EVE General Discussion

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 Impala (sp?) the insurance company gave me had a civilian mining laser, so while I waited, I headed to the local asteroid and mined the Golden Ocher.

I set my ship to orbit the asteroid and started in. That's when I learned that the entire economy of EVE online is based on* mining is an activity so boring that it's like someone drilling up your ass with a giant corkscrew. Only instead of excruciating pain, you feel overwhelmed by boredom.

I mean, I've used my mining to level my blacksmithing to 400 in World of Warcraft, I've played the various Mass Effect mineral gathering mini-games, and I once decided to find out exactly how many licks it would take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop (684), but I've never seen gameplay as boring as this. It's literally hitting the 'mine' button and watching your ship fire its laser at a rock for five minutes. THAT'S IT.

After taking my first haul to the station, I alt-tabbed and started chatting with my friend (she was laid off from BioWare's Austin studios a week or so back and is looking for a job) and then I pulled out my World of Darkness and Hunter: The Reckoning books and started working on a campaign I'm thinking of running. Next time I looked up, my ship was finished and it was back to the station.

This was what I did for 2 hours (and the pay is crap, even if I had three times the cargo space, I'd have made more running L1 missions) and I wasn't 'semi' AFK, I was totally AFK. I alt-tabbed out of EVE and was planning my epic X-Files rip-off in Word.

I suspect that someone will tell me that PVP is the heart of EVE and 'PVE' content like mining doesn't matter, but I disagree. Mining is rather vital to EVE's infrastructure and it's a gameplay element that's best enjoyed by wandering off and doing something else.

How has this existed in the game for so long? It's not some niche profession that the majority of players never sees or experiences. Heck, I suspect if you asked the average non-EVE gamer about EVE, they'd tell you it's a hardcore MMORPG where you backstab everyone and mine rocks for hours on end.

I know that I'm new to the game (and I understand many people reading will attribute this thread to my not getting what EVE is about) but this strikes me as poor game design. That mining isn't supposed to be the focus of the game isn't an excuse for mining to be 'click button and stare at screen for five minutes.'

I don't want this to be totally negative, so how about a suggestion.

When you mine, a bejeweled or tetris look-alike pops up and you play that. High scores get you bonuses to your mining yield.

Maybe you think that's sucks? That's okay. It's still better than nothing, which is basically what mining is right now.

Too long; didn't read: Mining is boring. Please do something with it.

* That was sloppy of me. I shouldn't have the entire economy was based on one thing.

You mined for 2h you must feel dirty after such a degrading activity. Why would you do such a lowly degrading task that doesn't pay well? The only way for you to even make any money doing this is to do it in parties with several other dedicated miners didn't you know?

(Minus the sarcasm there is actual advice in there)

I think it's fair for a game to demand patience, skill, and intelligence from a player. At the game time, I expect gameplay to be engaging on some level.

Whether mining is 'worth' it or not isn't what this thread is about, though I believe it's an important consideration, only whether mining itself is well-done.



Do they like mining because it's interesting, or do they like mining because they can talk to their corp members, read a book, or make some tea while doing it?

Mining is vital to the infrastructure of the game world. It might not be 'the' backbone, but EVE isn't designed to have a singular backbone. At least, as far as I'm aware.

What is the actual advice in there?

Mining with friends is fun? Yeah, if you're chatting with a bunch of people, that's fun. That says nothing about the activity of mining itself.

Mining is just as boring as mision running and ratting. The difference however is you can do mining while playing skyrim.

Which is why the nulsec is raging at highsec. How dare they do fun things while doing **** boring stuff while they are stuck actually keeping an eye on intel channels and local since all their bots don't work with the new UI.

You used to be able to mine in this way: scan down a combat exploration site with drones in it, warp in, slaughter the drones whilst paying attention to the game and almost having fun, loot all of the wrecks (OK, it was not a perfect alternative), and then refine the contents.

Instead of saying "oh my Gosh, we never should have opened the drone regions, now they've invaded all of EVE!" and making this the new way to mine, CCP eliminated this fun way of mining so that fully AFK mining could be more profitable.

Wut? Mining is boring? Wow, that got me by surprise here, didn´t see that coming...
I mean, seriously, who could have guessed?

If it happens it will replace moon goo.

Well, they said one option is for ring mining to produce moon materials. But they never said if that would be in addition to moon mining, or instead of moon mining, or if moon mining would start making different stuff, or something new, or... we just do not know!