EVE General Discussion

NRDS leads to more deaths than anything else.... Never trust anyone you are not blue with. even then don't give them any rope to do anything with.

making industry in null work is about protection not friending the universe.

Murk, try the tack of "would the nullsec alliance defend their space if they didn't have the moongoo?" If yes, then the second question is "how many of the fights that occur to defend the space would occur without the moongoo towers being up?".

Haven't people been going on for years now about how the moongoo situation is creating a giant blue donut, i.e., reducing the number of fights? If that were true, then moongoo towers actually cost NEGATIVE hours per month to defend them.

I don't know the answer to any of the questions above, and I'm not sure how anyone could know them for all moongoo alliances simultaneously. That's the point, without knowing all these answers perfectly, ascribing an exact number amount to hours per month required to defend each moongoo tower is just optimistic guesswork, and if someone repeats that number over and over, they're trolling you.

Why the hell are people still going on about moons?

5bil/month moons are pretty much limited to OTEC (mostly CFC and PL). And CCP has hit that with the nerf bat and is winding up to hit it again. And when TEST tried to do a similar cartel with the next best moon, it failed.

In short...


SHUT UP ABOUT THE MOONS


This whole "but nullsec has moons" is such a dishonest argument. NPC nullsec and lowsec also have moons. A lot of moons are crap. Only a handful of nullsec alliances can count on nationalized moons as major source of income. Most moons aren't regional enough for any alliance or even group of alliances to effectively throttle to get maximum isk.

The rest of nullsec is dealing with ratting and refining taxes, rent and straight up membership fees to pay for the costs of nullsec life. And this "but the moons" completely ignores that. Not everyone can dip into a tech moon to buy and JF in bullets from Jita. So quit building your arguments around that, because it is at least 80% wrong. Or as I said before...


SHUT UP ABOUT THE MOONS

...conflict driver.

…which no-one is claiming. Maybe that's why you're at such a loss.

No. Look, if you actually started to read what I write instead of just make stuff up, you'd have a much easier time with all this

What I've done is calculate how much you get from a moon a month (5bn) by looking at the extraction rate and the market price of the goo. I've then taken a very pessimistic view of what you can get from a largely AFK activity — low-end, low-efficiency ice mining — and figured out how much time you need to spend on that per month to get the same level of income as from the moon goo (500 man-hours). I've then taken this work measure and seen what it means for moon extraction. Obviously and unsurprisingly, it's what a 500-man fleet would expend while defending a tower for 1 hour (or 250 for 2 hours), and I've asked around among the moon holders if these are reasonable figures, which they apparently are.

The simple fact of these two activities is that they are exclusive. You cannot mine ice and defend a POS at the same time (or rat and defend a POS or run missions or anomalies or combat sites or any other kind of active income-gathering). If you arrive at not-the-POS-at-all in your not-a-ship-used-for-shooting-the-enemy-fleet, then you are not contributing to the required protect-the-POS man-hours, so you lose the POS and you don't earn the 5bn ISK.

“He.” And no. The reason I insist on using ice mining as a comparable income is because they're so exquisitely comparable: both require a 500 man-hour expenditure to collect 5bn worth of goods.

Your entire problem is that, by labelling moon mining as “passive”, you pre-programmed yourself to ignore the simple fact that it has a number of active components — the obvious one being emptying out the silos, but the large one being keeping it alive so it can produce anything at all. Keeping a mining POS up and running requires as much exclusive active attention as mining ice (ok, not entirely true… mining ice requires far less, but we'll take “exclusive active attention” to mean “be present on-grid and not off doing something else in a completely different ship”).

Ice mining 5bn worth of ice requires 500 hours worth of mining ships hanging around in belts, exclusively sucking on rock. They can't engage in any other active earning scheme at the same time.
Moon mining 5bn worth of goo requires 500 man-hours worth of combat ships hanging around the POS, exclusively shooting at attackers. They can't engage in any other active earning scheme at the same time.

500 man-hours spent to earn 5bn ≡ 500 man-hours spent to earn 5b. Simple. Comparable. Competitive.

…except that the imbalance is one of production capacity and availability of materials, which is a mechanical, structural, programmed-in limitation — i.e. not even remotely the players' fault since the game mechanics make it impossible to compensate for the imbalance. It is entirely CCP's fault from start to finish.

The reason we're back on the topic of moons is to disprove the notion that the presence of moon mining somehow makes up for the massive imbalances in favour of high: since high can trivially produce the same amount of wealth for the same effort, at most we have parity in this one area, which leaves all the other areas just as horribly imbalanced as ever.

Yeah, that would be one tough job for a guy.

But guy's don't own moons. Alliances do. And I don't think that 6000 plus characters are parked in a system chomping at the bit and waiting for the imminent attack.

It's actually three guys sitting at choke points spotting. So where does that leave the other 5997 people? Well pretty much anywhere else, doing whatever they want. Primarily pulling in ISK hand over fist.

So on an alliance level (the only way to discus moon mining), they are in no way mutually exclusive activities.

Mr Epeen

Ok so wait, just had an interesting brainstorm.

According to Tippia, I need to spend 1 hour a month to get 5b a month from a specific moongoo tower. Now granted, during that 1 hour, I have to employ X amount of pilots to help defend it (eh? 1 hr a month???), and cannot do anything else for that 1 hour.

You know what, fair enough. I can only do admin work for that 1 hour. I cannot mine ice while I do that. I'll mine ice for the other 29 days and get UNDER 5bil, maybe say... 4.3bil? to get my a total of 9.3bil for the 30 days of adding passive and active incomes.

So much for 5bil versus 5bil.

…except that during the time required to keep the moon income rolling in, you can't gain income from ice mining at the same time. You have to choose which one to do: skip the ice mining and keep the tower, or skip the tower defence (thereby losing the tower) and keep the ice income.

Allow me to repeat myself as well:

Your entire problem is that, by labelling moon mining as “passive”, you pre-programmed yourself to ignore the simple fact that it has a number of active components — the obvious one being emptying out the silos, but the large one being keeping it alive so it can produce anything at all. Keeping a mining POS up and running requires as much exclusive active attention as mining ice (ok, not entirely true… mining ice requires far less, but we'll take “exclusive active attention” to mean “be present on-grid and not off doing something else in a completely different ship”).

It requires 500 man-hours to earn 5bn from moon mining. If you don't put that time in, you lose the tower and earn 0 ISK
It requires 500 man-hours to earn 5bn from ice mining. If you don't put that time in, you have no ice and earn 0 ISK.

*Snip* Please refrain from personal attacks. ISD Ezwal

Or you could delegate that person to spend an hour ice-mining and the result would be the same

No. You've just delegated it — you're not defending the tower at all. So you're just doing one thing at the same time. Those other guys? They're also only doing one thing at a time: defending the tower. If they don't put in the 500 man-hours required, the tower goes poof and there's no income from it. If they do put in the 500 man-hours, then it means 5bn ISK income this month for all that work (work that you didn't contribute to).

…just like the ice mining in question. If the poor moon-less alliance doesn't put in the 500 man-hours required, their hangars will be devoid of ice and there's no income from it. If they do put in the 500 man-hours, then it means 5bn ISK income this month for all that work.

It requires 500 man-hours to earn 5bn from moon mining. If you don't put that time in, you lose the tower and earn 0 ISK
It requires 500 man-hours to earn 5bn from ice mining. If you don't put that time in, you have no ice and earn 0 ISK.

Either way, 500 man-hours spent to earn 5bn ISK ≡ 500 man-hours spent to earn 5bn ISK. Simple. Comparable. Competitive.