I’ve tried to protect my Miner, while he’s working on an asteroid, but there doesn’t seem to be an effective way to help him out.
Parking a combat fighter in the asteroid field has no effect. Either or both of you can get pulled into combat. It seems random. The rate of being pulled into combat seems the same. I found that my miner was lucky to get about 3 or 4 undisturbed mining cycles before getting pulled away.
Actively having your combat toon attacking the enemy at the asteroid field also does very little to protect the miner. The enemy spawn replacements as quickly as you kill them, and the miner gets pulled away just as often.
A couple of ideas come to mind, (assuming protection is something that is desirable for the game). The enemy attack percentage could be altered based on the combat ability of the mining team. Or the spawn rate has to be slowed down so that killing the enemies means it’s safe for a while.
We have this morning made some tweaks to the rate of drag-in’s whilst mining. Whilst we can tweak, we cannot of course be responsible for ‘Random’ and even though we have lowered the possible risk of a drag in over time, it does not stop mother ‘random’ throwing a curve ball from time to time.
This morning I’ve spent an hour mining with various toon’s in lots of different law level locations and it does now seem more ‘fair’ and ‘realistic’.
Just couple of side notes in addition to all of the above:
your combat toon cannot prevent attacks on your miner completely. At least not on his own - enemies do indeed spawn fast enough to prevent one toon from keeping an area safe. Multiple combateers, however, keeping enemies busy, could reduce the chance of miners being disturbed to almost zero -> teamplay possibilities
while patrolling the corresponding combat area, your combateer has a higher chance of “intercepting” enemies than if he’s idling in the mining field
if your miner is pulled into combat by an enemy, you can attack that enemy with your combateer and most probably make the enemy change his mind. As soon as no enemy is targeting the miner, he can leave the field immediately, w/o waiting for retreat counter
All in all, think about it in the following way: You’re going into a low-mid LL zone with 2 toons. Enemy density is rather higher as is their aggressiveness. Your miner, well, starts mining precious ores right under their noses. What can you combateer do vs. say 5 bored enemies? Obviously, he cannot block all of them at all times.
Your own combateer (1x) and your own miner (1x) were never mean to be a constellation that would allow you to mine at no risk and w/o being disturbed in low LL areas. Having a combateer around (either your own or a friend) does make it way more comfortable for you and decreases risks, but, obviously, shouldn’t allow “afk mining”.
For larger groups of players, however, the situation is very different: Multiple combateers (appropriately leveled) should be able to keep enemies in a given field busy most of the time, allowing way more miners to do their job almost undisturbed. That is, again, if combat field is kept busy by few fighters, any number of miners can be mining rare ores (somewhat balanced by the fact that amount of high level ores is very limited).