Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Most people agree that mining is boring. And everyone should agree that it's easily botted.

So I had an idea. One that's probably been thought of before, but here's my version.

What if we were to treat asteroids the same way as planets and PI?

Asteroids could be randomly generated, and some spots on it would be hot-spots that the miner could focus their lasers on. The hotter the spot, the more ore it yields per cycle. And as the asteroid depletes, it could have random, pre-determined changes to the hotspots. This is something that could be calculated as soon as the asteroid is spawned. I think this would make life difficult for the bots, but not for anyone actually watching their asteroids.

This could also introduce some new mining skills similar to their PI counterparts. Like how accurate a ship's reading of the hotspots are. Or the distance they can scan a roid.

Of course, it'd have to be much simpler than the system PI uses, but it seems like the basic code is already in game. I haven't really thought it through much, but the idea seemed interesting enough for me to post.


Basically, I think if a miner locks and then clicks "Look at" on an asteroid, it would zoom in on that roid. They could then use an asteroid survey module(or this could just happen passively when "Look at" is clicked) to scan the roid and produce a 2-dimensional map of ore density. Then it'd just be a simple click to activate a mining laser on any spot they wanted to mine.

Thoughts/suggestions?

Reminds me a lot of wehat has already been suggested here, once.

The problem with this is that the miner does'nt care about hot spots on a roid, he takes everything since roids are a lot smaller than a planet.

Good idea, and I support it, but it would most likely take forever for CCP to program, and it would probably increase server load. Maybe not alot with a single asteroid, but there are Hundreds of Thousands of asteroids in EVE at any given time.

That's why I thought it could just come up with a 2D sheet or skin of ore density. 3D engines are a whole lot more complicated than 2D. Asteroid rotation and laser pinpoints would just be a cosmetic effect, as it is now. We're already blasting lasers through asteroids anyway, so I don't think there'd be much of a point in making the back of the asteroid any more significant than the front.

If more people are mining the same roid, then it would change hotspots faster because it was being depleted faster.



I don't think it would have much effect at all on server load. Let's say every 25% mined out of the roid changes the hotspots a little. It's only one extra task the server has to do four times per roid. Which isn't much considering it already has to calculate the difference in ore remaining after every cycle on every mining module. It might increase downtime since the server would need to do a little more work when spawning roids, but I doubt even that would be very noticeable with efficient code. (If you think this paragraph shows I know nothing about how to program, then you'd be right)