EVE Evolved: Mining, the forgotten profession
by Brendan Drain 
Jul 8th 2008 at 1:30PM
Filed under: Sci-fi, EVE Online, Economy, Game mechanics, Professions, PvE, Opinion, EVE Evolved
Nostalgia:
Back in 2004, EVE was a very different place. The universe was sparsely populated and the cost of new ships meant most players avoided war like the plague. Mining was the primary moneymaking profession and dedicated mining corps were commonplace. While mining was just as boring then as it is today, it was the easiest and fastest way of gathering minerals for production. Today, mining is one of the least profitable professions and isn't even close to being the best way of gathering minerals for production.
What happened over the years that has ruined the mining profession? I'll tell you what happened...
The main problem with mining as a profession is that it's always been a low priority for CCP. Nobody comes to EVE for the mining experience, in fact it's probably the most boring thing you can do in the entire game. Additions to PvP and mission content have always been a high priority, with new ships and missions in every major expansion. In the past year alone we've seen overhauls to several key PvP elements such as electronic warfare and hitpoints. Most recently we've had the Empyrean Age expansion which brought with it the long-awaited faction warfare system. Miners aren't so lucky, occasionally being thrown a bone in the form of a new ship type, module or implant. The mining system itself is no more developed or less boring than it was at launch.
Mission-mining?:
Being a low development priority isn't the only problem that the mining profession has encountered. Over the years, other sources of minerals have taken over in supplying the mineral markets. With mining being as boring as it is, it's no wonder people would turn to any alternative ways to gather minerals. Possibly the biggest alternative source of minerals is mission-running. Not only do missions provide tangible isk rewards and bounties from enemies but the ships drop loot which can be refined into minerals.
With the release of level 4 missions, battleship class NPCs became available to people in high security space. Players quickly discovered that refining battleship class loot produced massive amounts of minerals. Rewards and drop rates in level 4 missions have been tweaked over the years but they still produce massive amounts of minerals for export to the markets. Unlike mining in high security space, refining mission loot will produce a good spread of mineral types including expensive megacyte and zydrine. All of the minerals needed for production can be procured without leaving high security empire systems making mission-running better suited to gathering mineral for production.
The issue escalated when rogue drones first made an appearance in deadspace complexes and missions. Rather than providing isk bounties, rogue drones drop alloys which refine into minerals. It wasn't long before players discovered just how much they could make farming rogue drone complexes and doing drone missions. When the drone regions opened, the volume of minerals being exported to empire markets sky-rocketed and market prices of nocxium, zydrine and megacyte crashed across EVE.
Risk vs reward:
One of the basic design principles of EVE is a system of risk versus reward that gives the best rewards to those willing to take on the most potential danger. Mission rewards in low security space, for example, are much higher than those in high security space. Likewise, the lower security status systems have tougher pirate NPCs in asteroid belts that have higher bounty rewards. One of the main complaints about mining rewards is that the ore distribution system doesn't really follow this risk versus reward scheme any more.
Instead of finding better ore in lower security systems, you find different ore which yields different minerals. Veldspar, scordite and omber are common in high security systems and provide a lot of tritanium, pyerite and mexallon. The ores Hemorphite and Jaspet provide a large portion of Isogen and nocxium but are only available in pirate-ridden systems of security rating 0.4 and below. To mine large amounts of zydrine and megacyte, a player has to venture into the dangerous lawless areas of space where they can be attacked without penalty. Depending on the market value of each mineral, it could actually be more profitable to mine in a high security system than a low security one, breaking the risk versus reward scheme.
NPC base prices:
When EVE first went live and the mining profession was implemented, the asteroid distribution system described above actually did enforce the appropriate risk versus reward scheme. Mining in low security space made roughly twice as much isk as mining in high security space and deep 0.0 mining made an absolute fortune. This was because mineral prices were more strictly enforced through NPC buy and sell orders. Using those old buy order values, the yield in isk per hour scaled up smoothly as you went into progressively lower security rating systems.
Since the removal of the NPC mineral buy orders some years ago, the mineral market has tended toward its own prices based loosely on the laws of supply and demand. Market trends are able to pull mineral prices away from the old NPC values and upset the risk versus reward scheme. When the market for zydrine and megacyte crashed late last year and tritanium prices spiked at 3.6 per unit, the crummy old veldspar and scordite in high security space temporarily became one of the most valuable ores to mine.
The current ore distribution system only works well so long as mineral prices stay near the old NPC base prices. As it's clear that market pressures can push the prices away from these values, the ore distribution system shouldn't rely on them. I think it's about time for CCP to create a new ore distribution system which promotes mining in lower security level systems
Critical mass:
Another big factor in the reward from mining is the number of players in the game. With over 250,000 players in one server, the markets have reached critical mass and always full of minerals for sale. Because of this, players who need minerals for production don't have to mine it themselves. They can simply make isk by some other method and then buy the minerals they need from the market.
Currently, a specialised mining character struggles to make over 8 million isk per hour in empire systems while a relatively unskilled mission runner can exceed 10 million per hour. With a good ship and some experience under their belt, a mission-runner can earn over 20 or even 30 million isk per hour. As expected, things pick up in 0.0 with a good miner being able to pump out 40-50 million's worth of high end ore per hour.
Mining for the sake of convenience or for local production isn't really viable either. Because of new additions to the game such as freighters, jump drives and the warp-to-zero mechanics, transport of minerals is very fast. It's much easier to transport large volumes of minerals from trade hub systems like Jita to your base of operations than it is to mine them. Because of freighters and the warp-to-zero mechanics, it's now as fast to move 900,000m3 of minerals as it was to move 15,000m3 back in 2004.
FInal thought:
Five years down the line, I am forced to ask why CCP haven't completely revamped their mining game mechanics yet. It's no longer an effective primary means of mineral acquisition and currently yields less isk per hour than mission-running. When a specialised mining character with a year of industrial skills under their belt and an expensive tech 2 mining barge makes less than half as much isk as a six month old pilot in his first battleship, it's a clear indicator that something is wrong.
We've had complete revamps of ship hitpoints, ECM, missions and a number of other game elements and yet we're still using the same boring old mining system. The mechanics of mining are in dire need of a complete overhaul to breathe new life into a part of EVE that's gone stale with time. Plans for system-wide asteroid belts, comet mining and a more interactive mining experience have been laying on the drawing board for as long as I can remember. Isn't it about time those plans were implemented?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
NBarnes said on 5:54PM 7-08-2008
I totally agree that mission running killed mining. Mission running is low-risk, high-reward. Mission runners don't lose ships to pirates or enemy corps, but do earn huge amounts of ISK. CCP has made mission running very easy and very lucrative, I believe, because missioning is the preferred playstyle of the bulk of their playerbase. I sympathize, but I think it's gotten to the point where missioning is undermining EVE's desire to be a living environment.
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DFG said on 9:17PM 7-08-2008
They've done Trinity and Empyrean Age. That's a ton. I don't see how you can make mining as interesting as every other part of the game. They ought to phase it out and make it a 'mass manufacturing' type of thing. Oh and they have Ambulation on their plate. I'm not seeing big mining improvements for another 2-4 years.
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W_Floyd said on 5:40AM 7-09-2008
Good, interesting read.
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rektide said on 3:05PM 7-09-2008
You've already mentioned some reasons. The drone regions are another: they're easy to sit and farm. The price of ore seems to be in continual decline. Very few people mine in 0.0, and the numbers seem to be in continual decline. Corp/SpecOps mining ops happen less and less. The couple reds I see mining are clearly amateurs, mining in cruisers or other similarly pitiful efforts.
But the biggest reason mining isnt done is because its logistically a hastle. Yes, a Hulk can fark 50m/hr without much difficulty, but he needs a dedicated hauler character to move the ore. If you scale up, you start to need gang bosses and scouts. Mining is not a one man activity, its a huge group chore.
CCP's talked up multiple proposals for mining. One was to make mining more like exploration, where you probe for fields, and different finds have different characteristics. This links to what I think would be the smartest, seeding new "high value" ores. The amount of minerals worth mining in 0.0 is very small, seeding higher value ores in nullsec might bring people back and give a reason to do something other than import from the hubs.
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Flatfingers said on 2:01AM 7-11-2008
Good article.
One interesting note is that this is precisely the same path that was followed by Star Wars Galaxies. It, too, launched with what at the time was a well-developed resource collection system. But from the day SWG launched it, like EVE, ignored that part of the game in favor of adding and tweaking combat content.
The result of this relative neglect of non-combat content was that those gamers who prefer non-combat content decided that the developers weren't interested in making the game more fun for them, so they left. Because SWG was designed around an entirely player-run economy, fewer resource collectors meant higher prices for the same gear (weapons and armor). To insure that combat-oriented gamers could always get the gear they wanted, the quantity and quality of loot drops were increased... which just drove off even more economic players, which required more and better loot drops, and so on.
I'm not saying this is solely responsible for the state that SWG is in now. But I do think it played an important role in that transformation.
The good news for EVE Online is that it was never designed to be the highly cooperative game that SWG was designed to be. Because SWG was explicitly constructed such that combat players required non-combatants, the exodus of miners/crafters put a major structural hurt on that game. But EVE's emphasis on PvP from the very start always meant that mining was an independent and completely avoidable part of the game. Plenty of people came to SWG for the resource collection; no one comes to EVE for the mining. So its long abandonment by CCP has done far less damage to EVE than the same abandonment of mining in SWG by SOE/LucasArts.
That said, I don't disagree at all with the article's conclusion. Reworking EVE's mining -- in conjunction with its manufacturing and research subgames -- could add value to the entire game.
EVE will likely always be a dog-eat-dog, zero-sum, Hobbesian nightmare of eternal combat.
It probably ought to have a mining subgame that makes a meaningful contribution to that play experience.
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Karanth said on 5:27AM 7-22-2008
I joined EVE mainly because of the mining, in fact. And the fact that all of the promise mining holds is ignored by people who would rather shoot rats as dumb as the asteroids makes me sad. Even more sad than the fact that 6 months of industrial skill is supplanted by a 2 month old character in a Raven.
AC said on 8:09PM 7-11-2008
I read your article and found it interesting so I did a bit of hands on comparisons. While I agree that mission running is more interactive then mining. What I disagree is that by reprocessing looted items you can het more minerals then mining in the same amount of time. I created an Excel spredsheet and compared prices of items I could get on the market and then compared that to the prices of ores I would have to buy on the market that would match the amount of minerals I could get. After comparing about 10 items, most were roughly the same, some were slightly more, some slightly less, and a fraction significantly less.
Now if you take into account the rewards you get from mission running I would have to venture a guess that they break out around even. In my opinion, to become a full functioning miner with exhumers it does take my training time to get to that level. In the same regard, to get to where you can run L4 missions it takes more playing time to get the standing and to get to L4 missions.
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Brendan Drain said on 5:13AM 7-12-2008
Some good points here but I can say without a doubt that I make more isk mission-running than mining. It's all about efficiency. A mission-runner parked in a mission hub has a choice of 4-5 different agents and he can decline one mission every four hours from each of them. That means he can afford to pick and choose his missions to a degree. If he knows which ones he can complete the fastest with the highest reward, a good level 4 mission-runner can easily pull in 20 million isk per hour in bounties alone.
I'm interested in your comparison spreadsheet but to be a true comparison you'd need a few tweaks. Firstly you'd need to account for the length of time it takes an efficient mission-runner to complete the mission. A miner can't make his ore come more quickly but a mission-runner can speed up his fighting and collecting with a good setup and knowing what he's coming up against.
Second I think you'd need to compare raw minerals with a 100% refine rate rather than using market values as the market doesn't represent true mineral value. Buy orders for most modules are set by people who are reprocessing them for cheap minerals so you'll never really get the true mineral value if you use the market price of a module. The market price of ore is affected similarly, best to rule out most of the market influences by comparing the jita buy order value of the minerals gained from 100% refine of the ore versus 100% refine of loot collected.
Ac said on 5:10PM 7-13-2008
Here has been my experience. I want to caveat this that I run both a mission runner and a miner at the same time since neither one requires my full utmost attention usuaully.
When I run missions, the ISk that I can gurantee on is from the bounties and from the mission rewards. I just did a short L4 mission twice in a row, Duo of Death. The first time I got really good loot with several million. The second time all I got in loot was 100 cruise missiles. Relying on just purely loot to get ISK is a risky a business. That being said the loot that I get from missions is just a small part of the total ISK I get from running missions. Mostly I get ISK in bounties. Also in running missions there is a chance you could lose your ship since it is actively being shot at. As skills increase the odds of survival go up.
As a miner, I know what to expect everytime. I know what ores I can get in a predictable manner. I know how long it takes me to fill a jet can. I know what the market price is for the minerals I produce. The only thing you have to worry about is the odd griefer jet can stealing or just simply blowing up jet cans.
Now if mining was the beginning and end of involvement then I would have to agree that mission running produces more income, more exciting, and requires a lot more involvement. However, if you look at mining as the beginning of a vertical process where you gain raw materials in order to then use those materials to manufacture ships and items to then sell it increases profit margins in production tremendously. Granted in order to produce the quantity it is best to be an a corporation that specializes in production.
Doug said on 11:29AM 7-14-2008
Running missions has become pretty wrote. In that respect, I find them no more exciting (or even fun) than mining. I find that I can usually mine in my hulk ore/minerals worth something close to as much isk as I can earn from missions in rewards, bounties, loot and salvage. However, when I factor in my time to haul the minerals to a hub to sell at a decent price, the isk/hr goes way down.
Also, what hasn't been said yet in the article or comments is the effect of macro-miners. More and more mining in high-sec means finding some place farther and farther out of the way so that the belts aren't constantly stripped. In a way that's a draw to lowsec/0.0. The availability of big asteroids means it could be easier to mine from one location without having to constantly be roaming looking for rocks left to mine.
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Mara Rinn said on 2:03AM 8-09-2008
Mining, for me, is about making ISK while getting on with other stuff.
Other stuff could be badge-farming in WoW, ironing in real life (which ties in really well with the 3-minute cycle on strip miners, incidentally), or watching a movie. Mining in a cruiser is not conducive to this practice - you need to pay attention to the game every 20 seconds - but mining in a Hulk (which I expect to have in a month) will be pure heaven.
I can't run missions while doing other stuff - I need to at least keep targeting the ships that are blowing up every minute.
As far as people who are interested in manufacturing - mining does not give you minerals for free. You are paying an opportunity cost: the time you spent mining could have been spent engaged in some other more profitable activity, the ISK/mineral income from which you could have used to make more profit form your manufacturing career.
Thus if mission-running nets you the greatest ISK/hr, you run missions and buy the minerals you lack - especially considering that you can get zydrine and other rare minerals from hisec missions. Why go mining in losec when you can get the minerals you want in hisec?
The "solution" is to identify the problem - people interested in the economic games within EVE need to turn to identify what they want to achieve, then engage in activities which support those goals. Mining is a low-attention mini-game which allows character advancement in a semi-afk playstyle.
Ultimately if the economy was truly player-driven, there would be no level 4 missions full of Machariel class battleships unless there were players actually providing the Angel Cartel with the materials to build those ships.
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Suraknar said on 4:45PM 7-24-2008
For me it is not about ISK, it is about variety in gameplay.
One Day I may want to run mission to make the ISk and another I'll go Mine for it, and some other time, why not, get some from PvP too.
It provides a flexibility of gameplay, that offers variety of choice to the player.
Honestly back in the days where mining was the primary source of income, the game was dull over the long term, and EVE is a long term game.
Bringing in Missions to Low Sec Corps, offers that variety that at the same time makes the game enjoyable to a broader audience, and gives the opportunity to some of the corps to evolve beyond a certain threshold, and why not, go for sovereignty at one point themselves and challenge those that are already in lace.
More Live as a game when there is turn over, challengers and defenders, rather than the same ol same ol status quo of the same alliances and corps holding deep space.
Having two or more primary sources of income is good and healthy for any game.
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Knier said on 2:57PM 8-04-2008
Kids of today have it too easy, back in my day we had to mine omber with our teeth and *walk* it back to the station
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Frank said on 7:14AM 8-21-2008
I sure don't agree with the Rorqual restriction to 0.0. That said, I'm not seeing the lack of money in mining in 0.0. I pop in my Rorqual (or command ship with 3 link modules) and gang up my alt in a Hulk. Granted, both are at End-Game skills and equipment - but I easily turn a billion in isk in no time. My only risk is to the Hulk, but that's not bad as I simply warp away if enemies get near.
Lets expand that equation now. Don't forget - Mining can be for an entire corp. I've run numerous ops with a dozen people in them. Hauling isn't the problem with a Rorqual or 2 in action. The entire op is turning a couple billion in a single op. Either sell the ore or make a cap ship, or both. When you get those level of skills running it a daily event to see from 2 to 5 on avg mining together. That's billions for the corp and people with minimal risk. Again - it's the community that benefits in mass now :)
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