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Re-Imagining Mining in EVE
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Silivar Karkun
Doomheim
#21 - 2013-06-24 21:35:09 UTC
when starting the mining laser you would get a window showing the targeted asteroid, along with bar which represents the asteroid integrity. you would be able to use the cursor to focus the beam in a spot of the asteroid, extracting ore from that location and hitting the integrity bar.

now, survey scanners would serve as an aditional tool, showing the more concentrated areas in the asteroid, i mean, the parts where there's more ore in it. the beam would harvest more ore from there at the cost of bigger damage to the integrity of the asteroid. the minigame would end when all the asteroid would loose its contents or when it got practically destroyed by loosing its integrity.

the process would have to be active, the asteroids in EVE have a rotation system, so it cannot be made AFK, the window could be sizable and it shouldnt cover the whole screen like the one used in exploration.

the only problem i find is what happens then with mining drones, i would say that they can still work as always. this new system would require only 1 cycle per asteroid and players would be able to select if using all their mining beams in a single asteroid or having each mining beam focused in a separated window, with a different asteroid.
Mole Guy
Bob's Bait and Tackle
#22 - 2013-06-24 21:47:49 UTC
there would have to be a way to identify what ore is what in an asteroid.

i work at north americas largest open pit copper mine.

we dont just blind dig, we drill and take core samples prior too thinking about which direction to go next.
we could use the survey scanner, that would be acceptable.

but, if i am in a hurry for copper (which is what i dig now), why would i travel to texas and dig in their fields? we all know texas is known for its oil. so, a survey scanner would remain AOE. if i see a roid with a high concentraction of mex, and i am lookin for mex, hey..i will target that right off the scanner.

but if we are just blind drilling, i want no part of it. it isnt realistic.

i do love the ideas of rings and belts that span a whole planet. or belts 1000's of km wide.

how would the crystals work? a crystal will cut anything, but cut more of whatever crystal you are using out of the roid?
ratuchikaka
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#23 - 2013-06-24 23:32:41 UTC  |  Edited by: ratuchikaka
Idea is good +1; Also Dae Mitry's #18 has good ideas on it.

My 2 cents: In a virtual world where tractor beams do exist, there must exist an ORE ship capable of hooking up a complete damn asteroid and do the hell you want with it in a POS, station or whatever.

We already have massive ships that can't dock in station. Why not this?

EDIT: Of course that roid/ice/whatever has to be processed and it takes time to get it.
Robert Saint
The Grumpy Dogs
#24 - 2013-06-25 00:18:11 UTC
+1

The changes are a good start.... really anything to make it less boring, such is the reason for AFK from most non-bot players.

However, if you truly want to FIX mining, MAKE THE MINING MISSIONS worth something? As there is really no incentive to run Mining Missions. Sure you get a bit of experience, but nothing compared to Security missions.

MAKE MINING MISSION have REAL Roids that can be harvested and SOLD on market.
I.E. GAS or Null Sec Ores (Smaller Quantities), but with combat risks (level 4 NPC rats with decent bounties) to fight to get it.

Mining is boring , because mining missions are boring and basically only used for standings.
Silivar Karkun
Doomheim
#25 - 2013-06-25 00:51:03 UTC
ratuchikaka wrote:
Idea is good +1; Also Dae Mitry's #18 has good ideas on it.

My 2 cents: In a virtual world where tractor beams do exist, there must exist an ORE ship capable of hooking up a complete damn asteroid and do the hell you want with it in a POS, station or whatever.

We already have massive ships that can't dock in station. Why not this?

EDIT: Of course that roid/ice/whatever has to be processed and it takes time to get it.


it would need a hell of a tractor beam O_O....or use several little tug drones ?

in any case, it would be too easy, the thing is to make people go an harvest their minerals not just kidnapping an asteroid and leaving it processing in a POS.

going on topic, i get a gigantic resource rebalance in order to implement this.

the asteroid belts would be seen in the sky view and you could warp to parts of them depending on where you make the right clicking, they would act as gravimetric sites, where people would have to scan you in order to reach your location, but rats would spawn no matter where you are in that case. the belts would span thousands of asteroids meaning less problems of scarcity

these belts would be composed of the asteroids defined by the OP, with random acomodations from small to big asteroids. the difference between security zones would be the concentration of ores in them. for example, having low sec have 25% for low sec and 50% for null sec for each asteroid. or more if you want.

ice asteroids would spawn in the fartest parts of the system and would be as abundant as ores with the same mechanics than ore asteroids.

planetary rings would spawn a new type of asteroids which would contain moon materials and would require a new type of harvesting devices.

ring asteroids would of course contain limited amounts of moon materials, this in order to not make them more efficient than actually using moons for it.

the mining mechanics would have to change, in the case of using the aforementioned new mining minigame, the yield would have to be completed by the player, this means keeping the button pressed until the laser has finished a full cycle, of course, mining cycles in the game would be shorter than the current module cycles, at the must it should be half the time (30 secs for a mining beam and 90 seconds for the strip miners, with variations given by the ship types)

ice harvester cycles would have to be tweaked again to get in par with the ore mining lasers (we cannot leave people pressin a button for 5 minutes come on).....

each complete cycle would net you the same amount of ore of the current cycles, and the percentages of ores you get would depend on the asteroid, like in the OP, that means that you could get veldspar, scordite and pyroxeres for example, from a full cycle, in different quantities.

now what happens with crystals? crystals would change from allowing to harvest more of that specific ore, to use the yield to harvest only that ore, this means that in the example of the veldspar+scordite+`yroxeres asteroid, you could use a crystal for every ore, the mining beam would only harvest that specific ore and would spare the others, it would still damage the asteroid but you could cherry pick the ore and move out to other.
Daugar Draaken
EBSTF Holdings
#26 - 2013-06-25 11:26:00 UTC
How about blowing up large asteroids?

1. Preparing a big enough detonation device would take massive alliance effort, probably for weeks. It would be noticeable on local markets - someone is buying big bomb components

2. detonating such a specialty bomb might "disrupt the local warm field" for a few hours. In such an environment warp and even microwarp engines would not operate. Maybe long range scanners would also fail, restricting ship visibility to 100 kilometers, maximum.

3. A moon does BOOM, and turns in to a massive asteroid field littered with rare minerals. The detonation attracts attention, the news casts would be buzzing, attracting hundreds of sneakthieves. Try and keep the thieves away.

4. Investment would be X. Profit would be (provided the sponsor entity would be able to keep the thieves out) many times X.

Every day in Eve there would be opportunity to blow up a planetissimal, and that would be fun. However once every month a big one would be detonated, and that would be spectacle of amazing proportions, attracting massive attention from potentially hundreds of players. The detonation would create a complex game fields of interlocking game fields riddled with high-yield asteroids that slowly fade into nothingness after several hours.

It would be an orgy of violence.
Silivar Karkun
Doomheim
#27 - 2013-06-26 17:45:58 UTC
bumping for survival
Ash Katara
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#28 - 2013-06-26 20:30:00 UTC
Thank you for all the positive and or constructive comments.

I agree this is not a complete solution, just the beginnings of one. I have not included changes to the basic mining mechanic so as to not completely **** off current miners. I do however like all of your ideas on making mining more of an active skill.

If CCP does build an active mining mechanic, I feel it should offer greater reward for the effort, but at the same time is should not replace the current one as the passive nature of the current mining mechanic does appeal to many players. The problem I see is that if me make mining as interactive and similar to PI, the current server cluster would choke. There would be more asteroids in a single system and there are currently planets in EVE. What ever method is use it would need to have a light footprint. My current idea, while needing a complete ore balance would only add a few new attributes to the current asteroid data model. So what could we do, to add an active mining component to eve, without requiring a complete re-coding of asteroids and with a minimal amount of added computation on the part of the server cluster?

The idea of increasing the rate of ore retrieval to offset the time needed to find good ores might be one possible solution. One other thing we could do is change the mineral density of the current ore types. Currently each ore has 3 variants, base, +5%, +10%. We could make these, Base, +100%, +200% or more and then make these more dense asteroids far less common. Say 1 in 100 is a +100% and 1 in 200. In this way current miners who are just looking to pass the time might get lucky every once in awhile, but people actively searching for the rare asteroids will reap greater benefits.

My posted idea, would result in vastly more asteroids in a given system. In addition to increasing the rarity of the more dense asteroids we could also make the better ores more rare. With lots more total ore in a system, far too much to mine in a refresh cycle, the relative availability of the more valuable ores would need to decrease as well. In this way the majority of asteroids are low end base ores. Perhaps 75% base, 20% medium, 5% high end for the available ores in a given system.

The last thing we could do is not delete the asteroids once they are empty. Just leave them in space with 0 ore volume. They are still rocks or balls if ice in space, they just have no more useful mineral value until the next refresh. They also would not cause mining equipment to turn off once they reached 0 ore volume.

The end result here would be greater reward for those actively engaged in the mining activity, while still allowing people who like the current mechanic to just find a spot and AFK or low attention mine to their hearts content.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#29 - 2013-06-26 22:50:52 UTC
My ideas for "fixing" mining:

  • Move all belts to anomalies and grav sites
  • Make grav sites once again require probing
  • Remove the "(Veldspar)" style designation so all asteroids are just "Asteroid"
  • Add in "fake" ores like Flawed Gneiss, which refine to (almost) nothing
  • Mix ore types in asteroids, with the model representing the dominant ore (so you still have a variety of asteroid skins)
  • Adjust the function of mining lasers so T1 will harvest ore by proportion, T2 with T1 crystals will bias towards a selected ore, and T2 crystals will harvest only a given ore


I do not like the ideas that some people have of making mining "more interactive". If you want interactive, go do some combat or hack some relic containers.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Tiberius Steiner
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#30 - 2013-06-26 23:50:01 UTC
+1 to Ash Katara. The current system is so boring. You browse on your favorite website and wait for the end of your cycle..
Victor Bastion
Danger Management
#31 - 2013-06-26 23:51:20 UTC
+1 I like your ideas.

I have a feeling though that it would not be easy to implement due to the need to randomly generate all of the sites at downtime.

It is possible though that the appearance of randomness could be implemented by generating the locations and contents well in advance and cycling to those data points at each downtime. Might eventually be something people could find the pattern in but it would take a lot of work and time and I doubt it would be worth the effort.

I would like to see changes like this though.
Silivar Karkun
Doomheim
#32 - 2013-06-27 00:35:39 UTC
it could be just a single gigantic asteroid belt in each system, you would just warp to a part of it when you right click in a determinated area. they would act like gravimetric sites so gankers would have to scan you.

same for ice belts, they would spawn as a single "cloud" on the far reaches of the system and would act the same, but then ice should be a depletable harvestable, the same way as ore asteroids.
Ash Katara
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#33 - 2013-06-27 23:45:36 UTC
If under a re-imagined mining system we do reduce the number of asteroid/ice fields to compensate for the massive increase in total individual objects, there would be little need to refresh the available resources every downtime. It could be reduced to once a week or month. Hell they may be able to only do a refresh of resources one per update.

For instance, lets say on average there are 10 asteroid belts per system and 1 Ice belt. Lets also say that there are 50 objects in each belt. That is 500 asteroids and 50 Ice rocks per system. EVE has something like 5000+ systems, including Worm-Hole space so lets say that the total ice and asteroid count is 2,750,000 individual Ice/Asteroid objects. Alright that is a lot of data.

Alright I just did some basic calculations and this is not feasible to build an Oort cloud or Celestial asteroid belt in EVE. A single belt at 2 Au from the star with a single ring of asteroids spaced 10km apart would need roughly 19,000,000 asteroids. A belt 50km wide and 10km high would be roughly 380,000,000 asteroids, for a single belt. I am not sure this is even possible with the currently available technology.

The only viable solution would be to make the asteroid belts and ice clouds visual objects like planets and have the actual mining locations random scan sites located at random points on their elliptic plane or spherical shell.
Tiberius Steiner
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#34 - 2013-06-28 07:18:42 UTC
Maybe it is not necessary to generate a whole asteroid ring around e.g. a Planet. It could be appear to be a ring. So on the solar map you have the information, that there is a ring with several warp points, or to continue the idea of Mara Rinn, there are several 100% anomalies or 0% anomalies. In fact, the Dev's only need to move the asteroid belts to another location and take over the anomalie-system on the normal asteroid belts.
Ash Katara
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#35 - 2013-06-28 13:59:00 UTC
Tiberius Steiner wrote:
Maybe it is not necessary to generate a whole asteroid ring around e.g. a Planet. It could be appear to be a ring. So on the solar map you have the information, that there is a ring with several warp points, or to continue the idea of Mara Rinn, there are several 100% anomalies or 0% anomalies. In fact, the Dev's only need to move the asteroid belts to another location and take over the anomalie-system on the normal asteroid belts.


You know that is a good idea and would not create a huge load on the system. If we made the sites a bigger and more spread out then the current 50km long belt arcs. The current belts could become 100% scan sites, the current 0% scan sites would just need to be relocated to be on the visual belt locations. With maybe some very difficult to find random scan sites with very rare single or small groups of asteroids.
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