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Mining- Why it needs to be saved, and how to do it

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Mors Sanctitatis
Death of Virtue
#61 - 2012-01-20 01:48:16 UTC
Janus Nightmare wrote:
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 :)


Uhhhh... (realize that I'm a huuuuuuge pirate at heart when I say this) The above would be exploited to hell and back and miners would never be able to mine again lol. I applaud the effort, but getting aggro just because someone mines the same rock as you would never work for the above exploit issue.

Also- while I appreciate that some (maybe a lot?) of people like the "AFKness" of mining, that needs to be stopped. Nothing should be able to be "AFKed" in Eve. I think that most players would prefer to have the ability to generate high value with less total time cost than low value across much greater time cost while semi-AFK. While I understand your position, it's not good game design.

Intelligence shouldn't be free.   Mining, reloaded.   ADDICTED.

Bunny Sweetcheeks
Boundless Hypocrisy
#62 - 2012-01-20 01:51:06 UTC
Elessa Enaka wrote:
Janus Nightmare wrote:
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 :)


I like that idea a lot, make it just the same as can flipping while your mining lasers are active on the asteroid. If another member of your corp decides to mine the same asteroid as you, it's not a problem. However, when someone else comes along they get flagged just the same as if they had robbed your jetcan and become a legal target for anyone in your corp. If you leave the belt though and come back to them mining "your" asteroid, you're SOL.

I do think that this would help with bots, I also think that there would be those who would exploit it just as there are those who canflip to provoke miners.

Either way though, I think that the positives would outweigh the negatives.


More work on how the agression rules are created would have to happen to avoid impacting alliance mining ops. Yes on a small scale it can work in fleet but too much to manage if someone leaves the fleet or DC's or is not in fleet.. etc. I'm sure someone can outline a way that the can flipping rules can change to achieve this. :)
Dunkler Imperator
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#63 - 2012-01-20 01:57:26 UTC  |  Edited by: Dunkler Imperator
Covert Kitty wrote:
I love your general idea, however, the problem is that the best bots don't look at the screen at all, they hook python or read memory directly. It would not take long for them to hook in the new information and pick the right rocks directly.

Personally, I think that mining should be replaced with "small holding" you anchor fairly easy to kill structures at the belts, and they mine for you, you just have to do the hauling from time to time. Not unlike moon mining, though at a much smaller scale a tank of say 500dps omni, with about 2-3x the effective of a battleship. This would free up the player to defend it, and open them up as a nicer target for small gangs. Botting for mining becomes obsolete because there really isn't much of anything to automate.


Only if it was for < .3.(i have never done WH so i have no comment about that)


Pro's
-Farms and fields of Null.
-Isk sink
-Good way for null to get low end
Con's
could be over used (i.e all 4000 goons are doing it at the same time it would flood the market)


Here is a post i made a while ago. It's got some more depth then What covert Kitty wrote.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=287969#post287969


Also, Not a single troll/ negative comment? Is the OP alt a forum mod lol?
Janus Nightmare
Exploding Kitties
#64 - 2012-01-20 01:58:10 UTC
Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
Janus Nightmare wrote:
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 :)


Uhhhh... (realize that I'm a huuuuuuge pirate at heart when I say this) The above would be exploited to hell and back and miners would never be able to mine again lol. I applaud the effort, but getting aggro just because someone mines the same rock as you would never work for the above exploit issue.

Also- while I appreciate that some (maybe a lot?) of people like the "AFKness" of mining, that needs to be stopped. Nothing should be able to be "AFKed" in Eve. I think that most players would prefer to have the ability to generate high value with less total time cost than low value across much greater time cost while semi-AFK. While I understand your position, it's not good game design.



I never said I was totally AFK'd while mining. I'm sitting right in front of the game, dual-boxing most of the time, My question is, why does it need to be stopped? How does that impact any other player in the game besides making myself a relatively easy gank target?

I don't entirely disagree with the suggestions you made, as I stated in my first post. My point was entirely about making sure to maintain balance so that you don't alienate the people who currently mine and like it the way it is. But your remark that the way I play the game needs to be stopped is right on the edge of sounding like "you need to play it my way or GTFO", which makes me start to doubt the sincerity of the topic.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#65 - 2012-01-20 02:11:48 UTC
Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
A few quick thoughts:

Mining is generally boring.

Mining is rife with bots.


Mining is also a staple income stream for semi-AFK players. If mining requires too much interaction, these semi-AFK players (e.g.: folks who have their mining fleet running behind the real life spreadsheets) will be out of an income stream. What will they do then?

Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
Let's get the easy stuff out of the way first: Get rid of ALL other mineral streams other than through the express act of mining.


100% agreement with you there!

Here are alternatives: rogue drones drop "drone tags" which are used in the manufacture or research/invention of drone related implants, modules & rigs. Other NPCs drop "things" such as components required to research/invent meta 1-4 items (e.g.: Datacore - Angel Cartel Starship Engineering). No more T1 loot dropping from NPCs. Sometimes the looter might find a limited run BPC.

Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
How do we do this? The EPIC WIN, I say. What if, while mining some basic ore, you have a chance, however small, of mining some exceedingly valuable alloy or mineral (or whatever)? What if it was valuable simply because it had attributes that were completely unattainable via any other means? Like mineral compression for instance? What if while mining Trit you happen to see some "super-ultra-mega-compressed-hyper-density-quantum-tritanium" (I just made that up by the way) pop up in your cargo hold? What if this stuff converted to 10 MILLION Trit per unit, and you just got 10 units of it in your cargo bay? And guess what the best part is? Each unit only takes up 10m3.


Just be aware that increasing the supply of minerals will not make you richer, it will only make minerals less valuable. To allow for 0.01% of laser cycles to produce a super-compressed ore worth 100 normal laser cycles, CCP would have to reduce yield across the board by 1%. Of course this could already be implemented by introducing a fourth tier of ore, and shifting the concentrations from 100%/105%/110% to something more like 50%/100%/150%/200%. Asteroids should also be able to contain nothing (i.e.: they are barren), and no number of cycles will ever extract any ore from them.

I'd also remove all ore names from the overview. All asteroids just become "Asteroid". No more "Asteroid (Blue Ice)" or "Asteroid (Veldspar)".

Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
What if 95% of the ore in a belt were concentrated in 5% of the asteroids? Same yield per belt, same time taken to mine the minerals etc., but the difference is that for every rock that has minerals in it, there are 9 that don't. The human operator could pick out the rocks with the minerals in them because say, all the rocks had a spin rate, generated in a random direction and axis, but the mineral-laden rocks have a spin rate that is 50% faster than barren rocks. Or maybe mineral laden rocks have more "gold flecks" in the texture, maybe 25% more, or the gold flecks are in a more veined pattern than on the other barren rocks.


Semi-AFK pilots would still be able to AFK-mine, as long as they spend a modicum of effort to select the appropriate rocks. An AFK pilot might want to mine rocks with greater quantity rather than quality, since they know they'll be AFK for about 10 minutes.

I'd also want to see mining moved to grav sites almost entirely, since part of the lore of hisec is that the hisec belts have been stripped of anything of value. Leave some belts out there, with very low yield in them.

To help the Semi-AFK folks I'd also like to see a new module for the Orca which could siphon ore out of the hold of the targeted ship. Thus rather than a mining yield booster link, use this ore siphon so the desk jockey doesn't have to come back to the screen every seven minutes to move ore to the Orca. For me the most tedious part of mining was having to be at the keyboard to move ore to the jet can or Orca every now and then. If it wasn't for that, mining wouldn't be so darned boring.

Smaller number of rocks with higher yield + ore siphon => no need to use a bot since you can more easily perform the boring part of mining which is the ore extraction.

Identifying the deposit is the skilled part of the job: probe down the grav site, survey the rocks, visually inspect, tag them, then start the extraction process. If all of that can be done within about five minutes, allowing the mining ships to then sit there for tens of minutes unattended, you kill mining bots by removing the reason to automate mining because it's just about entirely automated for you. Ideally you'll be able to buy bookmarks for local grav sites from entrepreneurial explorers - those who are looking for Mag/Radars and don't care for mining or gas harvesting.

Such a siphon would fall half way between "use a ship" and "deploy a structure". You have to be logged in and "active" (I use the term very loosely), but you still get what is essentially a passive income.

(I would also want to see a significant boost to the EHP of an exhumer, since the system would be focussed on semi-afk play)

PS: ISD Eshtir, I'm a little confused as to why this doesn't belong in Features & Ideas Discussion since it is discussing an idea for a change to the mechanics of the game. Or is your comment basically an official statement that F&I is the graveyard for posts that none cares about?

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#66 - 2012-01-20 02:23:44 UTC
Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
Also- while I appreciate that some (maybe a lot?) of people like the "AFKness" of mining, that needs to be stopped. Nothing should be able to be "AFKed" in Eve. I think that most players would prefer to have the ability to generate high value with less total time cost than low value across much greater time cost while semi-AFK. While I understand your position, it's not good game design.



  • Moon goo
  • The market
  • Planetary Interaction
  • Contracts
  • AFK cloaking
  • Invention
  • Manufacturing
  • Research Points & Datacores


There are plenty of activities in EVE which achieve something while being AFK. In many of these cases you don't even have to be logged in to benefit from these activities.

Semi-AFK mining fleets fit neatly into that void between actively piloted ships and deployable structures: both of which are already parts of the game, and both of which can be used to generate income. Deployable structures can be used to generate significant income without anyone actually logging in to the game for weeks at a time (you need to be there to shuffle fuel blocks from the hangar array to the fuel bay, while your capital component BPO is researched to optimal ME & PE).

Saying that "it's not good game design" is to ignore the current design and culture of mining.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Mors Sanctitatis
Death of Virtue
#67 - 2012-01-20 02:31:38 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
Also- while I appreciate that some (maybe a lot?) of people like the "AFKness" of mining, that needs to be stopped. Nothing should be able to be "AFKed" in Eve. I think that most players would prefer to have the ability to generate high value with less total time cost than low value across much greater time cost while semi-AFK. While I understand your position, it's not good game design.



  • Moon goo
  • The market
  • Planetary Interaction
  • Contracts
  • AFK cloaking
  • Invention
  • Manufacturing
  • Research Points & Datacores


There are plenty of activities in EVE which achieve something while being AFK. In many of these cases you don't even have to be logged in to benefit from these activities.

Semi-AFK mining fleets fit neatly into that void between actively piloted ships and deployable structures: both of which are already parts of the game, and both of which can be used to generate income. Deployable structures can be used to generate significant income without anyone actually logging in to the game for weeks at a time (you need to be there to shuffle fuel blocks from the hangar array to the fuel bay, while your capital component BPO is researched to optimal ME & PE).

Saying that "it's not good game design" is to ignore the current design and culture of mining.


Ouch, ouch! Blink Okay, I shouldn't speak in absolutes lol!

How about "less AFK, for mining"?

I get that people like the semi-AFKness of it. I don't think that the OP ideas would reduce that by a lot- once you find the right rocks, you still have to mine them traditionally.

Your responses two posts up are really good- please keep them coming!

I like your idea of completely removing the type of asteroids from the overview- simply calling them all "asteroid" would be great. Let survey scanners further identify the types as "Veldspar" etc. for the new players. After a while, the expert players will know what type of rock it is just by looking at it. Really great idea.

Intelligence shouldn't be free.   Mining, reloaded.   ADDICTED.

Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#68 - 2012-01-20 04:39:54 UTC
Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
How about "less AFK, for mining"?

I get that people like the semi-AFKness of it. I don't think that the OP ideas would reduce that by a lot- once you find the right rocks, you still have to mine them traditionally.


Yup, I feel that's the way to go: though my interpretation is to front-load the activity, then enhance the calm of mining in the tail end. People who want to keep their eyes open to avoid ganking can pay the necessary attention.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
ergherhdfgh
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#69 - 2012-01-20 04:48:45 UTC
One of the best, simplest, most fundamental, well thought out ideas that I've ever read on these forums.

Want to talk? Join Cara's channel in game: House Forelli
J Kunjeh
#70 - 2012-01-20 05:13:59 UTC
Janus Nightmare wrote:
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 :)


God no...just, no. That rock doesn't belong to you or anyone else. If you don't like him mining it, shoot him and deal with the consequences.

"The world as we know it came about through an anomaly (anomou)" (The Gospel of Philip, 1-5) 
Elessa Enaka
Doomheim
#71 - 2012-01-20 05:29:51 UTC  |  Edited by: Elessa Enaka
Elessa Enaka wrote:
Covert Kitty wrote:
I love your general idea, however, the problem is that the best bots don't look at the screen at all, they hook python or read memory directly. It would not take long for them to hook in the new information and pick the right rocks directly.

Personally, I think that mining should be replaced with "small holding" you anchor fairly easy to kill structures at the belts, and they mine for you, you just have to do the hauling from time to time. Not unlike moon mining, though at a much smaller scale a tank of say 500dps omni, with about 2-3x the effective of a battleship. This would free up the player to defend it, and open them up as a nicer target for small gangs. Botting for mining becomes obsolete because there really isn't much of anything to automate.


An idea that I had last night while drifting off to sleep involved something along these lines. I remember reading an idea about staking a claim on a belt (on the old forums IIRC). What if this were to be incorporated as well?

Say for instance, you find a nice grav site, you head back to station, grab your Orca and bring it out to the site. Now here is the idea, when you get back to the site with the Orca, you eject from it and then anchor it to the site (I'm thinking similar anchor times to a standard tower), bring some fuel back out and then online the Orca so that it becomes somewhat of a mobile industrial platform. Perhaps make it that you can't anchor any offensive POS mods with the Orca, but you could do shield hardeners and (warning, revolutionary idea about to be proposed) Refinery Arrays regardless of system sec level. It throws up a force field around the grav and then there you go, mine in relative peace in your very own personal grav site. Give the grav site an expiration date of 14 days or so from the claim and then even let the grav repop with each dt so long as it isn't mined out.

Claim jumpers could still come try to put your Orca into its RF timer (assume that the Orca has both Fuel and Stront bays after being anchored as well as similar resists to a standard tower) so they could mine the site themselves, so not only would this be a buff to Industry, but also a buff to small gang PVP.


Something that I just thought of as a balancing factor to this would be once you establish the Mining Operation, its location would then be broadcast in the overview similar to DED sites (Angel-Creo Corp Mining anyone?). If you were letting everyone know where the operation was, it wouldn't be long before someone declared war on you (assuming the operation is in high-sec) looking to come take over your operation.

Another thought is cost, make it so that the Orca (when anchored and onlined) requires the same amount of fuel as a large tower (though it should accept any of the fuel block varieties or perhaps an ORE specific variant that would be released along with the anchoring capability) as well as only providing a similar amount of CPU/PG as a small tower. Add to this, the cost of paying CONCORD for the exclusive rights to the grav and I think that it would more than balance being able to mine your own personal grav site.

Do the same with Rorquals in 0.0 (maybe give them higher fuel reqs as well as more CPU/PG) and I could see Mining Operations popping up all over the place.

Edit: maybe connect it to Sov for 0.0, if you're in Empire, you pay CONCORD for the claim rights, in Sov 0.0, you pay the Sov Alliance for the claim rights

Devour to survive, so it is, so it's always been Eve is a great game if you can get past all of the asshats....
Bloodpetal
Tir Capital Management Group
#72 - 2012-01-20 05:42:16 UTC  |  Edited by: Bloodpetal
Mors Sanctitatis wrote:

Ouch, ouch! Blink Okay, I shouldn't speak in absolutes lol!.



Ya, you totally got skooled there.


I've also mined... 2 times in my whole EVE Career.


The second time I was in a Scythe with l5 cruiser skills and Mining 4 (came with my character start up I think?) And I was mining as much if not more than 1-2 month old Retriever pilots in the mining fleet.

I got a bit of a kick in that.



I think we need to revisit the initial ideas they had in CCP a while back - the first one was get rid of "belt pockets" and institute PROPER solar system belts that span the whole solar system. I believe they had the technology in place for most of that with the expansions over the years, they just never actually had a chance to sit down and focus on those developments with everything since.


If you create a "solar system" belt - then you'd naturally have a lot of 'rubbish' rocks that you'd have to sort through - and you'd end up with a more Millenium Falcon through Asteroid Belt feel tot he SCALE of the belts.


At that point, if you make it valuable yet time consuming enough - you could have "crews" work over sections of this 300 AU circumference asteroid BELT (not pocket) and do more or less what you're describing. Eventually, explorers could turn a profession out of selling concentrated pockets in the belts to miners (and afk miners) who want to be able to sit there for a day.

So that satisfies the AFK level to a "semi-afk" level - and the "semi" part can be co-opted to mining explorers looking for "better" parts of the belt but don't want the "Easy" rocks, they want the "big hit".


A typical day for a miner would look something like this then.

Log on

Get in your exploration mining vessel (tricked out of course)

Head to the local Asteroid "Belt", starting at your favorite part of the belt, and start either using probes or some kind of belt analyzer to move around and hit segments of the belt that seem interesting.

You come across a really dense segment of Veldspar, but it would take 5-6 hours to get the amount of money you want from it - so you find a corpmate/local player who you know wants to AFK mine, you sell it to him for 10 Million ISK (site is worth 50M Isk over 5 hours)

You make some money for your effort, but not what you're looking for so you move on.

You eventually find some "rich" dense nodes that can bring you 50M in an hour - which is what you specialize in. You hit the rock hard and bring in your goal for the day, and head out - having played approximately 2 hours, made 25m/hr, and happy to go.


Corp operations...
For "mining operations" you'd start in a segment of the belt with your Orca and your 3-4 mining vessels and hit your MWDs and start scouring segments of the mining belt (high speed fly by mining) you hit some rocks as you move around and you'd have a couple "specialists" able to find and locate really valuable density ores that the miners can hit in less than 10-20 minutes. You'd be able to specialize in fast roaming mining activities that can bring in 25-50m/hr as a group, little less "AFK" but can work together to be more AFK, the mining ships can still be quasi AFK while specialists search and take turns looking for the next bit of rock and the Orca provides bonuses and picks up ore as necessary.


You'd basically create a new profession - Mining Ore Explorers that scour belts for a kickback from actual miners.


Rocks wouldn't be labeled "Veldspar" and so on - probably just labeled "Asteroid".

Then, an analyzer would mark them all for a fleet (or use some tagging system) what types were what kind, and skills would play into it as well as a level of technical application (something similar to learning to use probes while scanning for exploration - except on a much smaller level). You could essentailly setup probes in your local space to "cross" scan the segments of the belt sites, different configurations would give you different accuracy levels but allow you to cover large blocks of the belt easily.

So, you could do a ROUGH scan over an area of like 1AU to start, but then come down to 100km (small enough to scan ON GRID with you) with 4 belt probes - but you'd only get a general impression - there COULD be something really valuable somewhere in the middle of all of that juiciness, but you won't actually know until you get to the 5km by 5km scan range (size of 1 rock could be 5km) - and then you see there's more than just veldspar there, there's a really precious bit of megacyte style ore (whatever it's called). Naturally low/null sec would have higher concentrations of the stuff.

Of course, that wouldn't stop you from basically just "blind mining" and hoping you get something worth mentioning without ever using belt analyzing probes, superstitious style probing for the "intuitive" player. I think that should have some support as well. As long as "intuitive" doesn't mean "predictable".



This requires another idea I had mentioned to CCP which would be an "Exploration Contract System" for contracting out exploration sites/space sites you've found (Without needing to drag bookmarks around) - you could create a contract for the site for people that don't want to spend the time exploring - all they'd know is what system it was in and the type of site and in this case the analyzer data for confirming the site through game mechanics (rather than just someones promise) and "downloadable" to save having to redo the effort. In theory they could go out there and scan the site down themselves - but there could be a way to co-opt that from happening easily, or you could just make sure you price exploration sites competitively and someone decides pressing "Accept" is faster than the 10-20 minutes to actually probe the site down for the value.

Where I am.
Bloodpetal
Tir Capital Management Group
#73 - 2012-01-20 06:07:40 UTC  |  Edited by: Bloodpetal
There would be 2 parts to the PVP element of the above now.


You could "Combat Scan Probe" other miners and just go to see what they're doing to "steal" the ore that they've already found - basically parasitic mining off the hard work of "legitimate" miners and miner explorers.

That would SERIOUSLY **** off miners (and would definitely cause a few Miner wars, I already am laughing about hearing about the next great Miner war because of this).

This would lead to interesting behaviors on the "risk vs reward" element of mining - and how you counter parasitic miners.



The other PVP avenue is that you could implement some of the above ideas about "can flipping for belts".


The concept would be simple - you could "Plant a Flag" for your corporation on a rock. The item would load into some kind of probe launcher, let's say. It would be relatively expensive to manufacture - 1 Million ISK and it would basically set a beacon on the rock that anyone who mines it that isn't a member of that corp/alliance would get flagged for "stealing". This would feed into the economy of mining (some ore goes back into just claiming rocks) and would feed into the idea of "Risk VS Reward".

By mining that rock, the corp that is being "stolen" from can decide how to aggress the thief (just like with can flipping).

At that point, some rocks simply wouldn't (and shouldn't) be worth claiming (for 1 Million ISK in mineral value) - while others would definitely be worth it.


In the world of low/null sec, of course this does little to nothing at all.


In many ways, psychologically, I think this would promote more miners into null sec. By having to deal with "parasite" miners and having to spend money on "claiming" rocks to protect them from others - many miners would find Null sec a place to "strike it rich and control their destiny" - since there you don't have to spend the money on "Flags" or parasite miners would be taken care of by your alliance.

Although maybe not a huge deterrent to high sec mining, it becomes a psychological one - which is a greater force than any "financial" incentive. People hate more than anything the sensation of being "robbed" or having to worry about being "robbed" - I would say enough that they'd like to take the risk of Null sec more seriously as an option.


I'd say the above ideas pretty much would make botting a highly limited scope activity. Relying on a system that would need multiple people to cooperate and also facilitate the botters on a level much more challenging than "get in a ship and head to the belt to mine."

Where I am.
Zargyl
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#74 - 2012-01-20 07:58:36 UTC
Nice idea Mors!
I would be all for it Big smile
Shizuken
Venerated Stars
#75 - 2012-01-20 08:02:18 UTC
Mors Sanctitatis wrote:
In the 7+ years I've played this game, I think I might have mined maybe twice. Max. It was not for me. That being said, mining is one of the most important and fundamental aspects of Eve and it has never been improved upon since the start of the game. I'd like to share my thoughts on why it's so important and what could be done to revitalize this lackluster and horribly unrewarding profession.


This is an excellent starting point. Making visual cues as to mineral content is a good idea to make bot mining incredibly difficult, and it add a level of player skill that gives some value added to the profession. Also adding the possibility of striking it rich (hitting the "motherload" so to speak) is a good added incentive too. After you start mining it does not take long on a spreadsheet or calculator to plot your maximum ISK output per hour, hence why so many miners have multiple accounts. Adding a level of uncertainty to that would be a welcome surprise.
Mors Sanctitatis
Death of Virtue
#76 - 2012-01-20 08:03:25 UTC
Bloodpetal wrote:
There would be 2 parts to the PVP element of the above now.


You could "Combat Scan Probe" other miners and just go to see what they're doing to "steal" the ore that they've already found - basically parasitic mining off the hard work of "legitimate" miners and miner explorers.

That would SERIOUSLY **** off miners (and would definitely cause a few Miner wars, I already am laughing about hearing about the next great Miner war because of this).

This would lead to interesting behaviors on the "risk vs reward" element of mining - and how you counter parasitic miners.



The other PVP avenue is that you could implement some of the above ideas about "can flipping for belts".


The concept would be simple - you could "Plant a Flag" for your corporation on a rock. The item would load into some kind of probe launcher, let's say. It would be relatively expensive to manufacture - 1 Million ISK and it would basically set a beacon on the rock that anyone who mines it that isn't a member of that corp/alliance would get flagged for "stealing". This would feed into the economy of mining (some ore goes back into just claiming rocks) and would feed into the idea of "Risk VS Reward".

By mining that rock, the corp that is being "stolen" from can decide how to aggress the thief (just like with can flipping).

At that point, some rocks simply wouldn't (and shouldn't) be worth claiming (for 1 Million ISK in mineral value) - while others would definitely be worth it.


In the world of low/null sec, of course this does little to nothing at all.


In many ways, psychologically, I think this would promote more miners into null sec. By having to deal with "parasite" miners and having to spend money on "claiming" rocks to protect them from others - many miners would find Null sec a place to "strike it rich and control their destiny" - since there you don't have to spend the money on "Flags" or parasite miners would be taken care of by your alliance.

Although maybe not a huge deterrent to high sec mining, it becomes a psychological one - which is a greater force than any "financial" incentive. People hate more than anything the sensation of being "robbed" or having to worry about being "robbed" - I would say enough that they'd like to take the risk of Null sec more seriously as an option.


I'd say the above ideas pretty much would make botting a highly limited scope activity. Relying on a system that would need multiple people to cooperate and also facilitate the botters on a level much more challenging than "get in a ship and head to the belt to mine."


Great ideas Bloodpetal! I really like the idea of other players trying to leverage an experts hard work and siphon off their new found riches. Pirate

Intelligence shouldn't be free.   Mining, reloaded.   ADDICTED.

Bloodpetal
Tir Capital Management Group
#77 - 2012-01-20 08:24:26 UTC  |  Edited by: Bloodpetal
Mors Sanctitatis wrote:


Great ideas Bloodpetal! I really like the idea of other players trying to leverage an experts hard work and siphon off their new found riches. Pirate



Right, so in the Risk VS Reward scheme of things, small fast nodes that are more profitable/harder to find are also more valuable in terms of the miners not being discovered because they've moved on so quickly versus a large open site that exposes you to more parasitic behavior. Eventually, I figure that large belts that are more typical of "todays" belts would still be representative, but miners would still have to be probed out, and eventually I imagine large groups of miners would start to congregate at a site that is large enough to maintain a certain population, when that site is saturated you get the behavior of groups going out to find the next similar sites.


In High Sec this dynamic would work very well I'd imagine.


For NPCs I'd say that beacons should pop up randomly on the belt to identify where they are (kind of how Belts currently have triangles). These belt rats would allow pilots to fly to random parts of the belt in a quasi-exploratory manner without requiring to scan down a part of the belt, and might even give "clues" that there is something special somewhere within the vicinity.


Kind of like a little notice system. Also, I think anyone mining a rock should get a random NPC spawn (without a beacon, since that gives away their position too easily). This keeps things interesting.


This plays into an idea the CCP devs had about "segregating" exploration sites into "Deep Space" and "near Space", deep space sites would be more valuable and beyond the farthest planet, while intra-solar sites would be less valuable and easier - segregating the types of sites.


In this way, the belt would represent locations for typical belt mining (I think some grav sites should exist, but should be deep space sites now). The belt system would be interesting to see, but I figure there'd be pretty standard layouts and types of configurations that could be found hidden amongst the belts and would keep it somewhat predictable (although not too much).


So, let's say you have the following styles of "nodes":


  • Plentiful Cheap Ore Hundreds of Rocks, Smaller Rocks - Caters to large groups of active miners - small rocks mean that rocks disappear quickly and require full attention, satisfies larger mining operations that want to sit in one place for a long time.
  • Plentiful Cheap Ore, Large Rocks, Few Rocks - This satisfies more AFK miners, with some "flag planting" to deter "belt parasites" might be sufficient enough to let some AFK miners claim the site. Since they're AFK they might not notice the parasites hitting their rocks as often, alternately they could setup a trap to pretend to be AFK miners and have PVPers ready to nuke the parasite miner. Risk VS Reward
  • Limited Valuable Ore, Many Small Rocks - Caters to large corp expeditions that want to get some valuable rocks while on the move.
  • Limited Valuable Ore, One Large Rock - Caters to "sit down and mine what i just found" goodies for one or 2 players - susceptible to Parasitic miners due to extended period of sitting in one place.
  • Very Valuable Ore, Small Quantitty - Caters to the Solo explorer miner who wants that big rich hit in one place. Goes in, makes it rich fast and gets out. In theory.


Just playing with some ideas on configurations for these valuable mining layouts that need to be found and how you can cater to different styles of miners with different configs and value of ores.

I think overall the value/quantity of minerals needs to go up to offset the amount of time it takes to find these places, but should be interesting to see how that gets balanced and how it feeds into the system.


The other interesting thing is if these belts are actually environmentally "inconvenient" and "tight" enough that to get to some ores without a lot of navigation you have to "mine" through rocks to work your way back there and into range of what you want. If belts were 100Km wide with rocks densely packed, you'd actually want to make a "hole" for yourself to fit the Orca near you - this becomes a part of manipulating your environment to cater to your needs. One of the first things a mining crew might do when they arrive is clear out a central bubble out of a dense belt to get in there so you can get to the ore you want.

The logistics to clearing out a site would also be part of the technical skill in execution.


A big part of this is technical limitations in rendering these many rocks (many would just be bigger I would say) but also tracking them. How scalable is that for PVP engagements (large ones too, if they find their way to a belt)? Also the "size" of the bounding circle on asteroids curently is WAY too big and you will bounce off of "thin air" if you try and navigate through rocks - this would definitely need to be fixed.

Where I am.
Stonecold Steve
I N E X T R E M I S
Tactical Narcotics Team
#78 - 2012-01-20 09:15:47 UTC
Good idea!

“Hasta la muerte, todo es vida.”
Sheena Tzash
Doomheim
#79 - 2012-01-20 14:38:37 UTC
Personally I would like to see the ACT of mining to be more fun.

Having a bonus that is random doesn't mean it'll be more fun - it basically means that the people who mine the MOST will get the bonus dropped more often because they are there all day and all night long and therefore much more likely to get it.

The way I see it you could kill two birds with one stone, both bots AND make it more fun by changing mining into a mini game of its own.

Imagine that you land onto a belt and you start up the strip miners - as they run you have a mini game running which:

1) If you don't do anything at all will still bring in the ore - afk / low attention mining is still ok but it would require the user to do SOMETHING every so often to make sure they are not AFK for a stupid long time.

2) If you DO something you'll get a better yield than going AFK

3) The mini game requires an element of skill to get the best out of

4) Skills will make the mini game easier or provide more yield.

5) Mini game is actually fun!

This means that players who actually mine at the keyboard will get the most (maybe as much as 50 - 100% more than AFK miners), the AFK miners only work in short bursts (which is fine if you want to chill, answer the phone or chat in local without worrying too much) and bots won't be able to operate at all / as well if they can't play the mini game.

I think some of the appeal of mining is that its quite stress free (in high sec) and its something you can do with a few mins or a few hours and we can't take that away - but we should also be able to provide an incentive to allow miners to actually enjoy their profession and be able to get the very most out of the profession over AFK miners and bots.
Nyssa Litari
Doomheim
#80 - 2012-01-20 15:49:40 UTC
Sheena Tzash wrote:
Personally I would like to see the ACT of mining to be more fun.

Having a bonus that is random doesn't mean it'll be more fun - it basically means that the people who mine the MOST will get the bonus dropped more often because they are there all day and all night long and therefore much more likely to get it.

The way I see it you could kill two birds with one stone, both bots AND make it more fun by changing mining into a mini game of its own.

Imagine that you land onto a belt and you start up the strip miners - as they run you have a mini game running which:

1) If you don't do anything at all will still bring in the ore - afk / low attention mining is still ok but it would require the user to do SOMETHING every so often to make sure they are not AFK for a stupid long time.

2) If you DO something you'll get a better yield than going AFK

3) The mini game requires an element of skill to get the best out of

4) Skills will make the mini game easier or provide more yield.

5) Mini game is actually fun!

This means that players who actually mine at the keyboard will get the most (maybe as much as 50 - 100% more than AFK miners), the AFK miners only work in short bursts (which is fine if you want to chill, answer the phone or chat in local without worrying too much) and bots won't be able to operate at all / as well if they can't play the mini game.

I think some of the appeal of mining is that its quite stress free (in high sec) and its something you can do with a few mins or a few hours and we can't take that away - but we should also be able to provide an incentive to allow miners to actually enjoy their profession and be able to get the very most out of the profession over AFK miners and bots.

The thing of it is mining, as it is, is actually a blast when done as a group. You and ten friends in your corporation sit around and eat through a single field in about an hour. All the while you have haulers making runs back and forth. You have the Orca tractoring cans and boosting the barges / frigates / cruisers. And all the while, all of you are jabbering about everything or nothing, posting links to goofy pictures in chat. Meanwhile, you have scouts looking for the next location for the group because this field's about to go dry.

At least, when I bothered to mine a year or so ago, that's how it went. Corporate mining operations were both lucrative and fun, and they could also be part of a supply chain.

The single best proposal in this thread is to remove mineral drops from rogue drones. The rest is pretty good also, but I'd not want to see anything done that turned mining into a solo activity like PI. That's actually one of the chief problems with PI at the moment. It's a solo activity in an MMO. Mining should be at its best when you mine with your buddies. Heck, that's the whole reason for having smallish cargo holds on mining barges.