I just had this idea. Someone has almost certainly had it before.
Aside from dealing with the occasional rats, hauling your rocks back to station, or keeping an eye on local and dir scanning in more dangerous areas, there’s very little incentive to actively pay attention while mining. This of course makes AFK mining pretty attractive, only keeping a token watch over what’s going on. It would be nice to incentivize active mining, but at the same time you don’t really want to force a change, because that’s just going to piss everyone off.
So, solution: You bolt some minigames over the top of mining with relevant rewards for participating in them. Completing a minigame gives you some sort of bonus or boost for some relatively short period of time, say a minute or two or the length of your current cycle. However, if you don’t engage with the games then everything stays the same as it is now, and you can fire up your strip miners and watch YouTube/Netflix secure in the knowledge that you’ll fill up in just as much time as you currently do.
Potential Minigames:
A variant/copy of the hacking minigame - call it power rerouting or something, as the mining lasers require different power levels as they hit pockets of different densities of rock or whatever.
Ore vein targeting - think something like Star Trek Online’s dilithium mining minigame.
Rework the old exoplanet Project Discovery minigame - call it finding the ore’s resonance frequency for better mining or something.
You probably want several different minigames, with definitive right answers, to help prevent botting through them and keep it interesting.
Potential Rewards:
Increased Yield
Decreased Cycle Time (both of these probably should be comparable but not better than a Porpoise/Orca)
Small Amounts of rarer ore with your yield, say up to 100m3 or some proportion of your yield like 5 to 10%. This could be totally random, or structured like you get low sec ore in high sec, null ore in low sec, etc., or simply one of the better variants of the ore that you’re mining.
Receiving all or part of your yield as compressed ore
Could even do similar for the various industrial support ships to do stuff like increase their boost amount/range, or reduce the amount of fuel they use by some percentage, etc.
Pros:
Encourages active mining
Potentially encourages solo mining/mining without boosts
Doesn’t interfere with multiboxers or people who just want to do something else while keeping a side eye on what’s going on
Provides some potential additional distraction in more dangerous areas
Cons:
I don’t know, I can’t really see any, but I’m sure someone will be along shortly to tell me them all.
Yah, it has been talked about before. Very clever in pointing out STO.
I think it has not been implemented as it goes against uh… the “seriousness” (lack of a better word) of the game? Such as not turning EVE online into a carnival MMO filled with minigames.
This is pretty much the only benefit.
This goes against the stated/clearly implied direction that CCP has done through patches and how they are pushing us to play together and less solo.
I don’t see this as a pro or con. Just another thing to manage. This would probably be a con in many people’s eyes.
My point is someone is going to think of something better than a mini game while mining.
I just threw that one in there. From what little I know of the client under the hood I don’t know if it could handle that particular style of minigame in the UI. Too fast paced.
Well, that was the primary thrust of it.
I think the people hunting miners might think it’s a pro. As for the miners ourselves, if we wish to remain just as safe as we can be now, we just don’t have to engage in the minigame and no harm done.
Like what? Where’s all the wonderful ideas? It’s been 20 years, and I’ve been around off and on for most of them, and mining is still just turn on your lasers and practically take a short nap. And that should remain an option. From what I can see in cursory searches, other similar suggestions or intents basically boil down to “We must absolutely screw over anyone who isn’t actively paying attention and turn the entire industrial framework of EVE on its head” rather than just providing some interactivity and incentive for paying attention.
Yes, because I want to play this mini-game for hours on end because these mini-games are such an engaging activity.
This idea favors bots massively. They do not care about paying attention to the mining cycles, it’s their entire existence after all. They can solve these grids or PD grids better and faster than players. Players on the other hand will lose out on mining potential, will get distracted by it and don’t check their safety, they will get frustrated when they lose out on the bonus after having wasted a minute on the grid just because they mis-clicked. Just to name a few things how such a system favors bots over players and how it makes the game so much worse for players.
Now there, my friend is where I am not paid enough to figure it out. The developers behind these very large games will figure it out if their companies need a solution to the problem. (If there is a problem, they perceive.)
I can certainly say CCP knows about this idea. Everyone does, the mini game in MMOs is as old as time. (Solve puzzle in X amount of time to open the case!) They are not that ignorant or closed minded knowing this doesn’t exist. Need to give them credit somewhere they do design games and probably study their rivals.
I will throw it back at you then OP. Why do you think has CCP not simply added a mini game to mining?
@Tyndal Britannian Welcome to the Forums. Don.t feel bad about getting negative responses, some really harsh. It seems few people actually read the forums unless they themselves want to post something and those that do, seem to be Negative Nancys for the most part. That said you can occasionally get some thoughtful and helpful suggestions. Like you seem to have here.
The important Goal is that you can get CCP to like your idea, and use it. Even if they do it might take a long time before they show signs of it.
Like others I am not a fan of the mini game idea, as a long time miner, it would actually be distracting, there actually are other things you can do while mining.
PI work is one (your planing spreadsheet can be quite distracting).
Doing manufacturing remotely is another (Research using your browser, contracts the market window and your next largest required spreadsheet is another).
Then there are those that do market manipulation (yes even MORE research and an enormous and complex spreadsheet !!).
So if you pop into that mix a Mini game in order to mine? Sorry no. Those that complain that Mining is boring or just an AFK fest while eventually look back on that time as the Good Ole Days’ when you could just relax and kick back, and they will want them back lol.
That said if u want to juice up attention to mining. having the lasers occasionally wander off into space requiring u to press the fire button to get them back would work. This would require u to not AFK but would allow you to focus on other things.
Keep up what you are doing, CCP really does pay attention. For me using fitting windows for structures was one.
The idea is to provide a reason to actively mine, to give a reason you might want not to do other things while you mine.
Not “in order to mine,” I was quite clear that it should be entirely optional so as not to screw over people who don’t want to do it.
What you’re saying basically boils down to “Why should we bother to improve one of the foundational elements of the game when there’s so much else you can do?”
CCP would actually have to do something other than nerfs and new ships that are reskins of existing ones
This was already suggested at the very least once already - I only saw one iteration of this idea and I didn’t read this forum for 7 months. But guess what. Nothing changed.
Unfortunately this forum doesn’t seem to be visited/read by developers at all. This forum exists only for players to steam off their frustration and anger, cry out and to mock those who are complaining and crying. Even the Little things / QoL thread is a bait to make it look like they care, but they don’t.
They just don’t need to change anything. Players will pay them huge amount of money even for what they have now without having to do anything more than some rebalancing and throwing some old event here and now. Even if you stop playing and paying because mining sucks, they won’t care as they still have thousands of whales that are supporting the game with hard cash.
Tl’dr: Good idea and that is exactly why it will never be implemented.
