Just in case we hadn't covered enough topics in this "titan mining is annoying" thread we're now into that thorny question: Where are all the new bots?

Specialist liquid/ore mining bots. A specialist colixum bot. Something to aim for after the Riveler Mk2 like a bot that can get double the materials out of a single tile by using a deep-penetration tool.

I just got around to re-reading, I wasn't referring to your post which is perfectly sensible though based on outdated information. I was referring to constant excuses of "oh its low population so theres no point in changing anything until we know how Steam will do" that are floating around.

I'm approaching the point from a different perspective; with the way Gamma is structured (walled off teleports with hundreds/thousands of turrets), the logical thing to do for the min-maxing gamer is to simply make a script or macro (most better keyboard & mouse come with this built in) that drag & drops stuff into the can, and simply leave their miners online overnight or while they're at work.

This is particularly evident in the market display for liquid minerals, HDT, Liquizit and Epriton, and this budding problem is even more complicated by slightly intelligent terraforming and 12 Terminals/island limit.

There are four ways in my mind to solve it:

1. Redesign the mining mechanic (I've gone with this solution, so industrials are actually industrials that build & sell & trade stuff, not spending 24/7 in the mining pits, plus the whole mechanic is boring which lead to the original problem)
2. Redesign gamma & PBS mechanics (gee, wouldn't that be one monster of a refund)
3. Let it go on unchecked until trial-acc mining becomes a standard instead of exception.
4. Start banning accounts, then zoom loses his job because game shuts down.

With so much riding on Steam actually attracting new players to keep the game alive, the odds are gonna be stacked against the noobs anyway so why make it even harder by forcing them to macro, when they're already forced to sub multiple accounts to stand a chance?

Thus, my original idea - craftable deployable ore-specific mining towers that need to be emptied every XZY minutes/hours, making it a lot easier to spot and ban actual bots.

It feels like your merging two issues. The mining mechanic and the environment.

When the gamma miners are 100% safe, it really doesn't matter what mining mechanic is in place, it can be automated. It's just as easy to macro a scarab to move around to mining towers and empty them, if there's no enemies or roaming NPCs to blow them up. If there are environmental dangers, then macroing the mining bots to go overnight wouldn't work either; and those cans still need to be emptied.

I don't think it's wrong to create safe mining. Those 1000's of towers didn't build themselves, it took time and resources to make it safe.

And coming back around to low population again, it was the lack of external pressure that gave outpost owners the time to build up to those levels - during which time the miners were not mining 100% safe either.

Another wrinkle in mining is when you feel like your doing it for no purpose.

)We have 100,000M units of ore already, but I'm totally stoked to get out there and make it 100,001M.
)We're out of ore and need more bots because te PVP guys blew them up having 'fun', but sure I'll spend another 8 hours mindlessly clicking so they can try to get to the top of the kill chart.

Hm...a lot of the arguments here are solely based upon users macro'ing. 

I don't really see how mining is all of a sudden "broken" and needs fixed.

This automated mining, and just hauling my ore thing sounds great! I can unsub my 3 mining accts! Then all I need is my combat account and 3 trials hauling ore. Seems like that will really get this game going... Lord know the DEVs have plenty of money and dont need mine... Sounds like the Farm Workers aren't meeting their quotas....

To put it in a PVPers terms, if you make the towers have low masking (say, like the mining towers for colixium) then that lonely mining tower on Beta might have either 10 masked guys waiting in ambush or a few guys hauling and scouting. You could blow it up or hold tight and wait for someone to pass by.

Current mechanic = mine for hours, then haul it all in
Proposed mechanic = periodically haul

Miners would have more incentive to haul because in case of gank, all their eggs aren't in the same basket (field container) they can kiss goodbye if they don't have better combat support.

Many good ideas and points in this thread.  Being a few beers in as I normally am on Sunday fun day, lets me see what sense I can make of this thread.

1. Mining titan at the levels required by the top tier corps/alliances is a major PITA
2. Nobody likes bots, everybody likes win buttons (but only when they're holding the button), people are generally selfish and rude and anti-social and would like to be completely self sufficient despite their interest in playing an MMO
3. Mining is a time sink... Some vets like it that way (civilizations are built on the backs of farmers), while others prefer new game mechanics (it's the year 2200+, this is a game, we have FREAKIN ROBOTS, can't we pretend that humanity had finally tackled some of the most annoying productivity problems)
4. Game population is thin, but we're expecting and hoping for an influx of noobs... where will they fit in?
5. Titan currently goes for 0.8 on the market, less than half of other ores while occupying half the volume and mining at less than half the rate... anyone mining for profit at market prices would be better off mining pretty much anything else.

The answer seems obvious to me... Titan mining should not be easier for the existing player base, but harder.  Everything that makes titan such a giant PITA for a single highly skilled 500k+ EP agent makes mining titan perfect for a dozen or so 50-100k EP noobs who can get their foot in the door and make a real contribution to the player based community on basically day 1.

Remove titan from Beta/Gamma... Let market prices appreciate and force Beta/Gamma agents to complete frustration as they Alpha mine while switching targets every half second in their Revilers OR recruit and support legions of Termis level agents that are working their way up.

In a healthy economy highly skilled people/organizations could do everything themselves but choose not to because their time and skills could be spent more profitably paying others to do the less profitable work that they would rather not do themselves.

So I suggest making titan patches larger and more green and removing them from beta/gamma islands until Titan prices begin to appreciate thus indicating higher demand... In fact I think all resource spawns density and frequency should be tied to market prices in some kind of sneaky under the hood algorithim that watches the 60 day moving average or something along those lines.

Also... I love the idea of deployable mining structures, probes, thumpers etc... Best mining experience I ever had was in SWG where I would ride around looking for the best place to place my mining structure... (more prospecting/artifacting than mining) I think in many ways we are almost their already (with afk lizquit/HDT miners)... Keep the current system in place for ores but introduce low yield afk mining derricks for the liquids, make miners fill them with energy (plasma?) and occasionally empty the finite storage bins.  Leave the option of high yield active mining in the game for those who prefer it.

Remove titan and epriton from gamma would be fine. Remove liquids from the game completely.

Titan is not the problem, your mining mechanic is.

True, but no scarab back then. Next time you think of any changes, don't implement until you place the tools needed to counter them same as with OP gamma defences, that's just my advice.

if you bring me a frighter class bot (50kU+) then i think its a good idea. sry but scarab is simply too smal for resource transfer between alpha/gamma. its already a pain for one person. not to talk about corp/alliance level.

besides that i can agree.
no titan on the beta/gamma... colixum/epriton on the other side. then you can create some kind of trade between them in the long run. but first the bots that would make it possible...

Yup, common sense really. With infinite resources the only goal left in-game for corporations is to PVP for the sake of PVP. There can NEVER be any market-pvp or resource-warfare if everyone has infinite resources provided they can be bothered to turn the macro on.

I've said multiple times before, there are three key issues which will kill this game on steam;

a) Newbies will take 2-3 months to become competitive & able to earn their ICE.
b) Infinite resources create surplus of everything therefore inflation.
c) Impossible gamma fortresses emphasize A and B, meaning newbies will quit in hundreds once they join corps that take them out to those ugly *** fortresses where everything is infinite / realize they can't compete for months if they don't.

Games need to be fun, involving and challenging to succeed. Even WoW was challenging initially. Perp was fun, involving and challenging on release and subsequently until Styx was effectively designing the game (interference, explosion damage, all his features). Once he was gone, the wagon rolled off the hill into appeasement-mode to save subs with no thought to long-term effects it would have.

The bottom line being that feedback is definitely NOT being listened to. Look through the public test server - everyone and their mother was saying whats going to happen with terraforming. Everyone with a brain was saying whats going to happen with terraforming & everything except turrets going into reinforced mode. Wham, nobody bothered anymore and it happened.

Granted, even without the reinforcement ridiculousness, it would have happened anyway just over a longer period of time.