Science & Industry

How do ore prices stay as steady as they do? With so many miners out there, how are these prices kept from being dragged further and further down?

Is it the other game-producing means of making isk (that is, means that require no regular capital such as missioning and ratting) that miners compare their labor's worth to? How do miners determine what their *time* is worth?

Theoretically, could a large mining corporation strive to drive ore prices down by selling at rock-bottom prices and continually meeting demand? I realize they wouldn't *want* to, but would it be possible?

I don't know a lot about economics. Is there something from the other side of all this, perhaps on the manufacturing front, that somehow helps to keep ore running at satisfactory prices for miners? Basically, what determines these prices?

Also, any miners/manufacturers/researchers or even traders that want to share any insight or observations on the Eve market in general would be appreciated!

The ammount of minerals traded in Jita is so huge that single corp cant really crash the marked.

Well, you have to compare it to something you can do. For example if you have access to anomalies, you can compare mining to ratting.

look at what ore/minerals are worth and then decide what to mine and how much. although tbh a lot of miners don't value their time much and just mine whatever is in front of them, and mostly just see it as semi afk income. that and bots have long been known to mine, but with waves of bot bans, hulkageddon, and now goon bounties on hulks much of that supply of especially lowends is much lower.

also ore takes up a lot of space, going to have to move a lot of it to crash prices.

Short answer: A reasonable price is what someone is willing to pay. Why are prices what they are? Look in the mirror. Maybe you don't buy ore, but you buy ships or munitions, or what have you, aside from that looted in missions, all of it had to be made from ore. By agreeing to pay whatever you do for those ore byproducts, you're agreeing to the ore prices.

You also seem to be operating under the impression that the majority of the game is made up of miners. I'm currently sitting in a system with 98 people in it, and only 12 miners. Next system over 32 people, 1 miner (and that one doesn't count because it's a badger plinkin an asteroid). Aside from some of the systems with ice fields (and those aren't even collecting ore), the majority of a population in any system I frequent is by a large amount not mining. Granted I spend the majority of my time in high sec/low sec, so maybe there are a vast seas of miners and they're overpopulating null sec, but from where I stand at any given time I'd guess about 10% of the online population is actually mining, and only 10% of that number are actually putting up numbers close to what people think the average miner does.

Bottomline: I mine an average of 500,000 m3 a day, that amount of ore was likely blown up or expended in the form of ships dying or munitions firing while you were reading this post.

The prices of ore are now at level which was aproximatly one year ago .... so i would not really say the prices are rising.

High ends minerals are slowly but steadily going down, mexallon stopped rising, isogen is going back under 100/unit. Trit stopped to riste and pyerite is slowly going down ..... i dont know what are you talking about when you talk about price rise.

Also .... noone is mining Crokite, because that ore is now 5th worst ore in EVE. Even 4 high sec ores are ahead of it.

And what super caps are dieing ? I dont see almost no super cap deaths on KBs.

You should take a look at resources in the real-world like Oil prices. They look relatively stable or hover between certain values and then something big happens and they drop or increase ridiculously. Same with EVE, the variation in price of minerals is relatively stable.