Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
1016
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Posted - 2012.01.03 04:12:00 -
[1] - Quote
Ekaterina 'Ghetto' Thurn wrote:I can see both points of view. And I wholeheartedly agree that, whether you are in-game or in real life, you need to be enjoying what you are doing at work and/or home. BUT on balance I have to side with those that state 'mined ore is NOT free'. If for no other reason than that it is purely a matter of logic. Those industrialists who work on the principle that mined ore IS free and either sell that ore on for less isk or manufacture goods and sell those on at an undervalued rate do indeed destroy the econony of New Eden. There is no question that is a one hundred percent cast iron fact 
A lot of people keep confusing "free" with "worthless".
Mined ore is (or at least can be) "technically free" (as in, not having paid any ISK for it, or at least negligible amounts of ISK), but then again, so is ISK itself and just about anything else inside EVE, so the term "free" has very little practical meaning in EVE.
What mined ore isn't is worthless (or worth less than market price), so turning it into something worth less than its original worth is a net asset value loss, and therefore kind of silly (with very few exceptions regarding certain unusual relations between speed of mining vs speed of selling minerals vs speed of selling manufactured items).
However, I would NOT agree that they're destroying the economy, not as long as more mathematically-aware people stick around. What they're actually end up doing most of the time practically is donating ISK they don't realize they had to people who know how to value stuff properly.
Sure, it might shut out a small portion of profit-minded manufacturers from those particular items, but then again, if such below-cost (or very close to at-cost) items persist on that market, the profit from manufacturing those items would have not been worth bothering to begin with, so nothing of value was actually lost.
If somebody puts up an item below mineral value, a trader or somebody skilled in reprocessing should shortly pop up and either relist the item at a price closer to the usual market levels or reprocess it and sell the minerals individually. Either way, the original "MIMAF" producer loses the potential ISK while the trader gains it (minus applicable NPC fees and taxes), and the consumer gets a nice enough price - everybody else wins except the original MIMAF manufacturer.
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