Mining sucks. You know this, I know this, everyone knows this but CCP. Catalyst was supposed to be the big expansion that made mining more exciting, and it just wasn’t. Yeah the new rocks look nice, but mining is still the same braindead activity it always was, just now you also get a little cargo hold indicator trailing your ship for some reason, and have to right-click your mineral scanner button to actually see the results. Wow. Mining, consequentially, is something you either do in massive multiboxing fleets, with bots, or AFK. My suggestion will address all three issues. And yes, they are all issues. I multibox myself, so this is not some doom and gloom “I can’t compete with just one account” complaining, it’s just me observing a lot (a lot) of complaints about multiboxing miners during the recent Gallente Election event. Watching someone with two dozen alts roll up and strip the place bare before you can clear out a single rock is surely disheartening to a newbie.
What I’m proposing is tying mining to a minigame, the way Odyssey added a minigame to hacking over a decade ago. Let’s call it “surveying” and tie both mining crystals, the new critical hit mechanic, and residue mechanics to it. When you target an asteroid, you’re given a survey window containing a mineral scan of the rock.
This is a screenshot I grabbed from Reddit (I don’t have any characters that can fly a mining barge) with my “survey window” added (as well as some lovely AI hallucinations, welcome back Vivid Hemorphite). As you can see, the rock is marked out with areas of high and low ore contents. You don’t have to interact with this scan at all, if you want to just mine slowly, you can close it down and continue as you would today, or just ignore it while the miner cycles. But your yield will be low, you won’t score critical hits, and your residue would be extremely high. If you do engage with the minigame before that module’s mining cycle expires, you are able to raise your yield, raise your crit chance, and drastically reduce your residues. Because asteroids slowly rotate in the game-world, and the mining ship may be orbiting them, the specific image they need to draw a path on will be different from cycle to cycle, too, so it’s not just going to be Project Discovery’s “draw two rectangles each time”.
Here our miner has marked out a path for his mining lasers to take this cycle. Ideally he wants to spend as much time in the high-yield seams as possible, and as you can see, he’s done an adequate job of it. His yield will be decent, he might get a crit, and he won’t waste the entire rock away getting extreme residue. But he could have done better, there are still two high-yield areas his path doesn’t touch. Maybe training into a skill lets you raise the accuracy of your initial scan, or plop down more nodes, or have a longer distance between the nodes, or add patterns like “spiral from this point”. The specific minigame is less important than the fact that our miner has to frequently interact with each client to make sure his yield stays good and his residues don’t deplete the belt before he’s done for the day. Make them play “ore hold tetris” and tie the yield-residue mechanic to their actual score if you want something more fun than drawing a laser path on a survey scan, for example. The idea here is to disincentivize excessive multiboxing, by simply making each client require such an amount of attention that it’s just not viable to keep more than a handful of miners scoring good in the minigame. An example of tuning this minigame would be that up to three accounts you are easily able to maintain a perfect score on each. For an example, let’s say I field three hulks. That’s six lasers I need to draw paths for every 7.5 seconds, timing which gets tighter as my skills in mining barges and exhumers increases (more challenge, but also more yield). This benefits solo players and small-scale multiboxers, whose effective yield after the implementation of the minigame could be made significantly higher than they currently are to compensate for all the bots and big multiboxers whose yields are suddenly much worse. Much more than three clients, however, and keeping up with the minigame becomes very tedious and tiring, your scores will be low or zero, and you’ll waste the belt and see little profit.
Furthermore, it becomes easy for CCP to have an algorithm monitoring these scores. A miner who consistently scores high across ten accounts for fifteen minutes but then starts losing score or missing cycles probably isn’t botting, but one who can keep full attention on the minigame for hour after hour definitely is. For the humble solo miner, mining remains an activity you can effectively do while watching anime on your second screen, but you’re now paying attention to the client pretty persistently rather than just every ten minutes when your hold fills up and you need to warp off to your refinery to compress.
As I’m sure you’ve inferred by now, this also opens up another strategy players can use, which is to deny their opponents ore. By deliberately failing to play the minigame, you can effectively clear out a site ahead of a rival group which wants to harvest it.
By making mining interactive we make it a more fun activity to engage in, which is beneficial to newbro retention as mining is often one of the first activities they try, we cut down on AFK “gameplay”, and we hamper excessive multiboxing and botting. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
