An Open Letter to the Mining Populace of Sinq-Laison

Dear Miners of the Sinq-Laison region,

I want to help you. Really, I do. Although my occasional participation in various ganks, suicides, and “kill the silly miner” contests might seem contrary, I don’t inherently hate miners. I don’t quite understand you, but please understand that my occasional violence projected upon you and your kind is not born out of ignorance. But let’s be honest here, you engage in perhaps the laziest, most risk-free activity in eve. Mining may not be the fastest way to get iskies in this game, but sure as hell is the smoothest. Can you run missions afk in a mammoth for 2 hrs? Can you target someone, click “pirate” and walk away to make a sandwich? Exactly. No glamor for sure, but really no danger either. My point with this is that you have the luxury of participating in a profession that requires about 10 hrs of training to do effectively. Let’s call it a week if we’re talking efficiency. That gives you all the rest of the time in the world to train any other skills you want, and STILL be good at what you do as a profession. However, miners are regarded as lazy, fat, easy targets. You are preyed upon and mocked endlessly, and honestly, its starting to get sad.

So the other day, I decided to out for a little “aggressive interactive social experimentation” amongst the mining systems surrounding Dodixie. Yes, I was can flipping. But no, I don’t really need or want your ore, and no I wasn’t actively trying to bait some poor miner into an easy kill. What I was doing was trying to understand you and the ways you work in an attempt to gain some respect for you. So imagine my dismay when I find myself can-flipping the SAME guy 4 times in under 45 minutes , and then realize he’s a 2006 player. Sir, I’m sorry for the theft of your ore and your time, but you should have been able to utterly waste me with *something*. You’ve had 3 times as long a time in this game as me to train up some serious teeth. Instead, we got to the point where all I had to do was appear on grid and you’d pack up your mining drones, abandon your ore can, and warp to station. That’s just embarrassing! I am embarrased for you because you’ve clearly not been spending your time wisely in Eve. Ok, so you don’t have a lot of combat skills and felt fighting my rifter was a no-win situation. Fine. Then alternately, I would hope that you’d have some big bad mining skills to make up for it. Why were you mining into a jet can? Why aren’t you in a hulk, or hell a retriever by now? That’s like a pirate who hasn’t trained up any propulsion jamming skills, or a mission runner who’s never trained past gunnery 1. Staggering, and totally unacceptable.

The second day of my social experimentation, I was in Auvergne, and came across Jamey. Jamey had decided some time before I arrived on the scene that mining into a jet can for hours, literally hours, without trucking any of it to station was a pretty good idea. In the words of Billy Joel, “sooner or later it comes down to fate, I might as well be the one”. With this altruism in mind, I puttered right up to Jamey’s almost completly full jet can, popped one of my own, and then shifted the contents of his, to mine. As I sat there, unmoving, about 20 meters from Jamey and my new can-full of Jamey’s ore, I saw two thing happen. One, he recalled his mining drones. I thought this meant he was giving up, admitting defeat and retreating, until I saw a trully hodgepodge collection of t1 drones pop out of his covetor. “Noooo” I thought, honestly surprised. Yet sure enough, Jamey suddenly went flashy red to me as his drones started to hurl malice, insults or perhaps pebbles at my hull (because either way it wasn’t actually doing any damage to me). I sighed and shook my head as I scrammed him, went into an orbit around him, and began the very quick task of melting his tank into a nice little wreck. I locked his pod too until I remembered my precarious sec status situation after my recent Orca shenanigans and decided against it (I kind of LIKE being allowed in Dodixie), and allowed Jamey to warp away. Now, here’s where that story should have ended. Sore miner lashes out at can-flipping injustice, goes down swinging to a cheeky and unfortunately better armed oponent. The end. Now HAD that been the end, I very well may have ended my social
experiment right then and there with a much-improved opinion of you guys. But…(yes, there’s a “but’) unfortunately, that was not the case. When I realized how much ore I had, I bought a mammoth in station and went to go grab it. As I was fitting it out with cargo expanders, I suddenly noticed Jamey’s name drop from the station guest list, yet remain in local. I was perplexed; there was still a solid 9 minutes left on the aggression countdown. Intrigued, I put aside my new hauler, jumped back into my rifter and undocked…*just* in time to see Jamey, in ANOTHER covetor, warp off somewhere. On a hunch, I decided to warp back to the scene of the crime. To my surprise (and I’m pretty sure Jamey’s), I came out of warp right on top of his new, yet still flashy red covetor, and proceeded to make another floating pile of scrap right next to the first one. One angry German (Dutch?) evemail later, Jamey logged off.

So here’s the deal-breaker: Jamey is a 2007 player. Not a noob who’s inexperience and ignorance of aggression-timer mechanics I took advantage of. Jamey, in your 2+ years of experience in the art of shooting at inanimate objects in space, has this never happened to you before? There’s no way that I’m the first wake-up call you had. Did it honestly come as surprise to you that loads of ore sitting in an unsecured can in space was easily taken away from you? I’m pretty sure I learned that my first week in eve, and I don’t even mine.

Last example. After re-locating the contents of this astute gentleman’s can in Vylade, I get the following in local:

Dark Malakith > ‘poor noob Aiden
Dark Malakith > ore stealing fail
Aiden Mourn > I’s just a widdle nubin
Aiden Mourn > was I not supposed to take all that ore from you?
Dark Malakith > i play since 2weeks and you think i’ll fall in your trap…. Ho my god you stole 10mn of my mining time
Dark Malakith > in 5mn my corpo ‘ll be there to mine with me perhaps you’ll come another time …..
Aiden Mourn > re-allocated
Aiden Mourn > I re-allocated your time
Aiden Mourn > well let me know when the whole gang arrives
Aiden Mourn > little noobs like me need all the friends they can get =(
Dark Malakith > no problem two minutes they eat and i change my ship to my rupture
Aiden Mourn > like, a mining rupture?
Dark Malakith > no a battle rupture only for you
Dark Malakith > i’m allow to killing you i didn’t let my chance going out to kill a newbie
Aiden Mourn > Yeah wouldnt want to let that golden opportunity slip out the door
Dark Malakith > ho yaeah the third rifter of my day good i’m happy
Aiden Mourn > well, where are you?
Aiden Mourn > ill come to you
Aiden Mourn > Ive never seen a “battle rupture” before
Dark Malakith > in station to fitt my rupture
Aiden Mourn > Right of course
Dark Malakith > you never seen a rupture in action?
Aiden Mourn > Never
Dark Malakith > the best minmatar pvp cruiser
Aiden Mourn > Are they cool?
Dark Malakith > yes lots of
Dark Malakith > only one inconvenient it’s small cargohold
Aiden Mourn > Well, let me know when its ready

What can I say? Now I had the scent of fail-Rupture on the wind and I wanted a piece of it. Clearly, a man who doesn’t bother to check character info or history and considers himself a veteran at 2 weeks is in need of a wake-up call. Que up the Billy Joel again. I tried convoing him and baiting him into a dual but he had to “go for a smoke break” for 35 minutes. I gave up.

And so here we are. Miners of Sinq-Laison: I rally do want to help you. As you can see from the above examples, you’ve sort of earned a bit of a reputation for yourself as that table in the lunch room that no one wants to get stuck eating at if you catch my drift. You’ve become a punch-line of a sad joke; flying punching bags for the majority of the New Eden populace to punish and hurl aggression and insults at. Let me break it down for you: Lazy carebearish activities like mining into a jet can, or flying an untanked 180 mil Hulk in 0.5 space WILL get you stolen from or ganked; its not really a question of “if” at all, its a “when”. And mouthing off at people and coming across as a tool (especially in local) is similarly unacceptable. It makes you look foolish and ignorant and only furthers the generally accepted conception of you as chubby little carebears to poke sticks at. Gentlemen, you’re better than that, or at least I want to believe you are. Have you ever heard of anyone fucking with the coal-miners of the 1800’s? Exactly. Those guys were some hard-core, tough sons of bitches, and all they had were some hammers and a case of the black lung. Start standing up for yourselves! Space is a dangerous place, so learn some defense! Train up some tanking skills or get yourself some respectable drone skills! I know you have it in you, now show the rest of us your teeth. I’ll be see you.

With Respect,

-Aiden Mourn

~ by Aiden Mourn on December 16, 2009.