You should not compare the procedural, mindless, entirely predictable behavior of NPCs to players. You ought to know better - just look at how many NPCs you can kill with a single battleship.
Imagine facing off against another player. Your chances of winning against even one other player is difficult to predict - you don’t know what ship they will bring or how they will pilot it. Even if you win this time does not mean you will win the next time. With NPCs you just have to develop a procedure for beating them and you will win every time.
Yes, they really did that. Remember Rorquals and structures? Remember what that lead us to? Exactly, these dumb changes they are introducing now. Or before that when OTEC was a thing? I am not a fan of rewarding banding together for the sake of it the way CCP does these things. This will always lead to disaster.
It is actually very funny. Among other things because of OTEC, CCP changed mineral distribution and later changed Rorquals to introduce more active gameplay (which is another terrible thing to do) but they did not consider the consequences of these changes. That lead us to yet another, even worse mineral situation than OTEC. It’s like CCP never learns.
There is a distinction here between capability and (current) ability. The vast majority of EVE players are highly capable with the proper training and guidance (and SP and fittings) to become better than they are now (otherwise why would you ‘waste time’ training others?), but at any given time a considerable chunk of the player base fly around in shitfits, poor fleet composition (esp. regarding use or lack of logi and EWAR), exhibit poor piloting, poor coordination, poor target prioritization, poor reflexes, poor execution, etc. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that AI exceeds the competency of a large chunk of players while fully acknowledging that players can learn to outperform the AI. I only made the comparison with this specific AI (not AI in general) because this specific AI happens to strongly resembles that of player fleets since they employ logi, a considerable amount of a diverse array of EWAR, and constant target reprioritization.
And of course if you create fits (solo or fleet) to counter these rats specifically, you’ll have an easier time than general purpose PVPesque fits used to counter other players in general.
Meh. I’m talking specifics here. I’m not going to grossly generalize statements across CCP’s implementations of unrelated parts of the game. Mining NPCs are unrelated to Rorquals
Correct. CCP wants players to make a choice: fight them to preserve your belts, or be forced to find new belts. I’m not going to lie, the defense fleets can be challenging if you are not prepared, though they can be soloed with proper configurations, and it helps to know the Orca’s ship maintenance bay can be used to bring the combat ship(s) used to fight them (you can swap ships in-space without docking using a SMB). If you have fleetmates, it’s even easier. If this is your first time engaging them, I advise that you do prior research and/or practice fighting them on Singularity (where almost everything is available, including Keepstars and faction/deadspace mods, for only 100ISK) before you fight them “for real” on Tranquility.
I haven’t engaged them since they first came out, but if I remember correctly the hardest part about facing them was breaking their tank since they logi so effectively. Once you take apart their logi then they fall apart fairly easily. You’ll also want to be careful of their EWAR - they’re the next biggest threat after logi. You can always ask others who have experience fighting them for advice as well - maybe @Vaako_Molinari here can suggest relatively low-cost low-sp fits that can fit in an Orca’s SMB that can be used.
Point is: the solution isn’t to nerf the rats but rather to go buff yourself
That’s just it. I’m not prepared nor is anyone else in this sector. That’s why I’m there. I’m there gathering resources while my skills are upgrading so that I can go into the other sectors and not have to worry about getting podded.
NPC miners suck. You can shoot at the NPC and drive away the mining ship but a response fleet will show up to scale with the ship you attacked with. Once you drive the NPC miners away they will return in about 10 minutes and will start mining again. The toon/player that attacked the NPC miners will have to stay docked up or in a deep safe or be killed the NPC response fleet.
The NPC miners are pure BS! Imagaine CCP adding NPC fleets that rat, salvage, explore and scan to run sites as hard as the NPC miners mine!?
Screw CCP and Developers for everything they have done in the last three years to high sec. I personally hope CCP loses customers and can not replace them. I am looking forward to see the quartly earning report from CCP next year. I hope they lose tons of money!
I agree with the 1st part of your statement. I posted here to see if I could get CCP to help with the situation. I’m not agreeing with the screw CCP yet.
Or you could destroy the response fleet. Nothing wrong with players or their fleets collectively developing a spine combat-wise and standing up for themselves. Just saying.
It’s not a problem, it’s a feature that is working as intended. It’s a feature intended to encourage players and/or their fleets as a whole to develop and apply combat skills at belts and penalize those who don’t. Grow a combat spine and keep your belt and net the rewards for killing the rats (including the ore that drops), or cower and suffer for it for letting them consume your belts. One of the best uses of the Orca’s ship maintenance bay is to stash combat ships for miners to swap out for this very reason.
More than anything what you need the knowledge on how to defeat them - that knowledge is readily available. If you want practice taking them on without incurring “real losses”, that’s what Singularity is for. Buy everything for basically free (even Keepstars costs only 100ISK), die repeatedly until you master your reflexes and figure out fits and tactics that work, apply them to Tranquility, triumph over the enemy. If you lack the skills, you can use Singularity to help your skill planning on Tranquility. Since skill farming on Singularity is so damn easy (two different strategies), you can easily procure, use, and abuse skill injectors on there to test your future capabilities on Tranquility to help you skill plan. Personally I generate more than 350 Injectors every 14 days and stockpile them for my crew for training and simulation purposes - if @Neutralis_Tichim wants some he’s welcome to them. Cheap & easy skill injection on Singularity will give you a feel of what you will be able to do on Tranquility in the future with additional skill training, except that you’ll have developed combat experience to utilize those skills right now in the present. Once you have the knowledge and experience fighting the rats, then getting the ISK and SP to do so is the easy part. In the meantime, you can also/instead get some fleetmates to fight them off for you. You don’t need to restrict your fleets to members of your corp or alliance or coalition - you are allowed to make friends and create “one off” fleets. See others mining in the system? Ask to join their fleet or invite them to join yours.
When they first came out I believe I used a HAM (or RLML?) Tengu and I think I also used a RHML Golem. That has been a few years now. I haven’t mined actively or passively since starting LCSIS/USIA.
@Archer_en_Tilavine i belive that people dont want to listen to the advices and are not interested in content other than afk mining…
I did, hundreds of times and i even started to do it in porpoise… i wont be going into details cuz there is another topic about exacly the same thing where i posted yt clips and explained in more detail.
But yes, the way to do it is to kill them all. And loot ore/box/shiny modules.
Me goofing around, sorry for loud music:
It was the early days, now i optimized the process clearing entire site in 5min for ventures and retrievers and ~16 for skiffs.
This content is super easy.
Yes, from time to time you will get cruiser/battleship spawn, like a REALLY big fleet and you wont be able to kill it even in a carrier. The answer to that ? let them warp off, despawn and try again when they come back after 20 mins timer. Yeah its that easy… and in my opinion its about 20% chances of getting bigger fleet than frigates. At least in HS.
Indeed. But that’s their problem. EVE should not change to accommodate idle gameplay. To the contrary, CCP has been aggressive over the past few years about making changes to make passive gameplay difficult to do and unrewarding if you manage to do it.
Interesting video by the way. I’m also surprised they didn’t switch to attacking drones. I’m looking over existing guides (that didn’t exist when I touched the content way back when) - very much worth taking them on. Highlights:
When you kill the hauler, remaining miners will fill up and never mine again.
this one seems to be the most important
Killing the entire spawn will result in a new spawn. There are more than enough systems with fat miners ready to spawn haulers, so don’t kill the whole spawn.
Strong Box drops from Hauler. A Strong Box can hold various items such as Faction Module BPCs, Faction Drone BPCs and Permanent Empire Faction Skins for ORE Mining Vessel and Industrial Ships. The wrecks of T2 ships can be salvaged for T2 Salvage Materials and Ore can be looted.
If you kill the T2 barges, you definitely want the salvage. 40-60m from a typical group is median.
The last two points indicate that killing the response fleets can be profitable in its own right - what a fleetmate loses out in mining he makes up for in loot (and dropped ore), though he can always swap out mining/combat ships at the Orca’s SMB.
Lots of cheap ships being used in the guides and videos published. I played on Singularity a bit myself, seems the Golem can hold its ground against the cruiser response fleets just fine. And they aren’t attacking my light or paint drones either.
Well… they sometimes bug even without killing the hauler, just not mining anything.
90% of the time they go back to mining to random belts (the fleet splits) after 20 mins of killing the hauler. And there is 30min hard respawn timer so even if ore holds are full hauler wont spawn before the timer runs out. Also newly spawned fleets takes 100mins to fill up the ore based on mining mount (ventures 51m3/m, barges 103m3/m) and size of ore holds. Also from my observations i deduced that every ship has its own trigger for a hauler, and only ships that are currently full (which is more than 90% ore hold filled) are being emptied, so the timer starts and ships that didnt got the ore hold emptied spawn the new hauler after the 30 min cooldown… there are alot to the fleets bahaviors and mechanics i could write about but without visual aid (videos^^) will be hard to understand what i am reffering too.
The point is, you can predict when the hauler spawns if you want to chain them, but from my expierience full clear and moving to another system is the best way to make isk with this content.
I talked to a few EVE players I saw on Twitch and they advised me to just leave them alone and go somewhere else cause I would be just wasting my resources fighting them PLUS being in a high sec area I would get flagged and destroyed by the local police there. So I’m just going to cut my losses and start searching for another sector to call home…
Thanks everyone for your opinion/input. I really appreciate it.
Or before that when OTEC was a thing? I am not a fan of rewarding banding together for the sake of it the way CCP does these things. This will always lead to disaster.
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this one seems to be the most important