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.