Nethras
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
33
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Posted - 2012.07.26 03:17:00 -
[1] - Quote
Lorna Sicling wrote:You can never treat something as "free" when you have to harvest it. The problem with moon mining is that the effort required is all about the initial setup and then the limited logistics afterwards.
Ok, so lets calculate how much it costs to mine said cobalt - you need a fueled tower and a moon mining module. The first you need for the reaction, and the second is just a one time cost to stick on instead of a silo. Hmm, no remaining costs, so this comes out to a whopping grand total of ZERO ISK. Sure, you COULD value the cobalt and instead not have fuel costs for your reaction, but either way, market will be driven by effectively free cobalt with that many moons. And mining on your reaction POS is LESS effort than hauling it to the POS. You don't count things as free if you're putting in the same effort and have the same costs as someone selling on the market - in this case for cobalt, you're putting in zero effort (negative effort if compared to buying the cobalt) and have no costs you wouldn't have to do the reactions period. This is one of the few cases where something is totally free, because again, you have no effort and no isk needed to get it if you're doing your reactions on a cobalt moon.
Note that flooring the price of moon minerals ALSO floors the potential profits from ring mining as that was supposedly going to be the high value product you'd get. It's not like shooting for low tech prices is invalid or anything, but I think a lot of people at this point would like a response from CCP acknowledging that they haven't backed off their initial conservative approach on the flawed assumption that current market prices are a remotely accurate prediction of the future or of actual costs to do the reaction and realize how much this is likely to crash things. Remember how high mineral prices were due to speculation, and how most of them crashed.
I mean, they could avoid the fuel price crash by removing all highsec ice belts, but that might have other problems.  |