Anomalous Mining

Anomalous Mining

It's been a little while since Gravimetric/Ore sites were downgraded to Anomalies from Signatures and since I have the pleasure of ganking a few miners in w-space lately, let's have a look at how this change has affected WHs from the ganker's perspective.

Firstly, let me just say that mining is a profession that I take zero part in but understand that it is essential to EVE's economy.

CCP have been giving miners all sorts of handouts on golden platters over the past 6-12 months or so with the mining barge HP buffs, cargo buffs and ore yield buffs.  However, these changes were all mostly aimed at highsec mining to make it harder to suicide gank miners and to make it more profitable in general to mine.

I have no doubt that the recent move of Ore sites to anomalies, which do not need to be scanned out with probes, was intended by CCP as a benefit for miners who, in general, are too lazy to scan out sites to mine in kspace (certainly in highsec).  However, this 'boost' for miners is a very big double edged sword in wormholes where needing to probe out the site you are in is not so much a hindrance as it is a safety buffer.

Before the changes there was no way to find and kill an active miner in a wormhole without dropping at least core scanner probes, or more likely combat probes, which the miner has a chance to spot on dscan if they are watching it like they should be.

In addition to being able to spot the probes, this meant that the miner had several minutes from you jumping into the system until you were even able to be on grid with them.

By comparison, you can now be on grid with the miner within 20 seconds of entering the system, even if you have never been there before.  All you need to do is enter system, hit dscan, notice mining ships, warp to the Ore site.  Add to that a 54km heated point range on a Proteus (or even more on an Arazu) and you can simply warp to zero and you'll more often than not be in point range of whatever is there.

Not needing to use probes dramatically reduced the window a miner has to notice you entering system and if your WH entry is off dscan from the Ore site, it closes it entirely.

WH space has always been the single most dangerous area for mining but now it is out right foolish to do so.

That said, there are still plenty of people willing to take the risk to gather their Ore in w-space but since most miners are not completely stupid, there are a couple significant changes that have occurred regarding WH mining.

Firstly, while they used to be reasonably common, I have not seen a Hulk or a Mackinaw in a wormhole for many months.  Miners look to be going far more favourably for cheap T1 mining ships or even lowly Ventures.

Secondly, virtually every mining ship I have come across lately has been warp core stabbed (and I have missed a few because of this).

Bottom line is that the days of max yield fit Hulks in w-space are well and truly over.

So what does this mean for the hunter?  Well, it means a few things.

Miners in wormholes are now very easy to catch.  Before you needed to have probes and to be able to use d-scan effectively to locate the ships and then run a combat scan in as few cycles as possible to catch them and now you just warp to their site.  However, I would highly recommend bringing 3 points of tackle to guarantee a catch as the ships will be stabbed way more often than not.

In practice, the overall change is that there are less people mining in wormholes now than ever before.  The miners that do remain present little sport as the effort to find them is literally zero and since they were not smart enough to move their mining operations to a safer area, they generally are not smart enough to pay close attention to d-scan either, seemingly preferring to rely of their warp core stabs.

Blowing them up is still a fine hobby, but the satisfaction of getting a 100% lock off a single probe scan is now gone.

Many PVP players hate all miners on principle and while I would never join a corp that mines as a regular past time, it is a valid play style. 

That said, each play style has a time and a place and wormholes are becoming less and less the place for mining. 

The move or Ore sites from signatures to anomalies was a pretty big shafting of WH mining by CCP.

PS:  I am going to invest in a Sabre as missing miner kills to warp stabs is not on.