First off I would like to begin by asking a simple question. Why is the backbone career of eve one of the most boring and effortless?
My idea does not interfere with the current mining system, however by adding a few modules, a new drone and mining mini game CCP could increase the m3/h production and general enjoyment of mining.
lets kick it off with the General concept. To increase the level of participation, yield and fun during mining my idea is that a module is added to put mining ships into a form of Siege/triage/bastion.
This module would nullify the ability for the strip miners to tractor in their loads, instead once the ore is severed from the asteroid it sits around the rock. This ore could then be pulled in by a tractor beam from a mining foreman ship or by a drone. Like the siege module this would lock you in place and heavily increase your capabilities.
For the sake of simplicity lets call the mining siege module a fracking module.
Once the Fracking module is engaged the pilot could enter a sort of mini game ie. The pilot has a target moving around the screen and guides it over the rock, cutting out the useful ore. Adding a type of garbage ore to all asteroids would allow for CCP to vastly increase yield while in this mode, but deter afk mining since the pilot would mostly cut garbage ore from the rock if they were afk, however this useless ore would only be mined during Fracking. A chain bonus system could be added as well, to increase your yield on successful cycle completions, which could stack to a certain percentage.
Then you can have your foreman ships tractor in rock and or send ore retrieval drones and perform their boosting roles all while the miners focus on their mini game to achieve the largest output of m3/h.
All in all the current mining system could use a revisit.
I hope others find this idea interesting and add to it
You answered the question yourself: It’s the backbone. If it was not boring (which it is not really in fact) and effortless, it would not be possible to be the backbone as it would require too much work, attention and … effort to do.
Ore/mineral prices are set by supply and demand on player markets. Increased participation and yield would result in lower prices.
Rorqual already has an industrial core - a mining version of the siege/triage modules - that significantly increases boosts and drone mining yield while locking the ship in place for 5 minutes.
A lot of these ideas will become part of the game with the release of Refineries in the winter expansion - moon mining will require actual mining of an asteroid belt blasted from the surface of a moon. Yield will include both standard ore and new ores containing moon material. Maybe this mechanic will be used to harvest other resources in the future but let’s see how it works with moon mining first. A key consideration is it will not be available in highsec - other players will be able to attack the mining fleet.
While the potential output is huge, the actual will be constrained by risk and effort. This is active gameplay in dangerous space.
Because there’s only so much you can add to playing with rocks, and the fundamental problem with adding minigames to the system like you propose is two fold.
First and foremost, any simple game will get boring over time no matter what format it’s in, how challenging it is, ect. People will get good at it, get used to it, ect and it’ll become a boring and tedious addition. In comparison something that lets you earn ISK without really paying much attention is preferable since you can be doing a variety of other things while it happens.
Second, Eve players are pretty canny buggers so anything you add is pretty quickly going to get optimized and “solved”. People will figure out what the best way to maximize payout is and then do that. If the optimal way isn’t to play your minigame then CCP have just wasted a bunch of effort. If it is, then they’ve potentially just killed mining multiboxing and probably pissed off a lot of people whether they’ve killed it or not.
The combination of the questionable nature of any potential changes and the high potential for outrage and damage to the Eve economy as a whole makes any changes like this high risk and fairly low potential reward.
Also you have to consider that demand for minerals is pretty much fixed by the number of people playing, so anything that massively increases mineral output will also tank mineral income, as shown by the recent Rorqual changes. This further complicates anything like what you’re suggesting.
That’s why things like this have been suggested on and off for probably a decade now and nothing has been done.
This… isn’t really true, or logical. PvE still requires more effort and attention and more people do that than mine. The main thing you can’t do is change mining to be too rewarding, since because it’s rewards are based on economic conditions it will self correct.
The problem is mining is very boring. I have done a lot of null mining and it is still incredibly boring. Yes rorq changes changed the pricing due to an influx of mining, however they are destroyed a lot more since the changes. If you are locked in place with my idea and have to wait out a cycle time then more mining ships would be destroyed. There is always a balance.
PVE like ratting or missioning is not the the same level as mining. Without mining you could not run missions, which means that PVE activities depend on mining/are one level above mining and not on the same level.
Maybe local keeps you safe in Sov null, but anywhere else you need d-scan and to pay attention. And whatever mini-game you make for mining, once you’ve done it for several hours its going to be tedious.
Yes, but without ratting you couldn’t buy ore off the market. They’re both basic activities, they’re just generating different resources.
An activity doesn’t have to be boring to be a backbone activity for a game. The main reason few people Mine is because it’s unrewarding compared to similar options, as the Rorqual demonstrated when it broke this trend and a ton of people suddenly found that hitting rocks wasn’t so bad. Mining being unrewarding financially is related to its status as a backbone activity in Eve. It being boring, not related at all.
Matter of perspective, I guess, but you can buy ore without the market or ISK. Instead of ISK as payment for a ship purchase, services rendered to the miner could function as payment instead. Instead of selling ore, you would only sell completed products to people that help you.
With regard to the general “boring” part, for one, I do not think that mining is all that boring if you do not have ultrasecure space. I have not mined in a long time, but in the past I did it in areas with regular ganker activity in high sec and even sometimes in low sec. There are already many ways to make your mining “less boring” (and already add a lot of tedium to it). It subjectively being boring is not the fault of mining but rather how people mine.
And secondly, I do not get what people expect. The OP wants to replace one repetitive action (sending out mining drones and/or reactivating lasers and emptying your ore holds) with another and add tedium on top of it (same tasks as above plus mini games or manually aiming lasers). I can see how this would make things less boring, but at the same time it would also make the entire task less desirable. Kind of like the change in hacking: CCP replaced shooting NPCs, while sitting at a can and watching your module cycle with sitting at a can and run through grid after grid after grid to open the can. But you said that already.
Yes, sure, in theory, but it’s easier to generate 10 billion ISK in this game than it is to generate the trust required for someone to give me 10 billion in Ore against the promise of future services, let alone negotiate a value for the services to be rendered in return.
Plus if you want to nit pick there are ships that come from the tutorial and a few other places without any mining occurring, and you can reprocess mission loot, and it’d be easier to run the Eve economy on those dregs than it would to run the whole thing on trust and favors.
This isn’t intrinsic to mining though. I could say the same thing about sitting out in space doing nothing in “not ultrasecure space”. There are plenty of other more inherently complicated, interesting, or otherwise engaging activities that gain added excitement from being done in a dangerous environment that is external to the activity itself.
That doesn’t change the activity itself though.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the OP’s idea and if I had a better one I’d have proposed it, I just thought your logic in opposition to his idea was also flawed.
Perhaps make this an optional feature in which a player could mine certain parts of an asteroid with more valuable minerals. This would focus their mining beams on more profitable mineral compositions in a given asteroid. No need to create garbage ore
