Missions & Complexes

I've been wrong plenty of times in my life, but I can think of few times I've been more wrong than thinking mining missions might be an enjoyable change of pace from regular mining.

I've only done a single cycle of the L2 mining missions, but... wow. Who in CCP thought that placing the target rocks 70-100km from the warp-in point would be a good idea to do for ships that go under 100m/s and have a difficult time fitting a prop mod?

My Retty maxes out at 92m/s, without mods or rigs. With a trio of Nanofiber Internal Structure I's, I can push that up to 110.7 m/s. The nearest roid I had to get to was 73km from the beacon. The furthest was 96km.

To get to that 73km roid with the mods takes 11 minutes. The 96km roid mission was just shy of 15 minutes. Add on 6-12 minutes on top of that for the actual mining, and the missions take 25-35 minutes each, half (or more) of which is spent waiting for your ship to get to the roid.

So in the L2's, for an average of 30 minutes' of the most mind-numbing task in existence (slow-boating), I get... 200-300k ISK and 200-300 LP.

I did several mining missions, hoping that it was just one or two bad apples that could be avoided in the future. Nope, they are all that way.

I'd like to ask two questions, now:

To the players of EvE, do L4 mining missions become worth it? Or are they just as pointless as the L2's?

To CCP and the mission planners, was it honestly your intent to make mining missions this way, where you spend your time simply slow-boating to the roid? Mining is dull enough as it is; give us a break on the missions, would you?

Needless to say, without some changes to how mining missions are done, I will never do another, and I hope that my own uselessly-wasted time will serve as a warning to anyone else who is considering to do mining missions.

How much ore did you have to mine? Is it possible the mission was like a L2 combat mission and meant to be done in the mining cruisers? I realize it would require jetcaning and using a hauler, but for a low level mission that would kind of make sense as low level mining required that before the barge changes. If this is the norm for them though, here's hoping they introduce a cruiser sized mining ship when the revamp the cruisers or they revamp the missions as that is just stupid.

Honest questions as I've never done mining missions, and won't ever try them from the sounds of it.

What about bookmarking target asteroid, warp out, then warp back to it at 0km?

I have a hunch they're in deadspace pockets behind acceleration gates.

I've done only 2 mining missions, not so much to be sure - but they both were in common space, no gates.

I honestly didn't try that; I'm so used to doing security missions and FW plexes (on my main) that this completely slipped my mind. I'll give it a try a bit later today, likely, but I don't hold out a lot of hope for it.

I wouldn't be surprised if these missions were older than the ORE ships. Like, let's-design-this-for-an-osprey old. And never looked at again, because no one does them enough to complain about them.


... in all mining missions ever?

I wonder how hard one person would have to yell and push to get others to join them, in order to get these missions looked at again. I would love to have a diversion from the monotony of straight mining in a belt, where you need to do a bit more hands-on work to get the mining done, but mining missions right now are not it.

Then again, it may simply not be possible to improve mining. Eh, well.

I just ran a few missions to see if it was possible to bookmark and warp back, and oddly enough, the warp-ins are now fairly close to the asteroids in question. I don't know if something was changed (I'll have to take a look at the dev posts about the patches), or if the difference is that I'm in a different system doing them now (L2 mining missions + storyline agent in the same station == much less traveling for the storylines)

I haven't had a chance to test bookmarking, but the warp-ins are now blessedly near.

I've flown almost a hundred level 3 mining missions. Of the 7 on the EVE Survival missions wiki, I've done the 6 that don't involve ice, many times each (I think the ice one can't spawn in the regions I've missioned in), and I've never had any asteroids further than 30 km from the warp-in point. Usually I only have to move 3-10 km to get within range of all the asteroids I have to mine. That's still slow in a 100 m/s Mackinaw, though, so I've managed to fit a T1 AfterBurner on it, just about doubling its speed.

But 70-100 km? I've never seen that, in any level 3 mining mission.