it's not risk free, we can still get suicide ganks. it just won't happen as much as the goons want it to unless you offer bigger rewards to make it worth people's time. we're getting more ehp not an undestroyable ship. we've only been made safer because gankers are going to be lazier.

let's face it goons stopped paying out bounties on exhumers people would stop bothering to gank them as much and prices would go down again even without the new mining barge changes.

i'm sure you can find a ship that can gank the new hulk before concord arrives, i'll wager a naga/nado/whatever will suffice. those that you can't gank as easily will have lower yield anyway; like a currently tanked hulk.

between now and then nothing will change except that you need to be less lazy about ganking hulks. really no big changes from now.

So there's no problem but a well deserved balance.
If you feel someone is botting you can use report button or just decide to gank them witch will FINALLY require some effort and not the pathetic mindless mongoloid activity that is atm.

CCP fix ice mining... make it less mind numbing.

If this change really benefited you as much as you claim, you wouldn't be depositing vast quantities of your tears all over every thread involving Barge and Exhumer buffs. And nobody actually believes mining is risk-free. Every ship in the game is gankable if you use the right tools and have enough friends to pull it off. The upcoming changes do nothing to alter that, except maybe forcing people to make more friends. Which is just madness in an MMO.

Another myth. They're increasing EHP, not making the ships indestructible. You speak of "guaranteed surivival(sic)" as if there is some magical bubble of immunity surrounding ships in highsec resulting in no risk whatsoever. Undocking is always a risk, no matter what ship you're in.

the difference is, concord is the only defense that high sec miners have. high sec will never have intel on par with alliance intel channels in null, rarely will you have people ready to warp to you in combat ships if you really mess up and get tackled, etc.

you reap what you sow. Maybe Goons shot themselves in the foot here. And if they didn't, what are you doing here arguing with miners for then? You stomped around in the sandbox long enough and CCP recognized that GOONS do not make this game nor do they determine what CCP's development plans are. So they started to cater to the other players that have been screaming for these changes for years. And here Goons are complaining about it? It's about time the shoe was on the other foot and you don't like it. This is what happens when you **** in the wind, it sprays back into your face and some of it gets into your mouth. All of you should go find another game to try to wreck, so you can go stroke your e-peens a bit more on your lame forums.

Not really protected since you can gank them. However if you really think it's a good game balance to be able to kill 300M ships (some times more) with a simple 3M T1 fitted destroyer, then this is an endless discussion with fake arguments.

A properly tanked Hulk can now survive solo ganks from 10mil ISK Destroyers? This surprises you from a 300mil ISK Hulk? Should a 300mil ISK Hulk NOT be able to survive a solo gank from a 10mil ISK hull? I'll assume you're intelligent enough to answer with an emphatic no. In which case, at what point should the profit ratio for gankers be? Should they be able to gank a Hulk with 2 Destroyers or 20mil ISK in hulls? How about 10 Destroyers or 100mil ISK in hulls? Or, following your logic, it will require 15 Destroyers at 10mil ISK apiece to match the magical 150mil number you threw out as the point where "the incentive to do so (to gank a Hulk) drops off precipitously". Except it won't take anywhere near 15 Destroyers to gank any of the new Mining hulls, with the possible exception of the Skiff which has terrible yield to compensate for it's tank.

ah but that's not so true in a skiff with it's +2 warp stab bonus (which i think is still there on sisi... infact i should go and check that)

I have seen these feats done by professional quality players at cash sponsored PvP tournaments.
Quite amusing you pretend an entry "class" player of EvE is meant to react within 2 seconds in the middle of any random multiple hours sessions of repetitive activity (read: granted to lose attention).

.