An idea just popped into my head while reading the mining forums.
Regular mining in our Earth can sometimes mean you find a rich vien of ore. As a boost to mining in eve I would like to see a rare chance that the rock you are drilling into could produce a rare ore… not too much just an off chance that inside this rock there was something else.
Or a gas pocket to spice things up… also this chance would not be detectable by any means… only when you start drilling…
WHat do people think?
Random chance a diamond rogue drone or sleeper rat that can tank 1500 incoming DPS is hiding inside the roid and pops out when the mining disrupts its sleep so in its anger it instascrams and 1000 DPSes the miner that stirred up its peaceful resting place of hibernation then warps off once the offender died (including podding ofc). 
hmm just a tad over the top… but i like the idea of rogue drones popping out, that could be fun. same as belt rats you encounter.
I haven’t done much mining in the past several years but remember, as a new player in highsec, there would be an occasional spawn of belt rats where the boss (elite) rat could drop something valuable (by new player standards) like a mid-grade Snake implant - worth an order of magnitude more than the ore I was mining. CCP also includes occasional “jackpot” fracks for moon mining.
Going forward, I expect more variations on the moon mining paradigm - fixed assets in space plus a harvest that is tightly constrained in time and space to encourage more player interaction. I see no reason why a moon frack can’t include a variety of resources - including ores, ices and gas pockets - something for everyone! Reward does need to be balanced by risk.
This reminds me of another game I used to play, RuneScape. While mining it was possible to get lucky and find gems while mining, or to get unlucky and have your valuable pickaxe head fly away where someone else can loot it, or worse, an evil chicken NPC spawned and killed you if you didn’t run away at once.
I think it wouldn’t be bad for mining in EVE to have some random rewards and random dangers that reward attentive miners and kill the semi-afk ones.
