CCP seems deadset on adding penalties for using T2 mining lasers and crystals in order to force miners to make “interesting choices”. IMHO the loss mechanic is far to drastic a penalty to consider this a choice, at least when mining good ores. Devs are listening to feedback; lets provide them some more. Post your idea of what penalties would make an interesting choice when deciding to fit your mining ship with T1 lasers or T2 & crystals.
I’ll kick it off with: crystals have a chance to stop mining ore, but continue cycling. In practice, every time a laser with a crystal cycles it has a chance of no longer mining ore, until you reset it. The only indications to the player are the lower volume in their cargo, and the lack of a line between the hud, asteroid and target icon when the mouse is hovered over it. This would allow a visual cue to tell you which miner has failed, but only if you are actively looking for it. This chance of stopping would have to be quite small, in order to not completely negate the bonus.
This penalty would force a choice of being a lazy miner and just accepting the lower yield, or watching every cycle to get the bonus. This would also make multiboxing harder, since bad cycles will be that much more likely and more likely to go on for several unnoticed cycles.
I am not really sure how to apply this to drones, or if it should.
What’s your idea that CCP might see as a viable alternative to the loss mechanic?
I haven’t done the math to hate the loss mechanic as others seem to, but I do like the idea of there being either a penalty or reward to more active mining.
This could be in the form of equipment problems (like your dirty/jammed crystal) that the sooner you see it the sooner you can clean off the crystal and get going again, or something in the form of player skill/mini-game like rock analysis for cleavage sites to temporarily improve your yield.
These don’t address “more interesting choices” but would give miners something to do while mining.
Frankly I’d like to see a greater gap between the solo mining yield and mining fleets. I won’t get into the alt-boxing that folks do, that’s a different topic, but something where the more pilots you have on grid or in system the better. Perhaps some form of linked sensor array that gives everyone a percentage better targeting range (e.g. cumulative target painter mechanic) or better yield.
The Lore narrative would be that fleet ships can share data over a fleet frequency and so every ship in the fleet would be able to access data their own sensors cannot reach.
This would give miners a chance to make “interesting choices” in what ship fits they bring to the field. Solo miners would bring the rock scanners, but group miners could share rock scan data with their fleet so only one or two brings a scanner and the rest fit for tank or speed, etc.
Apart from the already existing extra cost, extra SP requirements and extra inconvenience of bringing sets of crystals, I don’t think T2 mining equipment needs downsides compared to T1 equipment.
In my opinion waste is an interesting new mechanic that allows players to choose between yield and efficiency while mining.
The issue I had with waste is how it penalised newer players by giving them high waste without affordable option to reduce that waste.
CCP tried to fix that issue but made a mistake by completely removing all waste for T1 modules.
The new issue we have now is that T1 modules are the most efficient option and that players are penalised for using T2 with crystals.
Neither high waste nor zero waste for T1 modules is a good option.
The solution is to let T1 modules have some waste, comparable to efficient T2 mining.
T1 miners won’t be penalised and T2 miners won’t be penalised either.
in what way? the only area high waist is a detriment is moon mining. Standard belts can ignore it as you can just move to the next belt and null anoms benefit from it letting you use the very high waist crystals letting you roll the belt.
Waist is only an issue where resources are finite, anywhere else and it just causes you to have to move more.
Waste is a pretty good ‘out-the-box’ answer to something miners have always wanted; a meaningful strategic choice for mining.
You can either mine quickly, which gets you more ore per second but wastes the belt. Or you can mine carefully, which maximises the ore from each rock but less ore per second. Or you can burn the belt down.
I dislike the RNG nature of waste and think it should be a static proportion each time or at least be more like turrets. I was also worried about new players being more wasteful, but as long as T1 waste falls somewhere between Type A and Type B crystals it should be fine.
I have heard it said that players will optimize the fun out of the game if you let them, but asking the devs to program the fun out of the game takes the cake.
I’m not even a miner, and I think that sounds like cruel and unusual game design.
So, in group PvE, you typically have several different roles, that all need to work together in order to quickly and safely run content. For example, in incursions, you have the FC, logi commander, light drone bunny, heavy drone bunny, anchors, logi squad, DPS squad, and sniper squad (and possibly an additional booster). Mining, on the other hand, doesn’t really have that. Most fleets seem to be limited to booster, barges, and a hauler.
Now, I don’t know exactly how mining could be changed in order to require greater fleet diversity and increased coordination between fleetmates, but I can’t shake the feeling like there’s a missed opportunity here.
Mining isn’t a challenge that requires many specialists. That’s what’s missing.
If you take the same PVE group you describe but reduced the incoming dps to almost nothing, all the logi and boosts goes away in favour of more dps.
Take out all the fast moving ships and the drone bunny is no longer necessary.
Once you strip down pve until it basically becomes an Anom or a L4 mission, specialists aren’t needed. On the contrary, using more than one ship is often considered inefficient.
If you want more coordination from mining fleets, you’re going to have to add a challenge, make it competitive.
But, as has been said, miners don’t want a challenge. They don’t want anything to take effort or involve risk.
Mining fleets could be very diverse and specialised if the miners were facing an active threat most of the time while playing. Instead of ‘miners and mining boosters’ you could then have logi, tackle, long range damage, brawlers and other forms of PvP ships in the mining fleet to keep the ‘mining dps’ ships alive while the Barges and Exhumers secure the objective.
However, as miners don’t commonly face such threats and usually just warp off as a group to the safety of tether when they do, this dynamic is a rare sight. I’ve seen it happen once.
