I think it is a viable idea that CCP should look at, there are those that cannot commit to hours upon hours of belt mining so why not give the player the choice to go PI mining or PI materials.
Shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish this, it also may tempt others to go Omega so they can choose to have the auto mining (like PI now), a passive income or use ore to build.
If people choose to do PI ore mining it could raise prices for PI materials as raw materials are not as available if people switch to planet side ore mining.
Also, I see this as very easily abused by people who multibox dozens of accounts, only now it’s even easier because you can have your multibox’d accounts actively mining AND passively mining at the same time. Sounds like a very bad idea.
Ore and minerals don’t work the same as pi materials.
The various teirs of pi materials that require other materials from multiple planets to make is completely different to ‘get ore->refine ore’.
That’s at least one thing you’d have to change so that there is actually some gameplay in it.
The next thing is the change in prices. Yeah pi materials will increase in prices if people opt for passive ore. But why is that a good thing? And on the other end of the feature, mineral prices will plummet, again. Why is that a good thing?
And why is this needed?
Why don’t these people just do pi, sell the materials and buy ore? It’s essentially the same thing but without screwing the market.
This can be said about most of the game especially null sec ratting with it’s big prizes and mega Corps protecting the gates, let’s not get deceitful about the real RMT money making because Capital ships and expensive pirate faction ships don’t get on RMT sites from high sec.