Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's relative velocity that matters, not absolute and Eve asteroids behave more like trojan asteroids - clustered in the L4 and L5 points in a planets orbit. Once you've matched velocities - they will appear stationary, just as the Earth appears stationary to us.

I do agree there should be more gameplay. Maybe heterogeneous asteroids that all look the same in the overview - you need an analyser to determine which ones are valuable - not a scanner that does all the work for you!

What does this actually add though?

Okay, rocks move, so now miners have to either scan down or chase after (or likely both) something which doesn't shoot back, attempt to evade, or really do anything more than necessitate turning on a prop-mod and hitting "approach" or "orbit". There is literally more interaction involved in moving a Freighter around as that at least has you pushing buttons on a set interval and, in some cases, webbing the Freighter with an alt.

Plus if you allow people to tractor Asteroids then you're inevitably going to get jokers who take rocks and basically just run with them so they can't be easily found or mined.

Basically the only thing this accomplishes, in my mind, is making the server have to keep track of more variables per rock, and maybe adding a new category to the scanning interface for people to ignore.

Asteroids moving through deep space = no. Asteroids whizzing across the existing belts instead of being stationary half moons = maybe. It would add some player skill to mining. As long as the option to sit still and mine whatever comes into range remains an option, also having an option to position yourself to intercept the better and faster moving asteroids would add some much needed interaction. Also would add some fitting choices... do you fit that prop mod to chase the better asteroids, or do you go for slow and reliable?

The rocks can't move too fast or the barges (particularly the retriever) will have problems keeping up.

Make mining great again!


It should be a mini game of some sorts, balancing drill power to not blow up a roid based on some indicators.
Bomberman on a rock cross section. Space Worms tower defence. Or something.
Need 3 apm (or more) instead of the 2 clicks per hour that mining requires nowdays...

Fast & Furious mining barge drift? Mining equipment usually doesn't have afterburners and moves at walking speed or slower. I see no reason for barges to fit a prop mod other than to use the warpout trick. So every barge would fit it and still die because the pilot is afk and/ or quadboxing.

We already have diminishing returns for the most part, it's just that barges don't have enough slots for diminishing returns to enter into the picture in a relevant way. Really we only need one barge with more slots (& PG/CPU to use them), and you gain the ability to create all three of the current variants with use of appropriate fittings. But that's a totally different
And Blade, Consider miners more associated with oh..... The Bridging/Flame Thrower tanks of WW2, or Trawlers which do actually travel at a fair pace to chase the fish and get in & out of harbour. That's a more accurate representation of what they are and the environment in which they have to work rather than stationary or near enough to it pit mining equipment in the current age.

Of course, neither of these make it any more interesting adding moving rocks, or any other sort of mini game.
As long as the majority of a miners time is spent mining, the current method is not RSI inducing and any mini game would actually be more mind numbing,

Mini-game it, and you end up with the same thing we have in sites with the hacking mini-game. That was neat for the first few times you tried it now it is boring as hell.

Rocks moving is never going to be interesting because you simply set your ship to follow the rock and the movement essentially becomes irrelevant and the boring nature of mining comes shinning through again. If the rocks are moving so fast a mining ship cannot keep up then it gets you nothing but frustration as that one ore type you need comes into then moves out of range.

Change lasers / strip miners and the rocks themselves so continual adjustments are needed and good old frustration sets in. Besides that after a few minutes, or maybe a few hours that continual adjustment process becomes just as boring and repetitive as the current mining process.

Even using lasers to drill holes into asteroids so you can plant explosives and blow them into small chunks your ship can then pick up would only add an interesting element for a short time and then like all the others it would become boring and repetitive.

You mentioned Interstellar Rift and it's teleportation style mining system and how interesting it was, the you tell us that even that got boring after awhile. There is a lesson in this one for you and the others that want mining to be more interesting, that lesson is simply this. Mining is boring and mining will always be boring no matter what you do to it.

FFS, it is mining. It takes as much skill as shooting fish in a barrel. Seriously you are shooting rocks....rocks. You aren't even shooting NPC pirates, but rocks.

I'll suggest something radical...a radical view: The "boring" aspect of mining is a feature not a bug. You get in your procurer/skiff find a nice belt, select some rocks, start shooting said rocks, turn on Netflix (Amazon, insert DVD, etc.) sip alcoholic beverage of choice, while periodically emptying your ore hold into the hauler piloted by an alt.

I'm not too sure how complicated the programming would be to make them all gyro's on that curved axis they're already on. It would make the most sense for me to warp in and the asteroids all have a set velocity (for each direction) that doesn't change once a player has warped into that belt. This sounds like some complicated programming to me, but I'm still very new to the programming world so maybe I'm wrong.

Well... I'd like to be able to grab a whole asteroid and then take absolutely forever in my Venture dragging the whole thing back to the station and shove it in... but then you'd get capitals doing it lol