Sub-Surface mining, whats the point?

[NeilF]

I never did mining, just started yesterday - to get access to engineer.
And it is a lot of fun!
1) I don't need to hunt for pirates, they come to me - my combat rating going up.
2) Flying between asteroids - is fun.
3) Exploding asteroids graphics and sound - amazing.
Very good experience and I was never fan of mining in any game.
I don't do it for money or efficiency - I play game for fun.

Understood... But the issue being discussed is how much better and joined up it could have been simply through some more considered design, or feedback during internal testing.

Case in hand:-

• What point is the PWA (pulse wave analyser) other than to try and help locate the next motherlode? Why is it nigh on otherwise pointless for mining? The PWA could easily have been made a more useful and involved tool for mining.
• Why are surface and especially subsurface deposits so poorly balanced, such that they are nigh on pointless. The design of them could easily have made them a more balanced and rewarding feature.

 

[cheesenbiscuits]

It's a game, there's no point to any of it.

Amen to that brother

 

[Stealthie]

S'funny really...

It's almost as if the team creating SS mining had no idea about what other changes were being made to mining as a whole.

In the old paradigm, finding an SS deposit would have been a decent bonus.
With things as they are, it's just not worth the effort.

I suppose it might be arguable that SS-mining would be a good way to pick up a few credits using minimal equipment - perhaps if you were in a RES and happeneed to find an SS deposit.
Trouble there is, again, that nu-mining is soooo lucrative that everybody who wants to earn credits from it has a full-on mining ship... which means they don't need to be picking at the scraps.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

Understood... But the issue being discussed is how much better and joined up it could have been simply through some more considered design, or feedback during internal testing.

Case in hand:-

• What point is the PWA (pulse wave analyser) other than to try and help locate the next motherlode? Why is it nigh on otherwise pointless for mining? The PWA could easily have been made a more useful and involved tool for mining.
• Why are surface and especially subsurface deposits so poorly balanced, such that are pointless. The design of them could easily have made them a more balanced and rewarding feature.

i think there are plenty of threads on PWA improvements which were ignored too, such a wasted opportunity.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Sub-surface mining is a "get it" thing. Most of us take a certain approach - we make mining about the Credits per Hour, and we target specific things - Void Opals, Low Temp Diamonds, and that's all we look at. That's ok if you're just doing it for raw credit value.

But there are some of us who "get it", and will mine solely for the sake of mining, because it suits a particular role-play, or because we just want to. I can do either, and often will just load up my mining ship, pick a spot and "junk mine", collecting whatever turns up, filter our lower valued items in favor of more valuable ones, and go sell the whole lot when my limpet supply is exhausted. It's called "Mining for Fun", and it can be a lot of fun, when you're not counting the passing seconds and assigning a profit margin to them.

I want to kill an afternoon, I go junk mining. Six hours later, I've got a couple hundred thousand credits worth of goods to peddle but I had fun wasting time. I go for-profit mining, and 10 hours later I've got 700+ tons of LTD's or VO's, and I feel like I've put in a full day's work.

 

[Walter2]

Zen and the Art of Asteroid Mining.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Zen and the Art of Asteroid Mining.

In a moment of Zen clarity...