Son of Dominion nullsec mining

The father.

Let me just start this with a phrase I’ve always, always wanted to use but could never achieve the correct context:

I effing called it.

As of Dominion, WH mining is no longer the best mining profitable task, having been completely outstripped by nullsec mining. For the chain of logic that lead to this conclusion, look no further than the following paragraphs:

I was sitting in a WH belt, mining and thinking about how much I love mining in WHs, when I saw probes on the directional. Entering a professional state of panic, I told my ship to warp to PoS and waited the agonizing seven seconds before my 200 mil ship was safe, all the while asking if the probes were ours or someone trying to kill us for the fun of it.

The probes weren’t ours, so you can imagine my surprise when I wasn’t trapped in a bubble on my way to the PoS; and the greater surprise I had when the pilot convoed me to say hi and not “Grrr, Grrr, you win this time, but we will have your very expensive ship for our killboards. Arrrrgh” or whatever pirates say. Apparently, through some act forgotten to me and him, our respective corporations had set each other to blue, which was strange, as his corporation was a nullsec habiter and we were a highsec mining corp. He revealed himself as an old WH miner that left the WH for nullsec come Dominion, with good reason, so he said. He invited me for a look around his nullsec, as his alliance and all nearby alliances were NBDS. Immediately suspicious, I took my sister gear off my covops, slapped on a normal scanner and flew after him. After flying past an impressive warp bubble on a gate:We made it to his alliance’s industry V system, and he excused himself while I scanned out some gravs. The small ones were easy to get too, and contained about 80k of ABC ores, and the large ones were slippery, but similarly had a goodly amount of ABC ores and some BS wrecks, one of which I found a survey scanner on, one of the items we never seem to have in the wormhole.

The dude explained to me that the belts would refresh themselves about every 36 hours, and were able to support thirty hulks with orca and rorqual bonuses happily, aside from some hostile stealth bombers who liked to AFK in system.

The feeling I was experiencing at this moment was akin to beating your head against a brick wall when suddenly someone walks up and points out a Styrofoam wall a few feet to your left. That… dispenses candy or something when you beat your head against it. This nullsec system had cyno jammers up for five systems in any direction, local chat, an intel channel to point out threats five jumps before they came near, and most mortifying of all, a station where the ABCs that in the WH we had been carefully compressing and hauling slowly to Jita, were being refined at a 4% tax w/ a 100% yield.

In Apoc, the WH was king. It seems that the WH has been king for too long, and I have heard from CCP from somewhere that “We never intended to have long-term habilitation in wormholes”, which would probably explain why grav sites stop appearing in our WHs after a week and a half, and why we can’t set up moon miners.

If CCP wants to shift focus from WH mining to nullsec mining, that’s fine. I mean, Apoc made WHs king, now Dominion comes along with vast changes to nullsec, they’re gonna want attention to nullsec more, and better belts seems the best way to do it. It just seems ta me that they overdid it just a tad. Unless a nigh-infinite source of every conceivable ore type next to a perfect refiner seems reasonable to someone out there?

(Actually, the dude told me that they don’t have enough tritanium for their manufacturing, so they’ve been jump freightering it in. I kid you not)

Similarly heard from the dude, CCP made the belts overly rich because they expected the changes in sovereignty to make everyone and his dog start fighting bloodily over every square mile of space-dust. Since in actuality, the big alliances are consolidating their space to conserve cash and there really being no reason to expand, there’s much, much less fighting than expected, the market is going/already has been flooded w/ lowsec minerals, ecetera. I really hope that CCP makes a few small tweaks to these gravs before WH turns into the equivalent of mining veldspar in lowsec with local minimized, one jump from highsec.

Also, the dude explained to me how to use that newfangled sovereignty button for something other than remembering how to spell sovereignty, and it’s pretty detailed on every concivable system, but it is odd that there’s been seven ships and one pod destroyed in my wormhole’s “region”, whatever that is.