Market Discussions

my uneducated guess is that when HAG peaked like a month or so ago people people were a little more nervous than usual to send out their mackinaw, mackinaws being a little easier to kill than a hulk and much easier to find than hulks because of fewer ice belts. ice was super valuable a month or two ago and now as the HAG threat has slowly dwindled more people are ice mining again and it's losing value steadily it seems.

their coming down, id stay away from them till there's news and tears from ice miners all over forums, otherwise, just stand aside.

Only the very experienced merchants can make ISK from Isotopes right now, lots of small fakeouts to be caught, still very risky thought.

tl;dr: isotopes are overpriced, and will crash, liquid ozone is cheap enough to go buy all existences right now and still make a nice profit in the long run, because it will keep rising in price.

The problem is that, as usual, CCP fixed the same problem from 2 sides at the same time thus "overfixing". (Think incursions.)

Now that botters are actually getting banned, and botting is almost a no profit endeavor even with the new prices, real miners see ice prices going up and go mine... good, right?

Yes and no.

Because... ccp also "fixed" the problem from another side... they created iceblocks which get consumed at a constant rate regardless of onlined modules... this created a bottleneck on cube production, because highsec ice is short on liquid ozone. And most pos used to have a much lower LO/hw consumption, around half of what they consume now, and in the case of highsec poses 1/4th. This is resulting on a massive excess of isotopes, because miners keep mining ice... But to get the Liquid Oxygen. now you actually need to mine around 4 times more ice to get the same time on the pos. what the ****.

This isn’t that noticeable with heavy water, because in the old system it was expected to get consumed by the bucket load and not only we had a specialized ice, but it wasn’t used by anything else besides rorquals.

And so, there you go, that’s the reason. hulkgeddon is a factor, but a fairly small one. The problem is that slowly people are realizing that there’s just not enough production, and incorrectly assume the shortage is on the isotopes, when it’s actually on the liquid oxygen. Simply because the ratio of products refined off ice is outdated. To make matters worse, apparently people can’t be assed to go sit at a belt for 18 million isk an hour, or 30 with orca support + haulers. So i guess ice will have to get even more expensive. And if we are to guide ourselves by the idiotic incursion rationale of "if its less than 100misk/h im not undocking" the sky is the limit.

There’s ofc, a new factor... the last blog about barges being "equalized" was incredibly vague on the details as to bonuses on ships, and very clear that the hulk will be the "king". So you get the idea... ice will even be more scarce. Because the hulk is no king when it comes to ice mining, it mines around 20% less than the mack.

In the end the best "ice interdiction" came from CCP, so I’m thinking CCP wants all the crappy poses offlined.

And btw, macks are not "easier" to gank than hulks, they die to one week old characters... 2 ppl can kill em on rifters.