Mining is not broken, it could be improved, but making it easier for gankers is not the right way to go, they already have an easy job.
My solution would be to have mining modules that are linked to a fleet, they run on their own (poorly) but increase in efficiency when running in a currently setup fleet.
Not necessarily for gankers, just make the player be active, just like explorers are to get resources, also explorers compete more. We’re not PvPers or gankers (all the time).
Ships in space should mean being active.
Passive for in stations (and planets).
I don’t see anything wrong with mining. It’s not my thing AT ALL but we need it.
le facepalm
missing the point.
“Gameworthy” gameplay/features range. Not everything needs to have you sitting watching every pixel of info on your overview/HUD.
Something to be constructive in the thread about mining and it being a core aspect of EVE universe and gameplay. Maybe an active mining mode that you have a mini game to cut the ore from the asteroid but get much better yields but not getting rid of passive mining.
Eliminating the choice of the player to be lax in their own management of ships/resources is against the whole spirit of EVE online imo. The choice to be passive or active should always remain an option in mining / resource gathering. IE the range of PI being super active when you’re updating daily or the passive hitting PI once a week.
Also, if they are in space they are active. They can ACTIVEly be locked and shot so go do that if you want them to be more active.
Also I’d like to add, being in a fleet with good boosts and plenty of miners forces me to be active all the time because the roids never last long enough for me to be afk this keeps the fleet moving in the belt and also from one belt to another.
Last time we had a bloodbath for miners in HS was Hulkageddon era, long past gone. Even then it was a short lived occurance. These mythical HS miner competition battles are few and far between outside of the usual 0.5 camps.
Why do miners need to shoot each other to be having a battle? Who can bring the biggest fleet, provide the best boosts, strip the most ore is a perfectly valid form of competition.
Not everything has to be pew pew magoo. Looking at Eve this way shows a single-minded approach to the game, one that is incompatible both with the core concept of a sandbox, and with the reality of how people have been playing Eve for some 18 years.
If you make every area of space, and every activity in that space, more similar the game becomes boring, as there are fewer opportunities to try new ways of playing the game.
There are already areas of space with delayed local. They are interesting because they are unique. Remove that uniqueness, there’s nothing special about those areas of space any more.
There are already activities that require high APM activity. They are interesting because they are unique / different from other activities. If all activities become high APM, they end up being very similar, so there’s no point doing high APM activity 3 if you tried 1 and 2 and didn’t like them.
Edit
Yeah, picking up on @Kestrix point, you should try keeping up with half a dozen hulks under full rorq boosts if you think there’s only sedate, low activity mining. Your lack of understanding of how mining works outside of AFK Orcas should tell us all how seriously to take any of your suggestions - not very.
Because I enjoy it and it helps to get to my goals. Before CCP touched NERFED mining I have saw small fleets here in high sec mining 20-50 ships. CCP has screwed up mining so badly that they drove miners from the game in mass.
Anything CCP would do to minimize mining would drive more miners and paying customers from the game.
Because CCP advertises this game as 100% player ran economy and mining is part of it. Heck mining/indy/market are the only parts of the game I enjoy.
You can mostly ignore the people like Scipio and Corrupted Destiny, who are happy to tell you that “no proposed idea has ever been better” or “every last miner behaves like X”. People who deal in absolutes are generally here just to flog a certain set of opinions and reject everything else, not engage in debate.
Yes, EVE should be about more options, not less, and more sandbox, not narrower gameplay. So mining, if it was to be altered, should be about risk/reward balance. Meaning that if you want to take it slow and easy, the current mining methods should remain available.
If you want to provide a less boring, simplistic, repetitive, bottable method for “active” miners, you make an expensive module and head implant that gives you the option to “scan” asteroids for hotspots (much like PI resource gradients show now), and have the highest concentrations show up as targetable nodes that you can focus mining lasers on, which would give varying levels of boost to mining yield.
Now you’ve got passive, sleep-in-space mining, and you’ve got expensive, faster, focused mining, and it takes minimal programming to achieve it. No need to rewrite whole systems. You’ve still got roughly the same “lamer PvP”-vs-miners balance.
But CCP doesn’t really care, because it’s easier to leave it as is than to improve the overall quality of game mechanics. The monthly subs roll in without it and as long as they have that security blanket covering their paychecks they’re quite complacent.
(You’ll also find the people who say “give me concrete details” will generally pick one aspect from a concept, say “this won’t work because X”, and write the whole idea off because 1% of players wouldn’t like it or something. They’re not generally looking for better ideas (nor is CCP); they’re just looking for ways to shoot down anything anyone else says.)
So that didn’t have catastrophy on the market prices as miners claim it would. Market lives on for ammo and ships and modules.
All this fear mongering and threats by miners if we ever touch their game, we would suffer on market prices.
tbh no matter what side of this discussion a person is on, this is the final truth.
*makes it a series of captcha’s
Well not as bottable but hella more repetitive.
lol
When is the last time you priced a new ship or fitting? Ship prices are at record high prices.
No it is very clear that the ore and mining changes over the last two years have driven players from the game. The indy and BPO changes that KILLED capital play also trashed the game.
These are not threats or fear mongering. A lot players have stated the prices of ships are way to high for the minimum rewards. I as a paying customer can can remove my financial support from any produce that I longer find enjoyable or rewarding. CCP has removed the reward for miners/indy/market players. I totally understand why players leave thus game and I defferently see how CCP drives players from the game.
And yet revenues are up. Revenues going up is not a sign of customer exodus and less spending.
PLEX sales are working.
I am waiting to say CCP’s revenues is up until I see last quarter report. I do know that player numbers are way down and there are areas of New Eden with very few players.
One doesn’t spend 3 million on upgrades when the company is failing, do they?
Depends on the country and tax laws. I have seen plants updated, ran for three weeks and then close their doors forever.
been mining for over 10 years and Mining is one of the 3 Keys to this game
its a dirty job, and some body has to mine the ore, and ice out there.
to make the stuff you buy and fly and blow up
yup yup
I have to disagree with you on this one. There are indeed people who enjoy mining as an activity. There’s nothing wrong with that at all.
All playstyles are valid, esp the ones you hate the most.
LOL this says it all. You only went in when there was no risk ROFL.
What miner offended you ROFL. Some people just like to smoke rocks. Working as intended, pillar of the game. This is a dead topic.
You realize by your own logic expo should be made harder right? Be careful what you wish for LOL.
Miners are getting ganked on the daily son.
Ah. So you’ve never even taken a basic economics class. Got it. The fact that you don’t understand this says it all.
This would certainly make the game more interesting in theory, but the net effect would be that miners (especially high-sec miners) would keep to the safest areas of the belt because they seem to prioritize safety at all times, even when not doing so would result in higher net average incomes.
Also, you would see a lot of whining form entitled players who would be complaining about not being able to mine in the good areas of the belts because of the “PvP griefers” or whatever. The moment that you create new potential for higher incomes in a certain activity, players will complain that they aren’t able to realize that potential at no additional risk/cost. This is why scarcity is so widely decried by miners, even though it made mining incomes go up.
I like this idea, but only from the perspective of a PvPer who’d exploit it in combat. Miners won’t utilize this game mechanic to engage aggressors because on a very fundamental level their gameplay revolves around the act of avoiding conflict in any form above anything else. I believe that even giving mining barges doomsday generators wouldn’t result in miners attacking other players or defending themselves except in rare outlier situations.
I am in favor of ships costing more, and everything in general being harder to acquire. I feel that there should be a sense of attachment to your assets in a way that goes beyond the inconvenience of seeing some wallet number go down a bit when you need to replace them. The mentality of perceiving EVE as a survival game with limited resources appeals more to me than the mentality of “buy and fit one hundred Rifters, lose them all, grind some PvE, and repeat.” EVE isn’t a deathmatch game, but with a glut of resources is sure felt like one for many years. Now that ships have value again, players have started making more complex cost/benefit analyses, and smaller ships and cheaper items have levels of utility we haven’t seen since like 2008.
Of course most players today won’t agree with this, but they weren’t around during EVE’s early days, and never got to experience how interesting the game felt when every item you had felt like a tangible accomplishment, and the game wasn’t reduced to a cycle of grind-buy-grind-sell the way it is today.
The servers wouldn’t be able to handle that. Respawn mechanics for points of interest keep the game manageable from a technical standpoint.
What do you mean you “disagree” with me? It’s the exact same sentiment. They could be making more ISK elsewhere, but they choose mining because the activity is appealing to them due to a combination of factors, e.g. perceived safety, synergy with their simple-mindedness and lack of desire to challenge themselves, etc. I even said that most miners don’t actually go AFK to “watch Netflix” as much as they claim they do, but actually intently look at their screens while mining.