as a player/corporate CEO I have moon belts that are not mined, for a little bit of extra fuel having the ability to leverage NPC miner fleets would enhance the experience and provide content for others who enjoy popping miners. that the moon mining stations have a module that could outfit mining stations with npc miners to harvest minerals as player characters would on be half of stations owning corporation. Features that would also support this in when these npc miners come under threat a distress call is sent out to the owning corp and the alliance that they are apart of. Players who are then online can then link a destination and respond to the threat against the corporate/alliance npc assets.
often real life prevents me from being on to mine my own belts. I often do not get to see the benefits of deploying these stations. If nothing changes I am considering un-anchoring them and that will be a sad day for the miner bumpers since there be less content for them to pop.
as a nice plus, the Owning corporation could actually build the mining ships and place them in a hangar for the npc pilots to use. All the enhancements to the AI controlling pve content could be used to make sure the ai pilots respond as close to how a player would respond.
The game does not need âNPC mercsâ in any way, shape, or form. It is bad enough that blue diamond rats are a thing (and that white diamond rats exist outside of empire faction mining fleets)
EVE is an MMO. Collaborate to accomplish goals, and that includes mining belts.
I have enlisted players in fact my corp at one point had 30+. they all stopped playing the game and have not signed in for over a year or more. eve has a population problem.
EVE does not have a population problem; you have a recruitment and retention problem. This is not an insult, this is a fact. Mechanics should not change to address a problem that lies elsewhere.
This would be like going back to the old system where the moon material was collected automatically and people would âmineâ it from the owner by placing a siphon surreptitiously. Granted, itâs not exactly the same, but if CCP wanted people to automatically collect materials without having to go out to get them, we probably would have stuck with what we had.
Also, I imagine miners wonât stop being miners because athanors shut down. The miners will move somewhere else and PvP players will go where they go if they want to shoot them still.
Nope, just NO. If you canât put together a mining fleet to extract value then your athanor is just a vanity item. Unless of course you are producing a moon belt as a public service (as some do) in which case carry on.