Science & Industry

A few friends and I are currently on a purification pilgrimage to the regions of Heimatar, Metropolis, and Molden Heath (that'd be Minnie Ice belts); our goal is to purify the belts of all ice mining bots and lazy AFK miners by sending them to the deity of their choosing. I realize that the purification process is messy and that sometimes honest miners get caught. I make no apologies for this. As is said, you need to break some eggs to make an omelet.

During the pilgrimage I've been keeping some numbers; you honest ice miners might be interested in these statistics.

The data covers the 393 exhumer kills during the months of December and January.

January Kills
December Kills

Out of these kills, a whopping 328 of the remaining pods remained in the belt for greater than 10 minutes after their ship was destroyed.

That's 83.6 percent of ice miners did not warp their pods off after having their ships destroyed.

Out of these 328 pods, an alarming 113 of the pods continued to warp back and forth to the station after having their ship destroyed.

That's 34.4 percent of remaining pods continue to warp between station and belt in a pod after having their exhumer purified.


Frankly, I find it shameful that this number of people are able to make free isk (no work invested) and CCP continues to allow it. Till CCP does something about these slothful players, we will continue the purification.

It doesn't matter what tank the bots fit, we are able to kill even the most heartily tanked mackinaws with ease. No bots escape the purification.

We see both types of bots. Some will have an orca, 4 mackinaws, and a hauler alt that warps between station and the orca. I assume the mackinaws mine into the orca. We have nabbed entire fleets this way:

Killing a bot fleet, including the orca, with catalysts.

We also see individual mackinaws that mine till full and warp back.

Because they want to pretend their suicide ganking has a point beyond increasing demand for minerals.

Didn't realize CCP changed ice mining in Crucible to also give minerals.


Clearly this person bot/afk mines ice.

If you are not a bot miner, then you should care because bots depress the value of the material you are mining.

Doesn't it **** you off that someone else is stealing your income by breaking the rules of the game?

If it does not, then please contact me IG. I have some faction ships for trade in station at a good price. Honest.

^^ Very much this...

Bots are a plague that should be eradicated!!!!!!

We do report them. Unfortunately, my method of determining if someone is a bot requires me to blow them up first.



Locator agent is in Hek, we use him quite frequently.



Works for me!

You do realize that ganking is one of the big reasons there are so many bots in the first place?

Bot miners can afford to replace ships easily, loosing a few hundred million in exhumer is not a big deal so it simply becomes a cost of doing business.

Human miners on the other hand play a lot less and their ROI is a lot lower, so often when they get ganked they simply do not return to mining, they can't afford it. So over time human miners leave the profession while the bot ones keep at about the same numbers.

So you are not doing some noble deed, you are making the problem worse.

Um... Take action before dire need? That doesn't work. If a tanker plans to get you, they will scram or disrupt you. There is no warping. If you mean have time to run a booster, again they usually bring extra ships to compensate. 3 to 4 catalysts will beat a shield boosters.

Better to stay passively aligned to your warp out and run when people arrive at the belt if you are not afk.

As for hulk, remember, the Mack gains a 100% yield bonus for ice mining, but mines a tad slower. Still, for ice mining if you do not use a Mack, then you are hurting your profits more than a gank will.

As for cost... About 1000 units of ice equal 200 mil isk, which is about 21 hours solo mining and with no bonuses. That really is a day of bot mining for a single botting account. (a week if you have limited play time for a normal miner) you would have to kill over a ship per day to hurt their profit.

We encourage this type of behavior. Nice critical thinking, some planning, the motivation to do something. These are all good things, and just further my justification of what we are doing (getting people to actively play the game, instead of a bot playing for them).

We have also created content for several different groups here.

1) People like the bloke above now get to come up with ways to defend themselves (and I will tell you that a few of the real miners have already done this and are quite effective)

2) Manufacturers have more business because of this. People building mackinaws, ice miner IIs, catalysts, blasters, etc. Since we started we've blown up roughly 1300 catalysts. That'd be about 10,000 meta and t1 blasters gone too.

3) Real miners will now hopefully get a little better return on their time.

I'm sure if you try, you can think of other people that now have more "game to play" because of our actions.




We try

And try

And try....

Also, don't forget that after we kill them, they can't mine anymore until their master comes back and starts the bot up again. This is lost income that needs to be accounted for.