Afk mining should not be encouraged.

Miners who pay attention and do basic estimation math benefit over dumb lazy miners. This is a good thing.

How about as a compromise, they dont change the spintime of the module automatically, but it gives an estimated time for when it would be appropriate to deactivate your strip miner (this stops people from afk mining but infact encourages them to be more active in order to maintain 95-100% efficiency)
Maybe they could implement this on the spintime of the module button itself -- there could be a bar on the module spintime that indicates when best to turn off the strip miner and move onto the next asteroid?

[url] http://i.imgur.com/NOtrMEq.png [/url]

This for example....
If left unmaintained, the cycle will continue to its full cycle and then deplete the asteroid... so for the miner who is lazy and non attentive, this will yield less ore/hr than the miner who is active, at his keyboard, NOT AFK MINING and who is paying attention to what is going on.
Due to the larger payouts, this will give miners an incentive to NOT be afk, and to actually be playing the game.. if they wish to gather more resources at a slightly more efficient rate

Instead of a new module for that, you could make this effect to the existing strip miners if the ship has a survey scanner equipped. This I would agree to.

The "dead ore" left within the belt ,or created was done so purposely by other miners who have calculated the optimal time to deactivate lasers. By fully understanding your mining skills, boosts, implants, hull bonus, ore sizes and your initial scanning data you too will reduce wasted cycles by knowing when to stop or call off your drones.

This feature is not needed, but I don't see how it will hurt. I don't think that afk mining should be discouraged. If players want to afk mine and expose themselves to all the risks that come with that, whether they are aware of those risks or not, then they should not be encouraged to do otherwise. To me, the most beautiful thing about Eve is its Darwinian nature.

That said, I don't think that this feature will effect afk mining as much as you think it will. Even with a little blue line on the cycle spin to tell you when to deactivate your laser, the reason which motivates people to afk mine will remain the same - it is a tedious and boring pass-time and miners are still going to want to tab out of Eve and watch netflix or go cook dinner or whatever it is they do when they go afk.

So now, instead of players having to choose between going afk and watching their lasers cycle, they now get to choose between going afk and watching their lasers cycle until a blue line appears. Yeah...if I'm gonna go make myself a sandwich in the first scenario, I'm probably still going to go make myself a sandwich in the second scenario. But this problem can be sidestepped entirely by taking advantage of features that already exist in the game. If CCP decides to entertain this idea, so be it, but I'd rather see the devs working on something a little more meaningful.

Nifty idea, but I have to give it a -1.

This is a great idea!

I like it being part of the strip miner itself, rather than requiring a survey scan. Perhaps it could require a survey scanner be installed,

I thought this was already established.

I can see a survey scanner installed being a requirement (of course gankers have only one thing in mind when believing that should be a requirment). So an alternative, that doesn't placate gankers (as much anyway), would be to have a more costly strip miner that does the same thing without requiring a survey scanner be installed. Of course, to a degree this is still an enticement for gankers, as they get to blow up (perhaps loot) a far more expensive module. However, a miner could tank more and make it a bit more difficult to be blown up.

End of the day, this isn't a thread about gankers (I personally support ganking.. as it teachs weaker players lessons, like it taught me)

They really have NO problem with AFK mining (even while they claim they are simply combatting it). They love it, and they want more of it.

That's not necessarily true. Some of us gank because we want them to stop AFK mining. We're not actually a very small minority, I might add. Furthermore, many of the proud gankers will claim they are unafraid of updates that would make it more difficult to gank because they will still be able to pull off rewarding ganks without problem. And they do, indeed.


Be careful generalizing the EVE Online community. This is not your average microcosm, as you'll discover with experience.