this doesn't add to immersion at all, seeing rocks appear as I travel down the line . . .

As a similar note on the belts themselves, I would love to see them take on a similar role as what we see in real life. Currently our solar system has two kinds of asteroid zones; being surrounding rings and zones. We have two rings in particular. One is an inner ring between Mars and Jupiter, and then the other is the Kupier Belt. The other "zones" are just particular areas near planets that are more centralized. Look up the zones called Trojans, Greeks and Hildas. It would be nice to see an implementation of the real-life system in the game. However, while I understand the line drawn between high-sec vs. null-sec ore, regular ice really would have to be added into the belts, like you can find them in real life.

Asteroid "rings" should also be set-up based on the size of the system. Currently, there are two kinds in our solar system, being the inner and outer rings. Most of the smaller systems should only be given inner rings that are lighter compared to a system that's over 50 AU across. Then, for your systems that are 100 AU and over, give them both inner and outer rings, as well as having them more heavily laden. Size would also affect the types of centralized "zones" occur. That merely takes a modification of the current belts that are in game now. You move them to being focused around the Saturn and Jupiter kind of planets. The same option could be added for ice planets with the re-addition of static ice belts.

ICCP doesn't want everyone being able to take one character and PLEX-play their way through. They want cold-hard cash.

It would be nice if it looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5toQqcxcNc#t=180

One of my friends who have been playing from the beginning once said that the belts used to be like the old ice belts. (ie a big line.) They were several hundreds of km long and very often covered multiple grids. Because of the grids and the terrible scanning system then, a person could hide in the belt at a off grid of the main warp in and be greatly protected from people trying to hunt them. Needless to say people were all upset and CCP changed it.

Now I don't know if this is true. But It would explain a lot.

The whole mining system needs a full overhaul and everyone knows it.

its not terrible its a job i do i f i like to relax or like some income and read a book at the same time ( in empire)

some people have reached the perfect miner they like mining and cant get more yield per skill or imp
and the find new ways to perfect mining

aka not managing 1 ship a fleet of ships

without is boxer even 6 accs is possible if mining changes to a playstyle were multiboxing isnt possible
many people leave eve or many accs cant be used anymore

Like a lot of ideas this is a good one but won't be easy to implement software-wise. Remember EVERY object in eve needs to be tracked by the server; roids are the same as ships in that respect, in that they are interactible objects. Each sun having a belt like our (real life) sun would not be good for the server.

The current system isn't perfect, nor even lifelike, but it IS manageable.

And it's not like the server has to keep track of every single bloomin' asteroid along the belt. Instead, asteroids would be procedurally generated on-grid. Tracking only, say, 30 asteroids on grid versus 100ish (as it is currently). And with procedural generation / removal, the number of 'roids the server has to keep track of would be more than manageable.

Server load wouldn't be as daunting as you'd think -- one person running missions generates all sorts of interactable objects for the server to keep track of. I don't see how this would be much different.

It would need to track them as you're not the only miner out there hitting this big belt, so a roid being out of range of you may be in range of another player. Multiple players in the area would require a LOT of roids to be generated, unless they are all close to you.

Also, once a roid has had some ore removed it can't be handled procedurally; the code can't predict how much ore you removed.

The idea isn't dead; I just think it's not an easy thing to implement. Certainly harder than you appear to believe.

I actually would much rather belts be entirely removed as objects to do that kind of thing.
Instead just do continually respawning grav anomalies. (Possibly not instantly, but on a fairly short timer at least)
Then you only need three or four in a system, rather than 20 or 30 belts. So you can significantly reduce the number of grids in use for mining, as well as removing the time zone bias involved in mining.

This also turns mining more active since you can't just have 10 anchored containers you dump it into and warp to the same bookmark every time, but have to go to a new site each time.

You could easily use the few larger asteroids with veins and some form of yield finding to focus & improve yield as well (I'd say up to 50% yield increase sounds reasonable). But.... Would have to give mining barges real cruiser fittings if you want them all to have to choose how to fit. And just limit strip miners & MLU's the same way as command links are limited on command ships. That way they have enough fitting options to choose from, rather than the current 4 slots total to pick fittings from which are what make for such obvious fits.