NPC Hauler Hunting Feedback

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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This is not a “player feature/idea”. This is documentation to show how broken or half finished the NPC mining fleets are. The bullets below are simple statements of how things are today. They aren’t meant to be interpreted as “this is what’s wrong”. The whole list taken together paints that picture of “everything together, sucks”.

  • Each NPC mining fleets gets 1 and only 1 hauler which, if destroyed, does not respawn until after downtime
  • NPC mining fleets live on, even without having a hauler, and they keep mining
  • There is no way to determine if an NPC mining fleets hauler is already destroyed for the day.
  • Empire haulers spawn on a schedule on the order of half hours
  • Pirate haulers spawn on a schedule on the order of hours.
  • NPC mining fleets appear to be limited to 1 per system per NPC mining corp.
  • Haulers that spawn are randomly T1 (paper thin) or T2 (chonky) haulers.
  • All NPC haulers appear to have a 50% loot drop rate.
  • NPC haulers exist in belt for about 5 minutes
  • unlike anything else in the game, as soon as the NPC Hauler begins to align out of the belt for warpout after “picking up ore”, it is completely untargetable and invulnerable.
  • Shooting NPC haulers summons a NPC response fleet after a brief pause
  • the NPC response fleet DPS is extremely high.
  • Empire: the NPC mining fleets and response fleet will go to a safe when aggressed, which can be probed
  • Pirate: the NPC mining fleets but not the response fleet will go to a safe when aggressed, which can be probed
  • Red-NPC miners: as soon as you land in a belt with them, they will trigger a response fleet immediately. You have to slow boat and shoot the NPC Hauler within the brief window. If you don’t, and the fleet was a Pirate one, the hauler will bug out.
  • NPC Haulers do not go to the safe, unless the aggression was done within the 5 minute window of them being in a belt.
  • NPC response fleets drop no loot
  • Once in a safe, the NPC Hauler does absolutely nothing.
  • Strongboxes give Industrial Livery skins which seem better suited as rewards for Resource Wars instead of as trophies for killing a hauler. No one wants to fly an Amarr-skinned ship to gloat “hah I killed Amarrian haulers” and no pro-Anarrian RP-er wants to kill Amarrian haulers to have their skin.

If any of the above are incorrect, I invite corrections.

The list above isn’t “each bullet point is something wrong”. However, the list taken together paints a picture today of something really wrong and broken. It’s a shitty half finished machanic:

  • Miners that want to ■■■■ over the NPCs to leave a system’s belts alone, can’t, because they keep mining on without a hauler.
  • People that want to hunt NPC haulers have to have the patience of Buddha and hope no one on the forums/YouTube/reddit talks about it due to the 1-per-day competition.

If anyone at CCP reads the above, they can figure out what contributes towards this content being relatively dead, instead of being a gateway to becoming a hunter (for example). If there’s some software dev or product manager at CCP that has “but it’s my baby” syndrome over this then they really need to get a grip on reality and let go.

3 Likes
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All you have to do is fire a single shot at one of the NPC miners and they all warp out. Simply take a shot at one of them, immediately warp to a station, wait 3 minutes, then warp back to the belt and all of the NPC miners and their response fleet will be gone. You now have the entire belt to yourself.

Roleplaying should have absolutely no consideration or bearing on game mechanics.

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Sure, from my observation though messing with haulers and toying with the fleets, they’ll still be in system, and will happily continue chugging rocks in a different belt – if there’s only one belt left, they will keep warping around system until they land in the sole belt with rocks again.

Sure, but that’s an opinion. I’m just stating observations. Feel free to tell your opinions to the very devs and the story arcs going on in FW right now :roll_eyes:

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In low-sec or null-sec, if you see a blood raiders hauler or guristas hauler, warp away and you manage to pin it down, there is a low chance that you may find an npc sotiyo but it is RNG.

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You want to make a post for every half finished feature? Because that may as well be a full feature breakdown.

Ccp hasn’t finished a project since apocrypha.

And this isn’t hyperbolic starting with wormholes ccp really has never stuck with anything long enough to finish before jumping to the next thing. It’s the same reason they can’t manage any of their spin-offs

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The response fleet is ridiculous heh.

I’ve tried blapping some and it can be crazy hectic to loot and scoot.

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I remember this content when they added it. IIRC it was the first time they used smarter AI and “diamond” rats which are using basic ships with tank and dps of a blinged t3c.

From the very start it was meant for fleets. Yet from the very start, just like FOBs, players refused to fleet up and tried to solo it. I lost a few ships on this when I tried it with friends, the dps and ewar was too strong even for 5 players with low to middle skills to survive. I tried to oneshot hauler solo, but even stupid badger had a tank of an Orca. With that I personally lost interest in this content, same later with FOBs.

CCP wass trying to battle solo players and their tricks over time, but while they kinda succeeded with FOBs (its now dual boxed with Leshaks though), they left this old content in a state where it can be soloed if you know how, yet it is nearly impossible to do it in fleet which it was designed for lol.

Imo, this “content” has no purpose in EVE and can just go. CCP is probably keeping it in game because “even if there is single player who enjoys this, it is meaningful” I have quite a lot of half-asses stuff on my multiplayer server myself and I am keeping it from this exact reason. (But 2 players out of 50 is probably something else than the ratio of players doing this in EVE compared to total players)

And it is ever since this, when the “content” went downhill. Pretty much everything since this was designed for cooperation of multiple players, for which I don’t mind, but it was also made to require nearly perfect skills and super expensive ships. Which is a killer for me personally. And seeing how many players are soloing this stuff with tricks or multiboxing it, CCP’s goal failed miserably.

But this one is the worst. As you are losing corp-standings and even faction standings by attacking them, so it is a choice for very small percentage of players. Skins as a reward are stupid to say at least.

Imo, the better take on this activity would be if:

  • ships had low/moderate tank compared to their hull
  • ships would be dropping “real” modules used by those hulls, ie t1/meta/t2 (strip)miners, shields, etc. and mainly ore they mined
  • attacking them would made player suspect along with a weapon timer as if they attacked a real player (so no more station haulers and docking right away)
  • response fleet dps toned down, in fact they could use real ships fits. Basically, the response fleet should be killable with t1 cruisers flown by low to mid skills pilots assuming they coordinate well and have some logis with them. Response fleet could probably scale with ships used by players though to prevent soloing this ie. if there is t3c attacking the npc miners, then the response fleet will have double the ships and twice as stronger, this mechanic is used in FOBs already.

Basically it would be ganking without losing ships and hurting innocent players’ feelings, assuming you get away before response fleet comes or you deal with them as well. This way I think it would have higher percentage of players willing to do this content than it is now. And it would even add more interaction between players as some players could side with npcs and attack players killing them.

And since the loot will be primarily in the pockets of miners it basically prevents soloing it because one attacker can’t point them all, especially if we add them some innate 1 warp core bonus to force players to use warp scram and come into their range. Also suspect flag should deter anyone to use expensive ships for this.

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I too, frequently discovered NPC’s generally cheat. Makes me lose interest very quickly.

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This. This is why it gets boring.

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