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Will CCP ever address the shortcomings of being a miner?
Teala
Member RarePosts: 7,627
I am curious. Maybe someone out there in the cybervoid of gaming can answer a few questions I have about CCP regarding their current mining model used in EVE. These questions are about mining. Mining and mining alone. 
Glad I cleared that up.
Question:
Did CCP ever address the need for learning survey when built-in ships scanners perform better than survey scanners one can buy? Why train survey when my ship scanners can all ready scan further and discriminate better and has 0 cycle time? Has CCP looked into correcting this? It seems so stupid that we are lead to believe that survey for mining actually means something when it is pretty much useless.
One thing I would like to see is the survey skill actually scale and become useful. In that as you become better skilled, so does your ability to use scanners. Isn't that a wonderful ideal? Imagine being able to actually use a scanner to a greater distance and being able to discriminate out all the stuff you are not looking for and do it faster - as you get better.
Also, add real-time feedback. I mean we're to believe that EVE takes place in the far future and these people have the ability to travel from star system to star system and what not and yet they haven't come up with a way to provide live feedback to miners who are mining roids. We can scan the roids and see their size, weight and composition at the push of a button, yet the system is not smart enough to monitor the roid we're mining in real time? Just give us the ability to set a cycle time to give us real time feedback on how much of a roid is left and estimated time of depletion. How many of you have mined a roid to oblivion and your mining turrent just continues to run as if there is a roid there? How silly is that? No really...the game has been out for how many years and we're still dealing with something like this? It is frustrating and a huge waste of time. This needs addressed.
Question:
Did they ever address mining crystals and their meager differences when it comes to actual numbers regarding yield? For instance. Look at the yield of a Veldspar Mining Crystal 1 and a Veldspar Mining Crystal 2. How much difference in yield is there between the two? Did you know there is only .125 difference. Now I dunno about anyone else, but that is truly sad. Do you know how long it takes to train up a character that can use level 2 mining crystals? I know. I did it. And I can tell you that for the amount of time it took to train to be able to be the best miner one can be, that .125 return on your investment is almost laughable.
This needs addressed. Make the reward for taking the time to get the skill up to that level worth it. Scale the increase according to skill level appropriately. I was really disappointed when I learned of this and it was "one" of the reasons I eventually quit the game.
Question:
Did CCP ever add color coded mining lasers or are they still the same old color they always were? Just curious on this.
Here, just read my blog entry regarding Mining in EVE and I cover all these things amd more in it. I'd really love to start playing again, but I do not think I can do it if all I will be returning to is the same game with the same issues I encountered before. It's not worth my time.
Comments
As long as mining is really easy and ore is massively accessible, mining will never be a way to get rich. The only way to increase the rewards of mining are to either make it harder or to make ore rarer (or both).
I guess CCP have decided that EVE needs an activity that requires little attention and can be done essentially in the background by pretty much anyone.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
What?!?!?! I use survey scanners all the time while mining!
It helps reduce what would be wasted cycle time while mining an empty rock.
Once the asteroid is low on units I'm able to guess when it's empty and switch my lasers to another asteroid which reduces cycle time which means more ISK per hour. That, or I switch to a fresh one and sick my drones on the partial. It really just depends on how much I'm focusing on mining. I also haul the rocks myself and don't use cans.
I agree that wasting time on higher levels of the scan skill is worthless but the survey scanners themselves are a useful tool for reducing wasted time.
Real time feed back isn't nessessary because after gaining a bit of experience with mining and using survey scanners you'll be able to know when to survey and when you shouldn't. Aside from that, you can send out a scan everytime your mining lasers cycle over.
The crystals are mutilplied by your base yield so although it doesn't look like much on the crystals the actual difference when everything is added up is high enough to make T2 worth it.
Time = ISK
CCP is well aware that mining needs some serious updates, the problem is that it's a huge part of the game's economy and a huge change could potentially upset the economy. It's also a huge undertaking with regards to game coding so they haven't had a chance yet to give it the attention it needs. CCP at one time was thinking about getting rid of static belts and moving them all to signatures, or the system wide belts which I think would be kinda cool.
Hopefully they will have a chance to work on it sometime in the future but as of now there are a few more pressing issues.
Mining really needs a complete overhaul like what they did with the probing system.
Make it it's own mini-game representing scanning for the richest deposits and focusing lasers for maximum yield. Maybe include a chance for a rare strike on a particularly good mining cycle. Make equipment like Survey Scanners have a more active and useful role.
Not only would this make mining a more valid and interesting profession, but it would reduce botting. If CCP didn't want to rock the boat too much they could still allow for afk automining, just with reduced returns and no rare finds.
We know it's well within their ability, it's just a matter of how far down on the priority list it sits.
Mining has been made large obsolete and CCP doesn't seem to find this worrying or wrong.
The answer to your question can easily be found by looking at where minerals actually come from and for how long that has been the case.
Ok, I'll bite but I'm probably going to regret it....
The most flown ship in the game during Q4 2010 was the Hulk. What were people using them for if they weren't mining?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Mining isn't the problem actually. The drone-regions are the problem imho, flooding the market with minerals.
Sure, prices have dropped to a point, where you can very easily replace your ships and most players do like it that way, but from a miners POV this ruined their profession quiet a bit.
Ice is the only thing that has to be mined in regards to jumpfuel and POS-fuel and this is the reason why hordes of mining-barges are still being flown.
On rare ocassions you'll find mining-ops in 0.0 going after the high-ores like Archonor, Bistot and Crokite, but this has become a rare sight. Back in 2006 you needed those mining-ops to get mnierals like Mercoxit, Zydrine etc in huge amounts, nowadays the russians are farming drones for those high-ends.
The mechanics of scanners don't need to be adressed as they're working as intended. You scan the roids for their amount, grab a stop-watch and setup your timers for when you need to switch. Those tools are readily available for the IGB for ages.
Another thing that needs to be adressed to make mining more worth it is to reduce the amount of items being dropped by NPCs. NPCs should only drop named modules in low amounts and ammo in higher amounts. All in all CCP should cut item-drops by half to heavily reduce the amount of minerals coming from that source. Salvage should be the primary stuff for killing NPCs now that they've introduced this system years ago.
On the other side, I can setup my Hulk in a 0.7-system and make some 5-10 Mil ISK an hour while being at work, watching a film or reading a book. That's not too shabby either. And if I go with dual-accounts and fly some LvL 4 missions with my other char, then a combined 50 Mil ISK per hour is possible... all in high-sec, basically without any risks involved.
Question is: will the players accept higher prices due to the needed changes? The answer would be NO I guess and that's why CCP doesn't change anything there.
Bots?
Of course some "people" (heh) still mine, but Bart's point was the minerals are not primarily sourced from mining. There's only one ship that does what the hulk does, but there are any number of ships that can farm drone rats and produce considerably more minerals than a hulk while doing it. And even more ships that can farm mission and anomaly rats and therefore the consequent loot.
The Noctis didn't help matters for miners either - every active Noctis obseletes a hulk. The mineral value of non-drone rat loot was considerably reduced, last year I think, but there are so many missioners, ratters and anomers that they're still a significant source of supply. And the Noctis makes it simpler to just hoover up everything rather than cherry pick the high meta stuff.
Tyrannis was a wasted opportunity to introduce a big mineral sink, incidentally.
With very few exceptions, miners are either automated bots or people who want a very low attention activity that they can essentially almost no attention to while doing other things. If CCP does decide to change mining to be engaging, challenging and risky, then they'll alienate virtually every 'real' player who does it at the moment. For people like teala who actually enjoy resource-gathering, you'd be better off introducing something like Comet Mining (You know, there could be a useful Incarna gameplay possibility there, as well).
Give me liberty or give me lasers
The existence of hulks does not indicate that mining was in any way relevant. The oversupply of minerals is what keeps prices down, caused by tons of people who engage in this thought-free activity without looking at profit.
But to build ships and maintain the economy, they are not needed at all. Loot got reduced a lot, but alloys were actually buffed and are farmed by bots 24/7.
It is, by the way, telling that the mineral distribution stats have never been included in any QEN. The last numbers we have were from 2008, before the drone region botting farms got extremely powerful and organized. And even back then, mining did not account for the majority of minerals, as you can see here.
So can we all agree mining needs a major overhaul? It could be such a cool profession again. It is sad that bots have totally ruined this part of the game.
Like I said. It would be nice to have mining being revamped in a way that it becomes the major source for minerals again, but that would result in ships and items costing twice or triple of it's current price.
Prices for ships tripling? Who's going to pay these prices then?
Combat would come to a grinding halt, resulting in the economy to collapse as the economy needs all this combat to happen, with lot's of ships exploding constantly.
So there's your answer: Making mining a real profession again and the primary source for minerals would basically destroy the game. So this is not going to happen.
Mining is pretty much fine as it is, cool semi-AFK play style and vital part of the game economy...
Don't you think that is kinda unfair to the players that would like to see mining return as a part of the game again?
I honestly think the best way to address all of these issues would be quite simple:
Make mining a game unto itself.
You need scanners to identify the make-up of a 'roid. Then what kind of mining laser you're using affects how easily you're able to cut into the roid. A skilled miner should be able to dissect (physically take apart) a roid and take out as much raw ore as possible while leaving behind useless rock. In turn, those chunks of raw ore would then need to be dragged in....which would give rise to the use of tractor beams in mining.
Similarly, there would no longer be the simple distinction between all the different prefixes for ore. 'Rich' ore would directly depend on how skilled the miner was at cutting it out of the rock in addition to how dense the ore was in the first place. This would also mean that if you found a very densely packed roid for....let's just say veldspar, if you were an unskilled miner you would probably ruin a lot of cuts.
Of course this would mean some pretty massive changes to the game system, which I just don't see happening.
How does some part of the game not being made to your personal, subjective liking make it unfair?
Boggling my mind....
Mining is still part of the game, and still important.
Every mechanic that can be automated by an autohotkey script needs a serious overhaul. But as you can see with PI, CCP doesn't necessarily agree.
Agreed. Nothing more needs to be done.
You want to jazz it up your mining?
1) Go to a lower security system.
2) Join a mining OP with cool people you enjoy talking to.
3) Play music that you find exciting.
4) Watch a scary movie in the dark while you play
5) Taunt the people in local
That should be enough to jazz up your mining runs.
I'm not seeing any such consensus. Before we got that agreement, we'd first need an agreement about what exactly such an overhaul is supposed to achieve.
For instance, to make mining pay more, you need to make it more difficult, more dangerous or make ore scarcer, so some combination thereof. Which of these changes would you accept?
Furthermore, most of the people who mine now do it because it's easy, safe and not very competitive. What do you say to those people who are losing their gameplay niche?
Additionally, many people have invested in multiple mining accounts, predicated on the fact the it's currently very possible for a human player to manage 3 or 4 hulks simultaneously. If you change mining to require continuous attention and intelligent input, then these people aren't going to be able to use their accounts. You'll need to be ready deal with their opposition.
And as said above, more expensive minerals = more expensive ships. That's going to be unpopular with everyone who isn't a miner. You need to find arguments to answer theirs.
There's a lot more to be done than just saying CCP PLOX MAKE MINING MOAR BETTER!
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Or you could just increase mineral requirements for manufacturing without touching mining which would lead to:
But that's no issue, people would be using smaller, cheaper ships. That would be actually interesting shift in ship size scale and big ships would be truly 'big ships' instead of common cannon fodder as they are now.
But wasn't that approach tried in PotBS with ships that required expensive supply bundles to make? The 'bundle ships' simply became the IWIN button because they separated the players who could afford the 3 million gold ships from the players who could barely afford a 250k ship. It proved more a hindrance to PVP than anything else.
Now, EVE players may be different in that regard, but in MMOs it has historically been a bad idea to use in-game currency as a way to encourage diversity of equipment. The two most common scenarios:
players take to viable cheaper gear, at which point the people that invested in the expensive gear complain the cheaper gear is OP, using the reasoning that cost should be equivalent to chance of success or level of advantage
a 'haves and have nots' schism forms. While that may 'seem' to be present in EVE with capital ships, you can still bring a drake or a tackler to a fleet battle. In the case of UO's artifacts or PotBS' bundle ships, anything below that was often a waste of time for everyone involved.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I am not familiar much with POTBS but from what you write it is an issue of game balance. The reasons for 'IWIN button' do not play a role.
What you talk would be equal to faction ship boost which I was raging about so much and indeed that is what happened in EVE. But thats another story...
Global change in mineral needs would be affecting the scale of the ship size because mineral needs increase with size but bigger isn't better in EVE.
Yeah, I think the fact that bigger isn't better in EVE - specifically, the playerbase's understanding of that concept - would go a long way toward making such a change more effective in EVE than in other games. I agree, it would be interesting to see how that would play out.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Well, it is not going to happen or at least it will not last long. Flat mineral requirements is not an answer, I was thinking about some more complex T1 production revamp(and/or new mineral sinks).
The problem is there is not enough PVP to make for increased mineral production so the effect would be temporary only. Same thing happened with Capitals and Titans. At the time back, the costs to make a Titan were astronomical but as the game grew, the costs proportionally dropped enough to produce them by hundreds.
I think you'd be shocked at how much you'd have to raise the mineral requirements to do this. There is a lot of unused mineral production capability, and there are vast stockpiles of minerals held as long term speculations.
In addition, T1 ships would be far more heavily affected than T2/T3; minerals are only a small part of he cost of these ships. So the nubs and poor players would be hit much harder than the high skilled and rich players.
I'd be quite happy with an increase in the mineral requirements for capital ships though.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Stockpiles do not matter, there will always be stock piles regardless nor your paragraph about T2 which makes no sense.
As said, flat increase in mineral requirements for all ships or caps only would not have lasting effect if any.
PVP as mineral sink isn't simply sufficient.