The Ore mining review.

[Ponge]

(This PoB discussion seems to be a bit off-topic, but...)

The field was turned off a small while after the base was put there, activity went down before the field got turned off.

Wrong. The fields were turned off with patch 4.87. Before that, activity went down because the fields were almost mined dry after restart, so the people who could play only severel hours after the daily restart, could hardly mine anything. Also,activity decreased even more after the PoBs were turned off due to the DPC PoB killing crysis at the end of 4.86.
Right now, silver ore mining in Humboldt is so slow, it takes 15 mins to fill a Hegemon, not to mention a 5k-er. However, this is due to the very close sellpoint (California); on the other hand, the low drop rate discourages people from mining after they try it for the first time (I saw that happen several times).

I agree that PoBs in the mining field makes pirating harder, but that also can be an inRP purpose of the base. However, if the miners can mine safely, there is more ore on the base for sell, that means more transports, and more targets for the pirates. The PoBs cannot be filled indefinitely, so transports have to show up after a while. So from this viewpoint, it increases the number of piracy targets. If the pirate is crafty enough, he can pull off the piracy in the field despite the presence of the base (happened to me several times in Humboldt).

On topic:

Making an ore type available only in one field does not really help here due to inter-House conflicts. For example, O7 is a good source of copper and silver ore. For example, if you remove the Humboldt fields, DSE will have no place to mine those until Liberty gets at least neutral with Rheinland (and who knows how long will it take, and Kruger/IMG might not even let them mine there). Introducing new ore types, and assigning new mining fields won't help this either, as it will create yet again too many mining fields. I think the best solution would be to re-introduce the price shifts every 2-3 weeks (it is already on; see: http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread...pid1571196) to increase activities in certain areas.

Also, increasing the mining rates back to "normal" (a little bit lower than the max. rate of the 4.86 era) should elevate the enthusiam towards mining. I am very frequent in Humboldt, and I see an imbalance between the number of miners and transports, in favor of the transports. Thus there is hard to find ore on the base, or a miner to get a fillup. I saw that since the field depletion was turned off and the mining rates were lowered, the number of miners decreased significantly.

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