When Sansha Kuvakei decided to play in the constellation I was operating in last week, I decided to move to the nearest Sisters of Eve station with a level 4 distribution agent and start grinding standings. The standings themselves are nice but I was more interested in getting enough loyalty points to purchase the Sisters' scanning gear.
If Poetic Stanzeil is correct and all carebears are deranged, then my condition is fairly harmless. I hate purchasing ammunition and scan probes fall in that category. I even ran the Wildfire level 4 epic mission arc to the get RSS Scan probes instead of buying them. So I started looking at the blueprints for the regular scan probes and decided that despite the fact that at 4.5 million ISK a copy for the blueprint originals making my own probes is not cost effective, I wanted to make my own regular probes to turn in for Sisters' probes.
In my old high-sec days a few months ago, the materials list would have seemed daunting. Lots of low sec minerals on the list. But now that I'm living in low-sec, only two of the materials are a challenge: megacyte and strontium clathrates. Megacyte is a challenge because the proper gravimetric sites holding Spodumain don't pop up all that frequently. However, I have a bunch of megacyte sitting in a hanger because I didn't want to sell it because I might want to use it one day. I was thinking of building ships, but scan probes are useful also.
The second material, strontium clathrates, isn't really challenging to get. All I have to do is mine ice. Have I mentioned I've never mined ice outside of a mission? And that ice in high sec only yields 1 unit of strontium clathrates per unit of ice? Ugh! But low sec holds two different types of ice that yields more. Glare crust yields 25 units of strontium clathrates and dark glitter yields 50 units per unit of ice refined.
In case you are new to Eve, ice mining in low-sec is pretty dumb unless done as part of a large corp operation. One could say only a deranged person would mine ice in low-sec. Especially since only one system in Minmatar low-sec contains dark glitter. Yes, that ice is that rare to find. I might just skip the ice mining portion and buy straight off the market. Or maybe not. I think the insurance on my Procurer is about to expire. The only question I have now is: do I fit a prop mod or a web? I already know if I go ice mining I'm going to fit a point.
I never used the word all. I had to write into a 140-character tweet. But you do find much more of that behaviour (the real-life threats, the real-life wishing of harm) in the carebear segment, than you do in the PvP segment of the playerbase.
ReplyDeleteThere are some of us who take great pride in being deranged sir... That aside I can attest that it is possible to run a POS mining ice and gathering PI products out in lowsec. I did so myself for months before moving out into nullsec. Even so it's not something I recommend for those with heart conditions or stable personalities... :)
ReplyDeleteEverything in EvE is about opportunity cost. If you're scanning in low sec for grav sites to mine, it takes time to do both the scanning and the mining. Interruptions when a flashy jumps into system slow the process down again.
ReplyDeleteFor the same amount of time, you may have hopped in your freighter, done a Jita run and purchased the minerals to build 50 frigates.
Profit on the each individual high sec build will be way less than the low sec route, but with economies of scale (if you've done your market research), you should come out a fair distance ahead.... or possibly behind (if you haven't)...
My point is this: neither the high sec thing nor doing the low sec thing is wrong. Both are doable. Which is the more fun, or more profitable, or more risky is entirely up to you.
Just as is deciding which is the best use of your time.
Oddly enough, trying to solo ice-mine (this was before the mining barge revamp) in a null sec system where the belts were full of warp bubbles was more heart pounding than getting caught in the middle of gate camp. I was not too thrilled that the belt rats (mostly battleships) spawned before the first laser cycle was completed. But I did get away, so I get to add one more thing to the "umm, don't ever do that again" list.
ReplyDelete