Yeah, CCP have had a track record of not thinking things through since the start. I remember one of the first (if not THE first) big patch, Exodus, back in 2004 when they put in Battleship and high end cruiser spawns into null sec. The theory was that there would be an "exodus" of players from high sec to null sec to go fight them, but they tuned the new rats so high that all the null sec players got ganked by these BS rats (remember, the game was less than a year old at the time and no-one had high skill points), so the "exodus" turned out to be people fleeing null sec for high. If you opened up the "players active" map a couple of days after the patch hit, Null was all but devoid of players.
Now, as a long time high sec carebear miner, (well, I was, haven't played Eve to any extent in years), I was talking about the need to re-do mining (and writing posts about it on the forums) for the first few years in Eve. I wanted to remove all static belts and replace them with a dynamic system. The way I saw it, each system in game would get two "ore classification ratios". One being "amount" and the second being "rarity". But they would also interact with each other based on the amount mined in the system over a given period (say, 1 week). It would work something like this:
Say you had an 0.5 system with 10 belts in Minmatar space that spawned Veld, Scor, Plag and Omber under the old system. Now, under the old system, if you strip mined all the belts one day, they would respawn with small volume roids the next day after DT. If you kept on strip mining them you'd only get baby roids in all the belts, but if no-one mined them for a day they would start growing. Under the new system instead of 10 static belts, you'd have something like 6-14 belts spawn of varying size, but collectively containing a certain total "amount" based on the previous system. Let's just say for this system it would be 1 million m3 of ore just for argument's sake. But, let's say you strip mine that system every day for a week or so. The system would remember that and keep decreasing the the amount spawned until it reached a certain floor, say 250-500 k m3 and 1-4 belts (or sites) each DT. The quality would also decrease, the more you mined the lower the ratio of omber and even plag you got until they even stopped spawning. Now, the reverse would be, that if this same system was not strip mined but only lightly (or not at all) mined, the amount and quality of the ore spawned each DT would go up to a certain threshold, say 2-3 million m3. Jaspet and other more valuble ore could also spawn, though maybe not in large quantities. Since this would all be dynamic, it would be easy for CCP to add an "eve" or "region" wide modifier too that could be changed each DT depending on daily market conditions. Hell, if you had a 1.0 system that no-one mined for weeks I'd say you could end up finding low sec ore there, and equally, if you had an 0.0 system that was stripmined daily for weeks it would end up only spawning Veld and Scor and maybe a few Plag. The point would be to create incentive to explore nearby systems. To make systems far from stations (and thereby not mined as much) more lucrative, and to clear out congested systems.
I'd also change what ships could mine. I'd remove all mining drones, and remove mining lasers (i.e. the original miners, not the spheres used on Mining Barges). The only ships that could actually extract ore from roids would therefore be T1 and T2 mining barges, the noob mining frigates, and the noob ships (like the Ibis). Capital mining ships would be reduced to what they once were supposed to be, glorified support ships and haulers. They could probably still fit mining gang modules, but in a reduced capacity.
Food for thought, but hey, I no longer play this game so what do I care.
