The mining braindead
- They are online 24/7
- They all have expensive, shiny Hulks
- They rip your mining system clean every day
- They do not answer in local
- They are mostly afk, as sometimes their ships will just sit there for a few minutes doing nothing
- They have T2 cargo expanders and cargo rigs
- They do not use jetcans to avoid ore theft even in highsec, they mine until the hold is full and warp back and forth between the belts and their base
- They have friends who come pick up their loads in freighters
- They will mine in your belt even if you were there before them and even if there are at least 6 other empty belts
- They block the docking area of your station with their frequent warp-ins and warp-outs
- They have strange names
- They are almost exclusively Caldari chars that offer the best training base to get the required skills as fast as possible (especially the younger ones)
- They avoid confrontation as that only lowers their quotas
- They only have one agent listed in their profile that they did missions for
- They mostly have a 0.0 security status
- They are sometimes not even human (bots)
- They are the so-called macro-miners.
So what are these guys about anyway? They are a bunch of people who work for one of the many ISK reseller websites you can find on the net. They have accounts that they use in shifts to earn in-game currency, and they also buy off ISK from players who are willing to sell it low-price. They use the funds they earn this way for several things: reselling ISK in real life to players who do not want to spend the time earning it in the game and/or reselling implants/implant bundles.
In highsec there is not much a single player can do about these leeches – you can only tease them, but not enough to actually accomplish anything. In this case, it comforts me to know pirates like Pulsar Solaris (ranked 16th last time I checked) who will even go to lengths like suicide-smartbombing whole platoons to get to the macro-miner’s T2 equipment. From what he told me, with some friends they once succeeded in blasting and podding 4 Hulk pilots in one attack. The T2 equipment they looted covered the cost of the battleships they used 🙂
…almost makes me consider piracy!