There are a LOT of people who one day are going to regret shooting npc miners. 
I don’t see why. Violence is always a solution. If things go south, use more violence. It’ll solve itself in the end.
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Every time you attack a fleet you get 0.001% (thousandth) standing hit.
Every time you kill a fleet, including miners, hauler AND guards you get 0.008% (eight thousandth) standing hit.
A single lvl2-3 mission will compensate for dozens of hunted down fleets. There are 3-4 corps in each of 4 major factions plus 2 pirate corps. Dont go for one or two of them exclusively and you will not even have to bother running this single mission for weeks or months or ever.
NPC miners are delicious. Their haulers bring the best box lunches. I’m building the orca I made from ores dropped by them this week. 
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Thought so
You think the numbers won’t increase over time? They will, and have to, otherwise they’ll be meaningless.
They tend to congregate in the systems that have over time formed the natural commerce hubs and have the highest count of the respective npc stations for their corporations. The area around Hek is flush with them and I can string multiple stings together with enough ease to fill my trailing porpoise several times over.
Meanwhile, go to a place like derelik and its dearth of stations and you might be lucky enough to spot one or two.
Thats it. So far repercussions seem laughable and easily reversible. And these mining fleets have been there for how long?
I hope they will eventually renew this activity somehow. I got into it pretty late after its introduction. And I dont really see anyone else doing it. It got old pretty fast too. I’m thinking of either of fitting a ship dedicated to the activity or quitting doing it
Fights are not challenging or fun. Feel like grinding. Lootboxes are evil. Overall meh-fine activity. I like classic combat exploration better. Scanning down highsec 4/10 site feels exciting. Seeing those dudes on d-scan feels boring.
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/me puts on tinfoil hat
Its not about the loot, its about removing ore from the hi-sec belts.
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No tin-foil hat needed.
The official narrative is that apparently everyone is running out of resources, so they start mining more aggressively. npc corporations and rats alike. this, of course, also eventually impacts highseccers. the few complainers sadly don’t allow extrapolation into a bigger picture.
Well since no one else has done it yet. Here is a breakdown of the Caldari constellations that these miner npcs belong to.
[LONETREK]
(Haurala) - Poksu
(Karnola) - Minedrill
(Koichi) - Minedrill - Poksu
(Marlariya) - Minedrill
(Minen) - Poksu
(Mito) - Minedrill
(Pietanen) - Minedrill
(Sela) - Minedrill
[THECITADEL]
(Isoma) - Minedrill - Poksu
(Kantanen) - Poksu - DCM
(Otawasa) - DCM
(Outartoh) - DCM
(Santenpaa) - Minedrill - Poksu
(Tasen) - Minedrill - Poksu - DCM
[THEFORGE]
(Etsala) - Minedrill
(Kimotoro) - Poksu
(Okomon) - Poksu
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I am guessing that this was supposed to drive conflict and it almost did.
The bad thing is that this “conflict” is now more of a “how to get humans to log on again” conflict.
Props for bot mining. Op success.
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NPC miners are disturbing in the fact that high sec belts have gone from having a rat or 2 that do about 10 dps to a huge swarm of cruisers with huge damage and huge tank and abilities beyond what any weapons system available to players can achieve. They sit outside Stations in FW space hanging on the undock harder to get rid of than the enemy militia. Of course FW players all have low standing with the enemy faction which is ok but they are still there after the system is captured.
it was never an intention to have people spend their whole lives in highsec. I dunno why they specifically made them eat belts and nothing else but I guess they want to stop newbies getting caught in the sand trap of mining in high until they quit.
Maybe not but nullsec isn’t very inviting, w-space makes you feels more lonely than before and lowsec is either a waste land or gank-central-station.
Sometimes you just wanna chill a little.
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NPC miners is a good thing. They makes space alive, bring diversity into game field. There only way to improve and make additions to it.
CCP needs to triple the range of NPC miners and double the fleet sizes.
Its not like plenty of workarounds don’t exist for smart players. Plus it keeps deflation from accelerating.
Doh this reply was in the wrong topic
“After we killed all the player mining bots, mineral prices crashed. So we added NPC mining bots so mineral prices stabilize.” – CCP Random
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