You're complicating what is a very simple solution Zoom.

Original ore mechanics (once you mine it, it regenerates over time) were good because it put an invisible limit on how many people can live and exploit 1 island. This also gives a real incentive to conquer more islands when needed/wanted. This will not become evident unless the population increases. This will promote meaningful PVP and give people goals to strive for.

Norrdec has a very good point.   Your new ore system, trying to find it and having unlimited minerals everywhere makes for no market and it was a poorly planned idea.  So in other words, switch it back.

No one mining and no one buying makes for no market. I seriously doubt fiddling with core game mechanics would make some areas more meaningful than others.

It did not create PVP hot spots, it created gank spots.  M2S, Eharm, HUN,  and others used to do that to STC all the time.  They new exactly where the fields we mined were, so they would log off there and just wait to gank miners.  This didn't create PVP, it gave vets easy ways to get indy kills from a newb corp.  because they didn't have to go hunting, they would just wait.  in effect you were creating a "Duck Blind".  The hunters would go sit in the duck blind, and wait for the indys to come to them.

That's my main concern with a time-based respawning too.

If it generates faster than players can mine, we did basically nothing.
If it generates slower, everyone will mine on alphas, which is bad for the newbies (and for PvP).
If it generates just about right, it's still infinite resources.

I bolded the exceptional stupidity, the rest speaks for itself.

As I said previously, the old system promoted active mining & combat account support, none of this script-mining thats going around now.

Sure, corps and people who were dumb would plop a 40M miner on the field and expect to be left alone. Smart corps plopped down 20-30 miners, and 20-30 combats. 1 miner = 1 combat was always a good ratio.

You want it generating slow enough so that an island-alliance of arbitrary size (say 1000 account on paper, ~150 concurrent accounts online) has to either wait for respawn/regeneration (which slows their industry down) or conquer more space to fit their size (which opens PVP options and creates some reason to want more then 1 island and all the hassle that comes along with it).

Alpha nodes = green & yellow tiles, Beta and Gamma nodes = red & orange tiles. Even if they have the exact same ore-amount in them on paper, people will by and large apply the famous hand-growing-from-ass logic and fight over the red & orange nodes. This creates content.

Currently 1 island is enough regardless if you have 10 people or 10,000 people living on it because as soon as 1 field is depleted, the next 1 pops up. We've field-tested this with ~38 Riv mk2's mining on Gamma, sure it was hassle to pause the TV show and move every so often to the new field, but its not any inconvenience.

What does that mean? With the current system you've eliminated every pretense of player-struggle for resources, and created what old RTS games (if you're old enough to remember you get a medal) had as the Deathmatch mode.

To put it in a more familiar perspective, imagine if CCP designed it for everyone in EVE to mine every ore in-game infinitely in as much quantity as they felt like it, from a single nullsec system, in an universe where every system is identical in the number of planets/moons/asteroids.

Zoom here's an interesting exercise for you though;

IF we agree that conflict over space/resources is the driving factor in sandbox large scale PVP, and if we agree that large wars breed lots of small PVP hotspots as roamers get excited...

... if you were in charge of a 200 man corporation in PO, why would your corporation need or want to have more then 1 island?

Put yourself in your players shoes and walk a mile or ten.

The bigger picture here is WHY do corps even need to mine in Island sized quantities?

It's my understanding that there's not enough PVP losses to account for even 1 Island's worth of Epi, let alone MK II fleets running continually.

So either corps are stockpiling ore or they are stockpiling bots/modules; or selling it to the market for NIC, and other corps/players are stockpiling it.

My point, is making resources scarce to encourage PVP won't work because there's not enough PVP to make it worth the effort to gather resouces if they are scarce; i.e. 'production' will simply stop at the current levels.

Zoom's proposed idea actually has merit.

Island 1 has X billion NIC's worth of walls, turrets, and terraforming that makes it 'safe' to strip mine. Only, there's really no 'reason' to do so other than as-hoc PVP losses.

As mentioned previously in the forums, those islands are basically impenatrable, and no one has any reason to try to get in anyway.

What zoom is saying, is if they can't encourage players to try to break-in, than they need to find a way to get those players to go out. There is no Epi on alpha, and while some corps may move mining 'lessor' ores to alpha, they will still need a supply of Epi for T4.

Now, if they intend to take over another gamma Island, they will also need access to alot more colixium. At issue here is the already large potential stockpile of modules and ore, but putting that aside, and assuming they only get 1 more pass at the ore on their locked down island, they will need to mine somewhere before they can fully lock-down another island.

This is the PVP potential, the battle for the new islands.

Yes, once they are conqured they will be locked down, but look again at the mechanics.

Ore doesn't respawn on 'your' island until it is mined elsewhere.

After the initial PVP rush, and the Islands are locked down, than what happens?

Lets look at the future slice at 'steady-state' ---

(3) corps/alliances have managed to hold and lock-down (4) gamma Islands each.

By this time they have figured out if they can mine a certain amount on their Islands, and more will randomly spawn on thier other owned islands. However, some of the mined 'total amount' will also spawn on thier enemies islands.

It is now logistically and stragetically WRONG to mine out your own Islands; because by doing so you feed resources to your enemy.

Is that a reason to try to break into your enemies island to mine... Yes and No.

If all (3) corps decide to do 'nothing' than the game is static and no PVP happens. But this is true with any game, if you never leave Riverwood in Skyrim the game is boring.

Most likely, 1 or more corp/alliances will attack the weakest islands and attempt to own ALL the islands. This is not a requirement at this time in the game, because 1 is enough. Only by owning all the islands can an alliance be assured of unlimited resources.

Is it possible for 1 alliance to own all the gamma Islands?

Technically, no. Not at this time. There's not enough man power. I would even hazzard that there is not enough man power to lock down more than (1) Island as it is; as long as the other corps were actively trying to stop them.

To prevent Alpha mining, simply leave the 'lessor' ores to respawn on the same Island, but put in a 'delay' factor before they randomly respawn. It's logistically a nightmare to mine alpha and gamma, more likely if they do deplete an island temporarily, they can wait or if it's an emergency, buy off the market - pushing the supply the other way.

Beta Islands will also be more natural 'targets' for Epi mining, as corps try to reserve thier 'safe' gamma piles. This is the subtle way to get epi mining back onto beta, and not the heavy handed 'remove' it from gamma.

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So, yes. In the long term implementing disappearing Epi/Colx from gamma could lead to a stalemated environment. But doing nothing will result in more of the current 'nothing' happening. While doing 'this' will generate some movement in PVP, if players want it. If there's no one willing to fight, there's no amount of mechanic changes that's going to fix the game.

Yes, it will create something that probably needs to be fixed down the road, but they can do that with more islands, or some other mechanic that makes owning all the islands impossible.

***, try it. What is there to lose?

I'd like to make it clear that in my proposition, this is only a long-term effect. A globally controlled mineral amount system would spawn minerals with the same chance on "your island" just like anywhere else. As time passes however, your window of opportunity to get a new field on a busy mined island would get smaller and smaller. (That is if we assume that there is at least one island where new fields can "stockpile" themselves.) So luck would play a significant role in this system as well. But even so, I imagine that tipping the balance of mineral amounts between islands to the extremes would be a slow process, and easily reversible. If we don't take player resistance into account of course

The effect is similar like with artifacts: if you keep avoiding low level artifact signals (~other islands) and only go for level 3 (~always the same island), eventually you'll be left with all level 1s (~tiny ore fragments/nothing).

The challenge is to change that somehow. The only way to change anything, is to change something.

Personally, I doubt messing with resources is going to cause corps to start moving around, but it's worth a shot. The direct issues is always going to be, making a change big enough to motivate change, also risks demotivating people to play at all.

There is always a make or break moment in any game's life-span, which is probably the steam release date. The changes need to be done before that, so it is status quo for the new players, and the vets will need to adjust to it.

Wouldn't you still just be fighting the same couple of dudes anyway?

With gamma islands double the degradation rate of the ore fields and when they are depleted/mined out they spawn with a lower amt, say 20% less than they originally had and make it so after 5 respawns there is a 3 day timer to wait for that particular ore to appear on island again at 100%. No more infinite ore on gamma.

With beta change the intrusion system. The outposts should be controlled by those that use the island. Split the islands up into "territories" that are governed by the closest outpost. Make it so killing NPC's or mining ores within those territories give you points towards ownership of the outpost. Increase the rate of spawn of NPCS and keep the ore fields the way they are now. As you have more points towards the outpost then you can add the buffs and lock out other corps. Make the original sap loot deposit into a hangar only available to the corp that has control and make it so that corp can change the level of access as long as they hold it. If you cannot split the island into territories make it so everything done within 5k of the outpost counts towards that outpost. Also make it so that sparks can only be removed from beta outposts when that player has access.

Revive the tournament island as the pvp island. Make a TP on each alpha 2 take you to there. Once there you get there youre flagged for pvp and your timer needs to be up before you can leave. Make it so single tf can be done on the island.

Just my .02