Mining for Players

This is a topic that I’ll probably come back to at some point. Apparently at somepoint in my career, I made the following statement to a good friend. “I am that most dreaded of MMO players, the care bear.” I tend to upset the natural order of things by needlessly throwing resources at things that could be better put use wiping the virulent infection of my fellow humans from the universe. I constantly waste isk, time and other things to put people that I hardly know into new ships, get them started training new skills, help them get set-up for mining/research/learning/pvp/pve/et cetra.

Case in point: Today I happened across a young Caldari pilot fresh into the SAK and had an overwhelming desire to just throw help at him. He really didn’t seem to know a PDS from an SPR but that only further spurred me to fill his wallet with my isk. To top it all off, he was genuinely interested in learning the game and getting over the learning curve. I almost couldn’t contain my enthusiasm at finding someone so ready to play the game and learn the ins-and-outs of a complex system like EVE.

We talked a length about skill training, mining, missioning and the general accumulation of wealth and power. In the end, I gave him over half of my net isk worth in new skills and equipment that would have taken him a couple of weeks to obtain on his own. I pointed him toward such perennial favorites as EveMon and EFT so that he could begin planning for his own future and make educated decisions [or at least ask educated questions]. By downtime I had made a new friend, had helped a new player and lost over half my isk. Sheesh, what was I thinking