Any attempt to lower EHP is gonna cause a lot of people to just leave mining…which will make nonsense of the ‘new era of abundance’. Me personally…I haven’t spent months getting the skills, and modules necessary to raise a Proc to 70K EHP only to have that trashed.
And if CCP’s attitude is that miners should simply run away from gankers in the 1/4 EHP barges…no…stuff that. I’d sooner run away from mining altogether…and with barges so easy to gank I’d make more ISK as a ganker…lol.
No, just no.
I chat with players waiting in queues to run incursion sites. Are they going to be keyboard monkeys for the “AFK is ruining Eve” crowd. How about people camping cloaked at data sites or ore sites to kill the next person to run the site. They sit there for hours, Are they going to have to press keys to stay cloaked? They’re AFK.
Why single out miners?
Given that the problem of afk cloaky campers was that they could be AFK 24/7 without possible intervention from other players and given that the problem of afk miners is that they can mine for 30 minutes without pilot input, I think the approach to mining should be of a different timescale.
I’m not saying that a miner should be as active while playing as an explorer who is actively clicking all the time if they want to speed up their ISK/hour, but I would say that a miner should at the very least be aware of what’s happening on the screen while playing and be ready to react to something within a minute.
So no, ‘one action every 20 minutes for miners’ does not cut it.
Indeed…its only ever AFK miners who get the blame, yet gankers can sit there cloaked for hours AFK. They can go off and make a coffee, watch Home & Away, etc, etc…and all they have to do is look at the screen once in a while and hit ‘scan cargo’ or whatever. Yet this mostly AFK way of making ISK seldom gets attention from the ‘we hate AFK’ crowd…probably because most of them ARE the gankers !
As some one who has been sitting at gates while gankers sit tethered I can agree with this. But we are going way off topic.
Hardly at all, just a simple drag and drop after 5k m3 mined by mining drones, it is nothing at all.
But it’s not one action that’s the point. An active mining fleet runner in an orca is tractoring in cans. Quite often you arnt told who dropped the can so you have to get into fleet chat to find out. Then once it’s tractor led in you need to record it so you know how to pay out stuff later. You are also managing your own drones and in highsec the asteroids barely last 5 minutes with a single drone anyway.
And now the solution to the afk problem is to add a drag action every 5 minutes to the above active game play? No that’s nonsense.
And since you highlighted the difference between exploration and mining let’s explore that more. An active explorer will never be stationary and cloaked up for 20minutes. They will scan a system then go run the site which decloaks them when they hack a can. So the click is irrelevant as their active gameplay results in active decloaking and recloaking which constantly restarts the clock. This mining proposal imposes the click regardless of if the player is active or not. It’s bad
Nighthawk - Command ship. Does it make sense it has missiles and drones?
Vulture - Command ship. Does it make sense it has missiles and drones?
Absolution - Command ship. Does it make sense it has missiles and drones?
Damnation - Command ship. Does it make sense it has missiles and drones?
Astarte - Command ship. Does it make sense it has guns and drones?
Eos - Command ship. Does it make sense it has guns and drones.?
Claymore - Command ship. Does it make sense it has missiles and drones?
Sleipnir - Command ship. Does it make sense it has missiles and drones.
Simple, easy, solution is to make all mining cycles manual…with a warning to start the next cycle 10 seconds or so before one ends. For a Proc, there’s about 5 cycles per cargo load of ore, each cycle being 3 minutes. If my idea was implemented…AFK miners would simply never get beyond the first 3 minutes worth of ore. Problem solved.
I’m not sure if I understand where you’re trying to go with the difference between exploration and mining, I just wanted to use that to highlight the fact that one is a very active playstyle and the other less so. I don’t know why role cloaking and decloaking is relevant to you in that comparison.
I agree with you that such an action would not add any meaningful gameplay choices nor make the gameplay more interesting. Things like this would commonly be automated under the name of ‘Quality of Life’ improvements. And while I often see QoL suggestions that would take away interesting gameplay choices and as such should not be automated in my opinion, a simple one as ‘click every 5 minutes to drag ore from one hold to another’ would be such a brainless action that should be automated by the game.
That leaves us with the problem: how do we make AFK mining less AFK? (Without requiring brainless “click every X minutes to show you’re active” mechanics)
A nerf to Orca yield would make people go back to barges for anything but the intended role of boosting mining fleets. And barges are much less AFK.
So the simple solution to AFK mining in my opinion is that mining boosting ships go back to their intended role of supporting mining fleets, rather than being decent yield solo mining platforms.
A good solution would not introduce the click at all. As I just replied above the way this was implemented for exploration and cloaks does not impact an active player at all.
If you look at this (as you obviously are) from the point of view that orca pilots are either solo or afk then sure it makes very little difference. But players creating contact by running fleets can be extremely busy collecting cans, maintaining their own mining ledger because the game doesn’t do it, answering questions for players in chat. And managing their own drone mining. It’s just unfair that it’s these players that will suffer as a result of Ill considered click per hour mechanics.
Solve that problem and I’ll listen
That’s what all malevolent rulers do, make the innocent pay for the guilty. Ta ta, it’s nothing at all.
It’s no way to run anything of value. Companies go out of business, political parties fail, etc because they forget who their best constituents are and abuse them. And there’s always the perfect rationale for doing so.
It’s nothing at all.
Nasty RL comparison…
Where I am going is that the solution for afk cloaky campers has zero impact on explorers going about their business as they will never be decloaked unintentionally. The only time a click is forced on them is if the chose to sit in a system with a mobile observatory for more than 20 minutes.
This mining solution of dragging ore from one hold to the other is bad as it doesn’t make the above distinction. It forces the click on you regardless of if you are watching Netflix or actively managing it a fleet (where it could legitimately be missed due to the multitude of activities that entails).
Therefore unlike the exploration solution it has a disproportionate effect on the players that any mining change should be supporting. Mining foreman creating mining group play in corporations.
As I said above and in previous threads I would support a reduction in the drone role bonus on the proviso the give orca pilots buffs to boosts and fleet support. Most notably a mining ledger. If I could see who has deposited what in the fleet hanger it would make running mining fleets easier.
Note I’m saying reduction and not take away the ships ability to mine. I just don’t think that would be viable. Sone players won’t pay for boosts. And ore prices are bad enough that even taking a cut from everyone in fleet will mean the earning potential for the ship is bad.
Its no less unfair than me arriving at an asteroid belt and finding that a single Orca has munched the whole lot in half an hour and left nothing for us Procurer owners. This, rather than ganking, is the biggest problem for the mining barge owners.
And, of course, the big mining companies can afford to waste a Venture or five diverting Concord to their location…as I have seen quite a few times.
If you want to mine. Live somewhere with lots of rocks away from hubs. It’s not hard.
My home system has 19 belts and one of the next door systems has 15.
Its not physically possible for our corp mining fleet to clear them all.
What you are describing isn’t a problem in game. It’s a problem where you live 
Most people want to be within 10 jumps of jita due to being lazy, even though there’s an abundance of untouched belts all over in amarr/minmatar space. Then they whinge about gankers and competition. And outside of hisec, orcas are a complete nothing. And Rorqs exist almost entirely within umbrellas (hisec 2.0) so all you have to do is go outside of those and it is once again barge town.
Yes it is most of us dont want to live in high sec like you. we used to get along fine out here in null. then poof we cant mine and build any longer because CCP jammed a big stick where the sun does’nt shine. Lots of us left the game because of these changes. Its supposed to be play how you want, not play how we say you have to.
So where is this dev blob to tell us all the changes CCP ???
Friday… don’t remember if they specified which Friday.