Probably Terrible Mining Rebalancing Idea

[Alain Colcer]

being completely serious, the one thing that mining needs to change is the "slow and utterly non-dynamic mechanic".....

if one would need to either latch, find, survey or explore asteroid belts to find the gold-nuggets or the mineral veins needed, then quite a few more interesting things could be done, and would be less boring.

now, on a not-so-serious standpoint, there are a few details that always bugged me with mining:

- currently most bonuses increase the ammount of "m3" mined, instead of reducing the cycle timer to make it faster. If i was mining, i would prefer it to be faster, not more m3 per cycle.

- the mining barges are the frig->cruiser->battleship progression (procurer->retriever->covetor), the problem is they all use the same skill, and the covetor has a level 5 requirement skill, which makes it useless since you can jump into a hulk fairly easy after that. Skill requirements for barges should be a lot lower to allow people to easily climb into that progression and be useful from the get go.

- all mining barges and exhumers could be made incredibly useful if they were changed to include an specific "ore bay" that could only contain unrefined ores (ice and rocks) in large quantities (20k m3 for procurer for example?), that way even procurers would be interesting for solo miners.

[Knight7]

Which brings me to the actual OP.

Basically, T1 mining should probably just be re-written entirely, and that's the problem you're running into here. Sure adding some reasonable EHP numbers and self-defense guns would help, but the vast majority of players are going to be sitting in these things with highly skewed SP ratios and never, ever be able to mount an effective defense vs. anything. Hell, you could put a combat main in them and all they'd stop is the most incompetent of pirate attacks. A few unbonused guns are simply not scary, and you can't make them scary without destroying what it means to be an industry-focused ship.

I'm also not too enthused with the introduction of yet more covop cloaking ships, or hull tanking as a legitimate thing. Encouraging players to train up a completely useless tanking methodology just for these mining ships is just poor game design. There aren't any faction/officer modules, and they negate the entire point that hull tanking is just a free-patch up to your ship's hull, not a method to actually tank damage. Just make them traditional shield or armor tankers, or if you really want to put a spin on them, you can have no-shield, regenerating-armor style ships sleeper style. Trying to balance legitimate hull-tanking with the power of the DC2 and the otherwise useless state of hull tanking is a bad combination in my book.

The self-defense guns aren't meant to be scary, barring effort to fit for it on the pilot's part and/or coordinated fire from a large number of barges. They're meant to be "better than nothing".

Regarding CovOps cloaking, obviously it shouldn't be something that goes on every ship, or even every other ship, but when it makes sense I think it makes sense - and on a ship that (in my rewrite) is focused on moving around quickly and evading detection and hostile attention, I think it definitely makes sense.

Regarding hull tanking, I'm pretty sure there are no skills useful for that that are not also useful for armor tanking, so they're not "training up a useless tanking methodology just for these mining ships" - and if there aren't any faction/officer modules, well, those can be added later. The existence of the DCU2 is part of why we only need to buff the hull reppers, modulo some ship bonuses which actually stacking penalize the effect of the DCU2.

And finally, regarding the SP ratios of the people likely to be flying these ships: you may have a point, but skill deficiencies can be corrected over time, and if we give them the room to fit more on their ships than 1-3 strips, a single mid, and 2 lows, they might surprise us. All we can really do is give them the tools and the opportunity.

[Knight7]

being completely serious, the one thing that mining needs to change is the "slow and utterly non-dynamic mechanic".....

if one would need to either latch, find, survey or explore asteroid belts to find the gold-nuggets or the mineral veins needed, then quite a few more interesting things could be done, and would be less boring.

Well, some people enjoy the slow and non-dynamic mechanics. I don't enjoy it solo myself, but I do enjoy occasional mining ops where I can make some isk while hanging out and shooting the breeze with a bunch of friends. So I think there is a place for the current model of mining, at least in the static belts.

I have been kicking around some ideas on how to make some kinds of mining more interesting and engaging, mainly centered around revamping mining missions andgiving mining lasers and strips a tracking stat (in which case we might as well forget the Mining Beam Extensor module, and just let Tracking Computers affect mining lasers and strips). In belts this wouldn't affect anything, since the rocks there are all stationary.

However, in the revamped mining missions (potentially also in some new grav sites), rocks could be set up with vectors of movement, so you'll need to position yourself to track them properly and potentially keep up with them (I have this idea that in some missions you might be trying to mine out asteroids on a collision course with some kind of NPC structure). Mining missions should probably also have more ore than is necessary to complete the mission, to serve as loot-equivalent.

- currently most bonuses increase the ammount of "m3" mined, instead of reducing the cycle timer to make it faster. If i was mining, i would prefer it to be faster, not more m3 per cycle.

Yeah, that's a decent point, and one I've already been thinking about. You'll note that my rewrite gives the Procurer a massive cycle time reduction, and a smaller one to the Retriever.

- the mining barges are the frig->cruiser->battleship progression (procurer->retriever->covetor), the problem is they all use the same skill, and the covetor has a level 5 requirement skill, which makes it useless since you can jump into a hulk fairly easy after that. Skill requirements for barges should be a lot lower to allow people to easily climb into that progression and be useful from the get go.

Covetor could easily be reduced to require a level 4 skill instead of level 4 - but we don't know exactly how CCP's tiericide is going to work; it's possible that once they get through with things, you'll only need a relevant ship skill at 1 to sit in any ship of that class.

- all mining barges and exhumers could be made incredibly useful if they were changed to include an specific "ore bay" that could only contain unrefined ores (ice and rocks) in large quantities (20k m3 for procurer for example?), that way even procurers would be interesting for solo miners.

I think tens of thousands of cubic meters of ore bay might be a bit much for the individual barges, but fundamentally I agree with the idea of giving the ships large ore bays rather than large standard cargo bays.

[FourFiftyFour]

Random ideas:

Allow mining lasers to be used as defensive weapons.

Introduce mechanics that allow for clever miners to at least attempt to escape such as:

Cracking an asteroid to obstruct pursuit.
Ejecting ore to break lock.
Booby trapping asteroids.

[Knight7]

I don't see a need to make mining lasers usable as even low-grade weapons - if you can't mine with guns, why should you be able to gun with miners?

However, I could see introducing ways for miners to use the "terrain" of asteroid belts/grav sites to their advantage. The first thing that pops to mind is a new kind of 'roid that appears only in low and null - I'll call it "haxite" for the time being.

Haxite would a variant of veldspar that refines into only half the amount of tritanium of normal veld; however, when you mine it, the action of the mining beam creates a small cloud of reflective but harmless microparticles that are then drawn back along the beam and become caught in your shields and interfere with the targeting sensors of your ship and any ship targeting you.

When units of haxite appear in your hold, all locks targeting or originating from your ship get broken, and both you and any ships that try to target you after that suffer as if you were being sensor damped for lock time, with both the degree and the duration scaling in proportion to the amount of haxite you mined - so if you turn on a miner, then turn it off after a couple seconds, you'll get the lock break effect, but only a very small and very short-lived damping effect. That might still be enough to get away if you're prealigned or in a smaller, more nimble mining ship, but if you're in something bigger you might need to let your miners get through more of a cycle, during which time you'll have to tank any incoming damage.

That's probably terrible for a whole bunch of reasons I'm too tired to think of right now.

[Sponk]

I like the idea of more types of asteroids.

[Elmnt80]

if you can't mine with guns, why should you be able to gun with miners?

Make it so you have to come along and shoot the asteroids, when they explode, a cloud is left in its wake composed of pulverized asteroid (whatever kind of asteroid it was). You pick it up with some vacuumy thingy highslot mod. (You have gas cloud harvesters already that are basicly giant vacuums, Might as well keep going with it). There now you mine with guns.

[Varcaus]

No more gun mining btw went out in any useful sizes with drone changes.

[Knight7]

if you can't mine with guns, why should you be able to gun with miners?

Make it so you have to come along and shoot the asteroids, when they explode, a cloud is left in its wake composed of pulverized asteroid (whatever kind of asteroid it was). You pick it up with some vacuumy thingy highslot mod. (You have gas cloud harvesters already that are basicly giant vacuums, Might as well keep going with it). There now you mine with guns.

My point was more that CCP recently changed things so that shooting things with guns couldn't substitute for mining, so we shouldn't change so mining can substitute for shooting guns.

[Knight7]

I like the idea of more types of asteroids.

Do you have any thoughts on what new types of asteroids to introduce?

On the topic of the "haxite" rocks, I'm tossing around two ideas - one, that perhaps instead of having a single rock that does both lockbreaking and sensor damping, we split them into different asteroid types (possibly with the addition of rack that produces an ECM burst-style effect), and that they should have stronger drawbacks, like causing shield damage, or rendering the mining beam(s) used inoperable - either by causing heat damage, or simply offlining them.

[Kyle Cataclysm]

I was about to propose asteroids which contain mixtures of ore types. E.g. a type of asteroid that contains 8% arkonor, 32% veldspar and 60% jaspet. Then I realized this feature does not provide any benefits over the current system except for more complexity. Anyway, here's the posting (which is slightly off-topic).

Jumpgate featured asteroids which contained a mixture of ore types. Each ore type could then be refined into raw materials used for production.
http://jumpgate.ddz.net/map/ores.html
(Click onto icons for detailed infos)

  Spoiler:

There are vast differences in the economy when compared to eve, though. Commodities+Items had weight, which influenced flight characteristics. Production was done by dropping materials on a station's public market. (apart from cargo hold, there was no private inventory, except for a small storage in a depot station; later: (small) player owned stations). It was possible to hinder production by buying up rare commodities, launching and crashing on purpose or simply flying away.
If a station had all commodities required for production, every 6 minutes some products (1-100) appeared on the public market. Commodities for the next cycle were removed from the market. There was also a small hidden inventory, allowing production to continue for some time (less than... 30min?), if commodities were bought up or depleted.
Mining gave a mixture of ore types, which were automatically refined when sold at a station. Tier0 materials (commodities) appeared on the market. Usually, to make items, one needed commodities of higher tiers. Tier2/3/4/5 commods consist of lower tier materials. Production sites were fixed. No station was able to manufacture everything; thats probably the basis of the hauling profession. For some items, you had to fly all over the galaxy when starting production from scratch.
Modules had to be build from various commodities. Ships, however, were simply bought. Until introduction of player owned stations, it was not possible to own more than a single ship.
Its pretty obvious the whole concept only works for a small player base (public markets+public manufacturing)

Useful:
http://www.capsu.org/jumpgate/jgs.html (use Item/Usage/Station menus)

[theBlind]

if you can't mine with guns, why should you be able to gun with miners?

Make it so you have to come along and shoot the asteroids, when they explode, a cloud is left in its wake composed of pulverized asteroid (whatever kind of asteroid it was). You pick it up with some vacuumy thingy highslot mod. (You have gas cloud harvesters already that are basicly giant vacuums, Might as well keep going with it). There now you mine with guns.

My point was more that CCP recently changed things so that shooting things with guns couldn't substitute for mining, so we shouldn't change so mining can substitute for shooting guns.

But that's a completely unrelated application of the guns. Also, I strongly support making miners into possibly agression causing weapons. Between highsec, auto-targetback and the semi-afk nature in which human miners (and bad bots I guess) would activate the new "guns" on anything targeted... nothing bad could ever come from that.