Zedah Zoid
Eve University
Ivy League
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Posted - 2008.02.01 16:14:00 -
[1]
We were discussing this a bit in corp and a couple of things that came back were the fact that we still need some fixed belts in the systems. These provide additional warp-to points that are useful for chasing people around systems and providing some randomness to flight paths. I like the idea floated earlier in this thread about the few "large" asteroids that contain multiple types and all mining lasers equipping crystals. Fewer objects to track, other roids in the belts could just be "eye candy". Each miner locking and scanning the "small moon" style roid could potentially get a completely different mix on their scanner for mining purposes as their ship would be scanning a different part of the roid(it's now a very large object) so this helps with eliminating overlap of mining lasers drawing down the same resource and wasting cycles.
Also, I see no problem in separating rats from belts entirely. There is no reason why both belts and rat spawns could not be dynamic content at separate(or combined) locations but basically using the on-board scanner and no special skills you should be able to find both of these types of encounters. The encounters could be relatively long lived, thereby giving people time to form gangs to mine and provide protection from pirates. I'm not in favor of fast extraction/depletion of sites as this removes the part of mining I like the most, the "come on in, settle down, mine and chat about stuff while keeping one eye out for pirates" type of mining. With both rat and mining encounters showing up on the basic scanner, pirates have the ability to warp into a system and very quickly locate the basic rat and roid sites so they can still bother both ratters and miners without expensive probes and skills to properly deploy them(note that I'm talking mainly about high-sec, not sure how this translates to low-sec/0.0). Also it removes the potential issue of ratters causing roid spawns in the still existing static belts when they just warp in to rat and then warp out 15 seconds later. If everyone knows the static belts contain just the few, "small moon" size roids and no rats, then only miners/combat patrols for protection from pirates, and the pirates that want to harass them will bother with the static belts. The biggest downside I see to the small moon static belt model is potentially it may make things easier for macro'ers. Not sure how to combat that. I really like the idea of crystals for all mining lasers and use of the scanner to examine roids for proper extraction. Maybe the static belts remain but are simply graphically represented roid fields and overview warp-to points, but either way I would hate to see them disappear completely. My 2 cents.
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