Curse you, Captain Market!

Well… we as the WH and nullsec miners of Eve have kinda screwed ourselves over with this. Most nerds players who read this blog probably already know why mega prices are currently in the hypothetical shitter of a race of toilet-people, but for those who enjoy shooting things in their spare time, let me give a general summary. I’m not a marketeer, but I like to think of myself as knowing at least a little.

6 Month Megacyte Prices

Insurance on everything T1 is essentially a cap on how low mineral prices can fall, because once the mineral and manufacturing costs of say, a Drake goes below that threshold, industrialists blow their products up for ISKies. The clever way the eve economy has found around this little cap is an overflow of mega and zyd, via WH space and nullsec.

There are two three types of miners, the risky miner, the safe miner, and the macro miner. The safe miner is content to sit in highsec and mine veldspar all day, safe(mostly) and making reliable ISK. The risky miner goes to WH space or nullsec and mines the best ore. The macro miner sits and mines veld automatically in a way so nerfarious that it’s undetectable by CCP.

In any case, this system used to work because there was not very much ABC avaliable. Miners had two choices, to mine in highsec or join a nullsec alliance that operated deep in nullsec for ABC. Then came Apocrypha, with its WHs. Initially, the combatants of Eve went in and carved a oily swath through the sleeper population, idly noting the presence of ABC roids amist the floating sleeper arms and limbs that they grafted together to make T3 cruisers.

After Mr. Wizz-bang-shooty-fun had essentially reduced the sleeper population into little flying bags of ISK with Hadoken beams, Mr. Industrialist perked up his ears at the mentions of ABC. And so the miners who were given a choice between working for peanuts and working for nullsec alliances chose….rapture I mean WH mining.

After the first few tentative steps in which the miners learned how not to die, stopped using T2 rigs and faction boosters on their mining vessels, they started mining. Quite a bit. This mining operation reached full swing about the same time Dominion came out, and with it nullsec roids. Not ordinary nullsec roids, however. These roids… were infinite. In all fairness, WH roids are infinite too, if you know how to work it.

So essentially, everyone who was bored with highsec mining(90% of the highsec mining population, excluding macro miners) went to the new nullsec belts or W-space, and about…half of them got shot to hell so quickly and efficiently that they went straight back to highsec. Those who remained, with large piles of the best roids in Eve, quickly turned those into large piles of ISK, so quickly that they were having to import Tritanium from highsec to build stuff, which was viable because they could spend an hour mining Bistot and buy three hours worth of Tritanium.

Unfortunatley, the WH miners, being unable to focus on making ships because of lack of stations, safety, ectera, couldn’t make ships, so they carted their mega and zydrine to Jita and sold it, possibly more than the market could handle, at about the same time that tritanium was being bought in droves by the nullsecers. All of this has shifted the balance of nullsec/highsec ores towards tritanium, increasing it’s worth until enough people say “f- it” to null and WH mining to increase the rarity of mega and zydrine so the price goes back up so people go back into WHs and nullsec so the price goes back down so….

ect, ect, ect.

So, who here that mines in null or WH is gonna wuss out first? ABC prices have dropped to about 60% of what they were last summer, and the price is gonna keep goin down. Or it won’t. Or maybe it will. Who knows?

6 Month Zydrine Prices

All I know is, I’m not moving from W-space. They’re no rats here, no can flippers, and the roids don’t explode after two or three cycles. You control who can come in and out of your WH, to a degree, and wardecs mean nothing. My corp’s in a wardec atm, and we’re still mining away juuust fine, w/ rorqual support even. It’s everything nullsec, but without a cap fleet breathing down your neck.