Dominion nullsec mining

Dominion has me worried, not on how nullsec will become more interesting, but on how it will affect nullsec mining. As I said earlier, WH space mining is arguably the riskiest and profitable way to make isk in eve. It’s balanced that way, because after you mine the ore while looking over your shoulder every few seconds to make sure a Loki isn’t behind you, you have to either compress or refine the ore, then get it out of the WH itself which usually equates to pulling teeth while very carefully watching local(if you get a nullsec link) and the directional as you go through C2s, C3s and nullsecs. Getting supplies into the WH is a hassle, seeing as you need to haul any large amount of equipment in an industrial, and unless you have the isk/time invested in a covops blockade runners, gate camps are a pain.

On that note, losing 100 mil to a lowsec gatecamp while holding 6000 m3 has persuaded me to upgrade from my faithful, infinitely customizable Iteron mark V to a Viator which, had I been smart enough to use it previously, wouldn’t have lost me a total of 200 mil worth of modules over the last month. Anyway, Dominion.

What we’ve seen so far has been what we’ve been told, a moderately smooth transition from the old to the new, and funny people to laugh at when they lose freighters. On the freighter topic, my fingers are crossed that that will fix the megacyte market. and by “fix”, I mean “make my WH mining more profitable”. On this topic of profit, the news on grav sites scares me. Quoting a recent devBlog:

“Ore Prospecting Arrays: These are hidden asteroid belts and you get one site guaranteed for every level of upgrade to a maximum of five.  These are not the typical hidden belts though.  If you’ve ever been into wormhole space and seen some of the riches there, then you have an idea of what to expect.  Within these hidden belts reside mythical beasts such as ‘King Arkonor’ and many of his closest friends. These sites will re-spawn every downtime, so even if you do not mine out every rock, there will be fresh ones waiting for you the next day.”

In the WH space I like to say I live in, the roids are, coining a phrase, fuggin monsterously huge. Some unforeseen circumstances arose and it was just me in my hulk , my alt in a hauler, and an orca pilot who had fallen asleep in the pos a few hours ago. Timing myself, in about 7 hours of sitting there suspended between being scared and being bored out of my skull, I mined about 55,000 units of bist and the roid I was working on did not die. I have no head for the market, mostly because a good friend manages the selling of the refined ore, but i’m gonna assume that 880,000 m3 of nullsec ore is worth a hella lot. The immense wealth I am sitting on is still at risk, we could get bubbled getting it back to jita, hauling it out through connecting WHs and nullsec, and then a jita gank. But that’s what makes this whole lovely world balanced. If we wanted titanium, we’d mine in highsec for hours and make 3 mil per jetcan instead of the lovely 15 mil per jetcan nullsec ores bring. But in highsec you have local and there aren’t people activley seeking your murder. Except goons or hulkageddon or some dude in a destroyer killing you and still making enough isk to buy a new destroyer and do it all again. Anyway, its all a beautiful graph of risk verses profit.

I feel that nullsec changes are going to take that graph and break it over it’s knee. In friendly nullsec, which is where miners would usually go, I’d assume, there is very little risk. Admitted, you can’t AFK mine, but you’ve got local and you’ve marked every space-tree for 5 systems in every direction. If someone who wants you dead even thinks about scanning you out and killing you, you have about 5 minutes notice to warp out and maybe go back and get the jetcans too. This safety while still getting nice lowsec ores and the occasional nullsec, depending on how deep you are, is again balanced by you having fought tooth and nail for every damn inch and someone could bring in a fleet of dreads at any second and kill everything you’ve ever worked for. If I’m reading this change correctly, then for every system you control and upgrade, you’ll be able to get up to five very, very rich belts full of ABC, which can then be mined at much less risk than WH mining, which then can be hauled out through friendly nullsecs and sold, or used to build more dreads that can be used to scare the hell out of your neighbors or be used as space-lawn furnishings or whatever.

Bottom line, I expect the ABC market to start lowering prices or for everyone and their dog who can mine in nullsec to have enough ships to use them as torpedo ammo. So, in scenario one, the bottom falls out of the ABCs and WH miners start getting richer slower and new corps start getting money faster. Scenario 2, the market holds and everyone builds more blobs with the influx and there’s more Internet spaceship fighting hurray. Taking a step back, there’s a chance that this will all just end up with happier new corps and more ships to bash against each other, but there’s also a chance that things could go downhill.

I’m expecting the market to react in 3-4 weeks, since right now people are more concerned with actually getting the upgrade thingys into the nullsecs :P. Let me know if I can put one of those up in a wormhole, I’d guarantee we’d appreciate some minin love. Or maybe some sort of… incoming wormhole detector, which playes a sound file that sounds like a little girl screaming whenever an incoming WH appears.