EVE General Discussion

They might want to try driving this though

http://www.telovation.com/photos/biggest-machines-in-the-world-excavator.jpg

EVE Mining difficulty doesn't scale enough. As starting profession it should have low skill need, but very little reward.

However, the mining "end game" ships should yield much more ore per cycle mined than now. HOWEVER, this should require much more attention and input from the player to achieve.

Think along the lines of having a 3d model of the rock with ore veins that has to be manually carved out, with dangerous gas pockets to avoid and maybe manual manouvering of the ship to stay at the optimal spot.

This should take concentration, but yield for instance 10x the ore per minute than regular "dumb" mining.

I'm sure if mining had the coordination, skill requirements and rewards of an incursion, many more people would have found it worth while and there would have been far less botting problems with it.

As it stands now, the whole mechanic just begs to be botted.

Just throwing fancier ships at the problem is not going to solve that.

Its called a cov-ops cyno and blackops

CCP announced (search yourself :p) the focus for summer expansion will be "WAR".

I imagine they could tweak some things with industrials, but it will clearly not be the core of the expansion :)

More war is nothing but a good thing for indi pilots so in a way, this summer will be a boost for indi pilots

Moving system wide belts behind probing apart from 1.0 systems would help. Also having scramming rats spawn at the said behind probe belts. Unless the bot works into itself way to attack scramming attacker it's tied to the belt until dt or someone releases it.

Smaller mass amount in roids and larger amount of small pockets of them helps as it prevents botters from scanning one belt and leaving their hulks mine it until next dt. On the other hand active miners should reap the reward in form of increase in +5 and +10% variant of ores to outset the need to constantly rescan and move to next small gravi site.

In my opinion, there is perhaps one niche remaining for a new category of mining ships or modules — ones that require far more micromanagement in exchange for a higher ore/ice yield. I haven't mined ore in an extremely long time, but I'm fairly certain it takes at least a few minutes for a Hulk to fill its cargo hold, asteroid pops notwithstanding. A "perfect" highsec Mackinaw with 8k cargo (requires a T2 cargo rig if using two MLUs) can go two full cycles before having to empty its hold, and that's the true "semi-AFK" mining technique.

I'm not proposing this seriously, but mining ships or modules that require player input approximately every 30 seconds (by dint of new lasers with extremely short, non-automatic cycle times, say) for a (roughly) 50%-100% higher hourly mineral/ice yield might not be such a terrible thing.

Also, people constantly claim that most minerals come from the nullsec drone regions, and it is all but certain that there are still bot miners afoot. If true, then higher mining yields for at-the-keyboard players should indeed net them more ISK, because their higher yields won't have a huge impact on market prices.

Just my 0.02 ISK.

can you go back in time and tell this to the bright spark that thought up super capitals

CCP please make it simpler for corp members to collaborate by adding a corp role for POS labs where you can put and remove BPC's/BPO's into a hangar and run relavant jobs without having to have the starbase config role. POS modules then can't be offlined and stolen and corp members can use the POS as a corp surely should be able to.

There are so many over complicated suggestions in threads like these.

POS work excluded because it's as bad as I can imagine making something.....except it doesn't really have any bugs just complete lack of thought....complicated suggestions are needed here because all POS work needs to be thrown in the garbage.....even the scale of pos structures is silly.

Mining: Minerals, NPC labs, refineries and manufacturing distribution do not represent the intended progression of EvE players. Almost all miners go (Highsec)->(Lowsec)->(Highsec for the rest of their foreseeable lives) usually ending in them leaving EvE. In some rare occasions they meet somebody that gets them into null or a wormhole but the bottom line is that as a miner why would you leave highsec and why would you ever even talk to other players? (I'm not trying to move people into lowsec or nullsec I'm saying that EvE penalizes the average indy player for not choosing highsec). Note that I said average indy player not somebody like myself or Tippia that spend all day here.

Reasons (Mining and General Industry):

Highsec
-Highsec mining yields almost all of the minerals the average player needs.
-The minerals they cannot get mining in highsec can easily be produced running L3 or L4 missions
-Highsec also has many research agents, many manufacturing facilities and many high quality refineries
-Incredibly safe and 100% AFK'able(I know because I do this)

Lowsec
-Lowsec mining yields 1 additional mineral....so why don't lowsec miners use that to make lowsec mining viable? Because mission runners are brining in a large volume of that mineral in their loot.(In my experience using a Proteus for L4's I bring in minerals just like when I'm using my hulk to mine)
-Lowsec grav sites are too rare to justify parking 200m in equipment in a station and the regular belts will often prove deadly even with a friend watching
-The lowsec areas I have lived in have less research agents, less refineries and less manufacturing facilities and they are all the same quality as highsec.
-Not very safe(don't even get gate bubbles for system access control) and not AFK'able at all

Nullsec
-So you probably do something other than industry as your main task and you've talked to the rare nullsec or WH industrialist
-Site spawn frequency varies but is generally manageable and enough that you don't mine in belts so you are fairly safe if you watch for probes.
-Somebody taxes your mineral income at a level high enough that you make more than in lowsec or highsec but you'd still be better off ratting
-You may also be using a POS refinery that nails you with a maximum of 75% refinery yield!
-Highsec Mission runners are still getting the minerals you do(at lower rates, but there are also an incredible number of mission runners and not an incredible number of you)

Given those facts it is easy to see why most miners act as they do and why the industrial system does not fit the intended progression of EvE. Lowsec is a step backwards for income to most miners because of the need to replace ships, transport goods and stay in station whenever a neutral comes around. Nullsec has huge barriers to entry for them because they can be self sustaining in highsec and without social interaction you do not get into null.

I know somebody will chime in with their own personal story to make me wrong but I'm talking about what happens to the average player, average does not mean everybody. None of the miners that I met when I made this toon are still playing(30+ people), they played afk and solo and usually quit from "griefing" or wardecs without ever experiencing EvE and that is no way to run a successful MMO.

TLDR Version: Nearly all of industry can be done in highsec solo while AFK making it even less of a game than running Folding@Home on your computer.