Good idea creating a Megathread for this. I’ll just have to remember that it exists for when it inevitably crops up again. Here is my recent reply to the most recent thread:
This has been brought up - and thoroughly debunked - numerous times before. Here was one notable thread on that subject: I think it’s time you let alphas use expedition frigates
Here are my responses to that thread:
I bet you can’t come up with a single VALID reason not to let us use them
There’s no shortage of reasons. I’m not going to list them all and deprive everyone else of the opportunity to hit the nail on the head, but I will give you one I bet you didn’t think of:
Venture is not a general purpose mining ship. It is not designed to mine common or even uncommon ores, basic or moon. That’s what most Joe Alphas using Ventures are doing, and they’re wasting their time. If expedition frigs are released to Alphas, they’ll be doing the same, which is not what they’re designed to do, and they’d likewise be wasting their time, only in a more expensive fashion, and in a fashion more juicy for gankers.
Venture is a good ship for guerilla gas harvesting and mining the rarest gases/ores in hostile environments in a low-risk high-reward fashion. The “low-risk” is in relation to the cost of the ship and “high-reward” in relation to the cost/time/risk of importing materials from tradehubs when you live far away from them, especially in LS/NS/WH. I remember back when I used to launch Guerilla WH mining ops staged from HS where a 2.5m Tristan fit would locate our friendly neighborhood WH, enter it, find a belt, clear all the rats, and summon an armada of Ventures to mine ABC(D) ores (rare) so we can procure massive stockpiles (relative to our needs) of the rarest minerals in the game. A couple of hours of mining and would provide us with stockpiles of rare minerals that would last for months, whereas we’d continue to have chronic shortages of common minerals like tritanium and pyerite that demanded barges hitting up veldspar and scordite (or embarassing imports from Jita).
As for Alphas using T2 mining frigs in the proper fashion I described… upgrade to Omega.
Yield dictates use case in this instance. Venture is already grossly misused by newbies, and what you are asking for is going to result in yet a greater disservice to those who are already shooting themselves in the foot. These are players who spend hours scraping pennies when they’d make more money and have more fun running L1 missions and buying ores with that money. And it’s pretty quick to go from L1 to L3 missions.
Mining passively isn’t a thing. That’s where suicide gankers and trigs would come to give you a wake up call. Especially if you’re using T2 mining ships .Even missioning can be done passively with 90% less risk of getting ganked while being funner and more profitable.
Gamma Account, you pay $10 a month for an Industrial oriented account. You cannot have BC or BS. And no tech2/3 Cruisers. But you get tech2 transports and frigates - with cloaks. I doubt that is going to win friends and influence others. But is a sight better than the something for nothing hand-out you are begging for.
Even without promos, CCP already offers discounted subs for multi-month subs. IIRC 12-months is like $10.95/mo or something like that. Occasionally CCP has promos on top of those already-discounted subs.
You can already use BCs and BSes as Alpha.
Your yield wouldn’t even pay off in ISK->PLEX->Omega what you are paying for in either ISK or $$$ via this castrated account. You would be scraping pennies for hours in order to PLEX the game in order to continue scrape pennies for hours, T2-empowered and with that greater a liability. You literally would make more money docked up in a station doing Project Discovery making 45m/hr + rewards. Technically you can do that while mining but at least you won’t get ganked by someone who sees a newbie in a T2 frigate as a juicy target.
Would skill training be included? Because the Omega community would probably object to that.
The Omega community would also object to these cheaper accounts being able to harvest ice, especially where botting is concerned.
Basically nobody would buy this, and I’d bet the farm that CCP would never consider this.
With all due respect, the only reason you are writing this post is because you are inexperienced and not knowledgeable about the game. You are going against the grain instead of with the flow, and you are not accepting the wisdom passed onto you by others who are telling you how to have more fun and make more profit at the same time than what you are doing now. Even with mining or with using the Venture there is a right way and a wrong way of going about it - your proposal is empowering the wrong way, and that is unacceptable.
I’m too lazy to go out and find other older threads on the topic and my replies to those
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