This is a bit trickier to test compared to previous things, but here's what I would envision:
- Have everyone go mining in a specific revival zone with the same (or roughly similar) finder depth. Let's say 50 unamped drops for now (ore and enmatter at the same time to speed things up). Pick someone to go first, another follows the exact path shortly behind the first, a third person follows #2, etc. Logistics could be worked out, but we could just generate a list of 110m-spaced coords for each person to drop at once the previous person is done there. If you get claims, pull them. I can't say if open claims affect anything versus one being pulled recently, but just to make sure it's standardized.
- Repeat #1 with each person having a different depth finder (maybe 150m difference for good measure). This will test if depth affects hit rate due to other people mining at the same depth.
- Basically do 1, but with concern over having each person bomb the same location just as long as it's within the same revival zone.
#1 is probably the better test first since if there is a difference, 1 will pick up on it, while 2 is kind of secondary to be tried out on a different day only if #1 shows a difference. #2 is basically assuming other miners affect hit rate, but is it only at the depth the previous person mined?
For both of these, the person should track their hit rate and maybe total drops and TT of each claim (exact size is preferable to the categorical claim size). The TT may not be that important, but it's possible claim size might vary too. Maybe just the first and last person in the chain could track TT and optional for others if they don't want to track the extra stuff besides hit rate.
I'd also suggest a single drop at each coordinate rather than dropping again if you find a claim with some search radius remaining. The first person filling out their search radius in this case might help make more differences apparent if there were only two people, but if we can get three or four, a decline in hit rate should still be detectable.
What I would end up doing is testing whether hit rate or average claim size are different comparing the first person to the others. Three or four people doing this would probably do the trick. I'm not really very flexible with time the rest of this week to join, but if it's say next weekend (Feb 23-24) I'd volunteer to go last so no one else has to be hesitant about potentially getting nothing. If someone gets this together before then, I can analyze it at any time as long as I get total drops and number of claims found for each person as well as their order in the chain. If this sounds like a plan for people, we can make sure to have more specific instructions finalized before starting anything.
Edit: I added 3 in since that's been discussed a little bit already. I think 1 would be the best for initial testing, though 3 could be interesting. 2 still seems contingent on differences in 1.
but as I said before, I hardly do enm and ores at the same time.
