Mining Ledgers, Personal, Fleet, Corp, Moon

[Vas_Vadum]

I made a post about this before, but it got out of hand. So I am recreating this, to explain it a little more clearly and to cover a few more points because my topic was poisoned by crap.

I also remade it to move it to the ideas section. Boy do you guys need a better tag system with more tags. I left this tagless cause I can’t find any good tags.

I type a lot and in great detail, and am not good with formatting using this forum’s software. Hopefully it is easy enough to read though. Thank you for taking the time!

---

For the longest time, we have had to rely on fleet history, to track mining history of our fleets. This fleet history, is vulnerable to exploits such as jettison ore and pick it back up to pretend you mined more. This can be a problem in particularly big fleets, when you start to issue payments out and someone somewhere cheated their fleet history.

It can also be a problem should someone lose connection, the fleet booster in particular. Of course you’ll have some inconsiderate people come and reply to this paragraph and say “LOL well get a better connection” because you know, people can’t help themselves and don’t realize that, connection problems happen on occasion.

Now, we have this Mining Ledger and a Corporate Moon Ledger.
The mining ledger tracks what you do on your one character.
The corp moon ledger tracks all players who mine on your moons at any time.

I’d like to see a small change here. Rename the Corp Moon Ledger, to Moon Ledger.
Add a Corp Ledger, to track your corporation’s mining.

Add a Fleet Ledger.
Now this one, would be more complex to add but it should theoretically be easy enough that it shouldn’t take -too- much work.

Fleets have an ID once formed. The creator of the fleet has a character ID. The fleet ledger can activate once you form a fleet, locking your charcter ID to the ledger as the creator of the fleet. The Fleet ID now becomes the ID for the ledger to track any ores/ice mined. The ledger now shows a dropdown list of the most recent ops you’ve been a part of. Anyone who joined that fleet and mined, adds to that ledger.

When someone transfers ownership of the fleet (aka make boss), that person is granted the admin permissions of the ledger as well. The ledger shows extra controls for fleet bosses, such as the ability to fade all work done by a player, to pay the players with the pay button which defaults to the same ISK as shown in the inventory window for those things and lets the player edit it.

The payment thing will show a worker in the ledger for that fleet as “paid”. Indicating to everyone that that person was paid for their services. Optionally, can show the amount paid as well.

Fleet Ledgers should probably be renamable too, so you can change it from “fleetid fleetboss system date timestamp” to “system op 12” for example. Another nice thing with these ledgers, would be to show ores mined under specific bosses, being able to mark each boss resource amount in a color. Right now you color ores their own colors, a toggle could be added that schanges these bars into a graph that shows how much was mined under what fleet boss. But thats just wishful thinking if a dev wanted to go that far and advanced with the tool.

Luckily, the corp moon ledger already has a dropdown tool that lets you select your refineries to see their stats. You could simply readjust this for fleet mining histories.

Remember, the ledger should not count anything obtained via jetcan. Only from asteroids and nothing more, to prevent exploits. I think thats what it already does, but I felt it worth mentioning just to be sure.

---

Some may ask, why ask CCP to make a tool when you can do so via the API?
Well sure. I -could- use https://esi.evetech.net/ui/#/Fleets
But… I’m not a web developer. I have basic understanding of coding, can understand a portion of this API, but I don’t have the skill to make the site.

On top of that, 3rd party tools are dangerous. You are trusting them with your data. Who’s to say, for example, a nullsec alliance makes a mining ledger tool and people start flocking to it giving their IDs to the site, it pretends to be only for them out of the goodness of their hearts. But it also adds to their own database and lets them know where mining fleets are at any given time so that that nullsec alliance can go suicide gank miners at the best times? CCP can’t stop this from happening, unless that make a built in tool. You have to trust the people you give your account data to, and you can never truly know because it can be undetectible. It would be labeled coincidence that the groups that all use the fleet mining ledger are being suicide ganked no matter where they go.

I mention the above because its one of the draw backs of using 3rd party tools that I don’t think most people think about or consider.

Another issue is, when you host a fleet free to join to all, why would those people who join want to go sign up on some website to get paid and trust you with the site you link to them to get paid a couple mill ISK or so after the op? If I joined a fleet and some guy there sent me a URL to some random website asking for my wallet info and other data. I’d be all “NOPE” and leave.

[Wander_Prian]

You are aware that you can revoke access from any 3rd party website or program yourself? Just go into the support-page and login to your account and you can remove access to your API for any program or site that you have given access to previously.

[Vas_Vadum]

Sure, you can revoke access, but then you can’t use the tool. So what would be the point in the tool if you can’t use it because you revoke access?

Not to mention, the website can store the information it obtains, and doesn’t delete it when you revoke access, it just does not get more information anymore.

[Xuixien]

I think this is a cool idea with a lot of merit. Hilmar has pointed out that EVE has a complexity problem. CCP has done a lot to reduce the complexity, but every new feature they implement adds more complexity which must be iterated.

Having to code your own website with ESI and all that - that’s a lot of complexity.

Manually doing it is also complex and tedious to boot.

I think a simple and easy solution is that Porpoises, Rorquals, and Orcas have the option to “Start Fleet Record” which makes a ledger of what gets deposited into them and by whom (regardless of if they left the fleet and came back), and an option “Allow Fleet Access: Deposit Only” on the Fleet Hangar to prevent any sneakery.

You can do something similar with a deployable structure that acts like a jetcan, but has “Allow Fleet Access: Deposit Only” and records a ledger for the owner.

Simple solutions that will remove a lot of tedium and complexity. But calculating payouts and depositing ISK should be done by hand.

[Salt_Foambreaker]

+1 (OMG 2x in one day!)

• I don’t like 3rd party tools or websites.
• this is just the kind of complexity that should be addressed, it is not tactical or strategic like a fit, it is just PITA

[Vas_Vadum]

@Xuixien

Simple solutions that will remove a lot of tedium and complexity. But calculating payouts and depositing ISK should be done by hand.

Well, I just said the system could include a pay option that defaults to the calculated value but lets you change it. This would be for lazy people who don’t care about the amount as much. I mean I don’t play for ISK, so I don’t care that I am always broke. I use a spreadsheet to calculate out payments right now.

If only the game could be set to calculate prices for a particular market hub like evepraisal and such do. So you can have the estimated value of Jita in your inventory windows.

@Xuixien

Having to code your own website with ESI and all that - that’s a lot of complexity.

Exactly, no one wants to be forced to code their own site to do it on top of the risk of using other people’s sites.

@Salt_Foambreaker

I don’t like 3rd party tools or websites.

And this as the other reason 3rd party sites should not be a forced requirement.

@Xuixien

I think a simple and easy solution is that Porpoises, Rorquals, and Orcas have the option to “Start Fleet Record” which makes a ledger of what gets deposited into them and by whom (regardless of if they left the fleet and came back)

This runs into two problems.

1. If you disconnect, the game usually closes up everything like turning off your modules, leaves the fleet, everything. It could end up closing that fleet record.
2. If people use jetcans and share a jetcan, it can’t calculate out who did what when you use a tractor beam to retrieve the can. The code already exists to see who mined what where. Why not use it to scan the people who mine within a specific fleet ID and then let the person who managed the fleet remove who to pay from that list. I say that because I open my fleet up to let random people in so they can get boosts as well while I and my corp mine but those people mine for themselves and shouldn’t be paid.

[Vas_Vadum]

Having done research on the API, it seems that the personal mining ledger is updated every 10 minutes, and therefor is inaccurate for mining fleet usage. Moon mining history is updated only once an hour, for reference sake.

There is no fleet history on the server, fleet history is entirely client sided and can’t be accessed via the API.

This means that there could be 2-5 million ISK inaccuracies or more in mining histories if we try to make our own tool for this, which is still a 3rd party tool in which you have to place your trust in.

Conclusion:
It is best if CCP adds a fleet mining ledger within the game as it will be the most accurate and use the built in ledger and already cashed mining data in the server its self on top of which APIs can build upon to make special fleet related payouts and checking tools.

It might also be good to change fleet history to server side to save with fleet IDs and destroyed when that fleet ID no longer exists or after a duration of time, say, 3 days? Depending on how much storage it ends up taking.