Like many of you here, I am a hulk pilot. Like many of you here I fly a hulk with an “incredibly expensive” (relative term) faction/deadspace tank.

Unlike most of you, I understand that PvP is at the core of the eve online experience. By undocking you are giving your tacit consent for acts of PvP to occur. Either be ready and prepared to defend yourselves or don’t undock, the choice is yours. Purely by the act of always being aligned to something, being aware of my surroundings and being able to fit a tank that runs permanently, I have survived many attempted suicide ganks, it really isn’t that hard.

If you want to mine, you have to accept the risks of being in an area that everyone can see on their overview. If you want a purely passive income then play the market, you can do that without even undocking.

In short, your safety while in space is YOUR responsibility, not CCP’s.

@ Helicity Boson: You are quite correct in that I should not have called “people” who organized the ganks of miners “imbeciles”. I probably should not have inferred you are in imbecile either.

After all, it’s not your fault that it took you this long to respond – we respect the fact that someone with your obvious Neaderthal-like intellect took this long to develop the ability to read. We congratulate you on developing the ability to read and taking a moment to surface to reality long enough to respond nearly two months after your bout of living off the misery of others in a feeble attempt to boost your own sagging ego.

“We have destroyed hulks fitted with incredibly expensive faction tanks…”

Why does this sound suspiciously like Hitler marching in to Poland beaming with pride at the good he has done for the world. What good do you feel you have done the world in getting together a bunch of thugs whose totaled IQ wouldn’t exceed a box of hammers so that they can work off their anger at having to shovel their moms sidewalk and actually having to come up out of the basement when their mom calls time for dinner?

You live in some pathetic fantasy world where you feel the universe rotates around you and you are somehow teaching players a “lesson” when all you are doing is trying to make up for the fact you have an inferiority complex the size of a third world nation.

Finding a way to circumvent game mechanics (for that is all that you have done here) to ruin somebody else’s participation doesn’t do anything other than point how feeble your intellect is, and how Neanderthal-like is your “we be teaching them a lesson boys…get yer ropes, yer hound dogs, and your white hoods…we is gonna have us a hanging” mentality.

Thank you for providing us with the opportunity to personally tell you what a pathetic hunk of anthropomorphic swamp gunk your actions portray you as. Let’s hope you are a much better person in real life – in game you are a waste of skin.

Got anything else to say? I don’t hide behind pseudonyms. Say what you want spell the name right. That’s…

JULIE WHITEFEATHER

Who is the imbecile here? The people playing outlaws that will go above and beyond the law for any sort of financial gain, or the AFK miner that is not even near his ship when he is attacked?

I understand your bias, but I would point out that EVE is marketed as a dark and dangerous place, furthermore, it’s incredibly easy -not- to get ganked while mining.

I organize hulkageddon, but I ALSO have a hulk pilot myself. Simply by being AT my computer when I mine, and observing the local channel and being ready to turn on my tank and/or warp out I have eluded two suicide ganks myself.

We are agitating against players that believe they should make large amounts of ingame money without actually being at their desk and playing the damned game. “But mining is so boring!” Well, that’s CCP’s fault, not ours.

We have destroyed hulks fitted with incredibly expensive faction tanks that would have easily weathered our attack had they been present at the keyboard; and indeed during the first hulkageddon several -active- players handily avoided death at the gankers’ hands.

As far as I can tell, your understandable bias has coloured your words, but it is a mistake to call people names for an activity they pursue within the allowed game mechanics, if that bothers you so much, then it’s just not the game for you. YOUR opinions are meaningless to what the people running the game allow/disallow.

as CCP put it: HTFU, this is now hello kitty online, this is the dark dog-eat-dog world of EVE, this is why we love it, if you can’ t take that sort of heat, then stay out of the kitchen.

Walking in stations alone wouldn’t bring me back to the game, but it would go a long way toward doing so. As it is, when you mentioned the word “accessible” you have a key point, and perhaps the subject for another article this week.

The famous “learning curve” of Eve Online is so steep that it would take a professional climbers and a team of shirpa guides a week to reach the summit. Now CCP obviously knows their market…whether that market is a matter of retaining players or continuously drawing in new players as old leave I can’t say. Still the “accessibilty” of the game seems to need a lot of improvement.

Thanks for the comment.

Julie

I quoted those ice mining figures to put 1M/hour from an Exhumer-class ship in context. Hope I didn’t offended. You were playing in hardcore mode!

If you’d been getting more ISK for that effort do you think you could have endured the death penalty more easily?

WiS could make the game substantially more accessible to potential players who find the lack of articulated appendages disturbing. I’ve never been particularly put off by it, but I can only see it enriching the game.

As to death penalties, whether it is through insurance or what have you if the death penalties where a bit less harsh I might still be playing.

As to walking in stations – I must say the whole “you are your spacehip” thing tends to get a bit old for me. Ever now and then I would like to get out of the pod full of goo and stretch my legs.

And yes, I am incredibly interested in seeing how the space games coming out turn out, as well as how the communities interact with one another (or overlap one another for that matter).

Once again, thanks for the well thought out responses and the time you took to share your thoughts with us all.

Julie

Thanks for the on-going conversation!

“What I can tell you is that when I was actively mining veldspar in Amarr space, even with maxed out mining skills, I was never making more than one million isk an hour.”

Erm… gosh. Suddenly things make more sense. That number is very low.

Here’s are some reference points for comparison. A ultra-basic ice-harvesting retriever (just two Ice Harvester Is, Ice Harvesting trained only to Level 1), would mine 12 icicles per hour to a jetcan. Each refined icicle would be worth 115k-135k at current Jita isotope prices, for unrefined goods the high buy order (for clear icicles) in Amarr’s core Domain region is current 99k. That solitary retriever would pull in a peak of 1.25M ISK an hour.

Max out a Mackinaw (which specialises in ice harvesting, it’s substantially better at it than the Hulk) and it will pull in 49 icicles per hour. Roughly 4.9 M ISK/hour.

Stack the bonuses from a maxed-out Orca on top of that, and its ~66 icicles/hour, 6.6M/hour from selling to buy orders, 7.6M/hour from perfect refining. And all the pilot has to do is sit in an ice belt, twiddlng his thumbs, dragging to a can every 3-4 minutes, with an indy alt or buddy hauling at suitable intervals. (Or dock the Orca occasionally).

Mining ore is a less AFK activity than ice harvesting (‘roids pop regularly, icicles practically never do). The benefit to an ore miner for that increased activity is that it is designed to be more rewarding.

This does not seem to have been happening in your case. The risk/reward balance for mining looks to have been tilted very steeply against you. I cannot know what caused it in your situation, but you have my respect for managing to soldier on as long as you did.

(I mined several billion ISK of hisec ice over summer – product of an insane work schedule leaving very little brain power to do anything else with my gang of accounts, so I’m familiar with ice harvester cycle times on a near-cellular level…)

I think 100% insurance is a non-starter. Insurance payment of ship market values would turn into an ISK duping machine. And even if it could be exploit-proofed, insurance is already a substantial ISK faucet. At 100% for all ship hulls there might be very nasty inflation.

Taking the ship-death-penalty away is an issue of substantially greater scope than your understandable desire to avoid being victimised by hisec comedy-gankers. It would change the economics of the game, probably beyond recognition.

Why was “fly a smaller ship” not a viable response to the pvp risk you encountered in EVE? If drakes were still too expensive, why not fly cruisers, or smaller?

Incidentally, those drakes would cost substantially less to replace since the introduction of medium and small rigs (they use only 1/5 and 1/25 of the components of the old, now “large”, rigs, respectively).

“Also, while I do love what the devs at ccp do, the whole “walking in space stations” idea has pretty much turned in to vaporware – and while they are busy “thinking” about it Cryptic studios is busy DOING it.”

Having sat at the keyboard of a WiS demo machine last year, I’m very glad they had a rethink or two. There wasn’t enough point to the vertical slice we were shown, fun bar minigames and “exotic” dancers notwithstanding. The new direction for WiS hinted at by the Incarna Fanfest trailer makes me think the time was well-spent.

And DUST514, well, that’s very definitely not vapourware. CCP Shanghai have been very busy.

Take the point, though. It will be interesting to see the reception for STO, JGE and Black Prophecy and how they affect EVE.

I have lost three battleships in my time: One to a corp war and two to mission running.

@ Hirvox: Yes the problem is that those who suicide gank for the jollies of it are not discriminate about who they blast out of space. I did indeed take the route of fortifying my hulk a bit with shield rigs and using scout drones. As far as losing ships is concerned only three battleships lost…but lesser ships like drakes…then the number goes WAY up.

@ Michael St. E and Hirvox: As I said, Eve Online is a game I wish I could love. It has always been a love/hate relationship with me. I loved the danger of 0.0 space but the death penalty, whether in high sec or low sec, is just too extreme. My perfect solution would be to modify insurance to allow for the insurance of the value of a ship (including tech 2 ships) not just for a portion of the value.

Also of note is that there are space games coming out that I feel will be rivals to Eve Online. Two that come to mind are Star Trek Online and Jumpgate Evolution (which I truly do hope comes out). Also, while I do love what the devs at ccp do, the whole “walking in space stations” idea has pretty much turned in to vaporware – and while they are busy “thinking” about it Cryptic studios is busy DOING it.

Thanks both for the input – I love our little conversations and I check the comments throughout the day.

But constantly having ships blown out from under you that “insurance” doesn’t even come close to covering anything but a fraction of the cost?
If you’re not just using hyperbole here, you might want to double-check your own response to threats. In my entire mining career (which includes both highsec and 0.0), I’ve lost exactly two Hulks. One due to my own stupidity (wasn’t really paying attention to my shields) and once due to being ambushed by a Vagabond. Both were in 0.0, and I had done quite a bit of highsec mining before that.