Mining

[Tenacity]

Bonrholme is somewhat broken, on account of the base being within the mining area. This is to be corrected.

Great, so you're going to take the only decent mining area left and cut it's balls off too?

Honestly, people hate trading, it's boring. Hitting F2 and F3 for hours on end, with nothing other than the occasional "2 mil or dai!" idiot trying to rip you off along the way is not fun at all.

There should be alternatives to trading, and the devs sure as hell dont seem too keen on making missions profitable.

The manner by which I define it being broken is due to the he risk to profit ratio being off. Comparable to Ouray buying silver at 500 credits per... The rocks are floating right outside the bast.

Ouray is understandable, but there's hessian and corsair NPC's around bornholme that demand your cargo every 30 seconds, did you ever take that into consideration?

The whole reason bornholme was BUILT was to collect and process scrap from that field. It's the same as other junker bases being built inside scrap fields, or any mining station in the game being built inside asteroid fields.

It doesnt make a whole lot of sense to have to ferry your mined ore or goods halfway across the galaxy to be processed.

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[worldstrider]

Bonrholme is somewhat broken, on account of the base being within the mining area. This is to be corrected.

The manner by which I define it being broken is due to the he risk to profit ratio being off. Comparable to Ouray buying silver at 500 credits per... The rocks are floating right outside the bast.

Mining is a group activity simply because a transport can continuously ferry harvested materials in a trade circut whilst the mining vessels remain on scene to continue producing resources for the next loop. Variations of that system are possible, yet vary in efficiency. One may mine on one's own, however the tradeoff is that you're shuffling your mining ship's worth of cargo while you could, instead, be producing yet more.

The end credit tradeoff for a group mining should be equivalent to all parties involved actively at the task of generating income.

That is the goal of the changes that are still in progress.

And yes 49 was smacked down. It was slated to happen far far sooner. Oh well, leave an imbalance in the system and people will flock to it in droves;)

I'll disagree with Bornholme being "broken". It supplies war materials (metal) in high demand to Corsairs and Hessians. The base is right in the center of it because the demand is so high and that the fastest way to get it. It's sold as fast as it can be processed. That isn't broken its just a specific scenario that fits well.

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[Benjamin]

Bonrholme is somewhat broken, on account of the base being within the mining area. This is to be corrected.

The manner by which I define it being broken is due to the he risk to profit ratio being off. Comparable to Ouray buying silver at 500 credits per... The rocks are floating right outside the bast.

So what is the point in mining at all? I've mined a lot at bornholm. With the 'perfect team' or whatever, with one guy basically just docking and undocking, it makes about half as much money as trading in a ptrain, with unbelievably more amounts of effort, AND RISK. I've never been pirated or stopped by the police or whatever on my smuggler, but ask any guys who hang out at bornholm a lot - indie BHG caps and indie RM caps come and blast you to bits multiple times a day. So, more risk than trading, more work than trading, and much worse profit than trading...and it's too good?

The general consensus seems to be that mining was really hyped up for .85, everyone made miners, were 'underwhelmed' by how good mining was, and since then there have been a couple of very significant nerfs, with evidently more to follow. What's the point of putting so much effort in to a system if it isn't even half as worthwhile as a much easier option? Who exactly is going to mine?


And I don't buy the team mining anyway. Mining stuff and then taking it somewhere isn't mining. It's mostly trading, with a bit of mining. And the mining element just seems to drag down the profit of the trading part, unless you have a team of 40 guys, all working perfectly in sync, then apparently it should be okay?


/rant


edit: tenacity also reading your stats, I'm not sure how we didn't use to make wa more money doing that (I dont do it anymore because it didn't seem to make much money and being attacked endlessly by indie oorp caps isn't my idea of a good time). I mean, you say it drops 10-20 scrap metal units per barrel? Last time I was doing it in my collector, I was getting 50-120 per barrel, with a couple of us feeding them into a P Trans who had docking duties. And well, whilst shooting a barrel and getting 120 units of scrap, at 500 per, is like 60,000cr a sec or whatever, I definitely wasn't making a million a minute. Not sure why that is, but yeah.

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[Weedalot]

right i didnt read the whole post here just the topic really but let me tell you why i think its good it got nerfed.

Sigma-13, yes yes that nice quiet place, you never heard of it?! the one with the whole to NB, still no?!?! is it so quiet? Well Omega-49 became the new sigma-13 miners (SOME NOT ALLL) will park their nice BH chars right there (not hostile to the corsairs even) and on the sight of pirate they switch and jump him, which is iffy but not against the rules, they would switch chars back so they can mine not even knowing that the pirate can already come back, once he does its "Sigma-13" all over again all you see on that screen is /////////////////////////////////////////

Now i dont say all of them, like that, there are nice roleplayers who want to make credits quicker and "easier" and i believe its alright as long as they dont forget its an RP server and dont abuse what is there. So its only a good thing to make it all equal so "Sigma-13" will never happened again.

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♠ Because we can ♠

[Rudo]

I also hate the idea of a neutered Bornholm, but I see why it should be done. We had a miner bring in a Rheinland BS "escort" to try and coerce the Junkers into letting him mine untaxed.

That said, I hope it's not too badly hit. I'd be all for amping up other mining fields to match Bornholm instead. It's not even that profitable; you can make a pile of nearly risk-free cargo runs and make a lot more per hour than mining.

Don't tone it down; make Bornholm the standard and build on it. Seriously, the Congress is making a ton of cash just pirating the field with all the miners there.

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[Encheta]

I never really wanted to get into this long arguement about mining, spanning over a number of threads now, but I think the main problem is that the mining system is being balanced to certain requirements that can only be met on very rare occasions.

Unselie, you keep saying things like doing mining/trade parties that require 4 haulers. While I agree that mining has to be a teamworking effort, it is very hard to get that sort of ratio - and this is coming from one of the leaders of arguably the biggest mining faction on the server. The amount of times I hear members screaming over our faction skype chat for more traders is uncountable, and it often just gets to the point where the miner just gives up, logs off their IMG, and does something else (pirating mostly, probably to go vent their frustrations). The amount of effort required to get the numbers for a profitable event goes up exponentially the more mining yeild is reduced, and this is for a faction - an independant miner is in no way going to get 4 traders (with decent ships) to carry his ore for him. If it took me 20mins of system chat spruking for someone to tractor up some spare niobium that I mined for free, what's the chances of an indie miner being able to do the same thing and expect a cut out of it?

It all comes to a balance of money earned (in respect to time spent), fun and the effort required to set whatever you're doing up. Mining is more desirable over trading as you have more fun, but with these balances the amount of effort to get the numbers for profitability far outweighs that. Ok don't put the effort in you say? You then have less numbers in the mining party, and the lack of money earnt doesn't make up for the fun. As much as that sounds wrong, that's what happens.

My belief is that mining should be set at a ratio of 2:1 - 2 traders to one miner being able to get profits equal if not slightly better to that of a trader going solo, as the amount of effort to get two traders is minimal for a faction, and still possible for an indie without heaps of trouble. For this sort of ratio one would probly look for a sale point in a neigbouring system to that where it's being mined.

Before the rebalance o49 was set to a ratio of something like 1.2:1 due to it's distance - there was just a little too much niobium for one trader to constantly haul himself, even with speed-docking, u-turning whilst in trade window etc. and having 2 traders meant having to queue. Per hour, one trader and miner could earn about 40mil each, with two traders and one miner less (I expect ~25-30, same as miner going solo) due to the queueing occurring. Granted, this is right on the cap the Igiss is requesting, but reducing the feild yeild by half is overdoing it, which I think is why Kuro and Zein are complaining. Personally, I think the feild should yeild approx. 85-90% of what it did before the update. That should make things so that in a 1 miner, 1 trader situation, the trader has to wait for about 30-45secs or so before the miner gets enough nio for him to be filled. The profit per person would then be ~35mil/hr which I assume is what you're trying to acheive profit-wise (as an average).

Java and Bornhole I admit are going to be a pain in the ass to balance as they are very close/in to the fields they are buying from. The Gold field in dublin on the other hand is next to worthless for miners currently as the places to sell for a good price is simply too far away (New tokyo, New berlin, Penssylvania..). For a solo miner (in Dublin) to acheive the same profit as a trader doing 150c/sec, he has to fill up and transport his ore to the Hood in exactly 5 1/2mins. For your benchmark for an ideal mining position (230-250c/sec), the miner has to do it in under 3 1/2mins. I've just asked through the IMG chat for a member to time it out, though I doubt the result will be that quick (I'd be suprised if it makes even the 150c/sec time).

@Kuro, Zein, and any other IMG I may have missed,

I know that it's frustrating having feilds nerfed to worse than trading, but understand and appreciate the hard hours the devs are putting into this mod even now to try balance things. This post has taken me 4 hours to write up, mainly because I find an idea on how to balance mining easier and halfway through writing the idea up, I recognise a fatal flaw which makes me have to scrap the whole thing - no doubt they've gone through the exact same process for every aspect of the game we now see. For mining, the only option so far that still holds is trail and error, which suprise suprise, is what the devs appear to be using.

@Unselie

You're probly already doing this, but the way I got those time estimates is by taking the base's sale price of the commodity mined, and divided that by the ideal profit per second. Result is the amount of seconds from the first 'roid pewed to the sale on the base. In terms of travel time... Don't know how you factor that in to figure out how long you're actually mining... Stopwatch? :S

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[Virus]

I can tell you why O-49 was nerfed. I tested it with a IMG Tag/IDd miner and a 5k transport. The transport never stopped flying, ever. And there was a total of 120 million credits in an hour. 60 million per person.


Err... Note: I didn't read this whole thread.

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[Harcourt.Fenton.Mudd]

I can tell you why O-49 was nerfed. I tested it with a IMG Tag/IDd miner and a 5k transport. The transport never stopped flying, ever. And there was a total of 120 million credits in an hour. 60 million per person.
Err... Note: I didn't read this whole thread.

True, a k transport and a miner with propper ship + ID + kid (which, btw, half the miners I saw there didnt have. Thye had generic miner ID, prehaps make the ID have more effect on things, or guard ID even, so they ahve to work to get full bonus) could make a 140mil+ cred/hour total as I did once in such a pair.

However, mining that fast gets you tired and you tend to slow down fast too.

Ah well, guess I'll trade my mining ship for an adv train and re-id it appropietly and go power trading, since RPing a miner is no longer worth it

[quote name='Virus' date='May 3 2009,

[Encheta]

I thought the aim was to have the transports constantly flying, or close to it.. All the part of creating maximum efficiency.

I got my o49 estimated from when I was with Kuro (in a mining ship) in my Heavy tanker. Both of us had IMG ID and IFF and after about 45mins (I doubt it was an hour..) we did about seven loads before quitting and coming in together (he was full from the leftovers I couldn't pick up each run by then). We earnt a little over 63mil, which we split to 30mil each and 3mil for the faction guildfunds. extrapolating that and I got 40mil per person if we went the whole hour (and if we weren't going gung-ho about it). I boggle as to how you earnt 120mil an hour Virus - I was speed docking, tractoring short of the mined "cloud", everything I could think to speed myself up.. I'm suggestion on nerfing the cloud 85-90% of what it was was so that the transporter can actually have a rest, perhaps even pewing a couple rocks himself before having to go again.

EDIT: Hm bit slow.. but now seeing that a second person is saying they can get that sort of amount maybe I am thinking off here. I'll retest it sometime and see if I can reaffirm it though..

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[Cannon]

I suppose I should mention this: the current target profit per player when mining is 15 to 20 million per hour.

Nerfing decisions are made based on this target weighted with the likely risk to the miners. As o49 field is in a neutral (possibly allied) area, the risk to miners is basically nil and thus the field was nerfed to somewhere around 15-20 million per hour.

This target profit might change in the future (hopefully not downwards) but for now it is what it is. If you want the target profit changed then provide hard data on the profits from trading. If trading is significantly more profitable than mining then perhaps the target profit for mining should be increased (note this isn't my decision).

Another thing, mining yields can be adjusted in real-time from the server. A mod update is not required.

As the Sirius News Network has noted the O49 field has been depleted but you never know when and where the next lucky strike might happen. Can any one say lovely shiny *gold*!

EDIT: Another thing I've noticed: you need to have exactly the right ID/IFF for a particular commodity to get the mining bonus. The same thing applies to mining lasers/mining ship - you've got to have both. Mining lasers have no effect if they are in another ship (except the some junker ships like the csv).

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