The unimportant part: After discussing and thinking about what possibilities there are to give other mining corporations something unique and something that could rise their popularity a bit - though "some" of them have got a bad reputation because of who lead the them, and thereby drove away people themselves - we, that being Quinn, Zynth and me, came up with a bit of a new idea, besides the old ideas.
The three factions who are mainly concerned by the struggle of surviving their selfcaused prob...eh...IMG outcompeting them are BMM, DHC and Kruger, obviously. Weirdly I never heard DSE complain about "IMG taking away members", maybe it's because they mine in Liberty and don't come in touch with any competition.
Anyway, enough with the sarcasm and snarky comments. :3
To the suggestion:
We came up with the idea of adding a new "high-value" ore-commodity for each mining faction - except for IMG - EXCEPT (!) FOR IMG (!!!) - which will either:
A. be an additional drop for the top most mined ore (of choice) for the faction in question
B. be mined in a completly new field somewhere along the coast of ...eh, wherever there's still place for that.
Personally I very much prefer A, since B would mean that that faction would then constantly sit in the new field. Aaaaaahctually thinking about it, I think option A could be used for ALL (or two) majorly mined ores for the faction in question, but no two factions can have the same "bonus-ore", maybe?
What point does this bonus ore have?
1st: it sells for a higher price. Pretty much "high-value ore".
2nd: it mines at the same field, it sells at the same sellpoint.
3rd: it gives the faction a reasonable bonus for mining with the higher risk of not having many friends and also for treating their employees like slaves and... eh,...yeah. All the other fun stuff.
4th: it's only available to one faction.
What else about the ore?
As I said, it's mined in the same fields. About every 4th (25%) or 5th (20%) drop would be high-value ore. High-value means something like 125% to 150% of the price.
Let's take Gold Ore for BMM as an example:
While other mining corps going to the gold fields would only get normal gold ore, BMM, that being a mining ship with BMM ID, BMM IFF and a mining turret, shoots rocks and gets not just normal gold ore, but also high-value gold ore every now and then. Eh...should be pretty simple.
(hope I didn't go off track or something, I was ... distracted a bit while writing this down)
There is no reason to even discuss further buffing factions at a moment when a certain leader is actively trying to fight a nerf war against the faction that has already evened the playing field by nerfing itself voluntarily in more than one field.
That's something what was proposed mining developer by me, especially after hessians and mollys got their respective bonuses buffed in that version, but all I heard was "nope, DHC/BMM bonuses are already top tier". Shame, isn't it?...
We brought up the idea ourselves independently and I decided to post it publically to see how the response of the people would be concerning this.
It's essentially only be a small to medium buff to the mining faction in question:
If every 4th drop is a high-value ore (150% of the price, highest suggestion) drop you get:
(100% + 100% + 100% + 150%) / 4 - 100 = 150% / 4 - 100 = 12.5% more profit.
This isn't just "you mine even faster", this is actual profit, overall.