Mik Nostrebor
Minmatar
Sebiestor tribe
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Posted - 2008.02.01 03:44:00 -
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Probably said before but reading 9 pages is a bit much for me right now so look at this post as just putting my support to existing ideas...
1. Removing the static belts and replacing them with dynamic ones will need some serious management.
1a. Scanning will need to be changed. After all ratters will still need to find these belts using the onboard scanner. Even in low/nulsec where the roids are of the more rare quality. Pirates too will need to be able to scan down the belts without sacrificing their combat ability(?).
1b. A system will still need to be restricted in the number of dynamic belts that exist at a given time. We can't have 95% of the Eve population settling 1 jump from Jita in the knowledge that there is an infinite supply of minerals just waiting there for them to exploit.
2. Mining is a basic need of Eve. It is not an exciting activity but needs to be done. People need to know that they can mine X amount of ore in Y hours to achieve their goals. If this formula is tampered with then the availability of minerals will drop and the prices will rise. If you make a year old miner have to suffer to get her ore and waste time, materials and face unacceptable risks then a significant number will quit the activity.
OPINION: Simply changing all the current belts to use the 'hidden belt' style might work out with the common belts scannable by onboard scanners. IE there is only a small number of belts at any given time and they run out. When one belt expires, another can spawn. Richer belts like we get now as Grav signatures are still a good idea. Hard to scan belts have higher return and more interesting/challenging content. An advantage of having some rarer, hard to scan belts is that the miners themselves are harder to find and are therefore safer (not totally safe) from the ravages of pirates or ore thieves.
IDEA: Having hard-to-find belts (hard even for pirates) with different and interesting content might even attract more miners to low-sec if balanced properly. Maybe something like a long range scan prob (>5au) required to find them and at least 1 other players scanning in conjunction to locate? It would mean that the pirates would have to actively scan for up to 30 minutes to find a mining op maybe? Enough to discourage the casual pirate and encourage the dedicated carebear miner. Perhaps to make it beneficial for the pirates, the specialised mining equipment could be worth 20+ million per mod.
ANOTHER IDEA: Perhaps there could be an EW idea to protect miners in low sec. Instead of making the belts intrinsically very hard to find, maybe miners could anchor a scan scrambling field generator that decreases the signature of the scan site or have a module with similar effect governed by skill. AS an aside, this item could conceivably have some use for hiding cov ops cynos or other clandestine operations in other areas in the game. A bonus effect is that a miner can effectively 'hide' his claim from other miners (who don't want to scan for a hour to find the site) simply by using an anchored item. Heh, maybe make it an anti-scan probe that expires every x minutes? One that is illegal in 0.5+ space.
IDEA 3: To add the element of risk, perhaps if the rare belts are distant and very hard to find, maybe concord won't be able to police them....even in 1.0 systems.  Of course the offending player would have to worry about concord once they fly back into normal space so they will have to stay in the belt for x minutes or something like that. Note I am still not espousing rae ores in 1.0 space, just rich deposits of common ores. Like 500k dense veld roids all in a 30k wide belt.... Better reward, higher risk. Imagine being able to scan down and blow away that macro miner in high sec???
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