I am at a loss on the ore collecting systems in this game.
With the intro to Asteroids, I did not really care for the effort put in vs ore collected before the asteroid is contested. It is very hard to do this without a medium to larger group to go with.
Issue I have is the availability of asteroids. It does seem that asteroids are fairly quickly snagged up each week and only the ones that are very far away are left for anyone else.
I also agree that the original mining option of underground mining had to be changed and perhaps gotten rid of. So I am fully okay with this being gone, however I felt the reward vs time put in was worth it.
Mining units were one of the worst additions to the game to date in my opinion. It creates an uncontested infinite amounts of ore, as long as your taxes are paid.
I would suggest a revamp to asteroid mining.
The suggestion I would have is to make asteroid fields that are decently close together. Idea is to have zoned asteroid fields, non PvP for lower tier ores, medium tier zone and high tier/ gemstone asteroids.
This would give the "Infinite ore that the devs were looking for but add the aspect of having to work for it.
Would create PVP opportunities for asteroid cluster patrolling
Asteroids can be regenerated on a daily / weekly or time based system.
Asteroid regeneration could be as simple as asteroids spawn, if someone comes the asteroid and alters it by mining either the asteroid surface or the ores within it will then start a timer to despawn this asteroid and once despawned, spawn a new asteroid in at a random coordinate within the asteroid field. Example if I mine an asteroid it could despawn after 72 hours or something like that and then spawn a new asteroid in.
Asteroids could be a lot smaller than the current asteroids in the game. Maybe 1 or 2 ores per asteroid with some more ore dense than others.
I think this would create better opportunities to mine and create good pvp opportunities as well.
I would say these asteroids fields should be fairly large so that there is a chance to actually go into a higher tier asteroid field and not have a 100% chance to be spotted.