get back to your station you redeem your claim ticket and get your ore to do with as you please.

So what about systems with no stations? Well, the skill can be trained up to extend the distance of the automated delivery system (Thanks ORE Syndicate for making the auto delivery system.) Level 1 – can only deliver to a station in system. Lvl 2 – 2 jumps away, Lvl 3 – 4 jumps, lvl 4 -6 and lvl 5 –region. Why region at level 5? Well the 0.0 miners would need a way to get ore somewhere and in some regions there isn’t but a few stations at all. Or make lvl 5 = 10, add ore transport infrastructures to the game and ore can go to a station or transport node. Let corps and alliances build out ore distribution networks. Want to wage war on your enemy? Fly in and blow up a few ore transport nodes and disrupt their flow of raw materials. There are lots of ways to go with this.

Why make it easy to get my ore to the station? Well because without the claim ticket, it’s not really your ore yet. Kind of like flying in space with PLEX, useless if it gets blown up in a ship cargo hold! Fly around with a whole mining op worth of claim tickets? Maybe not a good idea. Now instead of having industrials running back and forth between the orca and the station you have a cruiser.

CCP would need to balance a few ships and change a few things when it comes to cargo holds for specific mining ships but even if they don’t change that much it represents lots of risk to not manage your claims properly. If I have 40,000 claim tickets at 0.25m3 that represents 2bil units of ore that’s a huge risk! And it’s not like the time to mine it has changed. It’s now up to the pilot/corp to manage the risk to carry all the mining assets. Doubly so for ice mining!

Anyways…. That’s my few thought on this.

Enjoy!
- Bunny