I am stationed in Polfaly and I’ve been mining and salvaging out here. Things have gotten a bit rough out here since Joint Harvesting has come in and are acting like locusts. What I mean is they will mine everything in sight and leaving me and a few other players with almost nothing. It gets pretty bad that I have to go to the Sehmy system and farm Blood Raiders bases to salvage what I need.
All I am asking is that you get Joint Harvesting to leave or lessen their numbers so players that do work there can actually make ISK there.
Mining NPCs are classified as rats - you may and are encouraged to attack them, thereby eliminating the threat they pose to the asteroid belts you mine. Indeed, the response fleets are quite formidable, and to stand up to them you would need PVP-level pilots of your own to bring to battle; however, this is precisely the kind of behavior and combat-preparedness CCP wishes players to exhibit in response to the presence of these mining fleets. Fight the competition or be left with nothing.
As of right now I am the only one in the NMCP. I founded and I am running it myself for the time being until I am comfortable with having others in my corp.
That’s rather pointless. CCP apparently cranked up their presence in all belts. If you shoot them, they would not disappear. You would just get red standings and they would come back minutes or maybe an hour later, drive you away or destroy you and mine regardless. You would ruin your standings, had to have a sizable combat fleet ready all the time, which most of the time wastes their time sitting around as the miners maybe do not come to your belt and have an overall questionable at best, frustrating at worst gameplay experience for a lot more people than just the miner. JH and co. are NPC, not gankers. They don’t care about their losses. Suggesting that players engaging in a Sisyphean task was good game design is ridiculous. If the idea behind this as you describe it was really CCP’s idea to foster combat preparedness, they are yet again failing spectacularly at every level.
CCP wants there to be more (non-suicide gank) PVP-level combat at belts. This comes in the form of players (nothing wrong with mining during wartime) or PVP-level rats (that honestly are more competent than half the player base) you are incentivized to kill. Yes, after a while your standings turn red and they attack you on sight, but all that means is that you must have combat readiness at all times, which is exactly what CCP wants. Be willing to PVP, or suffer the consequences of not doing so - this is working as intended.
You don’t get it, do you? Those NPC just keep coming back. With enough combat readiness you can keep players from coming back, but these NPCs just keep coming back. They don’t care how often you kill them. And keeping combat readiness up at all times is not going to work either. No one wants to be at full alert status 24/7, that’s not how enjoyable gameplay works. The way how rats work does not “incentivize to kill” them, it should dis-incentivize you from doing so because you will just have a much harder time in the future.
If you are willing to “PVP” these rats, you have to suffer many more consequences without any positive gains. Quite the contrast, you only have negative results from "PVP"ing these NPCs. It is beyond me how someone can defend this kind of not-thought through, outright dumb gameplay. The only thing these rats do is remove ore. That’s their only job. And for the longest time, they did not even do it in the right places in the areas of space where it was most needed to be done. CCP blissfully ignored anoms and moons in null sec as spawn locations for these diamond NPCs, locations where they could have actually removed proper ore quantities and ore types and would have forced locals to fight them.
The combat capabilities and AI of rats are PVP-equivalent, better than half the player base. Tough ships, EWAR, Logi. And if you can take on those rats, you can take on actual players.
You make it sound like they come back right away; that’s not what I have seen. There is a wide grace period before they do. And when they do come back, you fight them off again. I’m not seeing the problem here.
CODE + other suicide gankers would like to know your current location
Rule #1 of EVE: Undock is your consent to PVP. Yes, carebears deserve a safe space, but if they’re not willing to stand up for themselves or band together with others who will help defend the mining ops, then they should not complain when they feel the need to shift belts once theirs has been invaded by mining rats or players. If they want to preserve their territory, that’s what weapons are for. In an MMO, tasks should be more easily accomplished, and some tasks ONLY accomplished, with the help of others.
False: you gain the preservation of your belt. That’s literally the point of this thread: this thread is raising a concern that belts are being consuming too aggressively; however, at no point did OP say “even though we’re fighting them off, the belts are being consuming too aggressively”. If OP was actually fighting them off then he’d have grounds to suggest that the respawn rate was too high (or that the rats are too hard), but he did not implement the intended solution to the problem, which is to engage the rats.
You couldnt be further from the truth on this one… i am farming NPC fleets for couple years now and profit is really good and there is alot of positive gains, and standing loss is marginal, one L1 mission repairs a month of farming fleets.
And there is a reason for them to exist other than piss off miners…
And to calculate, they dont devour belts that fast. Ventures mine 51 m3/min and retrievers/skiffs 103 m3/min (per ship ofc). Its not that much, so if you kill them in that system everyday they wont mine dry the belts. You jest let them do it and now you suffer from it.
You are farming them. That is not the same as “wanting to mine in belts”. Completely different activity. Of course you don’t care about the standings or implications. So, you are the one who’s further from truth than anything.
They have tried that a few times. But with them I do not need to be vigilant all the time. I know when they come into my system or if they are there already. That does not require “24/7 continuous vigilance”.
Problem here is the same that makes freighter escorts unviable: Nothing happens a lot of the times, so you pay them for nothing and they get bored, which leads to them not being around when you need them. That is the difference between fighting NPC and fighting players. Is this that hard to understand?
False: You gain nothing like that. The NPC will come back a short while later and you have to fight again. What you try to purport here is not how these NPC work.
False, too. The intended solution to these rats is not necessarily to engage them. You can also get positive standings with them so that they help you if you should get attacked by players or other NPC. But that blue standing does not remove the fact that they compete with your activity and neither being friendly nor being hostile helps at all with that.
You know that they drop back the ore they mined ?
Back in the beggining of this content hauler could drop over 500k m3 of ore (which was a bug ofc, unlimited ore hold). Now you can get 100% ore back from the miners. And i am blue to most of the NPC corps that send mining fleets, so yeah i do care about standings.
And by stating that i farm them i wanted to make clear i have experience in dealing with those fleets. 500mil drops from miners and haulers are possible, salvage and ore is also a good profit. You can deal with them solo, if not you just trigger them and you have 30mins for them to come back, and most of the time they spread on different belt (after coming back from safe spot).
You sound like you are mad at CCP for making you switch ships from time to time and do something else.
I am disappointed at them for doing these things in an unproductive fashion. These mining fleets could be beneficial if they not just stripped normal belts but all ore deposits, which they don’t and thus they are just a nuisance.
So I’m not talking about OP, just want to be clear, but you cannot have players running around wanting to claim a limited resource that other players and even rats want but then complain that the resources are being deprived when they aren’t being fought over. EVE doesn’t work that way. I’m not saying I’m a hardcore “adapt or die” Darwinist but the approach CCP has taken over the years is to penalize players who do not and reward players who do band together to stand up for themselves.
Tell that to everyone who failed to maintain vigilance at the time of their death
Orca has a ship maintenance bay for a reason - stash some combat ships in there. Bling a solo ship if you want, whatever. Also, stations/structures in the area can house combat ships for use even if they aren’t the drop-off for ores. Nothing wrong with having multiple bases of operation, even if that just means you have combat ships stashed there.
Then fight them again. When they die they’re gone for an extended period of time. Big whoop.
Yes it is. Blue standings don’t stop them from mining the belt. You know what does stop them? Killing them.
