There was already multiple complaints in the past by various players about griefing while mining.
From my understanding, it wasn’t clear wether griefing tactic were actually considered part of the game or abuse. Probably the former, since it’s hard to see how this wouldn’t be a natural consequence of how highlevel mining areas are designed.
In the past, I was just sucking it up, thinking that it was normal that mining high level areas should be hard, and that the high tier mining drops were worth it.
With the last november release (which is actually full of amazing changes and fixes), this reached levels that have became unbearable for me. The mob density have been greatly increased in the mining zones of shattered mountain. Consequently, it isn’t worth killing mobs anymore when there are other people sharing the area, because you end up getting all your nodes stolen. It’s much more profitable to simply try to grab the node with an instant mining proc, and at worse you die, respawn and come back quickly.
The areas are essentially griefing fests, and it has become a trully disgusting activity to mine orichalcum. It’s profitable but it’s the worst social experience I have ever had in a game. It was even made more toxic by the fact that we now have to activate pvp to profit fro mthe MASSIVE pvp mining loot bonus. There are literally people camping the high cliffs above mining nodes and just enjoy shooting pewpew at miners (not even mining themselves). It has reached a level where I personnaly just gonna give up on that activity altogether.
Currently, the system designed such as it is does not reward at any moment cooperative behavior and only fosters the most toxic behavior possible between players.
Edit: To clarify my point, I only think that the current state is TOO MUCH annoying and toxic. Maybe something like having grit when mining as a strength attribute bonus could take it back a notch to a bearable level.