Market Discussions

Not free. Instead of running Eve, you could use the CPU power to mine bitcoins instead. Then sell the bitcoins for a GTC, sell the PLEX for isk, and then buy the minerals.

Grats to OP for successfully posting the umpteenth Free Minerals thread without an immediate backlash from teh MD trolls. Amazing. Simply amazing. 10/10 and 5 bonus points for Gryffindor.

This discussion never fails to amaze me. Talking about free things in EVE is a multi-layered argument almost no one gets right. Except maybe VV, sort of.

At the in game level, minerals are "free" minus the investment costs of skillbooks and equipment. The **** is sitting right out there in the open and no ISK comes out of your wallet. That is the definition of free.

Cue the "opportunity cost" crowd. Opportunity costs are comparative calculations used for determining the best use of your time. They are not actual money. Everybody got that? It's not money in your pocket. It's theoretically what you would make if you spent your time doing something else. Theoretically. Conditions can change rapidly. Perhaps a miner calculates that the best use of his time and resources is station trading. He finally gets his act together and takes the plunge. Two weeks later the market crashes for his selected products, ruining his plans. Whatever opportunity cost he calculated is now utterly irrelevant and it definitely wasn't money in his pocket. In fact, doing the opportunity cost in retrospect, he will find it cost him dearly. Just because you might have made more doing something else, doesn't mean that you did, nor does it mean that the money you were dreaming about was ever real. Mining minerals doesn't "cost" you lost ISK.

At the out of game level, nothing in EVE is free, no matter whether it was scammed, found, or stolen. You paid either ~500million ISK or $15. You might get a better "deal" for your plex or dollars with more or less ISK earned during the month, but you still paid for the opportunity to participate at all.

At the real life level, as VV and others pointed out, the ultimate commodity is Time. Everything else is relative. Strangely, time is free. You don't have to pay to get days added to your "account." It won't accrue interest. It can't be bought or sold. There are no hedge funds against death (cue someone with link to hedge fund that is based on life insurance policy trading, but you get my point). At the real life level, the opportunity costs of playing EVE are pretty high. Which, theoretically, means that the more time you put into the game the less valuable anything you acquire in the game really is. What if the next million dollar idea was about to drift up out of the random thoughts you were having when you stumbled on this thread? But it was drowned out by the sudden rage engendered by the goddamn, neverending Minerals are Free argument? How do you calculate the opportunity cost of the Road Not Taken?

Conclusion: Minerals are free. Time is free. EVE is not.

Ultimately, this argument is pointless. But EVE nerds will be nerds I guess :P

Time is money, etc etc.

So I guess those minerals would be "free" if you put absolutely no value to your personal free time. But... I don't see how anyone could genuinely say that. No sane person, anyway.

If minerals I mine aren't free the BC won't cost 40m on market.

There is 1.5m profit from buying minerals on market and building a BC from that. No one would ever bother to loose time to haul all that minerals to production station just for 1.5m of profit when you can make 20m just from bounties on average lv4 mission and it will take you 20 minutes to complete.

From trader point of view it is also not worth to invest 38m in minerals just to have 40m return.

I would say that entire T1 market is filled with people who thinks "minerals I mine are free".

Minerals I mine are free (MIMAF) has so many definitions it is insane, from the "why are you undercutting my profit margin" to "are you people insane you are selling this thing for less than price I am getting when sell the minerals to buy orders from reprocessing your crap".


The reasons vary why people do anything, so you never know why something manufactuer for a profit.

In my opinion any item that sells for more than the highest buy order price of its mineral content is not a MIMAF, if there is no profit between the sell mineral price and the low sell price of the item, that is not an issue, if your perfect reprocess and a wonky market for mineral causes the price to be bit silly oh well.

The issue I would assume come from many causes, such as:

1.) I got these minerals sitting from minning/mission looting and it will take me forever to move them since I have a crappy hauler, so I will buy this Raven BPC, build and "fly" my minerals to market.

2.) The peeps who underprice the market were not getting to fight a .01 isk war for 6 different minerals. One priced to sell BC they may do, so their valuation of the minerals is not free, just lower than yours.

3.)People have this BPO and it used to make sense to turn the minerals to a product then sell, but it is not now, they have not redone their math.

4.) Building stuff is cool. selling minerals is lame. So the feeling of satisfaction overwhelms the opportunity loss.

5.) Math is HAAAARRRDDD, Spreadsheets require math so therefore spreadsheet are evil.

Mine safe

This is totally ignorant against all capitalistic principles. When you run something you are calculating the amount of isk per time unit. So you either mine or running missions. Not doing so is just happend because for example you aren't able to run 2 missions at the same time.

Time is ISK, if you value your time as free then its your choice.

Contract all your minerals to me on a daily basis, with "zero" in all boxes concerning ISK, and yes, I will consider them "free".

If you find a dollar on the ground, is it free? Or do you do an opportunity cost analysis before you bend down to pick it up?

I've posted this basic rant elsewhere, but I'll repeat it here: in EVE as in RL, time is money. Mining is the game mechanic most sensitive to efficiency -- any time you spend not sitting in a roid belt running your lasers on roids is less ISK in your pocket. That's why it drives me bonkers to see Hulk pilots fit for cargo rather than yield: all those trips back to station kill whatever efficiency gain you might have had by going with a Hulk. Ditto carrying tons of crystals in your hold -- have a hauler or Orca carry them instead. And when your paper-tank Hulk gets ganked during Hulkageddon, you're out a very expensive ship that will take weeks if not months to recoup the cost for, thus killing your profit for a long, long time.

Mining is all about yield...but "yield" is about more than just how much ore you can suck into your bay with your lasers.

If you mine to sell your ore, then you have ask which you you should be mining (in hisec: veld, almost always). Then you have to ask if you should refine or just sell the ore. With high skills you should refine, otherwise sell the ore, unless you're limited on your hauler capacity, in which case the smaller footprint of minerals offsets the refining hit. If you're mining to manufacture stuff, this is probably always a FAIL -- it's almost always cheaper in the long run to just buy your minerals. The opportunity cost of mining offsets the fact that the minerals are "free" in an ISK sense.

It's tough to make ISK as a miner, even with perfect skills. It's really only profitable to do it in fleets -- solo mining can pay, but almost never as much as missioning or trading (if you're smart). With perfect skills and a good market-sense you can maybe do 20M ISK/hr in hisec as a solo miner -- not bad, but you can make more money running level 3/4 missions instead. And it costs a lot of time (and time is money, remember) to train your mining skills even to that level. Figure at least a few months (Industry V, Mining V, Astrogeology V, Mining Barge V and the various refining skills if you plan to refine rather than sell the raw ore).

It's easy to mine badly, but it's quite hard to mine and still make a profit.