Abyssal filaments for mining

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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For a while I have been thinking of possibilities for miners who are looking for gameplay that is:

  • active
  • a challenge
  • solo

Most mining gameplay isn’t very active.
The payout often isn’t worth it either compared to similar activities, unless you scale up and use many accounts at the same time to mine. This means that people who would enjoy shooting rocks with lasers and want to use their mining skills are out of luck if they don’t want to multibox.

I’m such a player who doesn’t like multiboxing. While I’m fine with it that others do, I would like to see solo mining content in EVE. Which is why I suggest:

Abyssal filaments for mining

It would allow a single Venture, Expedition frigate, Barge or Exhumer.

The setup

A simple setup would upon activation of the filament drop the miner in a single room with at least:

  • a deactivated gate
  • a bunch of asteroids, spread out far and of various types
  • enemies to survive

A random lower value asteroid will contain the key to open the next gate, leaving the key behind in a container once the rock is fully mined out.

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The gate will lead on to a next room, or back out of the abyss. After a predetermined period of time your ship will in abyssal fashion explode, so you better start chewing through all those rocks while fighting rats if you want to survive.

Rewards: The ore you mine.
Once you’ve found the key you can spend the remainder of your time inside mining the rest of the asteroids until the threat of losing your ship orces you back to to the trace you left behind.

Questions and Answers:

Q: But instanced content is bad!
A: I recommend adding Celestial → Filament Trace to your directional scanner filter, combat probes to your ship and a custom probe scan filter:
image
Ships are guaranteed to come back at that trace within 20 minutes if they survive, where you can happily shoot them.

Q: Would I be able to use a Venture and T1 mining lasers? I’m new.
A: Yes, like the other abyssal filaments it would be good to have an easy tier accessible for rookies.

Q: Why would you use an Expedition frigate if you can use a higher yield Barge or Exhumer?
A: The frigate would have advantage from it’s much higher speed to move between the rocks

Q: Would I be able to use Type C crystals to find the key quicker?
A: Yes! It would in fact be a good use-case for type C crystals, if you are willing to waste most of your ore in an effort to find the key faster.

Q: Why three rooms?
A: More risk. Multiple rooms allow a miner to make the greedy (yet risky) choice to spend much time mining the valuable ore they found in one of the first rooms, and may cause the miner explode as result of that choice when they are unlucky in the last room.

Q: Which ores can we find within? Wouldn’t that make such ores available all across the universe?
A: Good point. I’m happy to hear your suggestions.

7 Likes
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No timer…?

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Yes, there is a timer like in combat abyssal filaments:

After a predetermined period of time your ship will in abyssal fashion explode

I was thinking the 20 minutes timer of combat abyssals would work well here too to keep things consistent.

You will be mining at a timer and if you don’t manage to find the key in one of the asteroids to open the gate your ship and pod will be lost.

High yield will be beneficial for your survival, but so will defences, drones and a propmod to survive the incoming damage from the rats.

2 Likes
4

This is a great proposal.

As a (almost) full-time miner I support 100% the idea.

2 Likes
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Not sure how you want to balance the “challenge” so it isn’t a 100% win scenario with basically no room for mistakes in a max-skilled exhumer… or a 100% loss scenario that no mining ship can solve no matter how good the pilot is. You know, mining simply isn’t that skillful… there simply isn’t that much someone can do “wrong”…

I mean, in the Combat Abyssals the possible combination of threats can be really really nasty and sometimes break even very very very expensive fits if the pilot is doing just one wrong decision. Mining ships don’t have even remotely this variance of options so I would be interested to hear what exactly the “threat” in there should be that is so challenging that you can actually die if you don’t read the scenario correctly.

1 Like
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I like this. Why should ratters have all the fun?

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The idea “seems” solid, but you forget who you’re asking it from.

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I agree, there needs to be a risk to make these abyssals challenging, where you aren’t 100% certain to win.

I thought the random location of the key in one of the asteroids could pose one unknown factor. Depending on the numbers that are chosen, even with a max yield fit you may not always be able to destroy all asteroids in time giving you a risk of dying if you didn’t manage to mine all asteroids and the key was in one of the last asteroids.

If a perfectly skilled max yield fit could technically mine it all, you still have downtime reducing your max yield numbers if you have to float your ship from one asteroid to another, which are placed far apart, which gives value to speed in these abyssals. An Exhumer is going to waste a lot of time to slowboat over to the asteroids on the other time, while for example an Endurance would do it much quicker.

Another yield downtime is that you won’t be able to use your mining drones at all times, as you will likely need them to fight off some of the NPCs that bother you, web you and neut you. If you ignore these NPCs they will slow you down, stop your mining lasers, may even jam your mining cycles.

Aside from these interfering EWAR effects, the damage of these NPCs will be another factor that likely reduces your max yield:

A max yield fit will be much less capable to withstand NPC damage than a tank fit. Even if your Hulk is fit for maximum yield to open the gate and leave the room in time, it’s not going to be as capable at tanking NPCs or taking them down in time as a Skiff.

If your mining ship isn’t going to tank NPC damage, isn’t going to kill the EWAR NPCs in time, isn’t capable of quickly moving from one asteroid to another and isn’t fit to quickly mine the asteroids, there is a good chance your mining ship isn’t going to come out alive.

And even then there’s a random chance you find the key to the gate in the last asteroid three times in a row, which even the highest yield fit may not be able to do within the time limit.

TL;DR: I agree that it should not be an 100% win scenario for the miners. I’m sure the abyssal rooms can be designed such that it isn’t 100% possible to win.

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@Felix_Frostpacker

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Thank you for your excellent suggestions.

I am a miner and one thing that I dream about is having a filament to warp jump me into a pocket with no timers other than being in a private pocket to mine in peace.

I know that this might sound crazy but. Do not care about Isk

I care about the process of mining ore then turning that ore into something…

11

Why not make it possible for others to enter the traces and hunt the pilots inside, of course without CONCORD intervention.

:blush:

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You may have misunderstood the suggestion then! There definitely is a timer and if you don’t manage to mine enough asteroids in time while fighting the NPCs your mining ship will explode.

It’s meant to be as stressful as regular abyssal filaments, but for mining. :wink:

That won’t work.

The downside of allowing others to chase a player into a filament is that people will abuse it to trivialize the abyssal filament content.

The reason abyssals can be challenging PvE is because unlike all other content in EVE there is a limited number of ships that can enter the site. This means you have to push your skills and ship fit to the limit, rather than doing the easiest solution of using more ships.

Once other people can follow you, you could just use that ability to run the site in 4 cheap cruisers with a big margin of error instead of 1 blingy cruiser with a tiny margin of error. It wouldn’t be content for solo players anymore, as the ability to reduce risk like that will crash the payout of filament loot.

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Maybe if more ships enter the filament more NPCs spawn, their strength depending on the ship type entering the filament? :thinking:

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Then people can kill abyssal runners by entering a bunch of T1 frigates to push the limits too high.

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Sounds like EVE to me. :stuck_out_tongue:

:smiling_imp:

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Too easy to kill abyssal runners without any stake, if you ask me!

I’m in favour of more opportunities to fight and kill players, but adding a cheese strategy like this doesn’t sound like an improvement. :wink:

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Maybe someone entering an abyssal trace illegally could incur a security status penalty. :smirk:

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Any ballpark on how many “key” roids would exist per room, and how much ore would be in them?

Or what kind of enemies/how many/how much outgoing damage would they deal?

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No idea, that would require some careful balancing during development.

The main goal would be to have engaging and challenging solo mining content of a few difficulty tiers for 20 minute sessions, similar to the existing combat abyssals.

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Just mine at any belt in Uedama. It will accomplish the same thing…