Ursula Thrace wrote:when i first started playing eve, i mined - a LOT. it was the only way i thought i could make steady income. quite frankly, over the last couple of years, i've seen a massive amount of posts that are filled with hatred for miners. personally, i think it's a viable career, but i just don't like doing it as much as exploration, incursions, and especially small gang pvp.
i'm a bit surprised that with all the miner-hatred that's been spewed on the forums, especially by nullbears, that someone hasn't created a petition to have mining ships taken out of eve. of course that wouldn't make sense, but that's how that group comes across on the forums.
i've never been able to discern whether this hatred is aimed at all miners, or just the ones that are botting. if it's the botters, i understand, but if it's towards an actual player that enjoys mining (yep, they're out there), i can't begin to understand why anyone, besides a narcissistic prick, would have a problem with it.
It's a complex situation I've been studying with some fascination since I became aware of the New Order. And it's definitely not just aimed at botters.
I'm similarly mystified as to why a bunch of people minding their own business tend to be the subject of such hatred... but It might be the responses some give when that business is disturbed by bump or gank.
I've actually been reading a number of James 513's Mittani writings - I have a miner, pre-industrialist alt and I tend to spend a fair amount of time in hi-sec, so I figured it's best to understand one's potential enemy - and I went in expecting some sort of disingenuous and elaborate justification for griefing miners, but... reading them, I get the feeling that I am reading the words of a man who genuinely believes that safe hi-sec mining is a blight on the soul of his beloved game.
The argument, as I understand it - and allow me to emphasize that I don't necessarily agree with it; I'm only a few months in and still assessing things, and I'm just trying to understand the social forces and lines of thought at work here - is that high-security mining, whatever it does for the game by providing an income stream for new players, does not by itself make the game interesting compared to the game's PVP engines, and is vulnerable to botting or mostly-AFK work; and that some miners, when ganked or otherwise disrupted, tend to complain loudly about it. Perhaps, some of these complaints have brought about semi-recent changes to high-security to make it safer, like the increased cost of war declarations and some not-insignificant buffs to Mining Barge HP.
If high security is safer and still profitable, goes the reasoning, everyone will go there instead of doing PvP in null or lowsec, and since Eve's bizarre mix of PvPvE is one of the things that makes it unique on the MMO market, anything that drives people away from low/nullsec or even looks like the start of a slippery slope away from it is bad; The doomsday scenario here is EVE one day providing a genuine safe-zone in high-sec, selling its soul to appeal to a wider audience.
And that is why, if I understand correctly, there are people so quick to shout down complaining miners/"Carebears.". If those miners are heard and listened to, Eve eventually loses its soul.
Someone can feel totally free to correct me if I've oversimplified or misunderstood this, though.
And of course, that's the most intellectual argument I've yet heard for a dislike of high-sec mining. Some people likely genuinely are just narcissistic pricks, who see miners as insufficiently aggressive to be playing a cutthroat game like EVE and who don't belong in their testosterone-laden world.