How bout a deployable beacon that AOE mines?

@hunter: Even if the mining mechanic was fun and interesting, doing it 40 hours a week is going to feel like a job. I had the same issue in WOW, I loved raiding, but 4hours 5 days a week and it felt like a job, and mining will never be as interesting as WOW boss fights. What needs to change is the same thing, more population will mean the mining jobs get distributed, then it will only be the masochists that run 5 rivs for 4 hours a day, instead of PVP guys who get bored after 30 mins.

@Zoom: Drop'm and forget'm is a bad idea, but as long as they have to be externally controlled, then it's just a matter of balancing their effciency with the mounted lasers. A head slot item could the the controller, skill increases the number of beacons you can deploy, and the effciency is still based on the agent. What you'll get then, is miners deploying AOE beacons from an Artemis, with the capability of defending themselves against roaming NPCs, but getting a significantly lower yeild without the bot bonuses.

Have beacons of varying internal cargo capacity. 5u, 10u, 20u = 50, 100, 200u capacity.

Beacons can only be, and are consumed when, emptyed at a station, but can be picked up by any squad memeber, and only consume the base u cargo space.

Beacons stop mining when controlling robot is out of range, they time-off the field just like a container.

Player buildable.

mining tower... any1?

Miners are a boring, outdated concept that nobody ever found fun or enjoyed.

Why keep pushing it?

Just throw it out of the window already and replace it with either deployable auto-mining towers or w/e, make the cargo requiring relatively frequent emptying and you're gg.

It's not like anyone in their sane mind is gonna be mining on Beta now, when they could be mining behind 400-500 towers on Gamma.

What does this lead to? Bots, scripts, macros

What does that lead to? Accounts that either need to be banned (money lost) or toilet-paper EULA.

Good luck making a simple script/macro that looks for fields, deploys mining towers, drives out to empty them, drive back to the terminal and deposit the cargo then redo.

^^ this. TBH thats what i expected the thing to do when i first seen it on the test server

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

Tower ... beacon - amounts to the same thing really. I refer you to the answer I gave some moments ago.

If it was to be implemented then its mechanic must drive conflict. I think my suggestions do just that,

Seems to be a trend that bannable stuff becomes legit, might as well make the famous Styx production-skillz legit too.

running in circles this topic, back the the universal answer that helped this game so much

"the real problem is the low population"

with that said,
stop playing with hands growing from ***! and close this topic since the ultimate answer was already given.

Celebro and I are miners from way back... *bro fist*

I had this arguement a couple years ago with whats-his-name about the difference between semi/AFK mining and automated mining.

Automatic mining will simply kill the mining profession, and cause miners to leave the game. The exact opposite of trying to get more players into the game. Automated mining only helps PVP players that are being required to do something they don't want to do simply because there are not enough players mining to supply the resources they (the PVP players) need to continue to blow stuff up.

If the devs want to change the flavor of this game to something more like planet side, where you log in, shoot stuff, then log out, then don't bother with automated mining, just remove the whole player built side of the game. Mining is just part of the manufacturing chain, and it NEEDS to be a time sink in order to make it a neccesary and valuable part of the cycle.

Could automated mining towers have a place in the game. Yes, if it was limited to a specific resource (like Moon goo), that could only be gathered with the towers. But then it wouldn't be relevant at all to the discussion of 'mining titan' since it's a completely seperate resource gathering mechanic.

Devs are already working on getting more players. If that works, then many of these types of issues will still be relevant, but they won't feel 'game breaking'. Conversely, nothing that is done to issues that are caused by low population will have any direct effect on the low population issue; meaning putting mining towers into the game is not going to get new players, but will have the opposite effect.

That said, the discussion on adding more diversity to mining, with CONTROLLED probes, new bots, new modules, ect. ect. are things that will help reatain those new players the devs are working hard to get.

The time-sink would come from actively hauling stuff in from your mining towers (this is the part where small enough cargo of towers kicks in). The more towers you put down the more hauling you gotta do (player investment), plus if you make it so towers can't be next to each other you create competition and conflict across the board. You can even make them hackable with a SAP hacker module on Beta/Gamma.

The same miner-involvement would be there, except instead of watching a riveler mk2 shoot his lasers you're sitting there with a hauler watching the tower shoot lasers.

Alternative is just the current script-mining on Gamma.

EVE argument is invalid, you cannot terraform off a belt or site and be perfectly safe from NPC's. You can't bot-mine into an infinite field container. Let me know when Perp has a working mechanic where you level up an island's quality based on how much you're mining, then we can discuss EVE vs Perp mining.

Mining profession argument is invalid, where are all these dedicated miners that enjoy mining? Why are liquids (macroable) so cheap, and plants (requiring activity) so expensive? Surely if it was such a successful game design, there would be loads of people doing it and talking about it.

Population argument is invalid, you don't wait for players to start making the game enjoyable for them, you make it enjoyable then market the smeg out of it.

Hauling stuff around is the worst part of the game, it's far worse than any other activity. How about making hauling easier, before thinking of replacing miners. Instead of mining towers replacing miners, how about towers connected to 'conveyor belts' transporting materials to stations.

If no one was PVP'ing, there wouldn't be any need to replace bots and modules, so there would be no need to mine.

Remove PVP from the game and it will be fixed.