Market Discussions

I'm new to both the market forums and the amusing sport of wildly guessing mineral prices 3-12 months into the future, so I may very well be missing something, but many of the projections in this thread seem amazingly ill considered.

Some have already mentioned several of the natural constraints on mineral prices such as reprocessing, speculator reserves and mining. It seems to me, however, that a reasonable upper bound on specific mineral prices can be easily found by considering mining alone. The reason for this is that there is no shortage of mining capacity, should the potential income surpass other methods of earning isk. Mining is also the constraint that's easiest to analyze quantitatively.

For instance, as a trivial example, let us consider a perfectly skilled Hulk. To be conservative, I'll ignore gang bonuses and say that a reasonable yield per hour is roughly 110,000 m^3 of ore (a figure easily checked by referencing any mining guide). At current Jita buy order prices, mining Arkonor would yield 46.3M isk/hr/Hulk. Very respectable, but comparable to high-end anomaly income, which also isn't burdened with the logistical annoyances, refining taxes and other irritations associated with mining, not to mention being slightly less suicide-inducing.

Suppose, however, that Zydrine goes to 3000 isk/pu, far from the high-end estimates posted in this thread. At this point, mining Crokite gets you 60M isk per hour per Hulk, and mining operations are extremely easy to scale to multiple characters, not to mention being probably the most botted activity in all of EVE. Fixing Zydrine at 13,000 isk/pu, as was suggested in the previous page, yields an utterly hilarious 242M isk/hour/Hulk, a figure no one should be able to take seriously in today's EVE. And in deriving these estimates, I've assumed that every other mineral would retain today's prices, whereas in reality most other minerals would rise as well, some very substantially, inflating miner (and miner bot) income even further. And that's not even mentioning CCP's plans (as discussed in the recent interview) to NERF anomaly/incursion income by roughly 10%, further increasing the incentive to mine the crap out of asteroids, even at today's prices I would guess.

It seems clear to me that, unless you expect CCP to seriously nerf mining (seems implausible) or some comparably unrealistic changes to the game, there is no way mineral prices can realistically keep some of the values suggested in this thread, even from a simplistic miner-centric analysis. Any consideration of reprocessing, etc., would only impose further constraints.

So tell me, am I missing something huge? Or is this really just a thread for speculators' daydreaming?

So that means I gotta keep undercutting you for a year now?

Whichever way they do it, I think it's reasonably clear that they don't intend to drastically nerf 0.0/WH/anom mining while they're at it. Even if they do, as some have suggested, decrease the availability of ABC (in the case of zydrine, it's the C that matters most) ores, the prices discussed in this thread would provide ample opportunity to purchase and sustain industrial upgrades in many systems. I think it is beyond reasonable doubt that a substantial (10%+) premium over high-end anomaly income would easily supply the mining capacity needed to satisfy reasonably expected demand in the medium term.

Considering this, it seems to me that zydrine around 2,500 isk per unit is probably around the highest sustainable point even in optimistic scenarios (though speculation does, of course, have the potential to drive prices up far beyond that for short periods of time). One must also keep in mind that nocxium, morphite (a seperate issue entirely) and other minerals are also likely to rise in price and while a detailed analysis of the demand side of things is beyond the scope of this post, I feel people in this forum have a tendency to severely overestimate the extent of the rise of mineral prices that undoubtedly awaits us with the impending removal of bounties from rats in the drone regions.

None of this is really meant to rain on the parade of speculators, I'm sure short-term investment opportunities will continue to be plentiful as we await the next expansion. I just wish more of the market discussions here were at least partly based on at least rough quantitative analysis instead of just guesswork and wishful thinking.

As someone who regularly reads self-serving bias in estimation IRL, I can assure you this is not unique to EVE.

Hell, anyone who's got a stock portfolio and reads the regular quarterlies can attest to that. Estimations being what they are: necessarily inaccurate, easily fudged since there are many ways of calculating them, and nominally accepted by the uninformed as gospel... pretty much lends itself to bias and promotion (or demotion if you're shorting).

Buy Zydrine and Nocxium before it's too late, and swim in riches.

Gun mining is more efficient than mining laser mining. Also players are willing to gunmine that are not willing to exhumer mine, and may not have the appropriate skills or alts to be able to transition to this anyway. Realistically efficiency wise will require there be rorquals and hulk packs dotted all over the drone regions come the bounty change, and many of the residents who currently generate minerals may not want to do that or be able to do that.

Also mining will become a mandatory hard requirement for ships, and because of the basket and access requirements, that equates to an actual person doing a couple of hours of mining for every battlecruiser loss. ie the current highsec daily trade in battlecruisers alone is probably worth 10,000 man hours in mining daily under this new plan. The basket requirements for all of this stuff will drag the lowends along with the highends.

Prices will simply rise until they hurt consumption.

I have no doubt prices will continue to rise.

I also have no doubt that once Beta Keys for DUST are handed out, that many pilots will suddenly discover the merits of "dusting off" their all-but-forgotten Hulk alts and return to semi-AFK mining while they shoot people in the face on their favourite battlefields.

Imagine that.


Mook

So...... Drone poo is gone....

When are we going to get to 3k so we can get rid of these stock piles?

The latter will be reduced, which puts a bit of a cap on the mineral prices from nullsec. Furthermore, not all nullsec miners use hauling chars, or defensive characters. Usually mining corps are embedded within pvp alliances, and there are always ample amounts of pvp'ers online to go after baddies when they show up.

As mineral prices rise, mining players and corporations will start getting some much delayed respect from the pvp'ers who will need to rely on their cheap minerals, since a PLEX won't buy as much as it used to.

Also with the increasing profitability of minerals, you'll see more corps/alliances battling over wormhole space as well, since every WH provides a nigh daily grav site with ABC ore, and often connections to highsec. This makes getting the ore to highsec easy and safer than getting it there from nullsec, and thus makes WHs a much desired asset in the months to come. You'll see a lot of mining in C1s and C2s.

You're going to be seeing a lot more mining corporations in all parts of EVE, and most noticeably in nullsec, doing more than just supplying their own alliance's goods, but also shipping more of it off to highsec. If I were you, I'd be investing in Hulks, Orcas, and Rorquals - Not Zydrine.