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So I will preface this by saying that while I do support the black out, I am not ignorant of the fact that alot of people either hate it or are struggling with it. I understand that alot of people are turning in their ratting carriers and buying hisec lvl 4 running rattlesnakes. The thing is that 3rd party apps, super umbrellas, high levels of safety, etc in nullsec have taken away a thing that made nullsec so wonderful to begin with, so here is how it use to be, and hopfully in this post you can see how much more reliant we were on each other, ei corp/alliance members to get stuff done in an era where there was no zkill, no evewho, no apps that link with local, etc. The way we played then would be pretty much immune to the blackout because we only relied on each other.
So back in the day, with no 3rd party apps and a ton of small corps/alliances that no one knew the MO of, when we would rat or mine, it was an organized thing. We would have people with alts watching gates on choke point. different pipes, etc. We would have a small defense fleet ready to do if something happened, but mostly we would be ratting/mining in a pocket as a corp and talking about hot pockets or how to fit a raven.
When we had to do logistics runs to hisec, we DID NOT have jump freighters or anything that could cyno. That meant people would load up t1 industrials, and if you were lucky enough to have a few freighter pilots in corp, you would load those up to, and you would form a pvp escort fleet. You would have people on alts in t1 frigs a few jumps out in different directions for intel. Once the fleet got to hisec, a portion of the fleet would continue to escort because concord was alot weaker then so you could not rely on them so much. In fact there were fits for tanking and fighting concord, there were a few but the popular one was either the apoc or the geddon, I can't remember since it has been so long, maybe someone in the comments can remind me. So as a corp we would go to Yulai (jita back then) or Jita once Jita became a thing, and sell our ore/ratting loot and buy stuff that people needed, then we would haul it back with the full escort fleet and eyes on gates everywhere. Bare in mind we had to do this with very few numbers, alliances back then had less members then most corporations these days so we would be doing this with all of maybe 20 or 25 people juggling alts and stuff in the beginning, though numbers did increase as eve aged.
Now weekends were the busy time for pvp, so we countered this by pvping ourselves, or if people needed isk they would go to hisec. Ratting on a saturday night doing US or EU prime time was seen as suicidal, and generally done by people who were bad, or people who were baiting. The bait drake meme originated around this time AFAIK because 1 the drake was legit for null ratting back then and 2 you would put a guy in a drake in each system in a pocket on a weekend during prime time and wait for someone to jump on you, then bam the calvary comes. After a while local people stopped roaming our pocket on weekends because they knew we were baiting, but still we would get people roaming in from other space and that was good times. Plus the drake pilots got to rat on weekends so those guys always had isk while the rest of us were alt tabbed waiting for a greenlight to undock and frag stuff. Come monday we would be back out in the ore belts and anoms talking about hot pockets and nerding out on how to fit a raven, making that isk to recoup a weekend of bait drake losses :)
Cynos and cloaky camping changed things a little sure, but with the amount of 24/7 cloaky camping that goes on, the black out should not effect this. Every system in eve with heavy ratting/mining has the afk cloaky camper in it, and you guys rat/mine anyway because "eh he will gank someone eventually, but he is probably not even home right now so lets just do it" So this is why it became even more crucial to not mine/rat during pvp prime times on weekends because you could get a cyno dropping a serious fleet on you. That being said we still relied on each other, we got to know the cloaky campers in the area and what kind of stuff they could drop on you and generally when they would do it, and we kept each other up to date on stuff because we were always in voice comms.
I could keep going reminiscing about eve circa 10+years ago but I hope you get my point. Back then we were always in voice comms, we always had eyes out, we were always dscanning, we kept track of fleet movement in the area when cynos became a thing so we would know how serious to take cloaky campers that night, etc. Overall the social factor of this game was at its strongest back then because relying on your corp bros was the only way to survive. Lone wolfing it with extra data did not exist, I mean even ratting/mining/population/etc data on the in game map didn't exist for a while so you had 0 idea what you were jumping into gate after gate, hence the need for good intel. These days no one is in voice comms, someone says "oh f*ck, died to a gatecamp in LXQ" within 30 mins like a dozen more people in your corp/alliance die to the same gate camp. That kind of sh*t did not happen back in the day because we were in comms.
TL:DR stay in comms, put alts out on gates, keep notice of fleet movement in the area, don't rat or mine on weekends, and you guys are going to be just fine. Going to hisec is pointless, most of you guys are going to hate it there, if you loved hisec you would have never left it in the first place to come to null, what makes you think your gonna like it this time around?
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