In Void Opal hotspots , i have seen Bromelite , Bertrandite, Alexandrite, and Low Temp Diamonds "motherlodes" they occur very rarely and raise false hope !
Mining - Am I alone feeling it's unbalanced/not quite working?
- Thread starter NeilF
- Start date
In Void Opal hotspots , i have seen Bromelite , Bertrandite, Alexandrite, and Low Temp Diamonds "motherlodes" they occur very rarely and raise false hope !
I've seen one, can't rmember if it was in Delkar or Tembala, but Bromellite hotspots do exist..
I would only ask for more danger and pirate interdictions while mining or jumping to sell our cargo. I've been mining for a few sessions now, around 6-7 hours perhaps, and have not had a single interdiction or any kind of bother while mining.
While the mining itself is quite fun and rewarding, I think it's too easy to farm credits this way. A real danger should exist to keep us on our toes, and to force us to take care and bring some shields and weapons with us. I think it would be cool if there were random pirates coming to the rings to bother us (or kick our arses) at least once per hour/2 hours of mining.
While the mining itself is quite fun and rewarding, I think it's too easy to farm credits this way. A real danger should exist to keep us on our toes, and to force us to take care and bring some shields and weapons with us. I think it would be cool if there were random pirates coming to the rings to bother us (or kick our arses) at least once per hour/2 hours of mining.
This is definitely not the case. I found Void Opals in a ring without any hotspots.
LOL! FD are just giving them away
Good isn't it
Yes and no IMHO.
I personally find it tedious that seemingly no matter where you jump into a ring or hotspot, anywhere in or around the bubble, there's a good chance of ships sitting there waiting... And if you log out and back in? Probably the same again... It's very gamey.
That said, I wouldn't mind a reasons to have weapons for defense EXCEPT now there's no blooming room for them
Hence the suggestion to at least combine the subsurface missile launcher and seismic charge laucher into ONE module, which are then shown as the two devices in your fire group. And if legacy mining is to be retained (& ideally better incorporated into the mining gameplay loop), there's surely the option to allow a mining laser to be used in place of an abrasion blaster. ie: All in an attempt to reduce down the outfitting requirements and to actually leave some room for weapons.
Might it even be possible for some of these mining tools to be utility mounts instead, again to free up weapon mounts?
ps: The challenge for mining for me is to juggle as many activities as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Defense against pirates might prove an annoyance for me at least. But I understand your point/preference.
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I've been interdicted a few times while on the way to the station to sell my stuff. But what does it matter? NPC interdictions are so incredibly easy to avoid these days, they couldn't even pull my T-10.
The problem is to balance NPC attackers to pose a threat to newbies as well as well-prepared PvP'ers with PvP hardened ships... Like all of my ships, my mining ships are PvP-hardened to an extent that I'm able to escape from any PvP attacker. It sure is possible to send a wing of NPC pirates in g5-engineered FdLs after me who would be challenging to evade and survive... but it would probably cause a lot of salt from the non-PvP players those NPCs would wipe the floor with.
It's simply not possible... you can either balance NPCs for the weakest link in the chain (aka the newbie PvE only player) which is laughably easy to evade for experienced combat players, or for the combat hardened players, sentencing every one else to death.
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I'm on the fence about having numbers. I like clever visuals and info graphics that show clearly what is going on. I think FD have always put things out there with a "figure it out for yourself" approach. I kinda like that discovery and puzzle. But at the same time, I can see how it is frustrating. Especially if you are chasing a red herring that actually means nothing.
Now I'm really sure that the spots I've seen are smaller and I think a couple are gone. I'm not really a recorder or screen grabber, but I may do some experiments on this.
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Hence the suggestion of a bar simply broken into 5 pips to give an appoximation of the reserves in the hotspot. eg: 3 out 5 lit would suggest it's somewhere just over half etc...
But to have no information at all (or poor information)? You could be mining a hotspot you think no one else had found, but unknowingly spending your time in a nigh on fully depleted hotspot. That to me is not good.
The ideal outcome IMHO is a reasonable indication of the reserves state of a hotspot, and for that value to control the frequency/size of the materials in question in that hotspot across the board, not just motherlodes. So if a Low Temp Diamond hotspot has been mined to hell, it will register a very low "Reserves Value", and if you still mine there, the frequency/size of LTD and other associated minerals will be proportionally reduced (in line with the "reserves value").
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Instead of numbers, they could do high, medium, low, just like the res-sites.
Btw, an update on my own success, after leaving the game for a couple of hours and then coming back, I managed to find several core-rocks and made a decent profit. Could it be a bit of RNG how lucky you are with the spawning of core-rocks perhaps? Don't know. At least I felt there was more to do. Scanning and flying and not finding any was frustrating. Felt like jonking. Next time it happens, I might try just log out and in again to see if it changes.
Yeah. It's gamey feeling to consider that there's trillions of square miles of rocks and somehow 1 or more pirates are exactly where you are. Sometimes it feels like Elite isn't an example of the empty void space, but rather the bathroom at a some busy airport.
A problem being attacked by pirates while collecting void opals is that there's a time limit to those rocks. Their life-percent goes down in a few minutes. Going away from them and chasing pirates might cause a problem collecting the minerals because they would be gone when you come back, so I hope they don't increase pirate activity for that reason.
With that said, most of the time the NPCs showing up haven't been pirates but security forces. The few times I encountered pirates, I was either empty or I simply gave them some of my cargo and they left. So they never been a real issue.
Still, wouldn't want an increase in encounters. Would take away from the experience. Unless, just thinking, maybe the pirate activity would be a reason to do deep space mining, say 500 LY from bubble being safe, while in bubble it's not?
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Considering motherlode explosions (and the status of the asteroid itself ofc) are persistent across modes and across players, it's unlikely there is any randomness involved.
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Well, what can I say. There was a slight difference in occurrences. Maybe it was just a fluke in the game.
no small seismic charges yet?
"high, medium, low" - Yeh, anything to give an indication of the amount of reserves (depletion) would be useful. Indeed a requirement IMHO! Again, the notion you could be mining in a hotspot with "low" reservers without reasonable information from the game seems cynical to me.
But, as for hotspots (completely) replenishing in hours? I'd imagine it needing day(s)/week(s) personally to be more logical. And the depletion figure should affect the frequency/size of the appropriate minerals in the hotspot (across all mechanics, legacy, surface, sub-surface etc).
In this way, there's surely a clear benefit to going out and finding some nice hotspots, rather than simply looking up the top X on an INARA list and knowing you can basically just go to those.
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LOL! Can you define "find the announced material"? Do you mean what is turning up in motherlode cores in a hotspot?
ie: So the likelihood of finding say Low Temp Diamonds as the core of a motherlode in an LTD hotspot?
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I don't think so. I've been visiting a ring with only one void opal hot spot, and also finding low temp diamonds and granditerite cores in it.
I think it can be balanced using your combat rank and current ship. If I were FD, I would assign a "combat rating" to each pilot, ship, weapon, and engineering combo (like the "car rating" in the Forza games, something like that) and balance against that with a combo of ships that match that combat rating grand total. It's pretty easy to do.
Aside from that, there's the option of not balancing at all, as it should be in reality, but it's definetly less fun in the long run.
For me, pirate activity inside the rings and outside of interdictions is just a matter of realism and sound game design. With the current "gold rush" for deep core mining, there are countless oportunities to make money with piracy. And if I was a pirate, knowing that interdictions are easily avoidable, I would try to follow the miner into the ring and attack him when he is more vulnerable: in the mining process.
I find it gamey that there are ships spawned in your instance as soon as you drop, but I wouldn't mind having to fend off a couple of pirates each mining session. Loosing your ship and cargo from time to time is also a way of "enticing" players to do better next time. I can't remember the last time I lost a ship, it's been years ago. Maybe a 10% chance of spawning every 10 minutes?. Of course, if you're away from the bubble, chance of spawning would be reduced or even denied, as it would be in more secure systems. That would make us think twice where to mine... because right now, the best place to mine is "anywhere near the station with the 1,6mil price".
That's what I mean too. It's one thing being followed, but if you drop in at a random spot or log out and then in, and there's a ship there already, it doesn't feel like a vast universe of empty space, but rather a tiny space of busy people.
Yeah. I can somewhat agree. I don't like losing a ship while trying to do some peaceful mining, but as long as there's a system to it, like secure systems vs anarchy and distance from bubble and such, then it's skill and knowledge involved and not just gamey randomness. I think there's something like that in place already though, since most ships I've encountered in the rings have been security and not pirates.