I’ve seen 16m of items in HS sites, and quite frequently.
Story time!
I’ve sat in mining corporations for big periods of time (or my friends did, depending on who was spying at the time), and I know exactly what miners do and don’t do.
And you know, I’ve always agreed that most (low-end) miners are actually very present at the keyboard despite all of their claims about how mining "is relaxing’ and allows them to “do other things” and such. But the actual reason why this is true is true is because most low-end miners are either too unintelligent or too casual (and sometimes both) to streamline, automate, and secure their work.
Also, miners usually lie about why they’re mining. On the forums, it’s always about “relaxing after a hard day of work,” because that sort of argument is easier to sympathize with when the conversation turns to how evil griefers are preying on the blood of the innocent and that CCP needs to do something about it. But whenever I’ve observed one miner asking another what’s up, the answer almost exclusively has been “not much just grinding some iskies lol.” It was always about the money, so the fact that they choose to engage in the least efficient form of making it lends proof to the lack of intelligence argument.
Miners are usually boring, which isn’t a surprise since boring people are attracted to boring activities. About the most exciting story I have about miners is this one time I sat in a corporation that got into a spat with another local mining group, and they ended up snapping at each other like a bunch of Hatfields and McCoys. But that’s all they did. It was just day in and day out of them insulting each other’s wives and mothers in local chat.
I tried to steer the conflict in a different direction, and being the silly miner corp noob that I was, I asked:
“Why can’t we just attack them?”
long silence
“We don’t do that.”
“Well why not? I heard there some kind of method to attack other corporations in this game?”
“That’s not how we play, we aren’t griefers. And we don’t have enough warships to do it.”
“But they seem to only use mining barges, and we have more captains?”
no response
Interestingly, quite a few people had “warships” because many were running missions on the side. A few days later I got tired of this, and declared war on both corporations. I was alone at the time, and they all talked a lot of smack, right up until I baited them into a fight by pretending to be trying to escape from them and clapped like a dozen of their ships in ten minutes. I sent the usual ransom request, but it didn’t matter because like 80% of them quit the game shortly after that. I would’ve settled for one of their Orcas, which they could’ve easily afforded by sharing the cost of replacement. Instead I got nothing, just like in 95% of similar stories.
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Okay, that sounds reasonable. I’m going to have to dust off a heron and at least measure a couple new play sessions in HS, to estimate the new ISK/hour .
Are you finding it hard to catch miners to gank? Do you need them to turn off their monitors so you have a chance? 
I’d consider miners, at least “decent” ones (which excludes the afk folks), considerably harder to gank then explorers or “ratters”
Ratters might have an alt on grid, but Miners don’t understand how mining works if they don’t have at least half a dozen alts on grid, and all of them have either combat drones (barges, command ships) or ewar (explo frigs) to bail out the majority of the fleet in case someone comes to play eve with them
Miners fighting back is them coming to play EVE with you. PvP has two sides you know. 
Miners fight back everytime I shoot them. They are just bad at it.
Sometimes I even see little hobgoblin drones in the debris.
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i can see why one might assume its a bitcoin troll at first glance.
But you just havn’t seen the number of mining alts i have. And my need for additional computational power to run them.
i wonder if its more efficient to just buy plex, vs hardware and electricity required to mine
I didn’t assume or express any thoughts on what type of thread this is.
I simply stated that thread topics like this are usually locked.
And to be quite honest, I’m actually surprised this thread is still active.
LMAO never thought about this. But you are right.
This is like “wargames” and their quote “the only winning move is not to play” 
Turns out you were right and I was wrong about high sec data sites. I’ve sacrificed 3.5 hours for science, doing exclusively data sites in high sec in a Heron, on an alpha account. That made 74.6 million isk.
That bad, but still not as terrible as mining.
There is no way I’ll float my ship in front of a rock and shoot a Lazer at it for an hour… not even ten minutes, not while every minute is paid for in real money.
There is also no way I’ll hunt down those BPO’s and waste my paid time on building anything, not even ammo.
What, I can have a few billion isk for an insignificant fraction of money from my real-life job yet I’m going to grind for hours, days and weeks on end? No, thank you.
All the time I’m not using my PC to grind is electricity saved and time saved to make more real-life money.
It’s far more efficient to dock up permanently and stop playing video games.
And avoid game forums, too…
–Inefficient Gadget
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I know this thread might seem like an attack on miners.
But, am I actually doing you a favour?
Pointing out to the game developer that solo (and therfore hi sec) mining is utterly dismal and unprofitable might be to your benefit.
At present, several thousand players are engaged in a Jita protest against scarcity.
Could the game be changed to allow high sec solo miners a slice of the pie that could help ease scarcity?
Interesting point. Electricity is 18c/kWhr here so looks like cost is 6.7 M isk/hr. Solo mining in a procurer is more like 8M isk/hr.
Of course that wont deter me from mining. No one really mines for the isk. They do it because they enjoy it. It’s probably the only PvE in EVE that capsuleers will do for trivial isk. If the isk was taken out of other PvE activities folks would stop doing it.
I stopped mining when minerals were taken out of highsec because a large part of the fun for me was building something. When you can make 200M/hr doing burners and 8M/hr mining there has to be some fun, or at least some satisfaction, somewhere.
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Yes, but you see, all of the miners don’t play for the money, but for the experience of mining, which is an enjoyable activity they can perform after a hard day of work that lets them relax, chat with friends, and maybe watch a video or two. What they make from it has never been an issue, and is just a bonus on the side that they get from this satisfying gameplay.
Which is why they’re all protesting in Jita right now about their mining incomes being too small. Trust me, it makes sense. Don’t try to think about it too much.
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Oh yes, I forgot the awe of mining with the incredible space backdrop, I’m sure it’s a religious experience.
A bit like the benefits of repeatedly hitting one’s head against a wall.
They’re selflessly speaking up for those who can’t speak for themselves: the ones who are still speechless from the shellshock of getting ganked… how heroic.
We went mining , you ganked and failed
Since the other thread was closed before I could reply, and it’s at least somewhat on topic here, I want to reply to your question:
A single-player game exists for the players. A multi-player game doesn’t exist for the players, but neither do players exist for a multi-player game. In a multi-player game, players exist for each other. Because everyone is connected to each other in some way or another in a game like EVE, players have obligations that go beyond seeking out their own pleasure and nothing else. Of course they can only seek out their own pleasure if they want to, but that leads to the problem of the commons as I mentioned before.
In the case of mining as per this thread, for example, if all miners only focus on mining as much as possible, then this attitude will lead to a situation in which none of them are able to get meaningful compensation for their work.
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Only a sociopath thinks that multiplayer games are inherently competitive!