Falkrich Swifthand
eNinjas Incorporated
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Posted - 2008.06.11 13:11:00 -
[1]
Edited by: Falkrich Swifthand on 11/06/2008 13:15:44
It doesn't matter what CCP does to the data, without a scarcity of the higher end minerals they won't be more valuable. As long as supply can be increased by players (e.g. add more miners) to match the demand, it will happen and the payoff for mining anything will balance.
0.0 mining is barely better than veldspar mining because the supply of the 0.0 mins is high. This might not be because 0.0 mining is safe and easy, it could be that there is too much supply of those mins from npc loot reprocessing for example. The "solution" is to balance high-sec supply of the low and 0.0-sec minerals, low and 0.0-sec availability of these minerals and risk of mining in low and 0.0-sec. This is harder than it sounds, because even tiny changes can tip the balance drastically.
The same goes for moon mining. The low-end moon mins are so crap in value because there is far too much of them available compared to demand.
Lets examine some potential changes:
If you increase mining speed on these mins then income for the pos at that moon will rise in the short term, but the prices will adjust and it'll become just as bad as before. Possibly worse, as during the price spike (if it goes over the "break even" line) people will set up more pos, and there will be even more supply than the change alone would suggest.
Decrease mining speed and profitability of the moons will decrease in the short term, but prices will rise and it'll end up back where it started. Some might shut down, so the price might rise over the starting value, but if it went profitable then more pos would just be set up and cancel it out.
Increasing the number of moons with the lower mins would clearly be stupid, there are plenty unoccupied already.
Decreasing the number of moons would **** a lot of moon owners off, or if you only remove unoccupied moons then you won't see a change. However the absolute limit of supply is not something players can counter, so making these rare enough that all the known moons for these mins were taken would actually work to increase the value. You'd probably end up with some serious inflation in value as the number of players grew though, so CCP would have to carefully control the number of moons of each type to make sure it didn't spiral out of control.
Increasing the number of these mins needed in production will make the value go up until people set up more pos mining those mins. As people are already stupid enough to set up a pos that mines these mins at a loss, there's no reason to believe that it won't stabilize back at the same level as it is now.
Decreasing the number of these mins needed in production is clearly backwards, people who are mining these mins to partially subsidise a pos as a safehouse (instead of the mining being the reason for the pos) would likely continue to mine the now even less valuable mins, and the price probably WOULDN'T rise back to even the current crap level.
Essentially the lowest end moon mins are worth crap all because too many people are willing to mine them at this value, and there are more than enough moons of these types available for them to do so. The ONLY ways to boost the value are to either stop people mining them at a loss (fat chance), to increase demand past all possible supply, or to decrease available supply below the demand.
Note that when I say mining at a loss, I don't mean that they're necessarily losing money on their pos. They could be covering the rest of the cost with research lab renting, multiple-mineral moons or other pos income sources. They could also be ok with operating the pos at a loss, because they need it for some other purpose (sovereignty, as a reasonably safe place, etc) and mining this moon instead of setting up at a useless moon costs less. |