I’m sure some of you guys played SWG back in the day. The materials you mined and gathered had stats that affected the item you built with them. If you want to talk about changing Eve doing this would be something worth investigating. the only bad part i could see is how messy the market would become with everything having different stats.
How about randomizing part of refining? You mine veldspar for the Trit but it has a chance to give other minerals? Say 1% chance to give isogen, 2% chance for mexallon. I think the law of averages would eventually just even out unfortunately but the idea that every rock gives x minerals is a bit basic. Maybe the different type of regions or security status could come into play too.
Several years ago some discussed mining being a mini-game of sorts that required you to do something akin to the hacking game. This way you couldn’t really afk mine anymore, plus bots wouldn’t be able to solve the puzzles, but based on the mini game results you could provide a short term boost to yield or something. Or the mini-game was like a laser focusing event where if you played you got the max yield from the ship/stats and if you didn’t you got garbage yield. You could still afk mine and botters could still be a thing but active mining would be more profitable and interesting.
I wish mining was a bit more interesting though.
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Let me preface what I’m about to say with this: I loved pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies. It was actually my first MMO. So, it will always have a place in my heart.
Now… do you remember how bad thus system worked in practice? The devs neglected one rather important aspect of games: the players. Specifically how players will game the game.
Players would specifically horde only the best materials and then only build using them. It makes sense, but let’s review how it unbalanced the game.
People remapped their health bars to all mind because the other two two were buffed via doctor buffs (which were constructed using materials and thus had variable effectiveness based on materials used) while mind was buffed via entertainer buffs (which were static in nature due to not using materials). Again, I loved SWG; but, this was result showed poor game design.
Another example was armor. Because faction armor (example: Storm trooper armor) came from NPC agents, it came with static stats. But because composite armor was made using materials, composite armor was almost always superior. The only people I remember using faction armor in PvP were RP guilds; and, they stomped because pure PvP guilds showed up in composite armor and whooped them.
So now that I’ve gone over why I think this is a bad idea as a player, let me go over why this would be a bad idea from CCP’s perspective: developing and implementing this concept would probably take over a year of development. That’s purely a guess as I’m not sure what all it would take… but that’s a seriously large amount of code to enter. For all that R&D spent: what return would CCP get out of it? Not as much as they would from other projects.
Don’t get me wrong, I thought the variable attribute materials concept of SWG was great. And with some serious work, they could have balanced it to eliminate the above issues. But would it be worth the trouble in Eve Online? I don’t think so.
We used to have exploding asteroids (gas pocket?) that would show up randomly and scare the heck out of you, but it has been so long since I’ve mined, I don’t know if they are still in the game in some form or not.
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Personally I’m a fan of mining as it is, minus the current lack of variety. There are a few things I’d like to see that might make it more interesting:
Just as we have rats that will infiltrate and attack us in a mining field, I’d like to see “rats to the rats” show up and attack them. They could all be enemies to us as players, or perhaps they could be allies to us.
I like the idea of the occasional Veldspar getting caught up in a belt outside its security status, or a Mercoxit that wanders off into a Veldspar belt. A little more randomness would make sense.
I’d like to see the odd mineral get caught up in refining. You reprocess some Veldspar, and every so often you get a bit of Mexallon, Isogen, or Morphite with your Tritanium.
Lastly, I think it would be interesting if there were belts with super asteroids, with increased rat activity. The idea would be that you’d need a ratting fleet working alongside a mining fleet to make any headway.
Nahh.
Honestly the idea of unknown materials to pop-out as a result of reprocessing is pretty nice; most raw ore already has A B C tiers to them and they can just add 1 2 3 random tiers on-top of the “density” factor to encourage higher tier rocks to be mined.
Doesn’t even need to be restricted to standard outputs; could spit out gasses, ice, etc.
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