Social Mining - extra rolls

[tame marlin]

Right now mining rocks is competitive, incentivizing players to hop worlds or find a less crowded spot, and making F2P mining truly a competitive activity. The best part of Forestry was the simple update making woodcutting with others as efficient as cutting solo. Can the same be done for mining?
Goal:

• Make it social instead, such that mining the same rock as another player is as good or better than mining alone.
  How:
• When someone else successfully mines the rock you're mining, you also roll to mine that rock. The rock is still depleted for everyone & everyone needs to move to a new rock - but it's not less efficient to do so because you haven't lost any ticks & actually gained a roll

This would still result in gameplay which feels like competitive F2P mining - you have to swap between rocks often - but would give much better XP rates, potentially better than individual mining. Another comparison would be stealing from stalls, where everyone can steal from the same stall as long as they click in the same tick

Normally when mining you get 2 rolls when starting a rock, then 1 roll every 3-8 ticks after depending on pickaxe, or slightly faster when tick manipulating your movement. Taking up to 8 ticks for a bronze pickaxe is also why someone stealing your rock in low level F2P mining feels so bad. Making you roll on others’ success would bump the XP rates up significantly.

Why this as opposed to something like instanced rocks:

• Competitive mining is actually kinda fun. It's very click intensive & feels like you're racing other players to the rocks. Moving to instanced rocks would completely kill that; this would keep the gameplay but make the XP much better.

[severe raft]

Sounds like i should boost my low lvl mining account with a high lvl mining account then

[lapis vortex]

an issue with mining with other people is that you need mining gloves for extra rolls, so a single person not having them griefs the spot
i think mining depletion just needs to be instanced to the player

[tame marlin]

Yeah mining gloves wouldn't really work here. Mining gloves increase AFK & this would be very not AFK. The main reason to do this over instanced rocks is that "competitive mining" (esp in F2P) is actually pretty fun. Definitely not meta efficient and better to hop or find somewhere else if possible.. but the competition and additional clicks is more engaging than other mining

[tame marlin]

There definitely could be weird boosting strats. Possibly limit extra rolls to not more often than every 2 ticks. As for "need an alt", I would guess mass worlds would make this accessible to all

[rocky forge]

I do like the idea of this suggestion, but I also have a bad feeling that this would massively increase the effectiveness of the Runite-mining bots as a side effect. Currently each member world can produce about twenty rune ore every 12 minutes, times 12k per rune bar times 24 hours is about 30m GP from high alching rune per day, per world. Multiply by 200+ member worlds is over 6 billion raw coins ending the game every day from Runite bots. Allowing each rock to be mined multiple times will only increase this number, while the only ways to reduce this are mass bot bans (unrealistic because Jagex), or lowering the value of rune items, which would hurt basically every PvM money maker as well.

[solemn token]

I don't think rune items will ever plummet too much below the high alch price or high alch + nature cost if anything, because if it does people and oe bots (let's face it already ) will just buy it to alch

[tame marlin]

Rune should possibly be exempt from every mining rework suggestion for this reason. This particular rework suggestion is not too bad though. It would add the possibility of letting multiple bots get ore from one runite rock, but not guarantee it. Because everyone mining the rock would get one additional roll when the rock is mined - but the chance of actually getting a rune ore from one additional role is only about 7%

Also, I think maybe folks are misunderstanding the suggestion. I'll try rewording the first one a bit. The intent is for rocks to still be depleted & everyone would need to swap between them - but for this to actually give efficient mining XP. As opposed to currently, only one player ever gets ore & XP from a rock, multiple players could get XP & ore. Added a comparison to stall thieving

[rocky forge]

By “lowering the value of rune items” I meant reduce the in-game “Value” parameter which the high alchemy price is based on. People already buy and alch rune items all the time; reducing the Value would decrease the amount of gold each bar is worth via HA. I think that PvM metal items should be instead dropped as Ancient versions that would have the same HA value and stats as the previous drops, to keep PvM rewards functionally the same. However, the useable equipment that is produced from Smithing would have a lower Value than the Ancient versions so that rune mining + smithing doesn’t inject so much cash daily.

[rocky forge]

I think I understood what you meant: one person successfully mining gives a chance for other players on the same rock to get rewarded as well. This is a great idea for lower-leveled rocks, but for Runite, even just three bots working in sync can still monopolize every single rock but would produce 15% more ore in total, adding an additional billion gold every day on top of the 6b/day rune bots already make. I really dislike the competitive nature of rune mining but I’m afraid of increasing its bot profitability as a side effect.
In terms of stall thieving, it’s been proposed to add a non-depleting gem stall in a Sailing locale, which I fear will be massively abused as well.

[tame marlin]

Ah, yes that math checks out. I think it's mostly an F2P problem, since there are much better money makers in members.

Probably yeah, shouldn't work for rune rocks. I will also call out the alternate implementation called out by eg @lapis vortex in their first comment of "instanced rocks", where each player just has access to their own instance of a rock and it depleting for me would not mean it depletes for you, would be way worse for botting and would definitely need an exception made for rune

[gaunt peak]

sounds like it would bring a lot more runite ore into the game, and since it's practically worthless as a drop for mains, it would probably devalue the price. So nah, we against this

feels like this only caters to irons and bots

also, if this excludes runite, then its just DoA, and again sounds like it just caters to irons

[solemn token]

This is such a good idea and can be a basis for lowering the tier of rune in a smithing rework too ❤️

[paper merlin]

mining rework in general would be peak
just because its oldschool doesnt mean we have to suffer old mechanics

[solemn token]

mining + smithing would be mad hype I am considering trying out RS3 just to see how the new mining and smithing feels lol

[tame marlin]

the primary places where this rework would matter would be F2P & the mining guild. I've definitely hopped worlds in the mining guild before & this update would mean I wouldn't have to. Sandstone / granite too. It would affect all mining training using regular rocks; definitely not just an "iron update". I called out "not rune" as that's possibly the biggest "bot buff" part of the proposal, but not really a key piece otherwise

[oblique mist]

Honestly it feels good as hell on there, the rework on rs3 made both skills feel good and WAY more social vs silently competing for rocks.
Every good mining spot had shooting star vibes with people just chatting (not sure how it is now, player count was dead last time i was on there)

It's progress bar based mining vs "random chance" so something like that would be easy to balance on osrs, it wouldn't destroy prices because stuff like runite can just be slow af to get, but would still be an option for people wanting to mine it (without having to fight bots for spawns)
(if anything it'd screw over those bots hoping worlds for spawns 24/7)

[tame marlin]

Thinking about this again with leagues having a lot of competition for rocks

Might try to make a post presenting 3 options with "instanced rocks", "shared rolls", and "different types of AFK veins"

[half cipher]

I remember when I dipped my toes in RS3 a while back, they had a system where mining rocks gave you ore on a set timer based on mining level and pickaxe tier, and the ore never depletes. You could sit there and AFK mine like it was woodcutting if you wanted, but there's also a more active method where nearby rocks of the same type would start to glow, and if you switch over to that rock, it boosts your mining speed.

I think this is probably the way to go if you want to renovate mining. Just give it the forestry treatment.

[cerulean eagle]

I think 2 and 3 would both be good additions. It does seem like they're adding some more MLM like veins with sailing

[tame marlin]

https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/s/dNqwWnLgF9

Not a very popular post but actually lots of good feedback

[spiral rock]

Devils advocate but I feel like instantiated rocks would just cause a massive boost in mine bots. They can all mine the same vein without fighting each other.

[tame marlin]

This is a pretty common argument and why I said rune rocks probably shouldn't be instances

[rocky forge]

Bots already monopolize every Runite rock near a bank across every world, since they can coordinate and tell each other when every rock is going to respawn, making it nearly impossible for mere humans to mine it. The only real solution is to lower the alch value of smithed items (rs3 did 6 years ago) and add a different item that mobs drop with original HA value to keep PvM gold the same.

[half cipher]

Disagreed. Bots basically own all the runite rocks already. They know exactly when a rock will respawn and there's enough worlds and nodes that there's effectively no cap on how how big a farm can be. All the current system does is inconvenience real players.