Hey guys,
Was hoping the council could either point me at the dope on the whys and wherefors or just explain the economic mechanics behind NPC mining. There has been a lot of outcry, but that’s no why I’m posting this. I want to understand the economic reasoning. Seems to me it must be important to making the economy work or they wouldn’t do it. So what’s the story? Please - I am NOT trying to start another brawl thread. I’m looking for insight and knowledge.
NPC mining operations were added in 2016. They serve no other purpose than to add scarcity to the ore and mineral market. The asteroids that they mine are not placed into the market, they are just gone.
Having said that, they do provide some content. You can kill the mining ships and they will drop whatever ore they have mined. You can also kill their haulers, which will drop whatever ore they’ve picked up from the miners, along with a strongbox that can contain skins, faction mining lasers and upgrades, and faction mining drone blueprints.
They pretty much exist only on belts and are great for luring gankers into diamond npc pray if you have the standings other than that they are useless. If you want to mine do it in anom’s or on moon’s.
I do not understand what their economic impact is supposed to be, either, and I can imagine that they possibly increase economic output.
The thing about ore, at least last I heard someone with authority speak on the topic, is that there’s only so much of it distributed in the universe. For more to appear, some of it has to be mined out of somewhere. Whatever is mined out in a day is randomly distributed at downtime into the universe.
This encouraged a somewhat nomadic lifestyle where you’d search the universe for large caches of ore in rarely traveled areas. Now that NPCs mine it everywhere, these goldmines don’t have a chance to build up.
NPCs might mine the ore in your system on a given day, but on any other day they’re out somewhere else working to get ore distributed into your belt instead of out of it. The complaints come in when people can clearly see how the ore leaves their belt but can’t see how it gets back in. Overall, I think they’re a boon to any group trying to sit in one spot and a bane to nomads who would otherwise be finding systems rich in resources to day trip into.
Possibly they wanted them to be content where miners would be motivated to take out some combat ships to cut their teeth on the more advanced AI, but if that’s the case then the standings hits to empire factions probably blunts the allure of some extra ore and experience so I don’t know why, if that’s the case, they’d not have made these pirate factions that award positive empire standing.
Anyways, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a justification from any source of authority, and if it exists nobody has ever cited it for me. Just speculation as to the true motives. If anyone does have a link to a direct citation by CCP as to the intended purpose, I’d like to see it.
NPC miners allow for some fun emergent gameplay.
A guy in my alliance often sits next to the NPC miners in his Orca, mining in null sec. And when people come to kill his Orca, the diamond rats of the NPC response fleet come to his help, repair him and kill the guy shooting his Orca, because of his high standings to the pirates. 
Since they nerfed PVP (wardecs, can flipping, crimewatch, and on and on, ) they needed to fill the void and made NPCs to keep the balance.
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