Extracted
from this thread. Basically the idea is to be able to get a good amount of resources using PvE or even PvP five-drugged ape characters, instead of superminer alts. This would imho make the game more confortable and increase immersion.
A bit of thinking about getting resources (ignoring current gathering/mining system):
Quest - Protect farmers to get fruit/fibers/tobacco. Guard mines to get ore/minerals. Protect a group of scavengers to get junk. The resources are sent to the player's tent (which reminds me of the suggestion to start with a tent) or to a base if a team of characters from the same faction come to the mine/fields/scavenging area.
The character(s) get the ad hoc location on their map and have to travel there to defeat enemies and protect NPCs. This way loners' rewards are not mixed with factions'. This brings up a question: what if a group of characters from different factions and/or loners come in a group and get the quest? (for example during TLL activities) - the reward goes to the leader's tent? it get divided into each guy's tent?
The reward should not depend on party size (which would be abusable) but on difficulty levels: there a lot of creatures in the wasteland that could be put in different levels of difficulty: ants, manti, dogs, (giant/pig/mole)rats, geckos, centaurs, floaters, aliens, deathclaws, also tribals, raiders and supermutants. The enemies could depend on location and game lore (wanamingos in Redding, geckos in Klamath, deathclaws in the Boneyard...)
Think about the quest
Dogs of L.A. as a references. Just imagine you also gotta protect salvagers NPCs while doing it, and maybe even you get a little bonus for every friendly NPC that survives?
Buying and caravan protection - Talk to a NPC in the location (for example the guy who sells private mines) and buy resources via dialogue (fixed amounts with fixed prices so no Barter alt is used). The resources are yours now but you gotta protect them until they reach your tent or base. There could be different levels of difficulty here as well, so a caravan transporting a smaller amount of resources would not be an attractive prey for raiders, so you just gotta kill some rats you find on your way, while a bigger caravan might be attacked by Khans or remnants of the Master's army. This mode would probably be mostly for factions with a lot of caps.
Protecting mines - This mode does contemplate the current mining system: players go to an unprotected mine and get payed for protecting it. The player should stay in the area for a given time to get minimum (low) reward and get bonus for every unit of resource that exits the map (can't depend on the number of characters that go out alive as that would be abusable). If the character dies before the "protecting mine" cooldown is over, they get no reward. The reward could be in resources or caps (player's choice) and quite attractive so that pr0s got a reason to protect these locations for noobs/lowlevels.
An alternative could be that the reward is fixed but gets reduced according to how many deaths take place in that mine/place (btw remember this protection activity would be possible in new "farm" and "scavenging area" locations for fruits, fibers, tobacco, junk...) - that way the reward would be higher if the area's ground does not get covered with blood.
Or it could be also a balance between number of deaths & number of resources that exit the location.
I've come to the conclusion that even if these features were implemented, the current mining and gathering system shouldn't be completely scrapped because it's positive that a noob who has just created their first character is able to mine a few rocks with a sledgehammer and craft a gun and ammo from them. If the current system was combined with something like what I suggested, total noobs could mine just like it's done now while more advanced players could get more resources with their rather combat oriented characters. There would be almost 0 need to create a boring miner alt and, especially with the last suggestion, the activities of noobs (mining) and those of pr0s (pvp aping) could be complementing each other. Superminer alts would only be useful for going from "noob" to "pr0" more quickly (getting some resources faster to craft one's first farming gear) but would become useless afterwards because a farmer or PvP character would give better results: more activities with the same characters -> less alting.
