Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ore is the Backbone of what dictates prices for items. This would create a major in-balance in the market place. Yes chanced do need to be made or better ships need to be created but nothing as extreme as you are talking this would crash the market. EVE is like the world in the seance that the more you chance the fundamentals the radical everything else revolves around it.

And here I thought you were going to post somehting like "Give all mining ships a 50% chance of spontaneously exploding upon activating their miners." That would certainly make mining more fun!

As for your OP, no. Entirely too OP. The market is finally close to balanced after nerfing the drone regions, there's no way increasing mined ore by 1000% is going to help anything.

I don't think this would work like you intend it to.

First off, if mining time was reduced by 90%, the price of the minerals would rapidly drop. This would mean that you now have to mine some 10 times longer to make the same ISK. Now you're back where you started, except it now makes even more sense to go do a lvl 4 mission instead of mine. All I see this doing is cause temporary chaos to the marketplace in the shortterm, and in the longterm it just adds more micromanagement to mining.

It doesn't make mining more fun, but now your mining ship fills up 10 times as fast with minerals worth 1/10 as much.

No thanks.

If mineral prices drop by 90%, you would only have to spend the *same* amount of time mining for the usual amount of ISK.

You won't have to mine ten times longer unless prices drop by 99%. I don't really see that happening but, so what if it does? Like you said, it's only temporary. The Eve economy can and will balance itself.

Yeah, good point about the time thing. True, you wouldn't have to spend 10 times as long mining, just the same amount of time. You would though be filling up ships 10 times as fast with materials having 1/10 the value.

I fail to see how that makes anything more fun. In fact, I fail to see how changing nothing but the speed of mining makes it more fun, it seems like, at best, you'd make it less tedious. Except that isn't what would happen - mining would actually take longer (due to filling up ships faster with more worthless minerals)

Mine in a battleship!
Since I don't fly flying strip miners I occasionally mine in a Rokh which is a great mining boat, unless you need ice
And who says it is no fun mining?
Bring some friends along a do it together. Since you don't really have to pay attention so much you can you the time for chit-chatting and if you still think it is not fast enough, bring an Orca with ganglinks along or use mining drones.
Mining drone increase your yield by 350m3 per minute, depending how far you have to send them away.

The point is not to make faster ISK, it's to spend less time making the same ISK. But if you're willing to spend the additional time, you have the option of mining more ore. But that's not necessarily going to translate into more ISK if the market is already saturated and prices are near zero. You will have to hold on to your ore/minerals until the price goes up, which it will as manufacturing picks up.


Yes, and the prices of minerals will implode, forcing them to *stop bot mining*.
It's no skin off my nose.


YES!


They already are deplete in a matter of minutes. Increasing belt capacities would be great, but decreasing belt capacities would be disastrous. It would defeat all of the benefits of this idea and introduce new problems.

Faster mining.... No, I think it is fine the way it is
If you want to make it faster there are better ways.... different mining ships with better bonus's for the high level miners.

I do think that the use of mining drones is under utilized in-game, would be nice to see a drone miner that can compete with a Hulk.

PvP is the blood of EVE but mining is the backbone, would be nice to see some null sec ore pop up in the mission sites, perhaps this could be used to stimulate more PvP fights in high sec since now there are reasons to fight for it. Before you yell unbalance, I'm not talking about huge amounts of low-sec ore, just enough to make it interesting and perhaps get a high-sec miner interested in heading out to lower sec space.

Possible way to balance this is to improve yields for mining and reduce the reprocessing values by a small fraction.

Considering that the vast majority of minerals come from reprocessed materials, mining is largely only for self production to obtain minerals needed quickly for free (or with time investment).

The changing of value associated to the mining task would then improve the role and more fun, recognised better as an improtant activity more and as a result of rebalancing other areas of the game potentially having minimal effect to the market.

It would simply provide more needed empowerment to the industrial role imho which is a present lacking in a free market saturated by mission minierals.

Of course it's highly likley that mission minerals will need to and remain still the strongest source to ensure stability in the EvE economy. But any small shift in favour of the miner will help the role.

How about another idea to mining:
Create a whole different second way of dealing with mining by adding those 5 ships:

1. The "Belt Eater"
2. 4 "Towing Cruisers" (one for each race)

It would work as the following:
The Belt Eater has to go into a kind of "siege mode" to mine, has very short range (5k) but mines asteroids almost instantly. It is a capital like rorqual or orca and needs high sp (like exhumers + orca + additional skills). Now there is no point dropping the ship at a belt, mining the few asteroids in range and waiting out the siege timer, thats where the cruisers come in.

The towing cruisers have a special tractor beam that allows to "tow" or move asteroids. Each race has one and it needs a racial cruiser skill, ore industrial and a tractor skill (low sp requirements). Furthermore, it has some combat capability (like a t1 cruiser without combat boni, but a good slot layout). Those cruisers tow the asteroids to the Belt eater to give him something to chew. The racial differences can be in wepons, slot layout and number/range/velocity of the tractors.

Mining would then look like this: Plant the belt eater, have a group of low sp pilots tow the asteroids to it. There are different strategies for the towing, like building a chain and handing the rocks over or just flying all the way (that diverstity could be encouraged by different boni. Higher velocity and range for the chaining, shorter range but more tractors for the flying).

It would make mining a group effort (which is not necessarily the case today) and you only need one high sp char, the others can be combat pilots joining the op. Furthermore, as the cruisers have some inherent combat capability, they could deal with much more constant belt rat activity (some pew pew to not get bored).