As a matter of fact, the Dublin roleplay of mining factions has largely ceased.
MMC, I'd say, is almost gone before even having existed really.
IMG| has focussed it's mining to other parts
BMM has never been very visible and has vanished completely.
I don't know how others feel but Dublin could need a little mining back, perhaps tweak the fields a little (no, I don't want 24/7 mining at high drop), so that MMC and IMG would actually have a reason to discuss the D6 Arry Contract. Now it's just useless... no one is there.
I don't want the pre-change goldrush back, it was harmful.
Now it is equally harmful because mining has been taken out, but 3 mining factions are present.
You can wait until Dublin has been reduced to stupid pewpew between BAF and Molly... and not even that seems to really work.
Man, I spent ages on that treaty! if this has reduced mining so much, prehaps we could get an increase in the drop rate at max and high yield, whilst keeping the low yield?
I like the concept but its implementation seems to have damaged mining.
On the other hand; if the admins/devs/cannon could RP thi,s e.g. a news post saying due to the massive increase in mining, fields all over sirius are being depleted, and add rp consequences e.g. increase ore price/change mining factions diplomacy, that could be good too.
But just reducing mining and expecting RP to continue is... fanciful
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If the MMC gives in due to BAF pressure, IMG could potentially become the Molly mining contractor I suppose, get some RP that way (with BAF grumbling - but BMM grinning since they'll have the other two fields for themselves). Still, it seems many new players can't figure out that they need to -use- mining turrets on the rocks in order to get cargo. And they can't seem to figure out the cargo goes directly to bay. It's almost a daily occurrance that I have to educate a new (or returning) player about this. That said, there's a healthier balance between the number of miners and the number of traders now.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
' Wrote:Man, I spent ages on that treaty! if this has reduced mining so much, prehaps we could get an increase in the drop rate at max and high yield, whilst keeping the low yield?
No, the max and high yields are fine. The problem is that at medium and low yields, you can make more money by rolling your face on the keyboard and randomly picking trade routes than by mining, and efficient trade routes are better than mining even at high yields.
Miners need some guarantee that when they make the choice to fly out to the fields and fill their holds, they won't just be wasting their time and will be better off (either monetarily or via roleplay) than they would be if they were just trading.
From a monetary perspective, miners without Hegemons don't have that guarantee because there aren't haulers ready and willing to pay for your ore (exacerbated by the fact that mining a cloud is a PITA and haulers don't want to sit and wait for you to fill their holds), nevermind the low drop rates. Miners with Hegemons don't have that guarantee either, because the fields might be low and the only way to find out is to head out there and shoot rocks in various fields until you find one that works, and even then you'll still end up making less money than you could by trading.
As for roleplay, now that there are a lot fewer miners, there are also a whole lot fewer roleplayers interacting with miners. Haulers, ore pirates, IMG [D] ships...they just don't show up anymore, because with mining no longer being lucrative, miners are gone, which means they've all left for greener pastures. This means that I'm more likely to get roleplaying encounters while trading than mining. Strike two, and now mining has nothing to offer me that I can't get from trading.
' Wrote:No, the max and high yields are fine. The problem is that at medium and low yields, you can make more money by rolling your face on the keyboard and randomly picking trade routes than by mining, and efficient trade routes are better than mining even at high yields.
Um I think that youv just contradicted yourself. If you get more money from trading even at high mining yields, then clearly the high mining yields are NOT fine as disco is based on the risk=reward scheme where the higher risk of mining -enemies know where you are + high value cargo to lose- makes you more money. (If your lucky)
So from what youv said the high yields DO need to be increased.
Following on from that I disagree with you about the need to always be sure mining will be the most efficient way to make money, its part of the risk=reward:
You risk getting a low yield, for the reward of possibly getting a high yield. (If the high yields are set appropriately)
If done appropriately it can also add to realism and RP - conservation of resources (mayby even give Gaians a little credibility!) and miners fighting, as well as encouraging expansion into other activities when the yield is low.
Your complaints seem to be that its is just basically unprofitable, which needs to be addressed, and can be, by increasing the high yield.
And about the smaller mining ships, yes they are now disadvantaged, I dont know what to do about that.
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' Wrote:Um I think that youv just contradicted yourself. If you get more money from trading even at high mining yields, then clearly the high mining yields are NOT fine as disco is based on the risk=reward scheme where the higher risk of mining -enemies know where you are + high value cargo to lose- makes you more money. (If your lucky)
So from what youv said the high yields DO need to be increased.
Perhaps, but they don't need to be increased as much as the medium/low ones do.
Quote:Following on from that I disagree with you about the need to always be sure mining will be the most efficient way to make money, its part of the risk=reward:
You risk getting a low yield, for the reward of possibly getting a high yield. (If the high yields are set appropriately)
I didn't say it has to be the "most efficient" way to make money, just that it's reasonably guaranteed that I will make money, and I have a reasonable chance of RP during it.
A risk of getting a low yield for the reward of possibly getting a high yield is garbage. It's a random-seeming game mechanic that punishes people for not being lucky enough to log on at exactly the right times. Risk/reward on an RP server should be RP-based, not mechanics-based.
Miners already have risk/reward tradeoffs in RP-terms: the risk of pirates is higher, because pirates know where they are. Pirates also know that ore is more valuable than standard commodities, so when a miner or hauler is caught by a pirate they will have to pay more than a trader. The reward for this is that you make money in one large payment, rather than the relatively slower trickle that you get from trading. There's absolutely no need to add another risk/reward parameter to the equation.
Quote:Your complaints seem to be that its is just basically unprofitable, which needs to be addressed, and can be, by increasing the high yield.
But just increasing the high yield doesn't actually help. Sure, it'll help sometime, but at max and high yields it already takes no more than 10-20minutes to fill a Hegemon (in the Niobium fields in T23). There's then a 40-minute or more round trip to get the ore to market. It's currently balanced so that if I spend about 20 minutes mining and don't have many delays, I'll make about as much in a full round trip as I would in the same amount of time trading in a 4200 transport.
Increasing the yield further won't actually increase the miner's take much, because you're just shaving time off of what's already the smaller part of their entire job.
On the other hand, decreasing the yield (or making the miner roam around for 10-15 minutes before finding a field that doesn't stink) can quickly cause the profitability to go down the drain.
The problem is that the "risk" of getting low drops in mining fields is a whole lot worse than the "risk" of getting pirated--getting low drops just feels like I'm wasting my time, while getting pirated (depending on the pirate, of course) can result in some decent RP. With trading, on the other hand--I'm not exactly at risk of my stops not being able to buy my cargo (or sell me the stuff for my next leg).
This is why there aren't many miners around anymore--the additional reward just isn't worth the additional risk of sitting there wasting my time.
My suggestion would be:
- Make mining rates fairly static normally, at about the rates they used to be.
- Mining rates only fall off in drastic situations--if you've got two dozen people all sitting in the same system mining the same thing, then yeah, have the rates go down and stay down for a couple hours, then gradually come back up. Maybe figure out how many miners you expect a field to be able to handle, and as long as it stays below that number, the drop rate doesn't go down.
For example:
If you want a mining field to be able to support a single miner, if you've dropped more than a single hegemon's worth of ore in the last twenty minutes, lower the drop rate.
That would allow the system to "react" to changes in player population. When Dublin gets full of people, it will naturally empty itself out as the rates go down, rather than the current system where it's always nearly empty because the rates are low all the time.
I kinda agree with what you said at the bottom, I think increasing the regen rate of the fields would be good, allthough I cant be sure as I dont know the exact rate its currently on.
Going back to the high yields, if trading is more profitable than high yield mining, mining will die, simple as.
Almost no-one Enjoys mining, and it is more dangerous than trading, so hardly anyone will mine if trading is more profitable than even the most profitable mining.
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' Wrote:Almost no-one Enjoys mining, and it is more dangerous than trading, so hardly anyone will mine if trading is more profitable than even the most profitable mining.
You'd be surprised how many people prefer making new cargo over moving cargo. But yes, with the powerminers going powertrader, things balance out a bit.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
I just got back after a month off and I haven't read the ensuing conversation that precedes this post, but from what I have seen the recent changes have killed off much of the mining population. The previous system was a bit dodgy with unlimited drops, high prices and the lolwuttery it attracted but at least it was a viable alternative to the monotony of trading.
The new mining system could do with a bit of tweaking, but I get the idea behind what your doing with it.
Quote:Fields get lower yields slowly, as they are being mined. They recover yield over time. More mining means a quicker decline.
I like this one. Fields that get spammed with prospectors quickly dry up until the ore is allowed to accumulate again. One problem with this though is the limited number of fields that are profitable mining locations. I think some of the mining spots from before the mining mod could be opened up again to give people somewhere else to mine when the safer fields are running a bit low. Maybe even make a few new spots.
Quote:Ore is automatically transferred to your cargo bay, no more ore packets in space.
Being a user of the smaller mining ships I don't like this one much. This change makes the hegemon the most efficient mining ship for both group and lone mining as smaller ships have to stop every few seconds to transfer or jettison the ore so a hauler can hold onto it, reducing their mining speed to way below that of the Hegemon. If there was a way for the ore to be automatically transferred to the hauler, this would remove the disadvantage of being in a smaller ship.
Quote:You -have- to hit ore with your mining turrets now. Normal weapon hits won't give ore.
This one dose not affect me or any miners that know what they're doing, but it dose hurt the newer players and those who mine in transports.
The changes are good but there's still some work to be done on it
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