Player Features and Ideas Discussion

In a word, alchemy. Right now prices for technetium are sky high and the Mittani seems to be intent on creating a cartel to control just about all of the technetium production so prices could conceivably go even higher. Now, if this situation is viewed by CCP as an imbalance then a very modest proposal that could address the problem would be to introduce a new alchemy reaction, one for platinum technite.

Right now to produce platinum technite you need 100 units of platinum and 100 units of technetium. With alchemy you usually bypass the more expensive input—i.e. technetium. Instead you’d use a Rarity 32 moon mineral like vanadium or chromium. So for example suppose you have the new alchemy platinum technite reaction use 1,000 units of chromium and 100 units of platinum and that this results in 1 unit of unrefined platinum technite that can be refined into 40 units of platinum technite and 80 units of platinum. At current market prices at the end of 30 days (assuming you keep the process running that entire time) you’d make enough platinum technite to sell for around 1.37 billion isk. Back out 370 million for running the tower and you are at around a billion isk a month for minimal work once the set-up is done. This would scale linearly as you add towers.

Run 4 of them and you’ll make 4 billion and fuelling 4 towers and running them isn’t that much harder than 1 if they are all in the same system.

For null sec alliances if they can get a moon with chromium and or platinum they in effect have a technetium moon. For those that don’t, just go buy the materials and react them. The market would of course not stay where it is. People would flood the market with platinum technite and the price would drop…but so would the price of technetium. In theory, the price would drop to the point to where alchemy is just barely profitable; a quick back of the envelope calculation would indicate a price 74,000 isk/unit, or slightly over a 30% drop in prices (assuming the price of inputs do not increase).

This would also likely lead to a drop in the price of technetium as well since the only refine product from technetium is platinum technite. This in turn reduce the incentive to stay in the OTEC for its members, especially the smaller ones and it would increase the desire by members to “chisel” on the production quota agreements (“chisel” means to sell more than your allotted amount since cartels often try to control the price by controlling the quantity on the market).

This is a very simple “fix” to the “problem” of technetium prices. It could be done without any major patching, no new nonsense like mining planet rings or finding technetium is special exploration site asteroids, or making moon materials move around randomly from moon to moon.

–Viper Rum