EVE General Discussion

Most of Eve industry is absolutely dreadful. Especially if you have to set up POS at any point to do it.

To be fair: Ratting in eve is also pretty bad. Sit there staring at nothing while three bars on the Red + sign turn red.

Really the only thing worth a damn is PvP and even then it's only fun while it's happening.

I'm in eve for the politics and the giant space battles. When nothing is happening: I play other games. Any other games.

Even worse, the value estimator said 240 million for the refined minerals. I rounded up. Also although there were 4 hours of mining, there was maybe 2 more hours of flying about, setting up the fleet, and so on. Still, 40 million an hour. But I don't sell minerals, I build stuff that I sell for an average 50% markup over the local mineral buy order. 60 million an hour is fairly good for high sec, especially for an activity I can do while watching TV.

Mining on Eve is very similar to games such as Runescape and what not. But mining is a good time to spend doing other things such as watching movies or stuff, doing school work (I do it all the time) or just chatting with your friends.

Nobody said Eve is easy, grinding is apart of all MMO's.

I honestly started playing EVE to mine and do manufacturing, as I used to like mining and blacksmithing in Ultima Online (my 1998 account only recently closed due to an accounting error when they changed their accounting system), and mining, engineering, and blacksmithing in WoW (I cancelled that one shortly after Uldum expansion).

When I'm mining I:

* Hit dscan every 5 seconds or less (a good habit learned from living in w-space for over 2.5 years).
* Watching local for tears and gank related messages.
* Watching local player counts for changes.
* Watching the people in local, and recognizing regulars and transients.
* Researching the kill-boards of the people, corps, and alliances in local and their associates.
* Checking on the stats of systems in the constellation and neighbours, in-game and on DOTLAN.
* Unloading 2 Hulks and Orca with a Bustard (I think I'm gonna switch to a second Orca just for this).
* Switching asteroids.
* Scanning asteroids and tagging them when they get low.
* Locating the next belt.
* Checking on the off-grid siege warfare booster.
* Killing NPC with the Orca's drones (same character is also a Rattlesnake pilot when doing missions).

With all that, I don't really have time for anything else. I have 7 accounts, and currently use 5 or 6 when mining.

I haven't lost a mining ship to another player yet (lost my first and only Retriever to the 6 cruiser NPC spawn on mining the ultra-rare Arkonor spawn in Artifact Recovery, got Hulk 2 days later), but have survived or avoided several attacks.

I don't sell minerals directly, but rather manufacture with them and make sure to get above Jita sell order prices for them (5% over sell minimum). I toss them onto the freighter loads of other minerals I buy, so I don't really know or care how much I earn directly from mining.

Mining isn't my primary ISK earner: manufacturing is my meat and potatoes. I mine when I choose to simply because I enjoy it for some inexplicable reason. I must also be slightly OCD because I really hate leaving any asteroids behind.

I also have a PvP alt that is CEO of a small PvP corp, and was last harassing miners of a small hisec indy corp, when not roaming lowsec with reckless abandon.

I think the only mining designed to be done solo would be the various Mining Missions that Agents offer.

Over 3 years ago I had bought a researched 2 run Hurricane BPC. I had only been playing Eve for about 9 months and had trained up some basic production and mining skills in order to manufacture items for my own use, not to do Market Trade Career.. After looking at the amount of minerals needed to build 2 ships, I knew it was going to take forever to mine the required amount even for 1 ship in my little mining Cruiser, let alone get enough material for 2 ships. Besides that, I wasn't really into being an Industrialist and I definitely wasn't specialized. I just wanted to be able to produce my own stuff whenever needed.

So I just let the BPC sit in station and continued running missions wondering how long it would take to get enough ISK to buy the ship, let alone the modules and of course all related skills. I was thinking I had wasted my time and ISK getting that BPC and had mentioned in chat channel was thinking of selling it. Another player said he had some friends who could help me get the materials needed, I would just have to do some hauling. I said ok and he said it would be set up for the weekend.

Weekend comes around and I'm in my Hoarder ready to haul and didn't know what to expect. I get invited to a Fleet of half dozen ORE mining ships, mostly Hulks. I have to say I was very impressed by all this, my first time being in a fleet as well as my first time being in a mining op.

The ORE ships spread out in the belt and got busy, Jet cans were deployed and chat was very active. It was a sight to behold, definitely an excellent lasor light show. I started hauling and couldn't keep up with them so I asked another friend in a different chat channel to help haul the Ore. Seemed like every time the hauling ships (my friend and I) warped on grid, NPC rats would spawn and attack us. Of course the ORE Pilots would have their drones quickly dispatch the rats. After a while one of the Pilots brought in an Orca ship (Orca only been in game for 6 months) to boost the others and store Ore since my friend and I couldn't keep up with the hauling.

Was a lot of fun and within an hour or so had more than enough Ore to refine for most of the minerals needed in the BPC. The Orca Pilot had excellent refining skills, did the refining for me in station and informed me to sell the extra for ISK to buy the missing minerals listed in the BPC.

I will never forget that experience. At that time I happened to have a small stockpile of True Sansha Power Diagnostic System's stashed away so within the next few days I contracted one to everyone as thanks for helping me. Most of them said they were just glad to help out and it wasn't necessary but still accepted it after I insisted.

Unbelievable, players helping out someone else who they didn't know and probably would never see again, for free. I highly doubt that would ever happen again, especially with the ever increasing 'screw you' mentality that's currently plaguing this game, especially with high security turning into gank security.

Ahhhh, the good ole days.

About 1 1/2 years ago while doing exploration, I would supply Gravimetric bookmarks to a friend who dual boxed a Hulk and Orca team. When both of us were online at the same time, we'd fleet up with him setting up close to the middle of my route (dozen systems in a pipe) and move to the top sites I would bookmark for him. We'd be talking in chat, him mining and me scanning for various exploration sites. I'd inform him of the content of Grav sites found and he'd inform me when there was half a dozen rat wrecks with him, which I would loot and salvage while dropping of Grav bookmarks. When I'd find a Grav site with 1 or 2 rocks left, he'd come over and pop the site, while it was time consuming it also helped to spawn fresh sites.

When he wasn't online, I'd contract the bookmarks to him. Every few days I'd get about a 10 mill ISK donation from him. This went on for about 6 months. Was fun, even though we were both doing different aspects of PvE content solo, we were still in a group, interacting with the game and helping each other out. I'll never forget that either.

Anyway, he got rather busy with real life and basically was logging in much less so our 'fleeting up and contracting grav bookmarks' wasn't viable anymore. That was about a year ago when we stopped doing that. He still logs in once in a while for skill queue change and chat.

I doubt I could set up that arrangement with other Industrialists now, especially with the massive increase of gank activity aimed specifically at Mining ships in high security systems. Even if the ganking was to stop, it would take a long time for trust to return to this game.


DMC

Enjoyed reading your post. I trade now so I haven't done a fleet op in a long time, you made me miss it.

I don't think you should be so fatalistic though about the future of that part of the game. It'll balance out eventually, and trust has always been in short supply.

You can always mine in a coveter. With mineral prices this high, there probably isn't that much of a difference in isk/hr as compared to pre permageddon.

Gets a bag of popcorn to watch the troll and griefers go to work.
This is what you do when mining read the trolls.

My ship got blown up and instead of buying the same thing, I decide I'd train up for a different ship. I noticed that the Reaper the insurance company gave me had a civilian autocannon, so while I waited, I headed to low sec and hung around looking for a fight.

I set my ship to orbit an asteroid in top belt and waited. After a while I came back to the game to find that I'd been podded. So I got back in my Reaper and went back to that system to wait at the top belt to see fi anyone would fight me.

I mean, I've levelled to the top 10 tiers of WoW arena PvP, ganked countless noobs in Stranglethorn Vale, raided Orgrimmar countless times, but I have never encountered gameplay as one-sided as this. It's literally hitting undock and watching your ship explode. THAT'S IT.

This was what I did for 2 hours.

I suspect that someone will tell me that PVP is the heart of EVE and "ur doin it wrong", but I disagree. PVP is rather vital to EVE's infrastructure and it's a gameplay element that's best enjoyed by doing it solo.

Too long; didn't read: PVP is one sided. Please do something with it.

To the OP: you are doing it wrong. Mining starts off quite dull due to the limitations on equipment. By the time you can fly a fully Hulk with exhumers 5, implants and fleet boosts, you'll find that you can't take your attention off the mining process for more than a few seconds at a time. There's ore to move to the hauler, asteroids to keep targeting as you pop them, D-scan and local to monitor, and fleet location to maintain as you move to access the next batch of rocks while staying aligned to a celestial and within range of the hauler. It's a frenetic activity!