Pure, utter failure of an idea.
1) Risk-free epriton mining = fail
2) Mining is already fairly mindless.
3) Take a look at EVE to see what mining bots did. Fail.

First off its not risk free by any stretch of the imagination. You still have to go and retrieve the can that's been sitting out in the open for 3 or 4 hours. Enterprising people would be sitting there waiting for you to return.

Secondly, this is pretty much the main motivation for doing this. Mining is mindless and boring. Unless there is a major mechanic change it will always be so.

Thirdly, despite what CCP tell you, the exact oppose is true. Macro miners in eve keep the economy running. Without them there would not be enough minerals mined and prices would skyrocket as normal humans cant mine for that long or in those numbers so supplies would quickly get used up. If you removed every macro from eve tomorrow supplies of minerals would dry up in a month and prices would skyrocket. (And I'm not just talking miners here, mission bots as well contribute a huge amount of minerals to eves market)

And lastly, making something 'easier' in a controlled way will usually increase its activity. You still have to go and run around on a beta island, you still have to go back and collect the goods, but you can do something in the 4 hours of not standing around looking at a nice red laser.

I'm sorry you feel this way as I do only want this game to grow. This game will not grow while there is no functioning market.

Also, I resent the argument that you are trying to make. Perhaps you do not know me very well, but I am an ex eve player. I spent much of my life in eve in lowsec and am possibly the least risk adverse person in existence. Lowsec in eve is dead for the exact reason that it is TOO dangerous and any attempt to change that gets met with exactly this type of comment.

Standing in a single spot on a beta island for several hours is going to get you killed. No one is stupid enough to do it. My first day in this game I got my little noob bot and went on a world tour and do you know what I saw? I saw absolutely no one outside of the main hubs. 12 islands, 6 of them beta, and all the people logged in were congregated around 3 outposts.

I have been on 8 hour mining ops that have supplied our corp with battleships for an entire month of war in eve. Give me hard numbers or you're just spewing more bullshit to fertilize the troll field.

Where did I make things personal? You said that bots make the eve economy run. I said prove it.

LOL.

The effect of having bots is to imbalance the game in favour of the side that uses them. If both sides use them then there is no advantage, you just remove a chunk of the game that other people may enjoy. Why not just put credits in your account or get a new mech each time you login?

There is meant to be a cost to losing your stuff or getting better stuff, that cost is the time it takes you earn.

Mining is a profession in this game, and some players take it seriously and enjoy the challenge of setting up bots and take pride in Yeild/Hour.

"Auto-miner" in the title says it all. You could extend this to "Auto-production" or "Auto-PVP". There's room in the game for improvements to any activity, but none of them should promote the ability to do them AFK. The idea is that players 'play' the game, and that the game makes it somewhat enjoyable to do so. There has to be a balance however in HOW players play, it's not reasonable to expect a game to keep you entertained for 100 hours a week.

When mining gets boring, switch to another activity, like artifact scanning.

A common mistake I saw at launch was Player Burn-out. Any activity that is repeated for hours/weeks is going to result in players looking for ways to avoid doing them, or to avoid the game entirely. But automating them removes the enjoyment of the activity for players that have not burned out on it.

tl;dr - Mining allows players to be semi-afk already, which strikes a good balance between the time invested and the level of effort required. Some tweaking either way may be needed, but automation moves it much to far toward AFK.

Considering the nice bot friendly color code and long lasting deposits, the only reason there aren't macros available already is because the game community is still small. Pre-empt it by evening the ground between bots and people may not actually be a bad idea.

Make it alpha only.

Like building that mines and that can be destroyed? Maybe, just maybe that could work.

Definitely a no to that. There is already too few things a player can spend their time on in-game at the moment. This would just make "miners" log in, pop auto-miners, log out, play Minecraft/APB/whatever, log in and haul it back, making them unavailable for any other impromptu corp ops.

Maybe it's something that can be looked at in the future when we get constructables though.

Good point never thought of it that way. What if these structures require refueling and loads of different resources to build that will involve the player in the equation.