Science & Industry

Tears of joy that is

That makes you one of the smarter ones, then.

I see this too. It's 10x easier to mine in highsec (perfect refine, freighter runs, no need to compress) and if you don't have a wardec, easier to do as well.

I'm all for doing everything in nullsec if I can, ice mining included, but this 4 hour timer is going to suck. It'll be much easier to just hit up high sec for ice as a corp/alliance and jump it back out. As I said before, this will drastically impact T2 prices as well if a tower costs even more to fuel. Heck, I'm not even really worried about prices going up...I'm worried their won't be enough supply to keep all the towers fueled.

If this change is really directed at high sec, I think it's awesome. Cuts down on bots, lowers supply a bit and increases prices (which are abysmal), but making a blanket change like this and including low/null doesn't seem to make much sense. There aren't huge bot fleets in null sec mining ice all day long. If we want to do an ice mining day to fuel corp towers, I'm not sure why we are getting penalized for it under this new system.

Wow, someone who actually understands these changes yet doesn't live in nullsec.

the above post is why i voted for mynnna for the csm.
although i did nearly choke on my breakfast because i was laughing :(

I've just caught up on the thread. I'd like to re-iterate that you cannot break the bond between nullsec and highsec ice supplies.

Nullsec is absolutely dependent on the racial ice supplied by the 4 empires. It is not feasible for nullsec to switch to using just one type of racial tower that coincides with their local isotope product. This would be equivalent to asking players to only fly one race of ship. Each control tower has unique bonuses which suit them to specific tasks. Until control towers are fundamentally changed this argument cannot hold.

You could refine your ice products locally, but for certain ice like Dark Glitter this only vastly increases the m3 of product that must be exported. Dark Glitter is the primary source of ozone in the game, and these changes are going make gathering that ice much more difficult. Ozone must be supplied to empire.

I'm feel compelled to put a stop to the incorrect values being thrown around in here. In the months prior to fanfest Dark Glitter was earning 36mil/hr and the 10% racial ices earned 12.2mil/hr. That placed Dark Glitter at 3x better than the 10% racial ice. At current unstable market prices the speculators have generously pushed isotopes up from the 350 range to an astounding 760 range. A 20% reduction in highsec ice will not warrant a long-term 220% increase in isotope prices.

Now just to emphasize the point, assume that isotope prices hold at this value. Dark Glitter post expansion would be 50mil/hr x2, and 10% racial ice would be 26.5mil/hr x2. That still places Dark Glitter at roughly twice the value of the best racial ice. I've made this handy comparison chart to show how ice prices will compare before and after assuming pricing doesn't change at all. You'll note the heavy value placed on the "bad ice" effectively rendering the "good ice" a burden to mine by comparison. (Please note that the after category would technically be twice the rate shown, but it's the ratio of ice values that I wanted to showcase)

But once we step back we realize that isotope prices will drop and probably settle around the 500-600 range. However it's unlikely ozone will drop again. Without any other significant source of ozone in the game, and the increased difficulty of mining it in bulk the prices will continue to rise. This will once again push Dark Glitter to complete ice dominance in terms of value.

But why is this?

Let's take a moment to examine the types of ice and how their composition is incorrectly aligned with truesec. The original intention of nullsec ice was a ranked scale of value (Krystallos > Gelidus > Dark Glitter > Glare Crust) with strontium being the highly valued ice product. But right now Dark Glitter has complete dominance due to a lack of ozone source anywhere else in the game. If you want to rebalance ice mining to provide greater incentive for nullsec miners then the refined products of ice should be changed to accomplish this - just like the ore composition changes are fixing the mineral problem.

It's been stated that the nullsec ice fields will include a greater amount of "better ice" based on the sec status of the system ("I wasn't happy with the way the best truesec systems often missed out on good ice so each tier builds upon the one before instead of replacing"). But that incorrectly assumes that Gelidus and Krystallos are more valuable than Dark Glitter (see above chart). As a result of that change, the lower the truesec of the ice system the less valuable it would be to mine.

This whole system is introducing power creep to ice mining for no reason. Doubling the ice mining rate will not yield a net double in income because miners will be forced into lengthy frustrating downtimes. This is only going to exclude casual miners with non-flexible hours from ever experiencing the ice mining profession.

We should instead be rebalancing the refined product yield for each type of ice. If the supply of highsec isotopes is too high then the rebalance should reflect this by lowering the refined supply slightly. Likewise the value of nullsec ice should be reflected by the "sec status quality" of the ice. This essentially means that Krystallos should contain the most ozone, Gelidus the second most, etc.

If there is a desire to remove nullsec isotope dependence on highsec then the full spectrum of racial isotopes need to be obtainable in any nullsec empire - and I do not believe CCP actually desires this. If they did, it could be accomplished through ihub industry upgrades forcing systems to specialize in certain kinds of ice (Comet catching arrays, etc).

Last but not least, why should ore compress fast but not ice? We've already demonstrated that ice products mined in nullsec MUST be exported to highsec. If we truly want to enable ice miners in nullsec then we must give them fair and balanced tools to do so.

Like I said I'm happy to wait and see where the numbers fall out, we really don't know yet how this will all play out and where the prices will move. I'm saying if I can only make 5% more mining ice in null I might as well be in high sec. Though I would probably just switch to ore mining. I like your numbers so hopefully you are right :-)

Damn it man. You are freaking me out here. You mean that with THAT kind of oversupply the price per isotope was ~350 isk / unit ? Doing some sloppy math assuming 20 mil / h per account yield I ended up with isotope price of ~520 isk / unit mining the "thick" versions in the null sec.

So I was kinda assuming that the current ~750 isk / unit is just speculative overreaction. But if I read you correct and the ice supply is approx 600 times greater than demand (1 block atm yields 300 units, if 1 block would need to yield 1/2 of a unit thats the difference I get) then I might have miscalculated something pretty bad. OR do you mean instead that you would need to cut the yield to ~50 % of the current putting it at approx ~150 units / block and I am just misreading your statement ?

How very vanilla.

That statement doesn't make much sense, as the effective ice supply in the market has a finite ceiling via # of ice miners * # of hours mined per. Theoretical ice supply in the belts is completely irrelevant in this picture.

You could have just as well controlled that limited supply by adjusting refined values of ice and thereby making ice mining more or less attractive, thus manipulating the number of ice miners.



Limiting the ice supply via fixed amounts in ice anomalies and respawn rates is just another approach to the same goal, that gives CCP a bit more direct control over the ice supply that reaches the markets - or maybe it just seems so.

In order to correctly estimate the amount of ice thus injected into the market, you not only need to know the number of ice generated, but also the quota harvested. And while you have complete control over the former, the later depends on the same factors you had before - # of ice miners * hours mined and as another unknown: # of anoms going to waste because miners are elsewhere or not operating in the timezone those anomalies spawn.



Which means in the end you are not gaining but losing control over the effective available supply.