I think it was when you were trying to be helpful to the noobs and started noticing that you were getting the same requests over and over and over and over.

If I'd noticed that TinkerTronic had gone on sabbatical as moderator I'd have asked to take over - not so that I can have power or any of that BS, but to select a replacement.* There's some stuff that desperately needs to be stickied in here, especially with an influx of people trying mining for the first time, who are unwilling to try mining (if you see what I mean).

This is what I would have proposed - a build competition!

The idea being that people get points for proposing different builds for each of the ships, and then points for testing the different builds.

How would that work? So lets say there's a baseline asp build. You go and do some mining in that, and record your profit/hr. And then you do the same for the other builds people have proposed for the asp. You could still do missions, but they'd be excluded from the profit/hr (because they're too variable and would throw the underlying mining data out).

But then instead of people coming back and saying "look how big my e-genitalia is!" they would have to convert their numbers into something relative to the baseline:

E.g. the baseline is 1.0

"In Asp A I got 1.05, and in Asp B I got 1.07, but in Asp C I only got 0.97 so it's worse than the baseline!"

So that removes the "I'm a better miner than you nyah nyah nyah" factor, because you're comparing the builds against your own performance.

People would get points for participating, and points for suggesting builds, and bonus points for proposing the 'best' build in each class.

Ships might have different classes.

For instance there might be a 'budget' asp class, which might be everything up to and below 9 mil, and a 'wealthy' asp class, which is everything above that.

This is more of a factor for things like the anaconda, python or T9. With the smaller ships like adder or cobra once you get past a certain point you might as well upgrade.

Then the data for best builds could be collated and put into a wiki somewhere so that it could be stickied.

I despair of ever convincing noobs that T7s and T9s aren't the only ships to mine in, but at least if they insist on being clueless fucktarts we could point them to the best build for their fucktartery.

Anyway, the point of all the points would be to find someone that (a) loved mining, and (b) believed in actually testing how things worked, and then hand-balling the job of moderating to them.

Amongst the many other reasons why I'd make a bad long term moderator, I'm planning on starting a second job *and** doing nanowrimo in november, so just hold your breath and you'll be rid of me soon enough.