Does ‘AFK’ mining really exist? Or is what people are bent about really bottling?
I’ve been playing this game off and on for years, mostly doing combat focused stuff, but recently I decided to try out an aspect of the game that I never dug into before, mining.
Now I’ve been back a bit over a month, and I’ve been zapping internet space rocks in my procurer most of that time, and I just don’t see the AFK there.
Sure, mining doesn’t take a lot of attention compared to combat, but it does take attention.
You have to adjust your position regularly, change targets every few minutes. Fly out and back to drop the ore somewhere. It’s not a lot to do, but to do it efficiently at all, you have to be there to keep an eye on it. I can only imagine how much more attention it takes to do when multiboxing a fleet of miner ships.
So really it seems that the only way to actually ‘AFK’ mine is to run some kind of bot.
Now I hate bottlers in games, I’m with the angry mob about that. It just seems there is some confusion about what it is people are mad about.
Case of empire there is some confusion. Some are taking that miner not responding in anyway as a bot. Or AFk.
It could be if like me when I do this I just don’t care. Bump…whatever. Back in the day jet can mining seeing can bait traps. Yawn…Its not like 0.0. oh bait, lets take it. I want to see what gets cyno’d in lol. Sometimes I just had to see if I could kill cyno bait.
My chill expedition frigate has been paid off. Many times over. Swing by a belt I don’t run to the hills on the miner. I am making isk cleaning my apartment. On a ship paid off long ago.
out of high sec is where you see this more. That has the bene of scripting to do things on triggers. Like safe up any non-blue in system.
So it really is bots people are getting bent about.
Without running a bot, I just don’t see how mining would work at all without some attention. Sure, all it takes is alt-tabbing away from something else back to peek at the game every 2 minutes or so, when you hear an audio cue that you need to target a new rock or something, but that’s not really AFK.
Basically. I don’t think some have mined since the changes and are living in the past. Back before scarcity yeah you could park a hulk on some fat as hell rocks and chill a good while. Jet can it or swing a hauler/orca by every half an hour or so.
I can take my miner’s Endurance out right after DT. Run a scanner to find the fattest rocks. 1 mining laser II, 1 MLU II II and expedition frigate 4 burn out even veld rocks all too quick.
I feed new targets often.
NOW the only true AFK that can still eb around iirc is orca with mining drones, maybe. That is slow so maybe it can be a more afk experience. Not gonna test that myself lol. I can lose an endurance.
My orca…is old as hell. LIke I am thinking selling it since at current prices its a hell of a profit for a ship I rarely fly anymore. So yeah…I ain’t losing it to AFK mining lol.
There is AFK mining. I did it once or twice, as I had important things to do IRL and left my proc in the field. Of course the gain was nothing.
The issue is when people affirm that AFK mining is valuable way of playing. It’s not.
The main points of interest is how long a player can mine without input and how little input that player has to do over time while still mining a considerable amount.
AFK mining is easy, I’ve done it before when I left my Procurer out mining to grab a coffee or take a bio break. Sometimes you come back to your ship alive, sometimes you don’t.
When rocks are big, the ore hold is huge and the risk is low, AFK mining is too easy.
Don’t mistake AFK mining for botting. While both of them are enabled by repetitive low effort decently paying PvE, botting is something different and against the rules. AFK mining isn’t against the rules.
The first part is very easy : you fit a praxis, with only one civilian miner ; which means you can mine for hours without any input as it will have like 0.5 m³/s (arbitrary numbers)
Therefore no, the time between inputs is completely useless.
The only interesting part, is how many actions you need per m³. And for this, the answer is basically lock+ activate gun (+move for orca, +jettison or move to orca for a barge) action per rock, whether you are AFK or not.
This is not very effective. With perfect skills even Miner II outputs 1.8m3/s, while orca with perfect skills and drone mining rigs has 5.0m3/s per Mining Drone II or 5.4m3/s per augmented drone, or the total of 25m3/s regular and 27m3/s blinged. Or roughly 14 times better than a praxis
This is more effective than your fit, at being AFK.
Also more effective at being repeatable, since you actually need a lot of actions to find those 12 000 + rocks. Not even those 18 000 +.
But you’re right, it is useless to look only at time between inputs without taking yield into account. A ship without mining laser could ‘mine’ afk forever.
It’s not the amount of actions you need per m3, it’s the amount of time between actions per m3 that’s relevant. If I can do a hundred actions upfront to leave my ship untouched for 3 hours, it’s far more AFK than if those hundred actions are evenly spread during those 3 hours.
This was not nitpick ; your point is wrong.
Your affirmation that time between actions is important is logically the same as the affirmation that yield is important, because time between actions is linear with the inverse of the yield.
Therefore, you are saying that the only way to make ships less AFK is to increase their yield. Not that I do mind/care as this will make everything cheaper and bots less interestings.
There are many ways to make ships less afk. Increasing yield is one, but reducing ore hold is another. Reducing asteroid size a third, increased NPC risks a fourth, or completely overhauling how mining works to a playstyle that gives more yield to attentive players and less yield to players with less inputs another one.