EVE New Citizens Q&A

"Semi AFK" mining is not compatible with any other task that requires your actual attention. Unless your paid work is watching movies with half your brain, don't try mining. You will be far better off running a L4 mission or two during your coffee break, or setting up speculative trading.

Once you get to three characters, you will be continually paying attention to the game to transfer ore before ore holds fill up, hauling ore back to station, moving to new belts, or otherwise tending to your fleet. You will need to pay about 30 seconds of attention to the game every five to ten minutes. So unless your "real" job is compatible with your thoughts being elsewhere, you will find that your "real" job and your mining job both suffer.

Speculative hauling works well with limited attention: tank your hauler, carry a minimal value of goods, and rely on autopilot routes that don't pass through Uedama or Niarja, and avoid Jita like the plague. As your trade hauling becomes more profitable, you can start paying other people to haul for you.

I love blockade runners, because you can make them fast or hardy depending on whether you're at-keyboard or AFK.

Mining maxes out at about 20M ISK/hr per mining ship, with boosts. This requires your constant attention since your ore hold will be filling up very quickly. With the same amount of attention, you can be making 60M ISK/hr with each character by running L4 missions. So when you are on a coffee break, run a mission. If you spend 15 minutes doing that, you've made as much ISK as you would have if you had been mining for an hour.

Mission-running is scalable up to the point where your characters are blowing up targets faster than you can switch clients. You can also start a mission, clear a room, get back to work, come back and clear another room, work some more while your ship autopilots back to station, etc.

"Safe" semi-AFK mission ships include any battleship with long range weaponry and a MJD: you might go for a T2 sentry Dominix with 740DPS, which can be built for well under 500M ISK, or a T2 & faction Machariel, or a marauder, or … you get the idea. The nice thing about the Machariel is that it has the warp speed advantage, so you won't spend so much time warping to and fro.

So rather than mining semi-AFK, I would recommend trading (or "speculative hauling") or mission-running as better alternatives.

You make a lot of good points, but it really depends on your job (and your ambitions I suppose). Customer call center - no problem. Time spent in corporate conference calls - no problem. A 30 second distraction every 10 minutes while doing web development - probably not a problem. Trying to work on the next great novel - definite problem.

The nice thing about mining is that you can get into it almost right from the start of your Eve life. Getting a boat and the skills that can run lvl 4 missions without a lot of attention is going to take a while. Plus, if you get distracted while mining in a tanked ship you just miss a few cycles. Get distracted in Angel Extravagance and it might be an embarrassing kill mail.

I wouldn't try to talk anyone into mining, but I don't see a need to talk them out of it either, if it's something they enjoy. Different strokes and all that.

Do you have a fit for an auto-pilot BR? I always assumed people would gank them on principle since they can't tell when they're empty.