Bot miner Nous Underground has been stripping belts in Avesber for a little while now. His fleet was banned by CCP for a short period of time. Once the ban ended, the bots (Orca + covetors and a miasmos hauler) were back in greater numbers than before. Though I don’t care one way or the other about mining except to fill time between more interactive things EVE has to offer, Nous’ Orca had augmented drones deployed so I bumped that whale off the belt and forced the bot to warp out which freed me to scoop his toys. This happened twice in two days and the second time around, I waited for the Orca to return just to bump and scoop 10 T2 mining drones as well out of spite. Later that day, something went wrong with his hauler bot so he left a belt worth of ore in jetcans that I grabbed a good portion of for a combined total of about 600 million ISK confiscated from this lazy miner.
The following day, Nous Underground had blacklisted my main so that when I jumped into the system, his bot fleet would dock at some crappy player owned refinery and hide. There were also no augmented drones to be had because the whale was down to strictly T2s. I mined in-system for several hours to keep his fleet besieged then got bored and loaded up an untrained alt with a Miasmos to “help” haul the ore his covetors were jetcanning. 173 million ISK in compressed belt trash was confiscated over 2+ hours.
Here is a potato graphics screenshot of his operations (all those bots shamefully locking the same rocks) and my confiscation activities.
All good things must come to an end, and Nous finally checked in on the automated ISK farm only to find the hangar nearly empty and some week old character looting his cans. The fleet manually docked, logged for a bit, and when it came back online a bit later, retrievers had replaced the covetors and the hauler bot was sitting idle on station! My main was removed from blacklist so the fleet siege would stop as well.
What does any good EVE player do at this point? Well send an extortion e-mail demanding 3 billion ISK to make me go away. Of course Nous didn’t pay and I never expected to milk more ISK out of the bot fleet. Here’s hoping for perma-banning for that corporation filled with bot miners, but if nothing else, I reduced this clown circus from augs and covetors with a hauler to retrievers and T2 drones.
(Fix your bot problem CCP!)
