Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's a very simple chart.
http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Refining



Except that that means that each and every mining laser will have a different yield depending on what ore it's mining (and different ore crystals will have different multipliers). You don't think that's going to confuse new players? You don't think that's more complicated than a simple lookup chart?



Everybody does. Refining is a three click process.
It does have an impact on their gameplay every time they refine something. They just don't have to interact with the formula for it. Just like stacking penalties have an impact on the gameplay of everyone despite the fact that most people never interact with the formula. Better yet, there's the Gunnery forumula which is actually complicated and full of formulae that very few people ever bother to interact with, let alone understand.

So what we have here is a very simple chart that describes the details of a simple system that can be explained in a few sentences. Like this:

"Mining lasers extract a certain volume of Ore per cycle. Every type of Ore has a different volume per unit. Ore is refined in batches. Every Ore has a Different batch size. Here's a Chart of the Ore volumes, Batch Sizes, and what minerals those batches refine into."

5 Sentences. Each of which is about as complex as the sentences found in See Spot Run.

You're trying to fix something which is not broken.

You're the one saying that 10m3 across the board is good because it produces "good round numbers."

The current system results in everyone dealing with whole numbers of units at all times. This is good, because EVE can't deal with fractions of an item and punishing people for having the wrong size stack of an Ore is silly.

If you manage to mine only 10m3 of Ark then you have a bigger problem than rounding rules.

Let's say you mine 10,000 m3 of Ark

Your numbers become:

937.5 Trit
518.75 Zyd
1040.625 Mega

If you refine that in one cycle, your waste would be:

.5 Trit
.75 Zyd
.625 Mega

I would be more than happy to have an elegant ore volume and recycling system in exchange for that level of waste.

Uhh, I'm not sure if this has been brought up yet, but I think you've possibly put too much into it.

Really the only thing that needs to change is how the ore is displayed/sold/bought.

Example.

Instead of a veldspar roid showing that it has 230,000 units of veldspar, it will instead show that it has 23,000m3 of veldspar.


Now, when you go to sell/buy this ore, it will be done in the same manner. You'll be buying/selling using the m3 value instead of the unit value.


Basically, this allows all the mechanics to still exist so that CCP doesn't have to change any of that, but simplifies mining/whatever else makes you have to do an m3 to units conversion.

So, while
200,000 units of veld would be displayed on the market/production/survey scan/hull as 20,000m3.

While 200,000 arkonor would be 3.2 million m3.

Also, when compressing ores such as arkonor, instead of showing you that it requires 1000 units, it will instead tell you that it requires 16,000m3 of arkonor.





So, as far as all the changes are concerned, it's really just CCP doing for the players what they're forced to do everyday, which is the units to m3 conversion.

Only, they're taking it a step further and applying the conversion to anything that displays an ore value.

I'm assuming they've probably got something that can do this fairly simply without having to go through and manually change anything showing ore.


Point is, changing the values is a bad idea, however, simply changing how the value is displayed is rather simple.

If you changed that m3 value of the ores themselves, and made a single unit of veld 1m3, then 1 unit of arkonor would become 160m3 as it would be multiplied be 10 times higher in m3 value as veld would be.

Also, this would mean that mining lasers/strip miners/whatever else would need their m3 extraction multiplied by 10, and the oreholds would need to be multiplied by 10 as well.


This all goes back to my comment just above yours.

We can simply change the displayed value of ores to match their m3, so 1 unit of veld would now be displayed as .1 m3 instead and 1 unit of arkonor would be displayed as 16m3 instead.

Like I said, this allows all the values the game has established to remain the same, only now, we the players don't have to do the units to m3 conversion when we're mining.


There's no point in overcomplicating things.

The whole point of this thread was to make things easier and redesigning everything to do with ore would overcomplicate.

Just simply change the displayed value of ores to their m3 value instead of units.

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Edit

forgot to add that not only would the m3 values of the mining barges/exhumers need to be increased, but you'd basically have to do this 10x multiplier for every ship in game, however, do to the imbalance of increased hold size when carrying other items, you would basically need to increase the m3 value of EVERYTHING in game 10 times higher than it is now.

This is where the true complications in designing a new system comes in.

In order to give any ore or mineral a new m3 value you would have to rebalance the m3 value of everything in the game and what m3 ships could hold.

If you added in changes to reprocessing or just made changes to reprocessing itself, then you would have to go through and change the mineral requirement for EVERYTHING in game, and this WILL negatively affect either the buyer or seller and take a long time to balance out.

If you attempted to change both of these, then CCP would basically have to redesign everything in game that had to do with ORE and due to this, would throw the current market into CHAOS!

So again, simply changing how the ore units are displayed is enough to simplify things for miners without designing a whole new system that would throw Eve out of wack.

break this down a bit for me so that I understand it.

Cause from what I'm seeing, it seems like what you've suggested so far is basically an entire revamp of the ore aspect of eve.



OK, so it seems here that you're saying that every ore would be 1 m3 and would be refinable at that one m3.

Now, the fact that the ore woudl yield the same amount of minerals per m3 as it currently does keeps the market intact, HOWEVER, there's a lot more difficutly in what you're suggesting.

For instance, if you change the relative m3 per unit of an ore, would you then also change the relative m3 value of the minerals?


I ask this because those very "odd ball volumetric units that have no value" would still exist, only they wouldn't exist in the ores themselves, only the mineralsl.

You can't change the m3 of the minerals because if you made the m3 of a single tritanium 1m3 while veld was 1m3, then would it make sense that veld produced 1,000m3 trit per 333 m3 of velspar?
Not at all.
So, those odd ball volumetric units would still exist.


Now, the biggest flaw in a system where 1 unit of each ore is 1m3 is the mining value.

When extracting ore, your strip miners extract based off m3.
Now, if you changed the system so that every ore is 1 unit per 1m3, then you would basically have to redesign mining lasers so that the amount of m3 they drew off an asteroid what determined by the asteroid type.

So basically, all you've done is taken those odd ball volumetric numbers and applied them to the mining lasers instead of the ores themselves, which would actually be more difficult to program and be more strain on the server.

So I feel that your idea is a bit too difficult for trying to simplfy things

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My idea is actually extremely simple.
Like I said,

Instead of displaying units on ores in buying/selling/scanning/refining/etc. etc., you instead simply display the m3 value.

So, I'll break down how this would change.(not factoring losses or anything in refining)

So, you're mining veldspar. When you sruvey that asteroid it shows that there is 2000 m3 in the asteroid. You automatically know how much of that you will pull in one cycle just by looking at the number. No units to m3 conversion.

Now, you mine 100,000 m3 of veldspar. You then refine the ore. For every 33.3 m3 you're going to get 10 m3 of tritanium.
So, with your 100k m3 of velspar, you're going to get 30,030.03m3 of tritanium

You then place that 30,030.03 m3 of tritanium on the market for which players can buy in values of .01m3 because it is he lowest m3 value of that mineral.

So now a player building a raven has all that he needs except the tritanium.
He then looks at the blueprint which will tell him he needs 83,353.95 m3 of tritanium instead of telling him the amount of units.

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Now, this example of how my simple changes would display might be a little too in depth but it also shows how it's making things easier on the player, while at the same time keeping CCP from having to rebalance anything, but instead to simply set the ores/minerals to display and list by their m3 and not by the units.

It makes it easier on miners because they know exactly how many m3 is left in a roid without having to do the conversion from units, and it also maks things easier for those whom are performing production because they'll know exactly how much m3 they'll have to haul instead of having to do the conversion or buying it and finding out they can't carry it all.

Basically it streamlines the system so that everything and everyone is saying m3 instead of units.
If you're a transporter and your CEO says to bring back so many units of trit, well, you may not have the m3 for it, but if he tells you to bring back so much m3 of trit because it's what is easily displayed for him, then you can tell him exactly how much m3 of trit you'll be able to bring back instead of buying it and realizing then, or one of the two of you having to do the conversion.



Honestly, trying to revamp how many m3 a unit is and how many m3 in minerals it produces, you can just simply change how they're displayed so that there's no guessing/math involved.


Cause so far what I've seen y'all suggesting would require massive changes to anything pertaining to ore.

Believe it or not but the complexity actually ads gameplay. For example you have to figure out which is the most profitable ore to mine, and if you are a manufacturer you have to figure out which is the most profitable ore to buy etc. Simplifying it would not only take away some of EVE's charm, or what makes it stand out from other MMO's, but it will also remove some complexity that actually makes for fluctuating prices and a dynamic market, because the way it is now its not immidately clear which ore is best to buy or sell. This means most noobs will actually take to mining Omber or Plagioclase thinking they will profit more, and sure they will make money, but people who actually took the time to think it through will make even more, because they will eventually be mining the right ore which is scordite or veldspar atm. Its quite brilliant in my opinion

What happens if I buy 1m3 of Arkonor (or any amount not divisible 16)? EVE can't handle fractional items. If you're saying adjust all ore sizes to 1m3 and keep refining batch volumes the same, that's better but you have 2 problems. First, there are 2 ores with non-whole number refining batch volumes. Second, you've just made mining drones and lasers much more efficient at mining high ends. In the end (assuming you take care of those elegantly), what does it improve? You still need the same amount of mining time to get a refining batch and your mineral yield stays the same, and you end up with a lookup chart that's almost identical to the one we have now. You gain some extra granularity in the ore markets, but those aren't exactly active markets (mostly buy orders from refiners and sell orders from hopeful, silly people) and I don't see any sign that they need that granularity.

By the way, Gold is the refined Mineral. It's probably pretty hard to get someone to make delivery on a small amount of gold ore.

The metric system is a terrible analogy. Your suggestion results in a Ore to Mineral conversion table that's packed with many-significant-figure decimals. Where does a metric to metric conversion result in that sort of table?

Once again, neither ore sizes nor refining batch volumes are arbitrary or meaningless. The Ore sizes were picked by CCP to allow high end ores to be harder to mine than low end ores. The batch sizes were picked to allow different ores to produce the mineral yield CCP wanted without having to deal with fractional mineral output.

Your original goal with this proposal was to save newbies from doing the (trivial) math that the current system (kindof) requires. Now you're suggesting that we're "afraid to do simple math*" and are opposing your suggestion because of that?

*actually somewhat less trivial. People are much better at calculating whole multiples of whole numbers than they are at dealing with decimals of any kind (besides the series 10^-x, ofc).

If you can easily multiply .051875 (or any number of other odd decimals your system would inject into the lookup table) by any whole number in your head, bully for you. You have a talent that not many other people have.

If the "noobs" are confused by a system that takes 5 sentences to explain at a 1st grade reading level, they are going to have a hard time no matter what we do. Moreover, the current system was designed to produce a lookup chart that is easy for humans (at least those of us who cannot easily deal with 5 significant figure decimals in our head) to do mental math with.

You end up sacrificing usability in pursuit of a false elegance.



If you build differing wastes into the lasers (that change in non-linear, non-smooth ways when affected by skills and fleet bonuses, which would be a royal pain to explain because piece-wise functions suck), you're now going to have to explain to the newbies why there's a whole list of ore yields on their lasers and why, when they train Mining X+1, those yields don't all change by 5%. In addition, you haven't removed any arithmetic from the process of converting ore into ISK, you've just moved some of it to the process of comparing different ore yields on the mining laser.

No newb has to. They just have to press the three buttons to refine the stuff. Anything beyond that is looking under the hood at the workings of the engine.

I'd rather have an elegant lookup chart (I've yet to see any way that your proposal removes the need for a lookup chart for doing your own refining calculations) that uses numbers that are easy to read and that I can easily manipulate in my head. Again, without using a calculator, how long does it take you to tell me how many units of 1m3 Arkonor it takes to produce 700 Trit, 200 Zyd, and 400 Megacyte (using the lookup chart I made for you on the first page of the thread)?