High sec mining dropped by half? No way. Man you must have killed half the hulks in existence. And those efforts by CCP to ban RMT bots have not been effective at all, even though they have made at least 3 devblogs about their new efforts to root out a source of money they could be ra... I mean receiving in exchange for game time.

Here's some more numbers, 2 months ago CCP banned 150 accounts in one swoop of the ban bat, then in the following 2 days banned another 450ish accounts. These were reported to drive up awareness and make the EVE community aware of a new focus, that of continual banning instead of quarterly banning based on economic data dumps from the game's database. The last estimate I heard was over 30 trillion in isk and assets was removed from game. You are TOTALLY right, this had ZERO effect and your killing of 4000 hulks totally reduced the number of active mining accounts by half.

Just to throw out some numbers, it is typically considered insignificant if the error bound is less than 10% of the measured value. Hulkageddon accounts for 4000ish kills, CCP banned 500 *ACCOUNTS*, so assuming that those 4000 kills resulted in those individuals nerd rage quitting and leaving mining altogether, your efforts are still affected by CCP ban-bat in a significant way.

Mineral prices as a whole have spiked, not just high sec ores, your efforts are focused on high sec miners. How can you effect low/null sec ores and minerals by attacking high sec? The logic is non existent, if anything their prices would drop in percentages not equal to other mineral prices since the restricting factor on ship manufacture will be high sec ores leaving an abundance of low/null sec. However, this is not the case. Null sec ore/mineral price spiked with the high sec ore/mineral prices, suggesting a disconnect between efforts against high sec and the market forces.

Your hypothesis doesn't account for the drop in market prices, however, market prospecting does. Individuals have purchased up significant amounts of minerals to hedge losses from changes in the patch and to gain advantage as the mineral markets are expected to settle at a higher mark with the significant reduction in mining by gun. The purchase of minerals produced a market bubble which was used by some to quantify their efforts at hurting mining, yet the total volume of minerals on market is significantly larger than the volume of minerals produced in the game per month.

Heres the truth of the matter. There exists more in stock piles and reserves of rich players/corps/alliances than can be produced in any short term, ie months. This produces significant lag in the system. The rise/drop in prices is more closely linked to market prospecting by very wealthy individuals about the up coming patch (ie change of looting system...)


Go ahead and continue to believe that your efforts are making more than a drop in the bucket, and I will continue to observe purchases of minerals in the billions from high sec mining corps.