i ll start with my opinion: they are bad.
here s why:
they take a long time to complete for low reward. mining 45k m3 with stripminers 1 (t2 doesnt seem to wok since crystals dont seem to recognize mission ores) even at max skills and with implant will take some time to complete. neither the mac nor retriever have enough hold to take this in one sitting, so dropping the ore into a container and collecting it with a miasmos afterward is basically required. this at least allows the use of a faster miner like the covetor or hulk (hulk not recommended since it s a gank magnet). having to switch ships at the station and going back to collect the ore just adds the grief though. all for peanuts of ~2mil isk (with bonus already for completing in time!) and ~3.5k lp…how rewarding…
in the same time i could complete a l4 sec mission and get a bonus of about 20-30mil in bounty and loot on top of a similar mission reward. depending on the ship u can fly this could take even less time.
my suggestion:
anyone here ever played HF:AAR? (homefront: abyssal artifact retrieval) when u mine out the rocks in the mission there s a chance to drop a cache.
so why not do something similar for l4 mining missions? may it be 1 cache once u mine out the rock or let s say 3 smaller caches that appear 1 cache every 15k m3 or so.
cache loot should be related to mining ofc and could cover rare bpc for mods or mutaplasmids for example.
cache loot should increase the lower the sec-status of the system the mission is in. (higher risk higher reward)
aims for this change:
increase attraction to mining missions (yes u have to grind standing after all) and make them worth something.
also, increase the gank targets for the pvp-community.
cache loot could contain ORE-bpc’s to make them more accessible and thus affordable for the general community. thus being an alternative to trading concord lp for ore lp to get the stuff from null and break the current hold of players taking advantage of the fact to limit access and drive prices up to unreasonable lvls. (those bpc should be rare they r supposed to be a viable option not break the market completely.)
what r ur thoughts, suggestions to balance missions with other activities in the game?
edit:
distribution missions face a similar issue, i m just not sure how to fix those. though l4 distribution missions dont take as much time, they also have much lower reward. on average the rewards are similar if not a lil better compared to current mining l4 missions even without the lp-skill for distribution.
another thing is the accepting and completing of missions and having to dock up to collect goods u need to transport instead of accessing it form outside the station within a specific range. in my opinion u should be able to accept missions once u r in the same system as the agent. if ther e s issue with this please point it out for me.