EVE Search - Why do people mine? Seriously.

Roger Dew wrote:

I've been playing Eve for about 2 and a half years now, time has flown by and it doesn't seem like that long ago that I would laugh at my mates for playing MMOs. That said, I'm here and still enjoying it (to a point!)

I have a few accounts and do what I need to play the game. I don't think it costs that much to get involved in PVP but the ethos of bigger=better is always there and of course you must have an X-type fitted Vindicator in amongst your PVP assets even if it's never undocked before.

However, to reach these goals we must either endure, running missions/plex/exploration/incursions and what not. Or we must buy plex. But there is the other side of Eve that enjoys Spreadsheets online. The miners/industrialists.

I have never understood why you would sit mining an asteroid belt solo making 10m per hour at the most (unless you're in 0.0 hidden belts) to fund your PVP activities. Just recently I did some belt ratting in a tier 3 BC to up my sec status, and actually made an average of 20m per hour, at which point I'm not even trying to get ISK, I'm just trying to repair SS.

I was curious to this mining thing. So made 3x buddy accounts to train for mining barges. I already had a guy that can fly an Orca, so I bought one of them along with a few covetors and now I'm 950m down. That's ok, they're assets and will be counted as such on a balance sheet.

I head to the highsec belts, knowing full well not to expect great fortune, however comforted in people telling me hi-sec ores are worth nearly as much as the null sec offerings.

So I start up a movie on my laptop (This is England) expecting to click a few buttons over the next 2 hours and end up with a bunch of rocks. Wrong. Mining requires micromanagement! The cycle time on my strippers being just under 2 minutes meant I had; at most, 2 minutes free at a time. But after a few cycles and some rocks getting eaten quicker it's to the point that you have to constantly be activating them, that's not even including jettisoning the ore and then tractoring it with the Orca.

So the movie finishes about 2 hours later and I check my items hanger. 39m worth of Ore. Holy ****. That is OREful.

Now I'm sure a professional rock eater must be able to increase the efficiency of what I was doing, however then you're at the point where you're constantly watching the screen, and you might aswell be doing something that rewards your concentration. A well fit battleship costs 1/2 that of an Orca, and in 0.0 you can do anomolies that will make you more than 60m per hour. I dread to think how many hulks you would need to generate that level of income from selling minerals.

Now that brings us to the next point, who sells minerals? Do the miners all build with the minerals? If you do, you might aswell go grab a battleship, do what I said and make 4x the income you would doing mining, use that isk to go and buy all the minerals you want.

Now if everyone did this, there would be no more minerals, people would pay more for them, and mining would appeal to more people.

And I guess this is my point, are we still in the point where individuals still have buckets of minerals from botting or do people just not realise what a waste of time it is ???

tldr; if you're mining you're doing it wrong.