Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Change the refining system

Hisec ores only refine to the first 4 or 5 minerals
Lowsec ores only refine to the next 4
Nullsec ores refine to the last 4
Mission loot / salvage / droids and anything built etc only return salvage that cannot be refined to base minerals

Change manufacturing

Meta 0 modules/ships/whatever can be made wholly from hisec minerals
Meta 1 modules from mainly hisec minerals, with some salvage
Meta 2 modules from some hisec and more salvage
Meta 3 modules from some hisec, some salvage and some lowsec
Meta 4 as above, but more of the lowsec minerals
Meta 5+ needs a bit of everything, but the higher the Meta, the higher the proportion of nullsec minerals

If your toon wants to chill out in hisec with little stress, or you dont have the skills or support to survive lowsec or nullsec, no problem. Stay in hisec, but dont expect to make billions of Isk. If you want the big isk, or the nice shiny toys, be prepared to enter lowsec and nullsec, or pay a premium to those that will. This also keeps mission running as an important resourse gathering tool. More people will enter low and null chasing the isk, so PVPers will have more targets to pew pew.

As far as bots go, if anyone is doing repetitive task for more than 3 or so hours, the server can start a convo with them and ask a simple random question. "What ship are you running? What is your name? How many hi slots do you have?" It doesnt matter what it is, as long as it is based on the toon and ship they are in. Put a time limit of one hour to answer the question. This allows for afk miners. If the question is answered incorrectly, or isnt answered at all, send another one straight away. Any toon failing 3 in a month, suspend the account until they can demonstrate to CCP they are not bots.

I've been thinking about this idea recently, and I'm not sure it's such a great solution after all.

I like the idea itself, but will it encourage miners to make use of lowsec and nullsec? Pretty much no, as it won't change the fact that miners are hideously vulnerable in these systems.

Any good mining idea needs to make lowsec and nullsec mining a realistic option.

Sure it would involve a few new ships though. A new mining ship that is able to generate a bubble around the ship kinda like a warp disruption bubble. This will protect it from groups of 5 people. Groups of people higher than 5 will be able to burn down the bubble. (considering BC class dps) This could be a capital class mining ship or what ever since it is in low/null.

You can make up all kinds of ideas but CCP will never do them. Too many people will ***** etc.

I love your optimism but you know all thise things you can do.... someone with sufficient programming knowledge could make a bot do that.

For reference with this posting: The Mining Buff Fallacy

As to simply asking CCP to provide a monopoly on gaming features and completley remove any semblance of a free and competative market that should remain directly influenced by "player choices", one of the greatest strengths and appeals with EvE gameplay I might stress. I would say you are prescribing a viewed transition for how the game is supposed to be played as a result rather then the current view that players to some extent have some free reign in sculpting and influencing how New Eden operates. This whilst already having a game that deliniates resources opportunities already in favour of the null environment, but isn't being fully utilised. (See linked thread for redistribution of minerals, drone poo and other points associated.)

Or mineral prices will rise high enough for more people gruntingly agree to mine more, time to stock up on large smart bombs then.

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.


i dont think it should be rarity of rich deposits that make it intresting i think in sence should be a regular thing in sence that as many have said that it needs to be interactive i would like the hulk changed some thing like perhaps astroids are bigger and your ship attaches to the rock you have to scope out the vains of ore and then you have to scan it place the lazor drill and that one cycle would give you enough isk to make you happy and perhaps you have things like crystals breaking if you dont do it quite right im not sure but takes skill..."human skill"..... point being like everyone has said afk mining at least this way you feel like you did something

Then perhaps mining doesn't need to be saved, instead current being accomplished by a in system space environment that in it's behaviour towards the ship resembles the behaviour of a river, lake, sea or ocean towards a human body with a complex and dynamic rogue drone environmet is a better idea.

It might even be possible to introduce space whales ... as titanic mother drones.

Rubber asteroids.

If you want to catch bots, just use decoy asteroids. It doesn't matter if they hit it first or last, but the mining lasers will only move one unit of ore per cycle. This should result in it taking until downtime on a single rock.

Part two of the trick, make it a pit trap. Once mining the rock starts, have it spawn copies of itself.

Make the real asteroids visually identifiable, with the fake ones being obvious. Tweak so bots have a very hard time telling the difference.

The slag idea has some merit. Fields could become much larger, with a lot more rocks, but have about the same amount of "live" ore in them which you can find only with a survey scanner. Something like 80-90% dead rocks would be plenty to make blind botting a waste of time.

It seems possible to create some sort of captcha-like display of rock "quality" to defeat bots; so have the server send back a package of heavily randomized data that resolves to a small image showing the "density" of ore in a rock, which is easy to visually interpret, but which due to the randomization would be hard or impossible to memory pick or screen scrape. If it used a "heat map" with a random color palette or randomly formed intersecting lines and shapes, then "density" could be quick and simple for a human eye to read from it, but it would be harder (at least as hard as the usual captcha anyway) to read programatically.

The density reading should show up as a small graphical column in the survey scanner results, but should not be "sortable" in any way, or maybe should sort randomly, to defeat bots that try to macro a sort and then just pick the top X rocks to mine.