No card game this week, cancelled due to injury, so instead an extra evening of EVE Online. It's a bit odd these days actually, but what with four MMOs, an actual and tactile card game, and various regular Real Life Commitments, my week is pretty much booked solid! I literally don't have enough time to spend more than one evening a week in any one game, and definitely don't have time to take on another just now.
I'm sure Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is fun and all, and indeed seems to be getting rave reviews pretty much everywhere on the sidebar there, but I honestly don't have time for it at the moment, which is a bit of a mixed blessing, and anyway, if it's really any good, it'll be more enduring than this current World of Warcraft Fatigue induced honeymoon period, and will be around and still playable in six months time, or a year. I'll have a look then.
I'm not sure yet another MMO title would help anyway to be honest, as I've always suffered terribly from MMO Infidelity Guilt. When I'm in EVE, I ought to be working on my Nightfall Mesmer's side-quests in preparation for Tuesdays. When I'm in Guild Wars, I ought to be touring Anarchy Online. When I'm in Anarchy Online, I ought to be dealing with support calls in Second Life. When I'm in Second Life, I ought to be, well, working on my EVE balance. It's a never ending cycle of vague background anxiety,a constant low-level nagging sensation, that I should be somewhere else, and it just gets worse the more titles I take on. Never mind looking forward to new and upcoming titles, I've still not finished this lot yet! I often wish I could just pick one and stick to it, but I've yet to find that perfect MMO.
Anyway, all the above nonsense means that the occasional 'free' night like last night, when I don't have to be somewhere, is quite relaxing. I spent most of it mining asteroids actually.
I know, I know...I've often ridiculed miners in the past, and for all EVE's epic star fleet battle excitement, the mining portion of the game is only marginally more interesting than staring at a wallpaperless windows desktop. I guess it's meant to be a social activity or something, and my corp often do regular mining ops, where around ten of them will descend on an asteroid belt like a railroad laying chain-gang, get really really drunk at their PCs and...well, point a mining laser at a rock and wait. Sometimes, one or two of them will carry the rock to the nearest station - that's quite exciting. I guess the drunken state helps a lot, but on the whole, I'm, sadly, very very busy on that night of the week. Without fail. Very important business elsewhere, sorry!
I have no idea why mining exists in EVE in it's current form - how hard would it be to add some kind of little robot that clamps onto the asteroid and gets on with the really tedious bit of staring at a rock for hours on end, while you then go off and live your life? They already have Fighters - very large Drones with warp-capability that don't even need the Carrier to be in the same place. Why not Mining 'Fighters'? And they wonder why they have problems with macro miners? Hell, even a Puzzle Pirates style Tetris game would help! I guess it's designed to promote PvP - spend long enough doing that and even the mildest carebear among us will snap and go 'postal'. Yarr!
Anyway, I digress, and was indeed, giving it a go myself last night, partly to remind myself why I don't, but mostly to work on my project - a 1-Run Megathron BPc. These are quite fun, and something I usually do during my sojourns in there. There Blueprint Originals on sale for most of the ships in game, and those with aspirations of Science buy them, at staggeringly fantastic prices. They then do a bit of research on them, to make them require less minerals, then make copies, usually limited to one run each, and put them up for sale on the Contracts system, mostly at a fraction of the cost of the original, and much cheaper than the cost of the finished ship.
Meanwhile, I'm spending most of my time in missions and amassing a pretty huge pile of looted modules, none of which I need, or can be bothered to sell individually, so I throw it all in the trash compactor and am left with a huge pile of the basic 'building-block' minerals needed to build ships. Save up enough of each of these, and I can use the BPc to make myself a whole new spaceship, to either use, or sell on, or whatever.
This kind of 'Ikea' approach gives me a little mini goal to work at, and is a good way of maximising the profit to be had from the junkloot that soon piles up in missions. My current project is a Megathron - the Tier 2 Gallente Battleship - designed as a heavy Railgun/Blaster platform, and one I've never owned, despite having Gallente Battleships V. Given my skills, it's nowhere near as useful as my usual missioning Dominix, so I wouldn't go out and buy one, but I'd still like to give it a go anyway, so building my own is the perfect solution, letting me test it out, and assuming I don't blow it up on it's maiden voyage, I can repackage it and sell it on for more than the minerals to make it are worth. Win-win. Once I've done this, I can do the same with the Hyperion, the Tier 3 one that I'm also very qualified in.
Trouble is, the basic minerals tend to come in three caytegories - low-end (Tritanium and Pyreite), mid-range (Mexallon, Isogen, Noxcium) and high-end (Zydrine and Megacyte), and in general, the junk loot works fine for the mid-range requirements of most ships, but doesn't tend to have the right distribution of low or high end stuff. The high-end is only found out in 0.0 space asteroids, although some turns up in the loot everywhere, so I usually end up buying in that to get the ship finished. The low-end stuff is plentiful in junk-loot, but the sheer quantities required for something like a Battleship mean that it helps to bulk that up a bit too, either by buying in again, or, alas, by mining it yourself, so I thought I'd have a go.
So I refitted out my (still insured, "PvP") Battlecruiser with a full rack of mining lasers, mining drones and headed to the nearest belt. All a bit embarrassing really, but it will be a cold day in hell before I train for and buy a Mining Barge. I quickly discovered that the job is pleasant enough, as long as you aren't actually playing. The active part of the task consists solely of dragging the ore from one window (your cargo), to another (the floating cargo container) in such a timely manner that your cargohold doesn't overflow. When the rock in the barrel reaches the capacity of your nearby docked industrial ship, you dock, switch, return and carry it all back to the station. Then switch back to the mining ship, and repeat until your nose starts bleeding to relieve the monotony.
There's a little excitement to be had I guess - sometimes annoying NPC pirates show up and try to kill you and your mining drones, but I have two missile launchers on the mining ship which are easily up to the job of splatting those. Sometimes the rock expires and you have to target and mine a new one! And of course I'm doing mining the reckless and crazy way, 'jet canning' I know! I'm a maverick! This method involves me just dumping the rock out in a very very large cargo container, that any passing miscreant can help themselves from. If they do, I get 15 minutes to beat the hell out of them for their impudence. This would certainly make life interesting, particularly since in addition to my mining equipment, I have the above missile launchers, a webber and a warp scrambler fitted, and they, by necessity, will have to be in an industrial to be able to carry my rocks away. There's a whole intricate sub-game of PvP based around this 'Ore Thief' flag - bait haulers, ambushes, stealth, etc etc, but my system is a very quiet one, and the other folks I saw were just miners too, more worried about me stealing from them.
The safer alternatives include using an anchored secure passworded container, although even the largest of these is very small, making far more trips necessary, having a friend in the hauler to receive the minerals directly, having two EVE Online accounts and being that friend too (which I think is stupid and cheating, but is very popular - dual boxing. No MMO should require you to be logged in twice to get anything useful done!), or the cumbersome way - just mine until the hold is full, then dock and unload, and return. Quite slow, but very secure.
All in all, the process requires just enough attention to be annoying, but not enough to be engaging or interesting in any fashion, and it was only the discovery that Windows Media Player has an 'Always on top' tickbox that allowed me to mine for more than the first five minutes. So it became an ideal opportunity to catch up on some DVD viewing I'd not had time for, but I can't help feeling I've missed the point somehow. The total haul after an hour or two wasn't spectacular - perhaps one or two million, and once again, I have to compare that to just doing Agent 4 Combat Missions, in which I'd make far more money, with which I could just buy the minerals I need for my pet project.
I keep trying mining, and I don't know why. Perhaps it's the pseudo-afk style of it that appeals to many people, pull up to a rock, set the lasers going, chat, get drunk and watch TV, but I think I'd just as well not be playing a game at all in that case. Still, the economy does function - minerals are available to buy in large quantities, so that all suggests that a great many people do like, or at least, don't mind, the current mining gameplay of EVE, and in future, I think I'll just let them do the dull bit for me! This may make my hobby-based Airfix Battleships a bit more expensive to build, certainly, but what many people in MMO crafting often tend to forget, is that their time has a value too, and mine can be spent in more profitable ways than staring at a rock for three hours a night, while watching TV.
If I'm going to mine, I'll be mining Serpentis!