Lady Katherine Devonshire
Royal Ammatar Engineering Corps
42
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Posted - 2012.08.30 11:03:00 -
[1] - Quote
I believe that I covered this before, but I will reiterate:
Once upon a time nullsec was new and vibrant. There were incredible riches in rare, hard to find minerals there that simply could not be found elsewhere. It was risky, because of the high tier rats and the potential for pirates, but that was all part of the whole "risk versus reward" thing that CCP is so big on.
Then ... players happened!
Nullsec was eventually conquered de facto in it's entirety even before sovereignty rules came into play. Today nullsec is saturated with massive fleets of Alliance mining bots running Alliance mining ships in Alliance ownded nullsec effectively at zero risk. Well, so long as you're in the particular Alliance controlling that particular patch of space, but that is irrelevant to the market.
The result of this is a massive saturation of high-end minerals. When a market becomes saturated the price drops. Formerly expensive minerals start becoming cheaper. Add in jump freighters and the cheapness spreads from nullsec back to hisec in the blink of an eye, because hisec is where you go to sell these ores. After all, nobody is going to come buy them in your Alliance space because, oh yeah, NBSI. If you want to sell morphite you have to move it back into Empire space. So you do. And so does everyone else who's cranking out the morphite. Price keeps dropping.
There is a term for this phenomenon, by the way, it's called "Risk vs Reward." Player Alliances eliminated all the risks and then acted shocked - shocked I tell you! - when the rewards started dropping as well.
Meanwhile... over in hisec...
Ganking has become the EvE national past-time even without Goon payoffs. Thus the amount of low-end ores on the market goes up down and the price goes up. Why? Risk vs Reward, kiddies! See how well that works out? Since hisec miners generally are not in gigantic multi-account using alliances running sixteen Hulks at once with macro-bots all day and night, the output of this anarchistic group of random independent miners doesn't even begin to compare to the sheer industrial might of the Alliance bot-fleets. So guess what happens when the player's collective harvesting of Megacyte starts to outstrip their harvesting of frakking Veldspar?
It all very simple: Risk vs Reward is still alive and well. The problem is that the players - not CCP, but the players themselves - have, through their own actions & gameplay, changed where the greater risk actually is. The reward part is simply starting to catch up. |