Assembly Hall

Basically just create a system similar to PI.

Each asteroid is targetted, scanned and red/green sectors are present on the roid to show mineral deposits.

Red areas are targetted and mining commences.

Asteroid changes size approximately every x numbers of cycles after minerals are drained and roid is pulled apart slowly by operations.

Rescan and recommence mining on new sectors.

Stop the devaluation of isk!

Botters + RMT + PLEX = isk becomes less worth the effort real miners have to put in = less miners = more botters able to find a foothold in the market.

Kill all bots.

Yeah sorry, fixed ;)

Wait, you mean miners aren't half afk and are actually paying attention?

That said, bots use OCR, so no, it won't stop botting.

It's not that bad, but it's not exactly unique, either - we^d just have another instance of PI, basically. That way, mining would have some extra complexity, but it would still be boring and repetitive.

While most players would agree that mining is awfully boring, there will be some who insist they like it (botters, the lot of them I say ;) ) as an activity and will be vehemently opposed to any changes. Either you ignore them ("adapt or die...") or you simply retain the conventional mechanic for their sake, at lower profits.

A new mechanic should be straightforward to get into, with some variety and a simple set of rules, but really hard to master. A mechanic where skill (preferably not twitch reflexes but brain stuff) determines profits and where taking risks is rewarded. Botters might remain, but unable to really compete with the dedicated miner.

For example, if you need to actively monitor various elements of mining processes to not just optimize your yield but avoid catastrophic consequences, further increasing your risk due to shifting your focus away from the danger of other ships approaching, you should see significantly increased profits if successful.
Further,more, if you had to interpret some visual feedback from the mining process and smartly adjust mining targets, energy rates, investment of consumable tools in order to maximize profits, skill actually would make you a better miner over time.

I currently have no clear idea what such a mechanic would have to look like, but I'm sure that this would not just make things more complicated for complexity's sake.

Hey ore for brains..... wake up and smell the quafe.

Its a itty bitty rock.... you mine it completely....and move on....not parts of it...not placing an extractor and doing "stuff' with it to make it available.

Its just raw materials... you gather...and bring it on board.

Why should we complicate it any further than that?


You want to stop botting? Make all belts scannable like grav sites in WHS... even with "weather" disruptions and "hazards"

Stop messing with a system that is not broken.

This is just as bad as an "Afk prompt"....only worse.

"Scanning up an asteroid" and "plopping your lasers on the biggest brightest red patch" sounds like things bots will be very good at. Also, it still seems rather boring to me - how long would you be doing that with your attention glued to it, before going afk or to the forums?

What's with the personal insults right and left, though? You sure you're furthering your cause or its discussion that way?



I don't know, to make an activity that takes hours and is outsourced to bots actually interesting? Possibly even a valid alternative - profit- AND excitement-wise - to harvesting rogue drones?
Spot on about the scanning part, though.

Oh - "Ore for brains" I find almost acceptable, a tongue-in-cheek sort of taunt. You're getting better. ;)

For the umpteenth time, botters already work grav sites.

How is this problem solved ?

Scanning individual asteroids for better mineral concentrations, and thus better yield/cycle is theoretically bottable, but not necessarily with ease. If you hand out an option to micromanage the focus of your lasers by repeated scanning and retargeting at the most tasty bits of any given asteroid, then that's something people would actually have to work at... and at the same time, bots attempting to maximize it would be engaging in especially predictable (and thus, detectable) patterns. At the same time, you'd want to move away from a belt-centric model to a signature/anomaly-centric one, with the better opportunities requiring more homework. Ideally, you'd have a system that looks something like this...

Firstly, a prober scans down an appropriate hidden belt site. The people interested in the op come in first with combat ships, to clear out the rats; then the mining ships come in. A Rorqual sets up shop just off the belt, activating it's forcefield to give the miners someplace to retreat to when enemies enter the system... this isn't hisec, after all; enemies could arrive at any moment, and they need the protection offered by a forcefield to keep them safe. Additionally, the Rorqual can use it's onboard scanning systems to locate the richest asteroids in the belt, analyze them, and then send hi-resolution images of the ore concentrations present to the fleet at large, allowing fleet members to focus their efforts on the best and rarest ores. No need for haulers, here; the Rorqual's also responsible for snagging the cans and compressing the ore on-site. Each individual mining ship could be scanning the asteroids on their own to get this sort of information, but the Rorqual's optimized systems make it better... so long as they're getting up-to-date data broadcast on the fleet channels.

Don't have a Rorqual? Well, the Orca's just about as good. It can do everything the Rorqual can, with the exceptions of compressing ore and generating a forcefield... and in a large enough op, an extra guy running high-resolution scans of the belt might come in handy. On the other hand, an Orca can carry combat ships... so even with a Rorqual on hand, the fleet probably wants an Orca around, too... that way, the miners could flee to the safety of the Rorqual's bubble, swap into combat ships, and engage their foes much like if they were defending a POS. An op entirely without a Rorqual is much less defensible... but it IS mobile, since it's not waiting on any kind of siege timer; the whole fleet can simply abandon the site and warp to a safe at a moment's notice... long before hostile probers can locate them, if they're paying attention.

The mining ships themselves aren't doing anything too complicated... they're just targeting the asteroids and blasting away with their lasers, same as before. Of course, if they want to be getting good yields of the nice ores, they're paying attention to the scans broadcast by their command ships... using that info to target specific asteroids, and specific locations on those asteroids, for significantly better harvests.

Additionally, careful attention to the scans will doubtless reveal lots of small, specialized deposits hidden among the larger veins. That's no job for the Hulks and their Strip Miners... you'll want smaller, quicker systems for that. A few people certainly have mining drones on-hand, though, and they're keeping busy by micromanaging the acquisition of whatever crystals the drones can nab. Notably, the guys running the mining drones can double as the security detail. They aren't necessarily such... after all, you could be doing both mining with lasers and drones at once, but then you're either paying a lot of attention and running several things at once... or you're half-assing at least one of the jobs. Also, Hulks and such don't have the drone bonuses needed to really do a good job at drone mining, anyways.

Finally, there's almost certainly a Skiff floating around. He's playing an entirely different game from everyone else, since all the asteroids out there that can be mined normally also might have a totally different, and more tasty, sort of resource in their cores, inaccessible to all but their specialized equipment. If the fleet was well-prepared (and has more then one Skiff on hand), then they've got an entirely separate high-res scanner package on-hand to pinpoint and broadcast the locations of the otherwise-innocuous chunks of Veldspar with tasty Mercoxit centers. If not, then the lone Skiff is at it alone, prospecting in much the same way anyone else might, but for an entirely different layer of the asteroid.

Of course, just because the rats were shot down at the beginning, doesn't mean they aren't coming back... better pay attention, and have your security team / drone miners ready to switch up combat drones and handle it. And, of course... I did mention that sites this tasty don't spawn at all in hisec, so watch local. Just because you've got a shiny forcefield doesn't mean you're invincible, after all. Sure, you're basically a roaming mini-POS, with a couple battleships on hand for security, and a squad of battlecruisers stashed in corporate holds for safekeeping... but that just means that you're a nice mid-sized gang, and you'd better be ready to defend yourselves... or make a run for it... if a bigger gang comes knocking!

Lets see bots do that.

This is so much better!
One thing: not sure about restricting this to low- and null-sec. Why not put those belts and mechanics in high-sec, too, at significantly lower chances for good/high quality ores or great quantities?
Also, did I understand correctly that those skiffs would then be a (preferable) way to solo mine, quick and agile-like?

To be honest, I'm more of a small corp miner if I can get away with it.

If I had my way I'd create a corp, have maybe 10-15 guys logging on whenever they wanted and mining in a decent system. I like my daily PVP as well so I would probably solo roam or take whoever wanted to come.

Grav sites are too few and far between without taking sov and upgrading.

Taking sov means bowing down to higher powers which also means paying rent on an industry that's being completely choked out by the guys you are paying rent to more often than not - RMTers.

I've done it before, even in low-sec mining of hemorphite it can be really iffy.

I'll be happier with the drone regions change in the winter expansion I think. Hopefully that might even fix the issue of income, but I still think the entire thing will only give botters more income as well and thus still devalue mining, which in turn devalues isk and prices on things like plex will continue to rise after the initial changes have been made and the market restabilizes.

I'd love for eve to be a lot bigger, so smaller mining ops could run in distant systems reasonably unmolested, but traffic is rising in all of 0.0 and even low-sec and has been for years.

This means only changes to mechanics can make the small to medium operation viable. However, creating mechanics for miners means changes for other parts of eve as well like larger pvp alliances and those changes generally aren't wanted or needed.

It's a sticky issue at best.

Personally, I'd prefer to continue the war against botters, alliances that house and allow them and RMTers generally.

Changing the mining profession to more "human only" systems seems the best way to do that.

If scanning anomalies and turning all belts into anomalies is the way to go, I'm all for it. However, even some of the less sophisticated publically available software can be used to mine from bookmarks. Who knows what is running in the back rooms in some of the more influential RMT facilities ?