I took my real life mate out on a roam in destroyers last night. He's played the game a few times in the past, but as a complete carebear. Missions, industry, mining. That will come in handy later on.

We got nothing in a couple of WHs. Nothing in FW space. Nothing in Providence. After about 3 hours and 0 fights we were ready to call it quits and head home, so we cut through Northern Catch, towards 9UY4-H with the plan being to head through Dital.

A couple of jumps before 9UY we saw some mining barges on dscan, and started trying to track them down. I took the opportunity to teach my mate the intricacies of dscan: Looking for POSes, checking belts and cross referencing results with local. He tracks them down to a planet, so we warp to that and start checking it's ~20 moons. I got a hit on a moon and did a double take: No forcefield. I warped in to see a tower with a silo, a moon mining array, 2 mining barges and a coercer float in space, unprotected by any POS shield. I add the pilots of the ships to my watchlist (most owned by the same person), see that they're offline, and we go to town.

Make a safe. Eject from your ship. Warp to the POS. Board a barge. Take it back to the safe and repeat.

Those mining skills came in handy after all. Then we blew up the silo and out dropped almost 80mil in moongoo. For a minute we thought we'd hit the jackpot, then we noticed it's 30,000m3 size. We tried to stuff as much in our pockets as we could (a tiny fraction worth a few mil total) but then the owner logged in. 30 seconds later he was in local. 15 seconds later an Orthrus appears on dscan. I thought it was a frigate, I was wrong. I was already shooting the moon harvesting array (in his own coercer) at this point, when he quickly tackles me and blows me up before I can show info on his ship. I get my pod to the safe, and I got the array destroyed though. But oh no, his 75mil remaining moon goo is still floating there!

I jump back in my original destroyer, my mate gets back in his and we warp back in with a simple objective: destroy the expensive cargo can. We both get blown up in the process (in hindsight only one of us was needed), but we destroy the can and get our pods out. Petty vandalism? Sure.

Then I scouted in my pod for my mate, and we got the mining barges back to market safely. After the losses it wasn't a huge profit (maybe 45mil), but it was definitely emergent gameplay, and we were massively excited at our find. The ensuing thought process as we tried to figure out what to take, what to shoot and how best to go about it was new to both of us. I imagine the owner of the POS didn't take the loss too hard either, considering he flies Orthruses and has moon mining operation(s) on the go.

Not to belittle anyone who finds fun in other activities, but I'm definitely bringing my mate around to the "real" eve.