EVE General Discussion

Two people - a carebear and an EVE industralist - are mining in Mackinaws in high security space. Suddenly a fleet of ten Catalysts appears, piloted by outlaws. Each Mackinaw is targetted by five of them, pointed before they can warp out, and reduced to scrap metal. CONCORD arrives on the scene and gives the Catalysts a red card, blowing all of them to smithereens.


The Carebear Approach:

The carebear returns from their AFK and he sees himself in the clone bay in the station in the system. He complains loudly in local chat about the unfair treatment, sits in his pod in the local station, file GM petitions accusing the Catalyst pilots of cheating and logs off and posts a forum rant about being harrassed.

Sometimes he also does one of the following:
- Begs in local
- Threatens to get his nullsec main character to wardec the Catalyst pilots
- Threatens real life consequences against the Catalyst pilots or makes derogatory comments about the players involved (not the characters but the players)
- Gets into another Mackinaw and starts mining in the same place again
- Complains 'That ship was everything I owned'.

Three months later, he hasn't learned anything, and the net result of the Catalyst attack is that he lost a 250m Mack fit and a 300m pod.


The EVE industrialist

Firstly, our EVE industrialist follows the first rule of EVE - never undock in a ship you cannot afford to lose - and so the lost Mackinaw, whilst perhaps a painful loss, won't be more than a quarter of her assets. If she couldn't afford the loss, she'd have flown a tech 1 ship instead.
She also follows the third rule of EVE - never be AFK when not docked or behind a POS shield, so her pod warps out before anyone can pop her (much cheaper) implants.

She asks herself three questions.
"What could I have done to avoid this trap?"
"OK, I lost my ship, what's the most I can quickly salvage from this bad situation?".
And finally "Are there long-term profit opportunities in this for me?"

She addresses the second first - she warps to a nearby station, reships into a Myrmidon (the tankiest ship she has handy), fits Salvager 2 modules, and loots and salvages her destroyed ship, the Catalysts, and then salvages and finally loots the carebear's ship, invoking a yellow card from Crimewatch (but who will attack a suspect-flagged Myrmidon in an asteroid belt, looks like an obvious trap there). She then returns to station with a third of her losses recovered.

The EVE industrialist then asks around for help from other players as to how she could have avoided the Catalyst trap as she hasn't got the PVP experience to answer this herself. She is told 'check D-scan' and 'tank your Mack better' by more experienced players in local. So she puts training Cruiser Construction 5 on hold to train how to fit a Damage Control II module and, not understanding how D-scan would be useful, looks up a D-scan tutorial on Youtube and decides 'in future, 4 or more Catalysts within 5AU means I stop mining and insta-warp out'. Of course this lowers her mining yield somewhat as she is spooked by Catalysts that had other targets, but to save a 200m+ ship she thinks losing a small amount of yield is worth it.

Finally, she looks at the third question. Judging by the other comments in local chat, he and the carebear were not the only people to lose Mackinaws and Hulks to Catalyst gangs in this system recently - there seems to be an epidemic of it. She considers the potential to profit from this increased demand for Mackinaws, Hulks, Catalysts, Small Neutron Blaster I's, Magnetic Stabilizer I's, Small Hybrid Burst Aerators, Warp Scrambler I's, Warp Disruptor I's and looks into what is involved in producing those. After some quick research, she decides that making mining barges requires too much capital and so she decides to invest 60m ISK and a fortnight of her POS science slots to researching ten Catalyst BPOs. WIthin weeks she is selling 150 Catalysts a day in the system, with a cool 200k markup on each one, while her own mining operations (which increasingly she is less reliant upon as a source of income with all the Catalyst production) take place four jumps away in a quieter system where local seldom has more than eight people in it.

When the Catalyst sales start dropping off as the anti-mining gangs move to other systems, she then cashes out, selling her Catalyst BPOs for a tidy profit to other industrialists desparate to make ISK out of the miner extermination campaign. She then puts all of this ISK together and invests in what she could not afford before - a 2500m ISK well researched Retriever BPO - and offers a courier contract at a high price (with a 3b collateral) to take this BPO to the new site of the miner extermination campaign.

Within three months of the Catalyst gang attack, she's turned a painful loss into a massive business and is on the way to becoming spacerich.

The industrialist doesn't mine.

Mining is peasant work.

That is how I operate too. Although I PVP and do t2 production on the same character.

I do however occasionally board a mining barge. It's to blend in while passive targetting and scanning possible New Order targets, and providing a warpin point (and ensuring Crimewatch redcards anyone that fires an ECM burst at the Catalyst heroes, leading to a satisfying CONCORDOOKEN)

Someone who really knew what they were doing wouldn't need to be mining in the first place, but if they did they would have defensive rigs, a damage control, an invuln and a small shield booster running permanently and would have laughed at the suicide gankers after they failed.

An in-corp (or in-duel) and in-fleet buddy with multiple webs (this can be another exhumer, incidentally) makes staying aligned (I'd suggest to a bm, not a celestial) almost painless, and makes it substantially more effective.

Also requires alts who aren't *GASP* mining.

So, for a group who, as a whole isn't willing to drop 1 MLU to protect a 200m ISK investment to have non-mining alts...



Anyway (since we seem to be playing the funny anecdote game), as an industrialist, I recently bought a Freighter because I was tired of taking multiple trips from my station to my POS in the Itty V... so there's that.

I still cannot fly any hauler larger than an Itty 3.

Why bother when I can outsource my hauling tasks to the useful idiots that take courier contracts for a pittance? Besides, with a fairly high bounty on my head I'm not a huge fan of flying ships that are almost untankable.

I've never seen another player that wasn't a miner while mining. Are there no Oceanic time based gankers?

But the gankers are already producing everything they need. They are also faster than you when it comes to salvaging/looting the graveyard.

Carebear checking in!

I dont even really understand why this is a discussion... Everyone (should) knows that there are really no "set" terms on a player, weather its carebear, pirate, empire hugger, 0.0 dweller or merc. The more people you ask what the different term "means" the more different answers you will get.

As an example.
Quite recently my corp got accused of being "naughty pirates". Why? Because we did not approve of someone coming into the WH we occupy and doing the sites. In my own opinion thats not piracy, thats defending your terretory and resourses. But for the person who got blown up, we are pirates. And believe me this is not the first time i have heard this one

So why do i call my self a carebear? Because i dont enjoy the idea of destroying someone elses ship/pixels.
This does not mean that no carebears likes to PVP, and it does not mean that there is no truth to the...ideas people have about what makes someone a carebear. But i would like to think that people would accept that just because one person they met acted like this, it does not mean that everyone else that has the same "title" thinks or feels the same way.