Everyone hates mining. Right?

[Black_rose]

make it unbotable yes,


also make it more of chance,

diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, Giant radioactive mice attack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging, diggin, digging,

or make it real minning where you are actually making mines and stuff and chances are slim but pay is big

[Under the moon]

HA! Whemy, that\'s DIG DUG! Oh man, the good old days of one joystick and one button.  But ya, you get my drift.

I like the idea of digging up creatures too.  Nothing like a little danger to liven things up.

[Black_rose]

mabye finding rare artifacts and skelitons or corpses at a graveyard.

i was only around for four of the glory days of the simple sprite based games..... man i wish a new ol\' school mario would come out.. i would also like another tomba, that game was great

[Meketh]

There is now a 1m movement requirement between digging attempts to cut down on boting!

See:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/planeshift/planeshift/docs/history.txt?view=auto

Have fun!
Meketh

[Kaljostro]

Nice step, but mining gets more and more annoying this way...

Edit: And not to forget, using a bot will still be possible!

[ramlambmoo]

yeah, this dosnt stop you using a bot just makes mining more annoying....

[Seytra]

No mandatory mini games please! I hate cartoony things! It would be a shame to let PS degrade into this kind of arcade crap.

[elscouta]

***agrees with what it has been said about the new no-twice-in-the-row***. It slows the mining process which is good (4k trias per hour is just insane) but it makes the thing even more boring because before you could easily dig at a good rate and chat at the same time/browse forums.
 
I guess i even prefered MB hunting to the current digging system...

[diabolus]

I suppose it\'s a good step to \'force\' players to actively move around now. Althoug i would still prefer seeing messages like this :

/dig for gold \"
\"You could not find any gold here\"
Move a bit to the left
/dig for gold\"
\"You\'ve found a MINOR vein of gold!!\"  

[minor might mean only 3 or 4 ores can be mined before you have to move ]

/mine gold\"
\"You failed to mine any gold\"
/mine gold
\"You successfully mine an ore of gold\"

[amount you can mine in a single mining op can depend on
mining skill]

/mine gold
\"There does not seem to be any gold here\"  

[gold depleted]

..and you move on to find another vein by doing a search and then mining.

Now of course this is bottable, assuming movement is bottable. Unless of course you replace the \"/search for gold\" with a visible \"sighting\".  I doubt you can bot something you can only see on the screen [instead of text].

This will require gold deposits to \'spawn\' just like mobs [and randomly too]. I\'m sure you can restrict the spawning  to a particular rock wall. So you have a situation that everyone will still go to mine at a particular place [i.e. magic shop] but if everyone is mining along the same rock wall the entire wall will \'run empty\' and then respawn after a some time. The Major/minor veins can spawn randomly along the rock wall.

In the end, it\'s similar to the \'can\'t dig here twice\' except for two main differences:

1. You can actually dig twice depending on the \'size\' of the deposit [i.e. 20 ores if it\'s a major vein,  deposits also reset if someone only digged halfway and left]

2. Currently the \'no-twice\' system can be \'fooled\' by moving left and digging and then moving back to the right and digging at the original spot [so you just move left and right all the time = easily scriptable]. Spawn/depletion of ore will require alot more movement than \'left-right\' which is pretty hard to bot i\'d say ESPECIALLY if there\'s other players using up \'dig-slots\' .

So even if you don\'t want to visibly show dig-spots and only use a type \"Search for gold first\" command then you will need a really good bot to move along an entire wall [and probably walk across the room to another wall eventually].

[Hurleybird]

Why not just have monsters protect the mines? That way if you have a bot, you just get killed by the monster.

[elscouta]

I agree with you Hurleybird. It\'s what i proposed a few posts ago but it seemed people thought it made more luck enter in the place. As if you must always success...

I\'m not sure about diabolus system though. as far as i\'m concerned, this system suffers the main flaw of the current one:
- boring, repetitive, brainless.

[Under the moon]

Originally posted by Seytra
No mandatory mini games please! I hate cartoony things! It would be a shame to let PS degrade into this kind of arcade crap.

Hold on there Seytra, I never said anything about cartoony.  I was imagining a high quality system with realistic textures and immersive  play, something you need intelligence to play.  Nothing remotely arcade-like.

[diabolus]

I agree with you Hurleybird. It\'s what i proposed a few posts ago but it seemed people thought it made more luck enter in the place. As if you must always success...

I\'m not sure about diabolus system though. as far as i\'m concerned, this system suffers the main flaw of the current one:
- boring, repetitive, brainless.

Heh, considering that mining in reality is also rather boring and brainless i doubt a game trying to be somewhat \'realistic\' will suddenly make mining fun [otherwise it will no longer be mining?].

Mini-games might work or might not work, i can\'t really say. The latest Leisure suit larry did it, and even though the mini-games are fun, it actually detracted from the \'what are you really trying to do\' part of the game. In other words, the game have some plotline/big picture and here you are playing tetris for hours wthin another game. \"Game within game syndrome?\" Almost reminds me of the Matrix...you play an MMORPG to escape reality and then the game is too boring you play a game WITHIN the game to escape THAT ...somewhat ironic

I am however for KOTOR types of mini-games related to gambling/cards/racing whatever. The mini-game is not a means to escape some task, it IS the task itself. I.e. playing poker to make money vs. playing poker to mine gold and THEN make money from the mining. Simply put, rather build a Casino/Betting Arena/Circus to play mini-games.

As for monsters, also tricky but might work under certain circumstances. The scenario i expect would be that of a \'mine guards\' appearing. In other words you will get people that simply kill those mobs near mines for a fee while you turn on your bot and go to sleep. The \'mine guards\' will gain XP and protect the botting miners at the same time. [At least that\'s what i would be doing, imagine the cash fighters will be making].

I\'m not sure which direction PS will be going regarding jobs/careers. But if Ultima Online is anything to go by, you had the scenario where people would simply become expert miners/blacksmiths and be pretty crap at fighting [in fact they never fight, they pleasure themselves in the ability to make the best weapons or find the rarest ores because no one else wants to do it] . So if PS will have a career system then forcing \'expert fighting\' abilities to do \'baking\' or \'pottery\' or \'mining\'  might be a stretch.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Under the moon
Hold on there Seytra, I never said anything about cartoony.  I was imagining a high quality system with realistic textures and immersive  play, something you need intelligence to play.  Nothing remotely arcade-like.

This was mainly aimed at whemyfield. I\'m still unsure about the mini-game idea, though, as I can\'t think of an implementation that I would like to see.

Regarding the monsters / mine guards: IMNSHO, it would be somewhat unrealistic to have any significant amount of monsters in Hydlaa or, in fact, in Yliakum, especially in moderately to densly populated areas. I can see the occasional monster being dug out, but they\'d be minor ones and rare. However, we can also add additional surprises, like

- cave-ins of both ceiling and floor
- water flows
- poisonous gas
- extraordinary finds (like ancient artifacts or valuable minerals), should be extremely rare, though, depending on find
- digging into caves that might contain things, that might or might not have another opening

I think what\'s lacking most is diversity and visual indication. I see that it isn\'t yet possible to actually dig holes and tunnels that exist in the game world, though.

[Rhidan]

I think there definiatly needs to be something done about the current minning system. I think somepeople have made some good suggestions. These have basicly been said already, but here are my ideas in detail:

1. We create \"caves\" or such where all minning takes place. These should be long mazed corridors. Then there should be visible spawn points on the walls where players could see the minerals. There should be X amount of spawn points and only X/2 number of minerals. There should also be monsters in the mines but not incredibly hard ones. Mining would only take seconeds to clear a vein but you can only get as many minerals based on your mining xp. Players would have to spend time exploring through the caves untill they found a vein but the rewards from each vein would be high.


2. Another optoin would to create limited mining spots. They would appear somewhere in the world and only have a predetermined amount of minerals. When it\'s gone, it\'s gone and players would have to find another place to mine.   Each time the \"mine spots\" would come up they would be in diffrent places throughout the world. This would also help limit the amount of minerals that entered the society which would in turn greatly stabalize the economy.

I also think that the price of gold should not be set but be more of a rate that would change depending on the amount of gold currently in the system.


Just some thoughts...