To put this request into the right perspective, rather than just seeming like someone who hates mining and wants to bot, the reason I am suggesting this is to create optimal conditions for organic PVP and PVE. Currently, I feel that EVE suffers from the problem of specialist ship types: with players needing optimal ships for mining and gas huffing: it creates an artificial dynamic where if an enemy capsuleer shows up on local/d-scan, your best course of action is to dock up and either change ships to respond or wait for the potential scout/ganker to pass. In my opinion, this is not a problem of only player mentality, but also ship design in itself, since ships like mining barges are designed to be ‘specialists’ with little tank and no effective weapon systems. Because these ships are slow and rather flimsy, it doesn’t even make sense for capsuleers flying them to even consider other options since a gang emerging from a wormhole or an unscouted area could destroy the ship faster/as fast as anyone capable of helping the said barge/etc.
Hence, it makes me question, would there be more potential for combat if resource collection was done by programmable, automated convoys of drone ships or perhaps hirable npc-miner fleets? (whichever would be less constraining to program, i suppose. I am trying to think of a solution that uses existing mechanics as much as possible)
These drone convoys/hired miners should be sturdier than current mining ships to help players protect them, harvest resources on an industrially relevant scale and should have multiple tiers/scalability and also attract NPC pirates to facilitate PVE gameplay if/when there are no enemy capsuleers nearby. I guess you would still have the old krab/pvp dynamic, but at the very least, there would be potential for conflict because the players operating with their automated miner convoy would be in combat ships or even a fleet doctrine of some kind. Perhaps you should also have hirable hauling convoys so that attackers would have incentive to attack mining operations and of course, dynamic ore distribution with different regions holding different resources.
I dunno, what Im describing is probably no longer EVE but some kind of RTS, on a scale that just wouldn’t be possible on a singular server, but who knows.
Translation: I want to bot, but I know that’s against TOS, so I want CCP to give us programmable bots in-game. I’m going to disguise this as " create optimal conditions for organic PVP and PVE" (whateverthefuckthatmeans) as a cop-out response so I have an avenue to deny accusations of wanting programmable bots in-game.
just because a ship is not bonused to have armor or shields, doesn’t mean it won’t accept armor or shields… a procurer for example… can be tanked to where most gankers won’t touch it, and still be viable for mining a good amount of minerals.
with caveat of only defending my argument against yours, in my experience you cannot realistically expect to tank your procurer and just sit at a null/low-sec belt all day while roaming gangs, wormholers and weekend warriors in search of ‘any content at all’ zoom by. At most, you can expect to drive away a frigate or a poorly fit destroyer/t1 cruiser or so with your drone bonuses and that’s as the current game balance is intended. And even that is out of the window if they bring friends.
Yes, a procurer could theoretically survive long enough for friendlies to get on grid to help, but there is no profit or incentive for friendlies to sit in pvp-fit ships ready to warp in. They might as well be ratting or searching content in hostile space.
However, if you had a resource-gathering convoy that serves both as a magnet for pve content and target you need to protect from other capsuleers that would give incentive for pvp for every ‘type’ of an EVE player. The minus side would arguably be turning the activity of mining to ratting with a splash of pvp, but given that mining requires little input beyond staring at the local window and targeting a rock, I guess I don’t see much of a loss and this comes from someone who spends over 10 hours weekly mining in null, staring at local constantly while sitting in comms and keeping the intel channel open in a different window.
I agree with this. Ship fits optimized for PvE tend to be bad at PvP, which means most PvE’ers will bounce when they see trouble. Moreover, denying hostiles content is highly effective at encouraging hunters to go look for action elsewhere. So, yeah, current mechanics do frequently discourage fights.
However, I don’t think that NPC botting on the players behalf is the solution. Personally, I’m of the mind that the DBS and ESS are a step in the right direction. They punish players for turtling and reward them for fighting. So, I’d rather see more of that, rather than mechanics that encourage players to sit around on guard duty. Moreover, I’d imagine that botters would run with this sort of thing.
If you want stuff now, and don’t like the way to get it, you don’t pay an NPC to get it, you pay another player by buying it off the market. It should stay that way.
