How about going the other way? Instead of trying to make mining more active, make it just like PI. Instead of a field of small asteroids, make dwarf planet size asteroids (like Pluto or Ceres) that are permanent in space. Then have a PI-like interface where the player sets up extractors and a storage facility. The player can then go do other things while the extractors do their thing, Some time later, the player comes back and picks up whatever ore was mined and takes it away.
Yes it is ! Why ? More accounts running = more money for CCP = you can play this game and get every now and then an expension you dont have to pay
Easy to answer ā¦ multiboxing with 10+ accounts male ita an very active gameplay !
No ā¦ we dont need completly automated mining ! Its a shame that CCP bring put the passive moon mining againā¦
Iām not a miner, Xer, so I wouldnāt presume to suggest changes to their play style. As a ganker, someone who really must be present at his keyboard and paying attention (which I enjoy), it does seem odd to me that folks can display such a lack of engagement as does the average belt miner, and claim to be āplayingā EVE.
They also claim that mining is āboringā; but if someone suggests a change which encourages them to stick around, pay attention and make a few extra clicks, they get defensive of their āboringā play style. In Highsec, they mostly want it to be more lucrative.
I was interested to see @Gerard_Amatinās suggestion of a sort of mini-game, which would provide some benefit to the miner but which could also lead to other types of engagement, and even conflict.
Miners donāt want my advice on their activity, Iām sure, but if I see a comment or a suggestion which sparks my interest, I will respond.
No to āmini-gamesā.
No to making it āmore interactiveā.
ā¦
I think something like a Mobile Mining Structure (MMS) would be more advantageous. Itās something that can be shot (suspect) and would create more content. The MMS would target the nearest asteroid within say 25km and mine it until empty. Mining rate would be less than a venture.
Itās a way of āmultiboxingā for poors without the actual multiboxing.
That looks like X4 where you can search for asteroid spots to mine, or send AI to shoot their laza.
The issue being, that this would instead make bots better. They have no issue with paying attention.
Unless this has no effect on the mining yield.
Maybe another proposal would be, to have cloud effects like in abyss, which can have negative or positive effects, but never increasing yield. Example : -10% to mining yield, +20% to armor amount, +15% to travel speed, etc. Basically just like mutators, a list of effects with min and max values, respawning every 40min or so.
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In general, Arthur, I agree with this. Personally, I find most of those features intrusive and irritating. But I do understand why they may be designed into an activity.
I recall (I think, correctly?) when CCP introduced to Exploration that awful business of nabbing cans which were dispersed over a wide area after being ejected from their container. I may have it wrong there, but I immediately left off exploration.
Later, I re-engaged with the activity, to discover that the earlier iteration had been replaced with some sort of minesweeper mini-game. I left again, dissatisfied.
What Iām saying is that I can think of no means of making mining more interesting without at the same time increasing the amount of engagement required. Those who see mining as a source of low-engagement income generation will never welcome a change which challenges their unspoken definition of their play style. Theyād rather quit, Iām sure.
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I quite like this.
Donāt mine then, simples.
Itās pretty easy. Leave the current mechanic as it is, so no one has to change anything if he doesnāt want to.
Create an advanced mining mechanic with new modules, new sites and new types of roids (even appearing in standard belts) that can only be mined efficiently using that advanced mining equipment. These mining opportunities have high chances to trigger āeventsā while mining and the player has to react adequately and quickly. These events can vary from environmental hazards that have different AoE effects, artifacts/ancient wreckage parts found in the crust of some roids that can be retrieved, roid-instabilities which can lead to explosions or shockwaves, hidden pirate caches that trigger NPC waves, extreme density veins that can be focused on and so onā¦
Main focus of this āadvanced miningā design is that it cannot be done by bots, semi-afkāers or massmultiboxers, because the decisions to make have to be complex and require some āout-of-the-boxā thinking and at the same time cause severe disadvantages (in extreme cases even up to ship loss) if failed. Following a high-risk, high-reward scheme. Each time such an event is triggered, the āchallengeā appears for all ships that currently mine that roid, so people will be able to multibox at most 2 or 3 of them, else the attention and input required would get totally out of hand.
The goal is to make the rewards so high, that an active miner using this advanced mining mechanic can with only 2 exhumers make more profit than a āstandard crewā using 10+ exhumers passively, giving active and skilled miners an advance over passive multiboxers and bots.
Pleasing take on the issue, Syzygium; letās see what the OP thinks.
Any activity that requires fast reaction, or constant focus, is a boon for botters.
Activities that are harder for bots are those that require complex planning, especially 3D+time planning, as those are at least NP hard while our brain has an easy time navigating 3D.
Thatās why I proposed abyssal-type clouds, while of course knowing that AoE can have a huge impact on Eve servers.
The idea is not to make taking those into account mandatory, but instead a little bit more effective. Thatās because in the end if this is too costly, then it will become cost efficient to design, develop, implement a bot to handle them - because Eve is not a real 3D world but an abstraction, itās possible to make correct algorithm that behave better than human since fine-tuned for this.
Thatās why I said āno bonus to yieldā.
ANY challenge proposed by a computer, can be solved by a computer more effectively than by a human, given enough dev time.
Once itās done, the result of the āfeatureā becomes, itās hard only for non botter. So you only added tediousness, since the price of the mats will reach equilibrium again, and non botter will not be able to have correct access to resourceS.
Thats only true if the bot can solve the problem that is appearing. It isnāt that hard to create a task that a human can solve on first glance, but a simple mining bot just canāt. I mean, we donāt need to exaggerate the problem, EVE Online Mining Bots arenāt State-of-the-art-AIs running on supercomputers. They are for 99% pretty easy screen-reading programs that can issue simple pre-scripted command chains.
:
They donāt need to run on supercomputers to be more efficient than humans.
And they must not be AIs to be better than human.
{citation required}
Some bots donāt even need to read the screen, as they can access the game memory to have all the data they need.
Remember that time CCP patched āplayers can tell when someone warps cloaked to themā ?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/cyvq7y/big_bug_eve_client_receives_information_about/
no, its not. i have 3 accounts i dont mine cause mining is ā ā ā ā and ā ā ā ā ā ā ā boring as all hell, currently i wouldnāt mine with eve one account.
obviously we got another one who cant read along with spell properly despite built in auto correct and editing functions and only quotes part of a paragraph to fit their agenda, i asked
how conveniently you skipped that partā¦
with this i can almost agree, all mining should be made an active activity that is fun and engaging and requiers the play to do mor the just lock and press f1 and f2 and then wait for profit.
I like the cloud/effects idea.
so ā¦ then you just write some random ā ā ā ā and but you almost mean only yourself ? oO
otherwise you cant deny my point !
you mean just like you ? 
and i just quotet your complete question and answered it 
if youre not happy with its answer then its YOUR problem ā¦ xD
because you cant ! if you would change mining that only 1 char will have most reward then lot of accounts will run out and CCP loses lot of money ā¦ if CCP loses lot of money then they have a way harder time to bring new content and running their server and at the end ā Server Shutdown and eve is dead only because YOU want that mining is a singleboxing action ā¦
fun is what you get ! nobody can āgave you funā ! its important that the āboring actionā of mining is fun for you !
and this does not belong to the point that its an active activity if you want to have max reward ā¦ if your doing it semi afk then you dont have that much reward and nobody should care about this !
this is a point you could bring to all activities in eve ā¦ PvP / PvE / Salvaging ā¦ eve is build this way and you cant change it because its the basement ! otherwise you have to say that all PvE needs to be more then just lock and press F1 / F2 ā¦ this statement is a pure useless statement !
its just boring to you other ppl like this ! and if you would mine with 12 accounts then you could realise that its not that boring xD but iĀ“m sure you couldnt handle 12 accounts in a belt 
This is like 20th time I see similar suggestion here over last 6 years.
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OP wants Star Trek Online Style style mini game mining?
In Galaxy on Fire 2 the way to mine is a drill and as you drill the layers your mouse gets harder to control in a smaller circle where the smallest circle is the core of the asteroid.
X4 Foundations have various vanes you can mine for more rocks or just attack the rock for a tiny bit of ore.
Then there is Elite and Star Citizen and NMS to consider. idk about them.
Food for thought.
No thanks. If they want that, they can go play X4 or Elite.
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And minecraft !
The issue with X4 for example, is that it is solo game.
Once in low attention mode, the AIs donāt use their lasers at all.
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