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Beginning Miner
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Pugzilla Black
ACE Salvage Company
#41 - 2011-12-10 01:41:57 UTC
Akita T wrote:
Why on Earth would you ever entertain the idea of a player on a trial account that mining might even remotely be a good idea ?
You should spare him the indignity and utter skull-crushing boredom that is mining and direct him towards just about ANYTHING ELSE instead. .


Kind of harsh, but I agree. Real mining starts when you get a T2 barge and an Orca. I have both, but my real fun is going exploring in my Typhoon and blasting thing I find on probe runs.
Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#42 - 2011-12-10 04:53:38 UTC  |  Edited by: Akita T
Mortis vonShadow wrote:
Shut up. I'm a solo miner, am I afraid??? Oh, and I have 54mil skill points in combat related skills too and yes this is my main. I also run two other clients and enjoy my time mining alone. I don't do other things while mining, except read the forums and keep up with what alliance is doing what or to whom. Those that read books or watch movies while mining are the ones that get ganked.

Gee, you'd think all the conditionals would have been clear enough for everybody, but apparently, they weren't.

First off, you're obviously not a newbie so the vast majority of the post you seem upset about does not apply to you at all in the first place.
It's one thing to try out quite a few professions and then settle on being a part-time miner, it's another different thing to be a newbie that focuses on mining to the detriment of almost everything else.

Second, there is a HUGE difference between what can be achieved by a fresh-out-of-trial-account solo miner on one hand and a relatively competent if somewhat mediocre-skilled solo Hulk pilot on the other, not to speak of a fully realized miner operating in a larger-scale op (with at least an Orca included in the big mix).
The OP was inquiring about something like the foremost, you would fit much closer to the latest.

Last, there's very little difference in the attention you can direct at the game when reading and responding to forum posts compared to being engaged in reading a book. I don't see how you can think of yourself as better protected against surprise gankers.

P.S. It's also funny how you end up giving almost exactly the same recommendations that I gave to the OP regarding what's better for his friend in your next (unquoted) paragraph of your reply. Specifically, to stay away from mining.

Akita T evewiki profile | | | Build your own EVE-ready PC
Rip Minner
ARMITAGE Logistics Salvage and Industries
#43 - 2011-12-10 06:03:37 UTC
Weaselior wrote:
whats the best ship to gank a cruiser with i don't know cruiser ehp offhand



A Destroyer.

Is it a rock point a lazer at it and profit. Is it a ship point a lazer at it and profit. I dont see any problems here.
Alaric Faelen
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#44 - 2011-12-11 19:09:18 UTC
oh the peen waving. I'm not a miner either but do what you like. I can mine albeit at a mediocre level. I trained it because the corp I was in ran some mining ops on sundays, so I trained up to participate while mostly watching football on tv and chatting. It's a non-competition past time. See, some people can exist without the whole 'I'm better than you' attitude and need to prove it.

Mining itself, is miserably dull. As in hauling, as is manufacturing and market PvP----FOR ME. Strangely enough, I'm not everyone though....

Mining is great for newbs, you can spend time reading guides, meeting people in space, all the while every hour or so a message for a new skill learned pops up. Low end rats provide combat experience for the total newbie- how to set up an overview, how to consider various modules, the finer points of drone control.

Mostly it's just social. I learned a lot about Eve from that mining fleet boss just chatting during a roid raping.

Mining is also the ground floor of manufacturing, which is arguably more important than PvP, since that's where all the ships and modules come from. Again, I'm not into that part of Eve, but it's certainly viable.

PvPers are the people that liked shooter games, Miners/Industrialists are the people that liked Sim City and Capitalism. Apparently they don't get along (yeah, whatever)

My humble advice- consider the whole long term career. If your pal likes industry and number crunching, then mining is a solid place to start and represents the FiS part of what can largely be done in station. Like most people, if that person sticks with Eve, they will probably like to try other things too, possibly finding a whole new niche and abandoning mining.

Remember, in Eve it's not 'wrong' to train anything and everything. It's not power gaming, but that's for dorks. I don't mind a toon (I only play with one toon, one account) with spread out skills- means I got to try more than one thing in this huge game. I haven't mined in months, but don't regret the time I spent doing that (as again, it was mostly a social context) nor the time spent training a couple mining skills up.

Here's a novel idea-- play the game however the heck you want to. Ignore the trolls, their e-peens are knotted and bent, like a shillelagh.
Flurk Hellbron
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#45 - 2011-12-12 01:18:08 UTC
Waaawww,

Maybe let a newcomer search for himself what he can become in a 21 day sub.
Michus Danether
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#46 - 2011-12-12 23:40:50 UTC
When I started my career as a pod pilot in 2006 one of the first things I did was get a Bantam and put mining lasers on it. I had joined a corporation at the same time and went to go mine with them in a highsec belt. I was awed at the size and power of my corpmate's mining barge, and there were two other guys there in an Osprey and an Iteron.

From that moment on, with the EVE music playing and the thrumming, slithering hum of the strip miners devouring rock after rock, I was hooked.

We tried a small mining op to The Big Blue space while the alliance was still alive; I was amazed to find Crokite and after doing the value calculations I was floored, Crokite was SO MUCH BETTER than plagioclase, and there were two other ores rumoured to be even deeper in null security space, Arkanor and Bistot...

It was less than two weeks later that I had bid farewell to my corpmates and joined a nullsec corporation which was a part of the Interstellar Starbase Syndicate. I finally got my barge, joined a mining up full of hulks and went to town on a belt of ABC. There were battleship npc pirates, dozens of mining ships, lasers everywhere! The hooks went deeper.

A month later I was ratting like a pro, moving from a missile ferox to a raven, I was thrilled. Once I was even tasked with the dangerous task of escorting our corp freighter through null. Sounded dangerous but important.

One Muffin Factory logon trap later I was down a raven, but at least the freighter had made it out. The raven loss hurt, and the hooks stung but didn't let go. I wanted to revenge them and the hooks went deeper.

I'll spare the rest of this very long story, but bottom line is: Don't be afraid to start your career as a miner. I did, and never looked back.

(Mind you this was when Zydrine still went for 4,000 a pop :P )
Zaalphenia
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#47 - 2011-12-13 00:53:15 UTC
Akita T wrote:
Joshua Aivoras wrote:
Or you could just, you know, let him do what he finds fun.
Don't lie to him, of course. But if mining what he wants to do, by all means let him do it. In fact, the unavailability of mining barges/exhumers at a trial level could be an extra incentive to actually get a sub.
If he is interested in mining, the Caldari Osprey is the best he could do on a trial account.

Statistically speaking, the overwhelmingly vast majority of people that genuinely enjoy mining are either those that play EVE mostly while doing something else (and they don't really enjoy the mining itself so much but rather the fact they can make some ISK while being semi-idle or chatting with other people while doing it) or those that are regularly part of a mining op where 99% of the fun is the chat channel. They could be doing anything else and they'd still find it fun, but they don't have the time for anything else.

The problem with newcomers is that they THINK mining MIGHT be a good idea just because they don't know better (ESPECIALLY people that want to do it solo or in a very small group). They THINK they like mining, but in reality, they're merely afraid of doing anything else. And yes, after getting their skill-less ass whooped in one of the few harder L1 missions or failing to follow the tutorial or career funnel instructions (if they even finished the tutorial or funnel missions), mining might LOOK like a vaguely reasonable idea, but it seldom is.

Almost every second freaking newbie (if not more than that) thinks at some point in the first few days that mining is sort of nice, especially if they don't bother running the career funnel missions.
Heck, back in the days I started, there was only a brief tutorial and then it was "do whatever", and I did (very briefly) consider mining myself.
Thankfully, I tried some other stuff soon enough, and then in comparison, mining seemed junk quite fast.

Mining is a McJob.
It's slow, it's boring, it's low-skills and low-pay.
If they TRULY want a McJob, then they can have it.
But if they THINK they want a McJob because they're afraid to try anything else (because they're afraid they'll fail at it) then it's your responsibility to point out the error of their way and slap them into EVE-reality.


You know, up until recently I would agree with this. However, this week was the first time I went into low-sec and null-sec. I actually went out looking for a fight and I haven't even played a month. All I had done up until now was mine. After my first week I set up 2 accounts to start training mining skills. I did this because stress on ISK is readily apparent when you look at ship prices, and I also did it because mining, in my opinion, is the easiest thing in the game to get in to. I am not afraid to do ANYTHING in this game anymore. However, due to the lack of help, and the lack of knowledge or if you have a hard time learning in any way other than by someone explaining it and answering questions as they come up, mining is the obvious choice. Mining takes little to no knowledge of the game or fitting to do, go to a belt clear it, haul it and be done with it. People choose mining for whatever they want. Maybe they're like me and have given up on trying to find anyone to help them learn the game so they just do what's obviously easy.

If there were more able bodies willing to "hand-hold" rookie pilots like me, there'd be a lot less miners. Alas, there isn't, and people like me ship spin while looking for a corp, even though finding a good active corp with all the MMO hopping is next to impossible, or just go mine belts and suck at it but actually are doing something in the game because we love the game and dont want to lose hope so we do whatever we can no matter how minimal it is. I'd love to go out ratting, or do incursions, or pvp or do missions. But I have no idea what to train, how to fit, or how to play....so I mine. Because I am actually getting to do something.
Aggressive Nutmeg
#48 - 2011-12-13 03:16:00 UTC
Tau Cabalander wrote:
I'm one of the 0.01% that enjoys mining. I never mine AFK. I nearly always mine solo (well, with my 7 account fleet).

No, I suspect you're one of the 0.01% that admits to enjoying mining. The forum trolls and loudmouths have ensured that everybody knows it is très uncool to mine. Nobody wants to admit to being uncool!

Never make eye contact with someone while eating a banana.
Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#49 - 2011-12-13 03:19:42 UTC
Zaalphenia wrote:
I'd love to go out ratting, or do incursions, or pvp or do missions. But I have no idea what to train, how to fit, or how to play....so I mine. Because I am actually getting to do something.

There's a whole forum section dedicated to (mostly) mission-running : "Missions & Complexes".
There are sites that tell you exactly what to expect in each mission, so you know which hardeners to fit for best tanking power and which ammo type to pick for best damage output, sites like eve-survival.org or eveinfo.com (not just that, but a lot of other things too).
A whole lot more resources in the stickies there.
Plus, there's also the wiki : http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Missions_guide as a starting point (the wiki is full of a lot of other stuff).

There's another whole forum section dedicated to (mostly) ship fitting : "Ships & Modules".
Again, many sites that help too, like, say, battleclinic.com (in particular, http://eve.battleclinic.com/browse_loadouts.php for this).
And there's also always EFT ( https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=24359 ) so you can play around.

And surprisingly, there's also a whole forum section about skills that can be trained and in what order and for what purpose : "Skill Discussions".
You might also want to get EVE-Mon to help with that ( http://evemon.battleclinic.com/ ) as far as planning and supervision goes.
And then, there's always also the recommended certificates for each ship, most of the skills in there (with very few exceptions) are a really good idea to train as soon as possible in order to properly fly that particular ship.

You might not consider it very surprising to find out that EVE-Mon, EFT and the battleclinic loadout pages actually work quite well together (you can import a battleclinic loadout into EVE-Mon to fiddle with the training order of skills you need to use all listed items, you can import it into EFT to see how skills or implants affect it).

...

All in all, mission-running is rather trivial, and with not very much skill training and just a bit of patience, it can become almost just as safe as mining, from a practical standpoint.
The easiest/cheapest/fastest progression as far as mission-running is concerned is probably the Caldari missileboat route : Kestrel (you can actually skip that, alongside skipping L1 missions), Caracal (great for all L2s and even good enough for some L3s), Drake (awesome for most L3s even with minimal skills, decent enough even for L4s with more skills), then either Nighthawk, Raven, CNR, Golem or Tengu (depending on funding and/or preferences).

After a couple of months of skilltraining from SCRATCH, blitzing L3 combat mission in a Drake at virtually no risk should give you more ISK per hour than you can get mining in a Hulk in highsec, and training for that takes even longer (plus the ship is noticeably more expensive ; the Covetor is cheaper, true, but the skill training requirements are almost identical).

Even courier missions (for which you really only need a smidge of standings and an industrial ship only for the higher levels) pay better sooner than mining, have the benefit of increasing your standings AND require next to no skill training whatsoever. In fact, if you're on a regular account (not trial), you could probably be running L3 missions in an industrial the next day after you activated the account.

...

You really don't need somebody to hold your hand while you do any of that, you can do it all alone by reading what others have posted before for the benefit of people like you.
You only need to read, and apply what you read.

Akita T evewiki profile | | | Build your own EVE-ready PC
Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#50 - 2011-12-13 03:27:15 UTC
Aggressive Nutmeg wrote:
Tau Cabalander wrote:
I'm one of the 0.01% that enjoys mining. I never mine AFK. I nearly always mine solo (well, with my 7 account fleet).

No, I suspect you're one of the 0.01% that admits to enjoying mining. The forum trolls and loudmouths have ensured that everybody knows it is très uncool to mine. Nobody wants to admit to being uncool!

It's only "très uncool" to mine outside of a mining op with less than 2 pilots of your own in that op and PRETEND you're making any serious amounts of ISK.

Using 5+ accounts to mine, that's actually pretty allright. 7 is even borderline cool.
Mining AFK in a capital ship in highsec, now that's pretty cool too.
Mining AFK with a fleet of capital ships, that's actually awesome (and stupid if outside of highsec, but awesome nevertheless).

Also, mining because you can't spare the attention to do anything else that might make you ISK, that's ok too. Not cool, but ok.

Akita T evewiki profile | | | Build your own EVE-ready PC
Woo Glin
State War Academy
Caldari State
#51 - 2011-12-13 04:29:42 UTC
I make almost 4M per hour mining in hisec.
Alaric Faelen
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#52 - 2011-12-13 15:28:42 UTC
While I do agree that mining quickly gets overshadowed by other incomes- remember that mining is often just the ends to the means of manufacture. It's the FiS part of the game for indy types. These folk build our ships and modules so I don't dismiss them lightly.
Like many players, I quit mining early on because I prefer seeing explosions in space, but that slow pace of mining was great in those first few weeks to get to flatten some of that learning curve. I knew no one in this game, and nothing really about the game before playing- especially things like Align To, drone aggression rules, PvP rules from can flippers, weapon ranges, etc..
You'll figure all that out in combat mission running too, but that takes many more skills and having a grasp of which ones to train and when (something else I learned while sitting in front of a roid and reading guides).

By the time you can make decent money with mining, or it becomes just a way to manufacture items, you'll know whether you like it or not. I'll still show up for corp mining ops in my barge to just chat and swap lies about epic space battles. No need to have a max'd skill investment, I can dust off a ship I haven't used in months and still pull in my share of the pebbles.

I'll never be a dedicated miner- nor industrialist nor alliance chief nor many other things in Eve. But I don't think it's terrible and certainly it's not my place to tell others how to play a sandbox game. I may find raping roids boring, but it's still better than multi accounts and a horde of alts to mostly hump EFT numbers. So to each his own.
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