Offline Mining

[Vilusia]

Will it be a thing in the future for ships to mine while you are offline?

[koonschi]

Not while offline. While online and in another sector, yes, but I don't think offline mining is a good idea.

[Vilusia]

How so? If a player has a large fleet I would assume they would want offline mining operations. I'm talking about on multiplayer by the way.

[Kane Hart]

Performance reasons is about 95% of it for MP.

 

@koonschi recommendation:

Since you  will be digging through all this maybe offer a config option to allow those who want to enable to have it enabled. I know for one if I was playing a tiny small server co-op with friends I would activate it for the fun and thrill of not just making money but the risks of having it afk.

 

Either way once koonschi adds the feature you could just stay logged in the game anyways. But right now server owners Like myself would not want their servers having 1000's of sectors left open :P

[koonschi]

I'm talking about on multiplayer by the way.

Me too. I realize the need for efficient resource generation, but I think offline mining wouldn't be healthy because it removes resources forever,  without effort for the harvesting player.

 

I simply think that there are better ways for offline resource generation. Renewable resource generation if you will. Like factories or trading stations.

[Vilusia]

So instead of offline mining I can just put my ship in a system with a small fleet of miners and deplete the whole system. There is literally no difference. A game with finite amount of resources needs stuff like this.

[koonschi]

Yes, and I think that's not very healthy either. I'm not saying there's no problem right now, but I don't want to make the problem even worse. My biggest concern here is new players joining a server and finding no resources at all, because others farmed it all away without even lifting a finger.

[LordHavoc]

I was thinking about the technical/performance aspects on this and may have a solution to deal with both easily.

 

The devs could adopt a simple 'idle game' mechanic for distant sectors; where the players fleet has its mining/salvaging calculated.

So when the player leaves the sector, the resources just tick up using that calculation.

 

This also has the advantage of being easy to tweak for balancing; simply apply a percentage variable to that calculation and voila. (I was thinking of some kind of penalty for out of sector mining; something brutal like %25)

 

Oooh, while typing this - could also work for player owned stations

 

Edit: Can further control this by restricting where players are allowed to idle. Perhaps incorporate faction standings.