EVE General Discussion

the smartest miners don't use d, they only need to overview to be visible while moving anyway.

I'm not seeing how your points matter to what i was saying.
Maybe you just want to add things?
I mean, i don't recognize them as arguments against or for something.

You say non-afk miners aren't afk. That's true!
I was only talking about afk people, not non-afk people.
Anyone who isn't afk ... isn't afk ... and it'll show one way or another.

It doesn't matter if observers perceive him as afk or not ...
... and once observers turn into influencers, it'll be revealed anyway.

A chatting miner isn't afk and he's influencing society actively.
There's a difference between participating and actively influencing.


I'm trying to communicate that we as a society need to move away from some wrong beliefs that hinder us as a whole.
They stop us from evolving our culture and cause long term negative effects.

Being afk by definition means "not playing" and all arguments people bring up FOR afk play are nonsense ...
... because you can not ever play a game by not playing it. Being logged in doesn't mean you're playing.

(The only true exception being the afk cloaker, tbhl because he manages to influence society massively simply through psychological effects. A fascinating exception, if you think about it)


hope i got that right, i'm a bit in a hurry.

Yes. Hell, I do that when I want to do some mining, though I'll admit to relying more on local and experience in my neck of the woods rather than D-Scan.

These people decided to follow a career dealing with lines of code rather than dealing with people... I already question their sanity. But to each their own, right? /shrug

When I mine, it's because I need something that I can do in EvE while doing something else - usually reading.

I also control my industry and market resources remotely while mining, as well as participating in various chats.

It doesn't take much to keep an eye on your system.

Gadget

TBH those particular comments were in reply to Lucy, not your post

But you are correct, I'm not actually disagreeing with *you*.

Just pointing out some things to the other people reading along here, to make them realize that even though *all* of the miners *seem* afk - many of them really aren't - some of them really *are* playing - even if they are indistinguishable from the bots surrounding them to most of the PvP players attempting to interact with them.

I have two points to talk about this. I have played a lot (for a decade I could play 14+ hours a day), with many accounts and got experience in several EvE's fields.

In particular, I have been hit by the screaming differences in EvE minigames design. About mining, I used to have my own Orca + freighter + multi-exhumer fleet (I posted my accounts usage some pages ago).

Best design ever is in NPC nullsec and WHs and FW small scale roaming, it's vastly superior to ANY other MMO experience including today's sci-fi alternatives (which also, have extensively played).

On the other side, EvE's mining (as I say since 8 years) is the worst piece of manure ever conceived. Like the similarly bad L4 missioning, it's literally bottable content . CCP indeed had to decimate thousands of bots in the past.

Sure, a guy CAN make mining somewhat more active by inventing ways to stay awake / chat with friends etc but the mechanic per se is just sick.

In 2 EvE competitors (one is a long living MMO), mining is much more (re)active, you are constantly going to do stuff. In one of those games you can be also attacked all the time both by deadly (i.e. not easily ignored) NPCs and - of course - players and you can kill them 1 v 1 (no sitting duck syndrome). In the other, you carry multiple sensors to activate and manage, constantly re-evaluate the area because it depletes fast, move on etc. etc. Both of those competitors, fill in a ship hold in a relatively short time span and then you have to do stuff.
EvE is all unlike that. There have been EvE versions where I could park a ship for 42 or so minutes and let it auto-play.

This means, defective game design imo.
Players can "patch" this design by scanning (welcome to ice mining though), circling around roids, running in pretend-anti-gank patterns and so on. But that's just about somebody being bored enough and screaming to do something.

---

Second game design defect: why do I write: "But that's just about somebody being bored enough and screaming to do something?"

Because I have also paid mercs to defend my mining fleet. Paid mercs to kill competition's mining fleets. And personally ganked people's mining ships.

What do the above activities have in common? They ARE content, the epic EvE content everybody fills their mouth with.

Well... what I have found out is... "getting a friend" is utter rubbish.

Due to mining bad design, those friends need to stay at top notch attention for hours, including PAINFUL constant checking hi sec local chat for known and unknown hostiles. This can be mitigated for roids mining, but ice mining forces fleets to sit into high ships turnover systems.

Typical pro mining (I am talking about 2-20 billions made with mining a month) involves 8+ hours a day for the whole month.

Find me a friend... no... find me a marthyr who is going to keep 110% attentive for this duration. I have known many, but nobody would submit himself to such torture.

That's where mercs come in. Most mercs corp downright refuse miners defend jobs (I have played "borrowed merc" for a bit with a bunch of German friends, it's incredibly fun!!! ) because they are NOT fun and generally bad paid.

Of course hiring mercs has a cost too, but let's ignore this for a moment.

The hard truth is: even with mercs you cannot make sure you don't lose ships. A determined ganker IS going to take down at least 1 low EHP exhumer. Obvious remedies is to sacrifice exhumer efficiency for tank and / or use a different, natively high EHP ship. Other measures is using smart orbiting / alignment etc.... but the ganker is not stupid, he's not going to attack when you are fully attentive. Even aligned, you ARE going to be unable to be 100% attentive for 8h a day, nor to be responsive on 4+ ships (+ Orca + freighter) at the same time, all day long.
I have seen ganks going through mercs and ewar drones, there's nothing able to stop a determined disruptor (often a competitor's merc(s)). Sure, from now on that pilot is blacklisted and blah blah but right now you are sitting with a popped ship and mercs to pay.

Even worse, if you put 3-4 coordinated gankers, just forget defending ships, even with double the mercs than the gankers. You are going to lose 1-2. Losing 1-2 is going to disrupt the perfect timing that allows for superior income rate.


Wasn't having "friends" and high efficiency / low EHP high micromanagement ships (i.e. Hulk) the "pro way" to play EvE? No, in the end it's not worth it. Checked and re-checked on both sides of the fight.

So:

- you played abiding to best EvE practices, finding friends / mercs.
- you are orbiting / staying aligned

=>

calculating costs : benefits : effort you are marginally more effective than a noob in an AFK Skiff.

This imo is another EvE game design flaw.


Friends in hi sec MUST be put in position to:

- provide large advantage, not just some advantage. In defense, not just offense like it's now.
- play. That is, if I bring friends, then they want to play (duh!), not to sit down semi-AFK themselves for 8 hours).
Make mining take less time like in the other games, so the mining squad goes in with the defenders squad. Do their stuff say in half an hour. Then off they go, for the day. Put some max limits / timer on roids or something so this half hour worth of job can't be duplicated for hours and hours and voilà, we have meaningful and fun gameplay for everybody.

The point is, apparently the "if they enjoy it" portion is showing some issue

I imagine it depends how many people are using mining as a way to pay for "Chat Room Online" to keep in touch with their friends - since making it an active mini-game (particularly one that required friends being physically there with you) would drive all such players out of mining, and possibly out of the game if they weren't willing to start paying subscription fees...

PI is quite a bit harder to set up *and* to keep running if you want to PLEX with that as your sole source of income...


edit: I mean even in the EVE universe people figure out how to mine an asteroid within their first hour or so generally....

I *still* don't know how to "properly" set up a PI network - as I quit bothering to care when they deleted all my planets from the original PI release and re-released it in a much more complicated and annoying format...

And if I wanted to spend a few *hours* setting up a PI network *and then* a few more *hours* every week hauling expensive PI materials through whatever hostile space I chose to set it up in to get a decent return *and* I found or conquered a friendly POCO (or at least one with a reasonable tax rate), maybe I'd bother to look at them...

And if that is *your* thing - then more power to you...

But uh...For me? No thanks...I'll stick to blowing up idiots and looting the PI goods from their wreckage for myself, personally...

And most high-sec miners choose that profession because it is simple and uncomplicated - so I doubt it is a viable career choice for the majority of them as well... The ones who *are* interested in doing PI *already do it* - in addition to their mining.... So taking away one of their sources of income and telling them to just make it up using the other one? Doesn't help them...

True, but that does not grant them special standings in the gaming community.



The industrialist who is paid for what he provides. Again, no special standing.



Nobody is saying they should stop. However, it would be nice if they understood the nature of the game you are playing.

1. Eve is a sandbox game.
2. Do what you want.
3. However, if you are imprudent, either via ignorance or just not caring, somebody may very well show you how imprudent you were by blowing up/taking your stuff.

And we have people in this very thread saying, "I don't like that." That, by definition, is an example of the person playing the wrong game.

Look everyone! Dracvlad built a nice straw man!