To put it simply: these can be 20-40 mil per hour at best with a very high yield Hulk. So, not awful, but not much better than your regular hisec mining. I've opened a total of about 150 green boxes (one site awards about 50 boxes, including all ice respawns, if there's no competition) and 5 of the other, rarer boxes you occasionally get just by mining the ice. The good thing about these is, it's more straightforward than your regular mining. You don't have to keep warping back and forth between a station or have an expensive Orca on grid, as you can just turn in the ice, and the loot boxes don't take almost any room in your ship. You can literally stack a few hundred of them inside your barge. I'd say these are best done as a secondary activity while doing something else, which is not good game design. But hey, at least there's something for miners in these events....
I've been mining the ice event sites (and regular ice) for 3 days in nullsec in a retriever. One thing you should do when you finish mining and want to exchange the ice is to warp anywhere and then back to the jump gate - much faster than the slow boat you are doing. It will deposit you ~6km from the exchanger. After mining event ice, I would mine regular ice and then take everything back to the station. Got about 400M in loot red boxes (doesn't seem much more loot than the other colors - the extra loot boxes have 50M-75M extra loot - i got about 3 of these), some excellent skins, and about 150M in regular ice. Not been ganked so far - I've been lucky... just used one of the hisec ice filaments to get me out of nullsec and dropped off the cargo in Amarr for my alt to sell. Lots and lots of the overseer loot... Also, you should be mining one ice oid per laser. when the ice oid disappates, the second laser will complete its run and give you nothing.
That was pretty funny, thanks for sharing. I did the highsec ones last year and found that selling the boxes instead of opening were decent isk. But ye, you might as well as go mine regular ice for the isk alone.
keep boxes unopened and forget about them for awhile. same with login rewards. "everyone" will open this stuff, sell it, lose it, quit eve, and someday you can trade some of this crap for a tournament ship haha
If you want to try lovesec mining don't go straightforward where you was dropped by filament. Use your instruments - map and brain - to find a calm corner. For example, in a system where I do combat sites there is only one dude doing mining sites. And I got to this system by good old jumping through gates. While filaments always dropped me into systems full of angry people who tried to kill me.
My hisec experience with the winter events has been that you need a pretty decent combat ship to do the combat sites, the explo/hacking sites are probably the quickest isk but the competition is fierce to get to them first, and ice mining is solid and reliable isk for the most part with the occasional high value item, provided you've got the skills.
Last year the mining sites were a bit better return, as I recall. Also, the first day or two of the event this year seemed a bit better for loot as well (same with exploration, for me). That said, it seems a bit of a toss-up between combat sites and exploration for speed/isk. If you are a pretty fast scanner you can get all of the sites, but the respawn seems a bit slow. On the other hand, the combat sites never ran out while I was doing them. Side note: you can stay in the ice sites long after they vanish from the probe scanner view and the ice continues to spawn as long as the site is occupied.
I started on the mining, and quickly moved to the exploration side, I got bored of the slow boating, even the suggestion of warping out and then back in again still requires you to slow boat out to the ice. When doing exploration in low sec I hardly found any bits of space with so few other players that I felt I could usefully mine there at another stage - thinking of the extra loot... and in null exploration I got ganked too fast, which I had managed to avoid in low sec.
I've done this for every day the past week, have earned about 5.6 billion isk in low sec at no risk since I grouped up with corp mates in battle barges. 1 day I averaged 24 million @ crate while other days I've gotten an average of 5 million, it's very RNG based but generally I'd say if you have a few corp mates you can team up with, it's 100% worth it in low sec since it's pretty much risk free.
ya, this is why i hate the game some times, your not there to pvp or attack people but they have to feel good about themselves attacking 1 small ship that jumps in trying to mine. i hope they really feel good about themselves. such a good kill they got there.
I wouldn't say that they are risk-free, you can be ganked just like in a regular belt. But yeah, that amount of ISK for this much time is basically worthless.
There is a chance of getting additional special boxes directly from the ice roids. I've mined perhaps a total of 12 hours and made 658M ISK so far. so I'm averaging above 50M ISK/hr but it's entirely based on luck.
Ha yeah no HS mining events are terrible income, you’d make more mind veld, or the real ice you can take to market. I’m all for LS paying a lot more but the baseline needs to be a lot higher.
yeah the mining sites what utter shit I did 3 hours in high sec and a 3 hour test in low sec. All in all hig sec neted me 20mill for 3 hour ice mining while low making me about 45mill. All in all I would make more isk just doing regular ice mining. With it comes to seasonal events EVE online has the worst event´s I ever seen. If I want to do a Christmas or Halloween or summer event in a mmo I rather do that in ESO or FFXIV or Runescape. All does 3 mmo manage to make event´s FUN and rewarding and when I mean rewarding I don´t mean loads of in game money I mean special items they are nice to have but have little point other than being neat themed items. EVE manage to make even´ts all about isk but you noticed you would make 5 times the money just doing Abyssal or level 4 missions and often they are not even that fun. So for me EVE manage to make event´s waste of time. Reason that pisses me off is Seasonal events happens once a year they should feel special when it comes to mmo.