Verite Rendition
F.R.E.E. Explorer
Atrum Tempestas Foedus
   |
Posted - 2008.06.09 15:21:00 -
[1]
Akita, you probably did yourself a disfavor by combining ore minerals and moon minerals in to the same thread. The two issues are both components of the industrialist end-game, but they're so very different that people are clearly having a hard time keeping things straight. You probably would have been better off with two separate threads.
With that said, while Akita can be brash about things at times, his points are none the less correct. There are two things going on right now, both that are ultimately bad for the game.
---
1) Ore mineral prices and quantities
The drone regions effectively blew away any kind of balance or structure in mineral prices by blowing up the quantities of certain mid-to-high minerals. If you look at the 1 year price history of Zydrine for example, you can see this first-hand. At one point Zydrine was trading at near 1000isk/unit, which made high-end ore worthless, stupidly so. CCP has fixed this some by reducing the amount of megacyte and zydrine that come from drone ****, but it hasn't been enough, especially for zydrine. At around 2k/unit, only a fool mines ore in 0.0 unless it's Prime Arkonor, the kind of profit you can pull in per hour makes ratting/exploration/missioning/anything-but-mining more profitable and can be done with less reliance on specialized skills to boot.
Just take a look at all of the refining outposts in the game, and how underutilized they now are. It used to be that alliances would build them in droves to capitalize in ore-rich systems, knowing that the taxes alone would recover the costs within a year. Now their owners are often lucky if they can bring in enough to pay the fuel costs on POSs for sovereignty. 0.0 and low-sec mining, the end-game of the mining industrialist profession, have collapsed completely, and for those of us who are twisted enough to enjoy that kind of stuff, this isn't a whole lot of fun. There has to be life outside of high-sec space, and risk versus reward gives us that.
And the thing is that CCP already has a good idea of what the risk and reward should be, it's hard-coded in to the database as the default mineral prices. No one is even arguing that CCP needs to change the desired reward, but they have done so little to keep mining balanced that actual reward looks nothing like it is intended to be. Akita argues for, and I agree, that something needs to be done to restore balance to mineral prices, and restore the miner's end-game as a result. This ultimately needs to take the form of ending mining-by-ratting; drones need to become regular rats and dropped modules need to be deficient in minerals. Miners should provide minerals, not rats.
---
2) Moon minerals
As for moon minerals (or henceforth moon **** so that I don't reuse the word "mineral") it's also dilapidated, but in a very different way. I think high prices for moon **** are great, I owned some great moons for a time and made a tidy profit from it (and fought in a few wars for it). But Akita is right in that taken to an extreme this is a bad thing, it becomes a new game breaking bottleneck. Dysprosium is probably as high as it should be, and everything else is just screwy, owing mostly to unequal consumption.
R64-Thulium for example will never be consumed in the same quantities as R64-Promethium, it turns out that at the end of the reaction chains, 1 Thulium is used for every 2 Promethium. The R64s need to be balanced so that they're roughly the same in quantity used (and by extension, price); areas of space would still be valuable and incite wars, but it would reduce the risk of a single type of moon **** being a bottleneck like it is today. Ideally every R64 moon should be in production, they're the rarest of the rare, they should all be profitable for their owners.
It wouldn't hurt to fix the R32s either; Technetium is the only one of them that's really profitable. But this has more to do with the racial component of them, Technetium is Caldari so demand is the highest there.
----
FREE Explorer
Lead Megalomanic
EVE Automated Influence Map |