So mining is a hot topic as of late - and honestly for good reason. It's in a shit state. Yeah mineral prices are sky-high and people mining are making a ton of money, and hell, the MER even shows people are doing it at nearly record rates. But the general sentiment from them is still that it just sucks to do. The act of interacting with it just isn't in a good state.

From everything I've read and experienced, the income wasn't ever the issue. Miners don't love the activity because it makes boatloads of isk (though it's a nice bonus), they love it because it's slow, it's chill, and half the time you're doing it you're probably getting drunk on comms with friends, or have it going on in the background while you're doing something else.

It seems to me that it was the changes to the gameplay and mechanics surrounding mining now that pissed people off. So how do we fix it? Some people have thrown ideas around, I figure why not share a few of my own - who knows, since mining changes are apparently on CCP's radar, maybe if the planets align, some of these changes might make it into the game some day.

Multiboxers vs Solo Miners:

"So how do we fix mining so that solo players don't get left behind?"

I think this is one of the most contentious and heated debates right now. The Reddit hivemind has decided in recent weeks that the new thing it wants to hate more than anything else is multiboxers. So whenever it gets brought up, the discussion inevitably involves the question of how to fix this so that the changes can specifically help the smaller, solo industrial in a way that doesn't allow the multiboxers to ruin their ability to make a decent income.

To address this, I would propose a series of changes targeted at either general fixes that mostly multiboxers will employ, or changes specific to solo/small scale miners.

- General Fixes:

• Revert most of the ore distribution changes.
  • Spodumain remains a Pochven/Escalation-only ore.
  • Public asteroid volume averages 100k - 500k m3 per rock.
• Restore nullsec public asteroid belts CCP removed.
• Reintroduce Gravimetric/Mining signatures that don't show up in The Agency and are normal signatures that need to be scanned down like Gas sites.
  • There should be multiple sites of different rarities targeted at security band of space.
  • Lowsec and WH space would have the highest value sites.
• Increase the mining escalation duration to 24h and remove its publicly displayed beacon so it can no longer be seen by everyone in system. This would bring it in line with all other escalations.

- Large Prospecting Arrays:

• Large [mineral] Prospecting Arrays updated, no longer contain Prospecting Ores.
  • Arrays will spawn only normal ores containing the selected mineral.
  • Asteroid size averages 100k m3.
• Large Asteroid Prospecting Array added.
  • Spawns 1-3 asteroid anomalies with non-prospecting ores.
    • Average asteroid size is 500k - 2m m3.
    • Mercoxit is not included.
    • Number of belts spawned based on having an Industry Index of 1, 3, or 5.

- Changes targeted at solo players:

• Small [Mineral] Prospecting Arrays
  • Update the asteroid composition within the site to only contain A0 and Prospecting Ore types.
  • A0 and Prospecting Ores can be compressed in an Athanor/Tatara like normal ores.
  • Mineral composition of Prospecting Ores updated to be significantly (ie: 2-3x) more mineral-dense than the respective counterpart ore (ie: Arkonor vs Ueganite)
  • Asteroid size of Prospecting Ores reduced back to 500m3 - 3,000m3, while A0 minerals can spawn up to normal sizes.
    • This discourages multiboxers, and should not significantly burden solo miners, while also giving them optional larger rocks to target with the normal sized A0 rocks.
• Gravimetric Signatures for Solo Miners
  • In each band of space, there should be one signature that has asteroid composition targeted at solo miners or small-scale miners, with the high-density Prospecting Ores in it.

I'm sure I'm missing some things people would want, but I think this would be a good way of giving mining across the entire game a decent facelift that doesn't leave any one specific area of the game behind. Multiboxers get their massive rocks back. Public belt ratters and officer hunters get more belts to hunt in. Small scale and solo miners can go after the high value mineral-dense prospecting ores, and people skilled into Exploration can find additional mining sites to go mining in that provide better ores and a bit more safety than mining in public spots.