Dear CCP –
You won’t ever read this, so I don’t know why I am bothering. It will probably turn out to be to big a change to your code base, so it probably can’t be implemented, but if it could it might solve your economy problem and reward very active players. It might also drive conflict.
Today the asteroid belts are small 10 to 200KM long arcs. Nothing like the real deal in real life space.
What if, asteroid belts were instead the real deal, belts that circled the sun like the planets do? What if ore levels ran from none to almost pure? What if there was no daily refresh, and no anomalies?
The ore supply in a system might be static (less what is mined) for 90 days to two years, how would that change the game, the same with ice. Ice would be mixed in with the belt(s). ‘Roids are ‘roids, no labels, you want to know how good the mining is, you have to scan it down. Quality minerals (both in type and percent) would be scattered randomly in the belt.
Basic ore types disappear only the minerals remain, mining crystals are not by security level, and tech level not ore. Want to bot? Sure, a large percentage of what you mine is junk and a lot of your cycles are 10 percent useful.
Increase the mass that has to be processed to get the same amount of minerals in the new belts, put the same amount of minerals that have been mined in that system in the new belts, but with 3 to 100 times the number of objects in the overall belt – in some places (like the real belts) there might be 40-100 asteroids within mining range and in others 1 or 2, there might be voids thousands of kilometers in size in the belt. As they are mined out, the voids would be larger and having bookmarks to good mining locations more important.
How about 98% of asteroids that are less than one cycle for a barge?
How about dropping bases for the pirates into the belt, which routinely send out a squadron to take down targets? The pirates run mining fleets both to remove minerals and to build up their base/fleet – the longer they stay in a base, the tougher the base is. Concord is paid off to ignore the pirates.
If it does not get totally mined out, the reseed only puts back the amount mined. Randomize when a system is reseeded and reseed a few systems each day scattered across EVE. The miners who really want to be profitable will run from system to system to try and grab the best. Fleet miners will be forced to follow the minerals, mining out a system of most of its minerals before the belts are reseeded. Killing pirate bases will be the PVE of tower bashing – potentially replacing incursions.
There is much that could be done with this, but it never will, because no one will ever read this post!
Yeah, it is a smart suggestion. The problem is that a lot of players like lazy playstyles. Your solution is better than random NPC wtfpwn ganks, for sure.
Definitely like most of these ideas. My first concern are warp in points/overview points for the single continuous belt. We may need to have something like 4-8 and possibly more warp in points depending on the size of the belt. You are talking about several hundred to possibly over 1k AUs in circumference depending on belt diameter. I get that you want to spend time actually scouting belts but somethings that size might be functionally impossible to scout. Another possibility is to have probes be able to scan down asteroids. Either using core probes or make some new ones up. That could at least get you on grid with the roids you are looking for.
I am not a fan of the pirates paying off CONCORD. That is one of CONCORD’s specific jobs is to keep those entities in check. I think the normal pirate mining point mechanics works just fine as is. Maybe up the difficulty some the closer you get to one of their hidden bases or if you attack one of their mining fleets. I am all for making people tank their barges but you cannot make the content unwinable due to NPC mechanics. That just becomes unfun.
I would also like to see the asteroids contain more than just ores. Have them contain variations of ices, minerals, basic PI, basic moon goo. Asteroids are not some single mineral that coalesced together, they are many different things compacted together. If you just want to mine then grab a barge and mine what you want in range. If you want to look for a specific thing, you’ll need to scan it down. I don’t think anything should be “junk”, it just might not be exactly what you need.
As for the respawning/regenning of asteroids or minerals I cannot say what would be better. With belts this massive we don’t need daily or even weekly resets. I am inclined to see what this dynamic system CCP is coming up might actually address the respawning issues you are concerned about.
Hopefully someone at CCP sees your idea and likes it.
i think it could be a HS fleet education the the harder the base the lower the security system. Let the newbees fleet up in 1.0 and .9 and more seasoned pilots fleet up in .8 and below. kinda like the empire mining missions but larger
It’s definitely time to rethink Ore and Ice. We’re in the midst of a major shakeup. I don’t expect to see continuous belts. In our solar system the asteroid belt is 3.2 AU from the sun (average) making the circumference roughly 3 billion Km; the average distance between asteroids is 1000 Km and the the orbital speed varies from roughly 17-25Km/sec. That would be a difficult environment to mine - even with New Eden technology!
I wouldn’t be surprised to see static belts replaced by random anomalies with variable composition to fit the dynamic redistribution model CP are aiming for.
I think that would be ok though. Have something like 4-10 large asteroids or maybe a small group of asteroids that are marked on the overview for mining. This covers the new players being able to mine without scanning and the lazy people that don’t want to scan. These asteroids could regen faster or more often to make sure newbies have a place to mine. You could also make them .9 and higher only to further help the newer players. The rest of the asteroids could be 1km apart from each other like in real life, as long as you can scan them down with probes and book mark them.
Edit: The asteroids would still need to be static entities. I agree we cannot mine at nano MWD speeds
A realistic belt would have 1 rock per grid if even that much. And would force the server to track… hmmmm… probably a few million grids at once. That’s why.
Ore respawns because this is a game. Yes belts should probably go in favour of anoms so there aren’t time zone advantages to mining. But game requirements trump reality.
You fail to understand how complex bots can be. Scanning bots that run combat sigs exist and have for years.
FOB already exist.
All asteroids being unlabelled isn’t a bad idea. Though mining vessels would need increased slots to match which basically nullifies it. Because some only have a single mid slot yet are expected to shield tank already.
Just tossing out an idea. What if you keep the same asteroid belt configuration as it is, but orientate the belts them selves into the ring? you would have gaps which is unrealistic but it’s a game and I’m willing to give theatrical license here.
I am familiar with the Solar system, and I think that it is reasonable that we have 3.2 AU belts or larger, the horsepower that CCP has now can handle it and the database tech can too. Remember the warp time is used to setup the particular grid square(s). So they don’t need more than a few active at a time.
Except they do. Because any ship in warp can pass through the grid and see it’s contents. They also need to track how much is in each asteroid on each grid. And the grid boundaries. In every single system. Just for the sake of satisfying someone’s want for a proper asteroid belt.
That’s without talking about how having 50000 possible locations per system for a miner of which 500 are on the same 5 degree deep scan massively changes balance, or what this would do to belt ratting.
This would have nothing to.do with preventing bots.
Changing the physical layout of belts would be interesting and change gameplay a bit for the better, especially if you mine from within the belt rather than around the belt. Putting a substantial amount more emphasis on mining anoms over standard belts wouldn’t be a bad idea either. I think CCP is already planning this as part of their announced dynamic resource redistribution.
Keep in mind that barges are slow and this should NOT change, so this makes it slow to navigate around on large grids (though this wouldn’t be too big of a problem on 3D belts rather than the existing 2D planar belts). Also, Grids aren’t supposed to be that big - it is impractical both for the server and also for players to operate in. Large grids also significantly drops PVP at belts since miners would resort to warping around to a far greater extent than they currently are, which would be bad. @Kyra_Lee pointed out some of these concerns.
That, and dynamic resource distrubution is already coming soon, so this is unnecessary.
Do you mean a survey scanner? This isn’t a bad idea either. It would increase the value of survey scanning and tagging of asteroids in fleets. It would be interesting if the name of the asteroid permanently revealed itself (for the duration of the session) once scanned in the same way that signatures are revealed until logout.
Why remove the reprocc dynamic from the game? It’s part of what makes the game realistic and interesting. It merits skill levels, implants (yes, there are reproc implants), use of Upwell POSes for improved efficiency, different volumes for reproccedded vs raw uncompressed vs raw compressed, different ISK/m3 ratios for the three categories of materials, a major advantage of the Rorqual over Orca/Porpoise (in-space ore compression), etc.
I think from this point forward you demonstrate a poor understanding of how botting works, how botters would very easily circumvent the proposed solutions to your poorly defined problems, and how your proposed solutions would wreck havoc on players by providing undesirable and highly unstable gameplay to something that should be straight forward, albeit with a risk of combat (which CCP has done a good job of increasing both PVE and player side over the past two years).
What problem are you trying to solve? Whereas you previously made a case for diversity, now you’re suggesting unwarranted changes - or at least changes without clear benefits and without acknowledging the numerous downsides and how those downsides
A large number of objects in belt would cripple both the server and player clients. RAM consumption + complex geometry (even on high-performance low quality settings) would cause lag and freeze ups on lower end PCs in particular.
Mining is already an extremely low value activity in even the highest end of setups, especially in relation to the risk and investment - again, what problem are you trying to solve? The only way this would make sense is if the cycle timers were shorter, and even then this neither solves a problem nor enhances gameplay for non-botters. I don’t think most players aren’t smart or active enough to partially terminate their mining lasers to finish a partial-cycle asteroid, especially if they don’t have a survey scanner to measure it in advance.
Already a thing as pointed out by @Nevyn_Auscent . You’ve got pirates, you’ve got NPC miners, you’ve got PVP-level Trigs dropping in belts, you’ve got regular belt rats - what else needs to be added?
Yet again I ask - what problem are you trying to solve? This is no longer a matter of diversity, but rather complete and total instability of the mining profession. CCP has already made changes that make mining more competitive and combat-prone - their changes thus far have been simple but highly effective - no facelift required.
I don’t know if you are aware but CCP has already announced plans for dynamic resource distribution. If you had been previously aware of this, it would have been better to wait until the rollout came around and examine the impacts of the rollout before proposing additional, radical changes along those lines.
I can appreciate the excitement of some of your ideas, and I agree with some of them, but I feel you need to temper the bulk of your vision with better defined problems, more practical solutions, and a better understanding of the consequences, which should have been stated clearly and thoroughly addressed to indicate that you did take them into consideration; failing to enumerate and address the most obvious concerns suggests naivete rather than ingenuity when it comes to a such radical ideas.
A 3 billion KM circumference belt where only a few grid-size regions are available at a time (likely found using the anomaly scanner rather than fixed beacons), seems functionally identical to random anomalies with variable composition. I’m perfectly happy to call them belts for immersion.
Bots will be able to function as long as they have access to the client data. CCP could make their life more difficult by encrypting the cache. They could also take advantage of the fact that humans are better at pattern recognition than bots and provide visual cues to where valuable resources are located.
While aesthetically pleasing, it would make absolute no sense. Ignoring the physical aspect of it, it’d mean that every asteroid belt would be within dscan range, which changes quite a lot about the game.
It would be much easier and quicker to find non-empty asteroid belts. It would be much quicker finding miners to gank. It would be much quicker this way to find rats due to less time spent in warp. It would be much quicker for someone in lowsec to realize someone’s going through the belts looking for targets.
Things being spread out adds time that is useful in many ways, including for the game itself. That being said, I’d personally be for one single asteroid belt per system spanning several hundreds of kilometers. Belts around the star, though. Really. No. -.-
I think this Idea is awful and is trying to force everyone to play the way you want (PvP). The game was setup to have a rich variety of things to do. I really don’t understand why everyone hates Industrialist it can be very complicated and engaging. It seems you want to exclude all other activities that isn’t based around you preferred playstyle.
Here’s a better Idea maybe CCP should make a game where all you can do is pvp. since there will be no one to build ships or anything else you can buy your ships directly from CCP for RM and Salty the tears you seem to be desperate for will be even salter down to the real-world cost. leave the people who like variety to the current iteration of eve.
