Market Discussions

Hi guys,

Sorry, I don't get the whole point of taking risks mining Arkonor compared to Veldspar. I'll get, for the same investment in time, almost the same value in selling Veldspar compared to Arkonor. As an inspiring and debutant miner, I bought a Venture, 'just to see' what I could do with it, but the ship is basically useless. Bringing back a full cargo of Arkonor from null sec / WH will not make me richer selling it compared to mining in high sec Veldspar.

tl;dr : volume-wise, you get almost the same ISK profit selling Veldspar and Arkonor. Why mine the later?

Real miners have killed the king spod. It is not an easy thing to do.

ok, but fun answer aside, any serious one? Is a whole part of the gameplay (having fun and thrill mining precious ore in dangerous places) crippled and now (insert the update changing ore worth/volume) worthless?

It never existed afaik. Maybe in the first year the game existed.

Mining to sell has always favored Veld. It's everywhere and you will never need to worry about having too much trit.

Sit down a moment and look at the bigger picture.
Stopping and looking at stuff with calm often yields more profit than jumping in the fray and getting smashed.


What do you see from far away?

You see a MMO economy. Even EvE cannot escape being a played by MMO mentality players.
The random MMO player does not value his time at all and neglects any hidden costs, therefore they "farm for farming".

What you get is, you are in competition with them, a competition for the lowest common denominator price. Plus, EvE commodities tend to not be rare enough to cause scarcity induced appreciation. The rare times it happened (see a famous R32 material in the past years), the result became immediately evident in the form of prices rising by 7-800 and even 1000%.

Your ABC minerals are not rare enough to be priced for rarity. They are farmed by MMO players who don't price their time nor factor in their costs.

Result: whatever you gather is more or less irrelevant. There's a sort of "can't be arsed" thresold that supports prices when they tend to fall below it (people stop doing it so price rises again to it), everything more than that comes from stagional / 0.0 wars demand and supply appreciation. Outside of those appreciation times / causes there's little else that makes a digital, virtual item with a certain name different from another. So what becomes relevant is how much of that stuff you can carry around. If you can carry around 10 items A or 1 item B that takes the same volume, then you get a similar pricing for that volume.
In RL it does not work like that, but we are not in RL, people in EvE don't have to pay onerous trucks insurance + fuel, don't pay employees for their time (hence in RL time is relevant. And in RL you actually die so time is always short and you want to be well rewarded for spending that short time doing something for somebody else).

Also what is best to mine is always changing based on the supply and demand you have to check what is best daily to maximize your profit

You mostly mine in nullsec for the mid-grade minerals. Prior to the recent industry changes it was very difficult to acquire large amounts of mexallon in nullsec without having a huge surplus of tritanium, even with mineral compression through modules like 425mm railguns. I have not mined since the changes, but I imagine a similar problem remains: people across the universe choose to think as the OP does and places the value of ore and minerals at jita prices rather than on their scarcity and necessity for useful tasks. You would frequently encounter supercapital builderss complaining about the lack of mexallon and wondering why, when their own buy orders and spreadsheets offered the same prices as Jita -- which necessarily made mining the non-mexallon ores more profitable for the miner. Supply and demand don't quite work in EVE as they probably should.

Ark is the rarest so mine it first! heh, I almost wish my spreadsheets were updated so I could see what mining looked like now-a-days.