So I have 4 accounts 1 boosts 3 more mine. And even mining best ice I make like just under 100 mill an hour. (1 porp 3 coverters skills near maxed ice drone 2) Meanwhile my corp allies with 1 carrier and 1 account and good skills are pushing 120-140 mill per hour bad skills they are pushing 100 mill. So I ask myself why am I mining? Its far riskier, I have to refine my minerals transport them and wait for them to sell. At any time while mining or transporting I could be blown up losing all my hard work. Carrier ratters, are far safer because they are in carriers… They get mystically paid by the game in “ticks” don’t have to waste time transporting or refining or risking their earned isk by transporting.
Now people say “if your mining for isk your doing it wrong”. Meaning you are supposed to use the minerals to build stuff then sell that stuff for more money. But why should I spend my time mining minerals for lower isk when I could rat and use the money I make there to buy the minerals I need to manufacture stuff as passive income?
Rorqual, sure this makes a lot of money but it also costs a ton of isk and its nearly defenseless without a corp that can syno in to back you up. its such and easy target you dare not be solo with it. Add to this you need a ton of skills to make the good isk with it yes even more skills then a carrier.
So I ask the community why should I not just sell my mining characters and/or skill injector off their skills and just using a carrier on 1 account?
the market which comes from people that are apparently as stupid as I am mining roids. where do those people come from is a better question oh wait that is essentially what this post is about so maybe you could answer that? since that’s kinda what im asking and the meaning of the post?
Because someone has to. Without mining and manufacturing, there wouldn’t be anything else. No shiny PVP ships, no shiny ships to rat in, no dreads, no caps period, etc. I personally find it enjoyable, but then again I don’t have to live in constant fear of being blown up either…
If enough people think the way you do and choose some other activity the mineral supply will drop and the price will go up.
The nice thing about mining - especially in highsec, is that it’s easy to multitask. You can socialize in chat, post in forums or manage other industrial activity - research, manufacturing, refreshing PI programs, market prices, etc… just as easily sitting in a barge as you can sitting in a station.
I ran a 2 skiff fleet last fall before Ascension - 1 pilot has a mindlink which was good for a 15% boost at the time. I got a lot of work done while mining and saved a lot of ISK on minerals I didn’t need to buy.
The obvious answer is: For various reasons.
What you really want to know though is this:
Industry/Crafting minded people that have a mind for business mine, because outside of initial investment to be able to do so, the minerals are free.
Now, since i run into it all the time when saying that…
Yes, most people especially multi-boxers pay $15 per month to play, so in that context they are not free, but then neither is anything then.
However for In-Game purposes only, ISK, the minerals are free past a certain point, buying the minerals from market can cost anywhere from 20%-60% of your profits base as a Manufacturer. Whether you are mining roids, or gun-mining.
As an exmple: take a ship using cruise missiles for missioning, t1 or t2 ammo?
You can bend over backwards making your own T2 ammo, or spend ludicrous amounts of ISK to buy the ammo.
Or you could buy hundreds or thousands of T1 at 1/10 the price.
Best option, buy a BPO, grind up your unwanted rat loot for minerals, build your T1 cruise missiles at the cost of only 4 ISK per missile, build more than you will ever need…sell the overstock @ 100 or more ISK on the market, just dont buy them because its not a smart move if you are using them as ammo. (hint using t1 ammo over t2 for missions will add maybe a total of 5 minutes to your rat killing time.)
some people get enjoyment out of building things they “gathered themselves”
depending on where you live, it can be easier to mine on site than get things shipped in. industry can increase your profits considerably.
it scales very well. as you’ve probably discovered with your booster and 3 alts, you can keep adding more and more alts to your mining fleet, with the only real upper limit being how good you are at multi-tasking.
as for your comparison to your friends carrier, frankly i’m more surprised that there is only a 20-40mil difference between your isk/hr. a carrier takes FAR longer to train into with decent skills than it takes to get a porpoise alt and 3 covetor pilots trained up. also the hull alone is worth more than your entire fleet combined, so it makes sense that he would be making more isk/hr. a carrier also doesn’t scale the same way a mining fleet does, you can keep adding as many ships as you can multi-task. he won’t be able to use any more than 1 carrier (or 2 if his micro game is strong)
you are currently at the lowest tier of mining fleet, with covetors, porpoises and bad skills he is nearly at the highest tier of ratting with a carrier, and good skills, the only place to go for him is super carriers.
Your isk/hr will increase considerably once you move into an orca with hulks and eventually a rorqual.
well too bad you assume my skills with mining are limited to covetors and a porpoise. I already can fly an orca and hulks but I don’t because the then I would be risking more money then guy with the carrier… and it would be completely too easy to be killed in null sec (where I am). No one in null sec uses orcas because they are basically just targets waiting to die, and hulks are the same. A hulk gets only 15% more minerals then a covetor but costs about 300 mill to fit… and orca is about 1 bill fitted at least. The hulks have the worst warp times of any mining vessel the orca is basically a dead corpse flying. YOu and the guy who posted before you kinda don’t have any idea what your talking about do you? The orcas boots are only slightly better than the porpoise… so your theory about not risking as much money is basically completely wrong. 2ndly that’s with multiple accounts running at 15 dollars a month too while the carrier pilot is only 1 account running at 15. SO why would I mine spending a total of 60 dolllars a month to make the same money as 1 guy ratting?
@ Max Deveron talking about missles? and ammo? I did say carrier ratting didn’t I? ever hear of fightes? they are not 1 use items.
I based my “assumption” on your fleet composition based on what you said your fleet was composed of.
as for your “no one in null-sec uses orca’s or hulks” I live in null-sec, npc null in fact so I don’t have a big blue blob surrounding me. and I mine with an orca and hulks on a regular basis, haven’t lost one yet although there have been a couple of close calls here and there. most of them because of my own carelessness.
if you pay just a little bit off attention, and set your fleet up right there is no reason you should ever loose your fleet. so i’d say I have at least a little bit of a clue what i’m talking about.
but i’ll share some of my, woefully inadequate knowledge on how to mine safely with an orca + hulks. equip all of them with higs anchor rigs and stasis webs. align the fleet and spider web the ships, hit fleet warp the moment a hostile pops up in local and there you go. it won’t save you 100% of the time. but 99.99% is good enough.
as for your “why would I spend 60 a month to make the same money” if your extra accounts are ONLY for mining then you are doing it wrong and no wonder you feel ripped off. every one of my mining alts pays for its own sub off of passive income alone, which makes everything they mine a nice little bonus.
you missed my entire point completely.
You asked about mining, i gave you the basics of Industry, not PvP.
Better insert your “Reading Comprehension” skillbook and train it instead of just collecting dust in the hanger.
You can compete with one bot, yes. You cannot compete with all of them, and it is the ones not in your system that are the reason minerals are so cheap that mining is not worth doing. Single exception - massive multibox Rorqual fleets with appropriate defenses.
No offense, but you do you know how ships came to be?
Yes, that’s right. Miners set out to mine, later selling the ore to industrialists that made your ship. How do you think they did that? They got into a station that was built by minerals.
another post about “do you know where ships come from” did you read the whole thread? this was already asked and answered “from people who are too stupid to know or simply don’t care that mining is a pointless endeavor”
Do you really think explaining where ships comes from answers the question why should I mine? Are you seriously suggesting that I mine so that other people can fly ships around? and not to serve my own interests? Excuse me are you in the right game? or the right real world?
Of all the posts here I haven’t seen one good post with a compelling reason to mine. other than " do it for fun/relaxation" but don’t do it for isk even though that is the main reason most people do anything in eve other then pvp.
Really though for someone asking a question you are being quite aggressive to the people answering you. Whether this is out of frustration or something else I don’t know. Perhaps it is because they are not giving you the answer you are looking for.
“because they want to”
That is the reason people mine, maybe they like it, maybe it breaks the monotony of whatever else they do in game.
But the real question is “why do YOU mine” if you don’t like why you mine, then leave it and go do anoms and/or sigs and make 120m an hour, then you will be happy and can pay just 15 instead of 60.
Why does anyone mine? Because it fits better within what they can do than other in game activities. Mostly because it doesn’t take much attention and combines well with other in game or out of game activities. I mine when I have to do readings or something, because it does not demand lots of attention so I can do both. Sure I make more isk/hr doing other things, but I can’t do those other things while reading papers/forums/watching youtube so that’s a useless comparison.
It sounds like you are trying to devote your whole attention to it and expect that doing so will net you the same income as someone ratting in a carrier. Not all activities are equal for an equal amount of attention. Try carrier ratting while reading something and you’ll probably lose fighters and kill things very slowly, making it worse than mining. In fact, I’m sure that when fighters stopped behaving like drones, carrier pilots were unhappy that they had to stop watching youtube.
Mining is not an optimal choice for 100% attention, so you should pick something else to do, or start doing something else while mining like the vast majority of miners. Throwing more accounts at the problem does increase how much attention it takes, but it also costs you more isk for plexing, or more $$, so that’s not a great solution unless you also use these accounts as skill and PI farms (at which point more mining accounts should = more isk and, maybe, you can rival the solo carrier player).
A better question might be, "Why do you play Eve?"
The answer to that might indicate why you do anything in the game…
Is it about the mining, the ISK, the people, …?
