Karentaki
Gallente
federation navy taskforce
   |
Posted - 2008.01.10 22:10:00 -
[1]
Best idea I've heard so far to make mining/archaeology/hacking interesting, and at the same time reduce the impact of macro/afk miners on the economy. Just a few points:
- Asteroids should only ever contain ore when doing that minigame.
- It shouldn't be too easy to get low-sec ores in highsec (maybe 1 asteroid's worth per system max)
Also, I have another idea:
Some asteroids in 0.8 space and down could contain rogue-drone colonies, that when mined would trigger an attack significantly stronger than the highest 'normal' spawn for that system. e.g. in a 0.8 system it might spawn 5/6 frigates, while in a 0.5 system it might spawn 2 cruisers and 3 frigates, and in 0.0 6 BS + support might show up  - This shouldn't just be totally random however - while the asteroids would have the same name, and look roughly the same colour (just to be evil to macros), they would be easily distinguishable to a human who actually looked before starting mining (small structures and general 'weathered' look on the surface), and asteroid scanners would identify them as 'Infested Asteroids' or something similar. There would usually be 2-10 of these asteroids in an average system, meaning that it would not bother normal miners much, but anyone who wasn't paying attention would be running the risk of getting swarmed by angry rogue drones  . Also, since these asteroids couldn't be mined out like normal ones, they would change locations randomly, within the same system, every time the asteroids got replenished.
Obviously - this could lead to some problems:
Griefers - Warp into a belt with a newb/afk miner, find an infested asteroid, put your laser on it for 2 seconds, warp out, come back 5 minutes later in a combat ship to kill the rats and scoop the loot from the newb/afk miner who got ganked. - This would be very annoying, so simply, the drones would only attack the person who tried mining the asteroid, and would despawn after about 30 minutes.
Making mining harder for newbs - If a newb goes mining in a 0.7 system in his nice new mining cruiser (with civilian fittings obviously  ), tries mining 'the interesting asteroid that looks valuable' and promptly dies. He then puts a rant on the forums, and quits. - This could be easily solved by putting some mention of it in the tutorial, and also possibly putting in a warning for the first time a player tries mining an 'infested asteroid', which will only show once.
Also, /signed 
======
|