NPC miners running amok in lowsec?

Turns out you lose standing with the NPC corp when you destroy their mining ships to stop them from emptying the belts.

What happens if my standings get too low? Will they attack my mining ship with a response fleet as soon as i warp to a belt?

That would basically mean that i lose access to all the belts in their space, which is huge.

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Some of us miners are not at all the care bears we are made out to be. I mine because I really donā€™t have a choice sometimes. I have family, a kid, mining allows me to be a part of this game without having to be on comms constantly.

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What I would like to know is:

If all the mining ships in an NPC mining operation are killed off, including their defence gang, will they continue to spawn in that solar system? Or do they bugger off for a while or go somewhere else?

I am in a null sec system, and there is actually nothing to mine in the belts.

I am hoping to get some people interested in planning an attack where all the mining ships are destroyed in one go, and see if they come back or not. I would hope that some sort of deterrent is built in to the game that when players wipe out an NPC mining op they donā€™t come back for a good while, and belts can recover, so that people can resume mining.

Be great to read what people have discovered about blapping mining ops, and whether they bugger off or just keep coming.

o7

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Ever since this started happening, we have kept a casual eye on the belts in our home system and every day we see exactly the same thing.

All belts are completely stripped, regardless of time of day, except for one particular belt:

Every day the same belt has 11 veldspar rocks of differing varieties. It is our understanding that it is the same 11 rocks every day.

Weā€™ve bookmarked each rock to confirm this over the coming days, but we find it hard to explain why the NPC AI which seemed to flick a switch a few months ago and go into overdrive stripping every asteroid in every belt they can find across lowsec would leave the same specific pieces of Veldspar so consistently.

Bug reports have been submitted with screenshots, and weā€™ll be adding to them with our findings after a few more days of tests.

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New char here the system I did my career agent missions in had 1 belt the belt was mined out by npc bots in less than an hour after DT I know this because I was there mining with 15 npc ventures and 10 skiffs now I am in an 0.8 system and there here with me again ā€¦ how am I suppose to make a living at this when NPCā€™s are mining all the ore

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We have had similar things happening in our system since the June update. There might be 1 day per week when all 5 belts have not been stripped. We are in Lo-Sec.
I have submitted 3 bug reports:

1 was not answered.

1 ā€œCould not duplicate on the Test Server.ā€

The 3rd Bug Report was answered with, ā€œThe AI is acting as we want it to. If you donā€™t want them to mine your belts, you should destroy them.ā€

That is effectively a big F you. We donā€™t care if you canā€™t mine in the system you put infrastructure in.
cya!

More and more belts in the surrounding systems are being NPC mined. Was this the start of ā€œResource Warsā€?

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Yea ā€¦ because we are in game 23.5/7 like the NPC mining fleets!
That response shows that devs arent playing the game.

We players have to sleep, work and do other stuff IRL. When we log into the game we find ā€¦ empty belts!
When we destroy the NPC miners ā€¦ they respawn!

The best way to deal with them seems to be destroying all mining ships except 1, to prevent respawn.
But when you play in the hours before downtime this wont help you much because they belts are probalby already empty.

It seems to me that CCP wants to nerf belt mining and push miners into nullsec corps where they mine in ore anomalies.

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Our bookmark checks, along with watching the NPCs coming and going, confirmed that the NPC miners were ignoring the same 11 asteroid, all day, every day.

We realised that the NPC AI must have a range limit, and so any rocks sitting beyond this limit will not be approached and mined.

Each of the surviving asteroids in our system sit well beyond 200km from the beltā€™s beacon, and the NPCs warp in point.

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itā€™s insane most low sec belts are empty of rocks anytime i am off of work itā€™s just npc miners warping from empty belt to empty belt. This is definitely broken. How did this make it though quality control into production with such a major bug? really at this point you should just remove asteroid belts from low sec, since players canā€™t mine it anyways. devote those system resources to reducing lag or something, anything would be better than wasting CPU cycles on a broke ass routine.

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Funny thing isā€¦ IĀ“ve heard from a buddy, that NPC-miner love moonbelts too, it seemsā€¦

Do these NPC miners sell their minerals or ores on the market?
If they do seems a bit pointless because they introduced changes lately to increase the price on minerals.
While again prices are going down now againā€¦
Anyone knows more on this?

Anyone?

Nope they donā€™t sell the ore, it just vanishes from the game.

I seem to recall CCP Larikin saying (perhaps at Fanfest) that he would eventually like the npcā€™s to do something with that ore ā€¦ perhaps build something when they have enough.

Odd yes, looks like an out of control ambient factor than.
Seems someone went a bit to fanatic with it for now.

Good. NPC miners will be nerfed within days if they go for nullsec resources.

Ever try to bomb an NPC fleet in nul? The response wasā€¦ Funny. The miners ran, a support fleet showed up and it was impressive. But, hereā€™s the thingā€¦ After a while, the support fleet left. The miners, though on Dscan, did not return to the belt for the hour I stayed in system. I kept checking belts and they did not go to the other belts either.

So have you tried attacking the miners, even with a disposable ship and seeing what happens?

Thatā€™s a funny idea: Maybe the NPCs are like most HS war dec targets: OMG! They attacked us, better hide away until theyā€™re gone!

The only problem is that you have to get them off your belts before they empty them and NPCs get to work immediately after downtime.

Ya Iā€™ve been seeing this aswell the last few months. Even systems with 11 belts are decimated down to 1 or 2 belts left after half a day. They need to claw back on mining amount for these ships or limit fleets to so many per station in constellation not so many per system. They need to have a docking station they work out of. My null sec region only has a 3 stations yet all 8 systems are mined out daily. Can we nerf npc mining fleets pls?

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I would tell you guys how to fix this situation, but itā€™s currently making me rich very quickly.

CCP: DONā€™T CHANGE A THING.

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you my boy ayx