Mining itself isn’t considered fun by anyone. Doing it AFK is commonplace. Why? Because EVE mining is extremely shallow: you warp to a belt or anomaly, target a rock, activate a mining beam and warp back when the hold is full. The yield cannot be increased by proper ship flying. A missioner can increase his income by pulling the proper groups or flying transversally to be able to fit more damage or projection instead of tank. A miner can’t do either. Of course there are ideas to improve it, but they are fundamentally wrong: they aren’t trying to fix mining, they try to replace it. Better belt rats or ship PvP mean that you aren’t mining but ratting or PvP-ing in a mining ship. If that would be the solution, mining wouldn’t be necessary at the first place, minerals could be security mission rewards (last room rat structure drops it) or could be in a PvP complex where you have to kill competitors and capture the place by orbiting its button.
To have a game, you need opponent. It can be a player or an NPC. Ratting against a good AI rat can be a good game. PvP is considered good game by most. A piece of rock can’t really be a challenging opponent. While some mini-game could be introduced, the hacking minigame wasn’t a huge success. Also, mining has to be time-consuming or the mineral prices would crash and a game where T1 battleships are 10M ISK isn’t interesting in lack of losses. On the other hand forcing players to play some hacking-like minigame for hours would be a good way to lose them.
My idea is a two-level mining PvP system: the first level is completely nonviolent, no ships are destroyed, the competition is for the yield itself. It could be done by redesigning the ORE faction mining modules to have a thieving ability. If you are all alone in a belt, an ORE miner isn’t different from T1 miner, besides its beam color. The interesting thing starts when you mine where someone else does, typically in ice fields or high-level ore anomalies. Shooting the beam into an asteroid which is mined by other miners would allow you to steal their yield: when their cycle completes (including manual switch-off), the ore goes to your hangar instead of theirs.
How can the other miner protect his yield? By switching to another asteroid. Unlike the normal mining beam, the thieving beam couldn’t be switched off, it would run a full circle like the siege module. It would also have a spool-up phase (with distinct beam color) when it wouldn’t be able to steal yet. If you switch off your laser during this time, you can keep your yield and the thief got stuck on a roid for a cycle. So against active miners thieving would be hard, while bots would be in trouble as the only signal of being robbed is the beam color: good luck writing a bot that can detect a beam into his rock but not mis-detect a beam into the next rock.
The miners could also switch to ORE miners too, as these beams are immune to thieving. The second level of PvP would be with real explosions: the ORE miners are null-NPC faction items and their LP/ISK cost could be set in a way that they cost 100M on Jita. I already mentioned that the beam cannot be switched off. Let’s add that it would render the ship immobile, unable to warp or logoff while it’s active. It would also bloom the signature of the ship. This would not only turn the thieving miner to an ideal gank target but also killable by war enemies: they just need a neutral scout and jump in after the miner is confirmed to go “siege”. So thief-beam miners would be preying on normal miners and PvP-ers would be preying on them.
The daily anti-tears feature crying miners getting no support in local and a ganked miner's rebirth into smart miner:
To have a game, you need opponent. It can be a player or an NPC. Ratting against a good AI rat can be a good game. PvP is considered good game by most. A piece of rock can’t really be a challenging opponent. While some mini-game could be introduced, the hacking minigame wasn’t a huge success. Also, mining has to be time-consuming or the mineral prices would crash and a game where T1 battleships are 10M ISK isn’t interesting in lack of losses. On the other hand forcing players to play some hacking-like minigame for hours would be a good way to lose them.
My idea is a two-level mining PvP system: the first level is completely nonviolent, no ships are destroyed, the competition is for the yield itself. It could be done by redesigning the ORE faction mining modules to have a thieving ability. If you are all alone in a belt, an ORE miner isn’t different from T1 miner, besides its beam color. The interesting thing starts when you mine where someone else does, typically in ice fields or high-level ore anomalies. Shooting the beam into an asteroid which is mined by other miners would allow you to steal their yield: when their cycle completes (including manual switch-off), the ore goes to your hangar instead of theirs.
How can the other miner protect his yield? By switching to another asteroid. Unlike the normal mining beam, the thieving beam couldn’t be switched off, it would run a full circle like the siege module. It would also have a spool-up phase (with distinct beam color) when it wouldn’t be able to steal yet. If you switch off your laser during this time, you can keep your yield and the thief got stuck on a roid for a cycle. So against active miners thieving would be hard, while bots would be in trouble as the only signal of being robbed is the beam color: good luck writing a bot that can detect a beam into his rock but not mis-detect a beam into the next rock.
The miners could also switch to ORE miners too, as these beams are immune to thieving. The second level of PvP would be with real explosions: the ORE miners are null-NPC faction items and their LP/ISK cost could be set in a way that they cost 100M on Jita. I already mentioned that the beam cannot be switched off. Let’s add that it would render the ship immobile, unable to warp or logoff while it’s active. It would also bloom the signature of the ship. This would not only turn the thieving miner to an ideal gank target but also killable by war enemies: they just need a neutral scout and jump in after the miner is confirmed to go “siege”. So thief-beam miners would be preying on normal miners and PvP-ers would be preying on them.
The daily anti-tears feature crying miners getting no support in local and a ganked miner's rebirth into smart miner:
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