CCP treats lowsec without any respect for what makes it different. They’ve promoted Rorqual mining as the obvious source of a useful income level – an activity that requires joining a large group for protection, leaving individuals and small groups without a competitive income source. Here’s a piece i’ve written for CCP internally.
It’s worth noting that CSM members are not developers and do not get to steer how Eve is developed – but being able to identify the deeper causes of issues is absolutely an important skill as a candidate. By offering alternative mechanics, I intend to prove that opther options are available.
Mining is an activity that requires you to sit stationary, usually in a large ship, for an hour or much longer.
Sitting still in one location for a long time in a large ship in lawless space requires significant backup to assist in case of attack.
When you have significant backup ready to assist, you expand your operation and other people join in too.
This breeds further support, which breeds further heavy mining…
There are two problems caused by this.
The first is that this adds to the reasons to blob up into powerblocs – which by their very existence, necessitate ONLY the existence of powerblocs.
The second is that as everyone else balloons in size, this activity is now locked to those groups, with no option to do this as a smaller group or an individual.
Let’s find a new way to break up this hour, other sitting still and cycling drones or mining lasers.
Instead of the hour being spent exclusively in large ships, stationary – why are exploration mechanics not being leveraged?
What if instead of just mining for an hour, you spent 50 minutes of this hour hacking, analysing, performing some minigame, choosing and preparing a section of a volatile rock – (which you can only mine one portion of before it explodes, so pick carefully!) or a mixture of these tasks- and then you spend the remaining 10 minutes performing the actual mining with a mining ship, getting the full hour’s reward (or more!)
This would massively lower the barrier of entry on group size required, as most of the large defensive need is gone.
This means that small entities can more realistically do this, as only 10 minutes is spent in a mining ship (ninja mining!)
There’s much more player interaction going on rather than monotonously cycling
You have now removed a blob-accellerator, and added something doable by smaller groups.
