Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Eve is not an aerospace flight simulator. The captain of the Titanic didn't have a joystick that allowed him to "manually" avoid an iceberg, and your ship doesn't have a joystick that allows you to "manually" avoid space debris. Ships are not like airplanes, they're larger and MUCH heavier. A giant piece of metal the size of suburban neighborhood isn't going to just turn on a dime. I guess that will be the risk that you have to face for the reward of your new mine-able objects.

+0.5

I like the idea; I think that new mine-able objects would be cool to see, especially moving objects like comets. But the idea in OP seems heavily undeveloped and needs to be worked on a little bit more.

I know a lot of you really hate minigames, but I think that a minigame for mining comets could be interesting. Something where the pilot has to align his ship on vector that is parallel to the comet, catch up to it (or get ahead of it), and then match speed with it before mining lasers can be activated. Then, since the mass of the comet will change as material is mined away from it, and perhaps also due to a resistant force from the lasers (or whatever reason you want to make up for it) the comet's velocity could change over time.

This seems fair to me because mining lasers are automated, so the pilot can spare some of his attention to manage his position in space relative to the comet. If he drifts off course and/or too far from the comet, the mining lasers turn off, just as they do with asteroids. It wouldn't exactly discourage AFK mining (which I don't want to do anyway) because you could, of course, still mine asteroids. It's just that this particular method of mining would actually require cognitive activity. As long is it doesn't break the balance in any way, I think it would be kinda cool to see.

I've been working on mining improvement ideas on and off for a few months now, here's some thoughts (I'll keep it brief). The actual process of digging space dirt with space lasers is never not going to be boring - forget the idea of forcing people to play a minigame while mining, trying to do that for hours at a time will drive people away. Some even enjoy the chilled out, relaxation of mining too, and there's no need to take this away from people. However, while mining in eve is currently static and dull, it could be better made to reflect how mining works in RL, namely through the addition of danger and exploration. I mean, you don't walk around in the mountains and find a sign saying 'GOLD!' in the ground, dig it up with no risk (gankers excluded of course) and walk off with it.

Exploration, or Prospecting as it's known.

• Asteroids and ore sites are already identified and named. This could be changed so that all rocks show up as 'Asteroid' until individually scanned, and then become labelled for you only (possibly broadcastable with a survey scanner or something to aid group mining efforts).
• Unnamed ore sites could completely replace static belts in a given system, so that they spawn in random locations and in random ways each time.

Both of these options allow individual asteroids within a site to be replaced with uncommon or rare rocks for the security level of the system - i.e. finding a jaspet rock in 0.6 space, for example. The lower the sec status, the greater the chance of more valuable rocks spawning. It's currently far too easy to find lowsec and better asteroids in large quantities even in very high security systems (why go outside of HS if they're this common).

This allows for a couple of interesting additions to the process of prospecting: discovering which rocks are worth mining, plus the addition of 'tailings', namely asteroids whose content is 100% 'rock' - completely worthless and useless, but if you're trying to Bot, you'll probably end up mining a bunch of these by accident, filling your hold with useless garbage. People actively searching rocks will avoid these. It should be noted that the visual appearance of asteroids will need to be changed to something more random, so as not to give away the contents too easily.

As for the danger element, asteroids sometimes harbour dangerous gases which could explode on contact with a mining laser. Mercoxit asteroids do this to some degree (although it's pretty pathetic in terms of actual damage) but simply causing an AOE explosion at random to keep miners on their toes. The amount would vary between the asteroid types with veldspar and such doing little damage and the highend rocks having very substantial explosive potential.

Shorten laser range to bring miners closer to rocks to increase the danger element, and increase base speed on the retriever and covetor hulls - their slow speed contributes to the static nature of mining, and getting things moving around more would help here. I dream of a day when asteroids *move* so they need to be chased down (one thing at a time though!) Oh, and make the 0 distance range on asteroids hug their model size. The current gap around asteroids is ridiculous and makes navigating around them difficult.

Finally, shortening the cycle time of mining lasers and strips (while maintaining current levels of overall yield) increases engagement with the game. I suggest 30 seconds for mining lasers (civvie mining lasers are currently 30 seconds) and 1 minute for strips.

P.S. I wonder how hard it would be to make asteroids (and their associated clumps of rock) slowly rotate. Belts look pretty amazing these days but it's still quite static.

Thank you very much for the input. All suggested ideas should not disable current, semi-AFK mining ways. I just want to add some more rewarding ways to mine for people, who want to mine short time but more active, more interacting. It can be increased yield (Multi Ore, Multi Methods) or access to rear, high end ore / moon products / ice (planet ring mining) in areas, where it is not commonly available (high sec space) .

If I understood it correctly, you can see ships over 10000 km on Sisi. You really want the belt be that big? Why? How this will make mining more interesting?

And as I already pointed out this thread is not about "bigger ship for bigger yield". It is about "more interaction for bigger reward".

I am not sure if any of suggested improvements can be concidered as "area of effect" feature.

What I'm about to say centers around my assumption (based on experience as an ex-miner, contact with hardcore miners/industrialists, a moderate understanding of both EVE's economy and theoretical economies in general) that it is the AFK/bot/multiboxing miners that are #1: making the most money off of mining, and #2: mining the most ore.

I think it's pretty unwise to punish what few afk/bot/multiboxing miners are left. On an ideological level I agree with you; the interactive miner should benefit more than the afk/bot/multiboxing miner. But that is naive because it is the afk/bot/multiboxing miners that keep prices cheap, and, as a smallgang/solo/merc pvper, my expenses are high enough already. And I don't run implants, boosters, links or pimpfits. And that's just me. Everyone else in this game, to a very significant degree, owes their playstyle to a bunch of bored soccer moms, robots, and lonely, 40 year old virgins who sit in front of 6 screens all day long [the last of these being the true ubermensch both in and out of game].

What you're talking about seems noble on paper, but in reality you're targeting a part of the player base that is more important than you or me.

IMPORTANT: The AFK/bot/multiboxing miners, being the most productive miners in the game, are what drive everything in EVE Online; without them, everything falls apart.

That isn't to say that nothing should be done. And I realize that I'm strawmanning what you're suggesting to a certain extent; I know your goal here isn't at all related to "grr bots" and "i hate miners". I'm mainly just trying to illustrate that fixing the problem that you're talking about is a little more complicated than adding some "mining minigames" and making mining "fun" [I personally detest having fun, the mere utterance of the word "fun" makes me spasm with uncontrollable anger].

I think the root of this is that there needs to be an incentive for new miners (both young and old characters) to fill the vacuum that you speak of. Prices will inevitably rise, and, even if nothing is mechanically done about mining, there will be a variety factors that will cause miners in highsec to diffuse into nullsec. As someone who has made that transition, I know that the struggle is expanding your profit margin to a degree that supports several characters, and the expenses of nullsec [which can be considerable if you're in an alliance that has CTAs].

So really, and this is my opinion, what should be done about mining should focus more on making the bitter, thankless, and solitary rise from brand new player to successful bot/afk/multiboxing miner easier. I have some ideas for this.

/rant

#1: New ship! T3 Mining Ship (above exhumer). Can provide mining boosts that are inferior to the Orca/Rorq, but is much cheaper and requires much less skill training. It can deploy, along with the Orca/Rorq, up to 5 "excavation sites" (detailed in #2). This ship is designed to give highsec, carebear miners a way to transition into A)getting a god damn Orca or B)getting enough isk to go to nullsec.

#2: Excavation sites! Orcas and rorqs can anchor a structure in an asteroid belt that has a variety of benefits. The structure must be attached to an asteroid so that people don't anchor these things in places other than asteroid belts. It takes 10 minutes to anchor (picked this number arbitrarily).
Benefits (just some ideas):
-Provides dps (how much? not sure) against any hostile or rat (based on standings of the fleet leader) with a range of 50km
-Ore can be dumped into its considerable cargo hold
-Can compress ore (not sure if this is OP)
-A dscan alert: basically, its dscanning every minute and will make a beep if something unusual shows up on dscan. there are settings that allow the owner of the structure to set certain names, types and distances as okay.
-Autoprober, will probe out mining anomalies (and only mining anomalies) at a rate of about 1 per hour. Probing them yourself is way faster, but if you're just afk mining, this will save you some time.

Other attributes:
-has no reinforcement timer garbage. If someone shoots through its health it blows up forever.
-can be taken down, with a 10 min unanchoring timer.
-costs 50mil
-T3 Mining ship can manage 5, Orca 15, Rorq gets 30 as well being able to do multiple systems.
-Not allowed in highsec.

Well, this thread is not about how to punish afk mining. It is more about how to reward non-afk mining ;)

Well, I object to this bit of nonsense right there. As such, I don't see why any of the following should be done because the starting premise strikes me as nothing but a load of bullshit designed to cater to special interest groups want list.

Here is a radical idea....people mine because...it is boring--i.e. a low demand activity one can do while chatting with friends on TS, working form home, while doing something on another account, while watching netflix, etc.

That is people like it the way it is. Mineral prices are not sky high. There is no dearth of minerals on the market, and the bullshit about mineral shortages due to high PLEX prices...I'm sorry but fuckoff on that one.

Making a boring activity more complicated...how is that fun?

I beg to differ. The idea that people are going to be unsubbing in droves due to PLEX price increases rests on the notion that people value their free time at zero--i.e. it has no value. Clearly that is just stupid bullshit that should not need any explanation.

But since, it seems Eve players just do not get opportunity cost, I'll explain...

If you earn, say $15/hour you can work 1 hour a month to pay for your sub. If you have 3 subs, you work 3 hours/month. If you buy multiple months at a time for your sub you can cut that down substantially.

Now, if you have to grind for 20 hours to get a single PLEX that implies an implict way of about $1/hour. So unless you really love grinding you are doing it horribly wrong spending 60 hours of your leisure time grinding for 3 accounts.

Once the in-game price of PLEX rise to a certain level the substitute is not to unsub...it is to pay with RL money.

Edit: By the way, if you have a full time job you are working about 160 hours. If you have to spend "3 hours" of that time spent working to support your Eve habit we are talking about 1.875% of your monthly working time. If you buy for say a year in advance it drops to about 1.5%. Compare that to 8.33% spent grinding for 3 PLEX....