Re: Proposal: Auto-miner

The fundamental difference between production and mining is that mining is adding resources to the economy, while manufacturing is only converting them. Normally, MMO economies are balanced around players producing various resources and built-in sinks to drain some of those resources back out of the economy. Add dependencies to make players trade their resources, and you have a functional market. Since production is not putting anything extra into the game, it can be done AFK. 

The trouble I'm having with auto-bots:

1. Extra ore. Based on what I've seen of the market so far, I'm having doubts whether there is enough demand to absorb additional ore. If not, prices will crash, making any miner-only auto-bot bonuses close to meaningless.

2. Another step toward self-sufficiency. To have an active market, there should be reasons for players to trade. So far, I've seen very few. Everybody just makes their own stuff from their own farmed mats (or their corp does). That said, I'm still very much a newb, so I could be wrong on this one. I hope I'm wrong on this one, actually.

3. Balance. If these bots are very EP-costly, only hardcore miners would be running them. This defeats the purpose of adding them as a source of low level income for non-miners. On the other hand, if they are available to everyone, should the material cost of items be balanced around players running auto-bots or not? If no, see #1 above. If yes, is it really any different from what we have now?