Jita Park Speakers Corner

Dear CCP,

Please freeze the number of minerals in game. Make a judgement call on total mineral allowance for the game and freeze it at a set number.

Secondly, adjust mineral distribution based on needs. Areas with low mining activity gain proportionally higher mineral quantities through dynamically generated belts/anomolies. Areas with high mining activity will progressively have fewer and fewer belts/ice fields to mine.

In other words fix your supply/demand issues by freezing the supply of minerals in the game and then by adjusting the locations it is acquired from. I work in the mining industry IRL and have some insight in to how it works *in reality*. I think that the biggest problem the game has is that more minerals are entering the system than leaving. Demand is disproportionate to supply. Prices on basic ships are too high because sales volume is messed up, suppliers aren't desperate enough for sales to drop prices because there are no supply shortages that create new markets opening up elsewhere.

To create for you an analogy: in australia mining investment has finally peaked and is now at a plateau because the overwhelming majority of potential sites have been discovered (exploration) and have either had their plots assigned or deemed unviable at current ore prices (there is an oversupply of ore to china at the moment).

Therefore now mining conglomerates are stepping up exploration and construction in Brazil/East Africa and other smaller locations like PNG in an effort to firstly: escape tariffs (empire taxes) and secondly to have back-up supplies of ore as Australia starts running out of viable mines (highsec drying up as mining outstrips supplies). The shipping of this new ore back to manufacturers in India and China is not a task undertaken lightly due to piracy (piracy! Holding haulers to ransom!) and other obvious logistical concerns. Manufacturers in China (highsec T2 manufacturers and their WH equivalents/alts) are not determining prices in the final POS locations eg such as your average hardware store because they have an oversupply of goods to their markets therefore middlemen are charging prices 500%-10000% higher than manufacturing costs for the goods because the market is oversupplied and the cost of their purchases don't require quick restituion. In other words Bunnings Warehouse charges 500% the cost to produce for a spanner because they know it doesn't matter if it takes 6 months to sell this spanner as it cost them so little to buy it from the manufacturer in the first place.

Once China (highsec manufacturers) starts to buy more ore from africa than from australia they will raise their prices on their goods to retailers to recouperate costs, the onflowing effect will be ultimately be lower prices on goods in stores because retailers will not be able to afford to hold on to the products for as long as before as they will need to sell higher volumes to keep the same incoming bulk of cash. By moving raw mineral acquisition to a static amount (and honestly make it currently lower than it is now by a very significant amount) you will control the number of supers being fielded, the inflation in markets, help to more evenly distribute activity across the bulk of space and in the end hopefully create the need for more nullsec alliances especially of the industry focussed kind as more militant empires will have to fight for territory more than before in order to have access to resources as the ones in their home systems dry up.

This balancing could extend to moons if T2 material acquisition is still regarded as problematic. An overfarmed moon runs dry over time and moons in other areas of space eventually start producing more minerals than before. Moons become conflict drivers more dynamically and naturally than before.

I'd really like Dr Eyjog's thoughts on my proposal, I do not claim to be a market specialist I am a miner by profession and by necessity understand something of the markets my profession relates to.

My vision is a world where static empires cannot endlessly accumulate resources without focussed CCP intervention. To cite the battle in fountain as a case-in-point example, as soon as the resource was moved a war started. If the system itself controlled based on an unbiased formula how a pre-defined number of minerals globally were distributed based on use it would force those wanting/needing the resources to be much more dynamic with their space.

Going back to moons as an example, over-mining the immediate ore around them will mean more minerals shipped in from further and further away in order to protect the asset. Therefore holding a moon while it is dry can potentially become untenable as the costs of supporting its defence become too high from a logistical perspective. If you walk away from the moon can you guarantee it will be so easy to take once it has resources again?

Miners will need to go further afield to gather their pay-check



When I first started EVE 4 years ago I was surprised it functions the way it does regarding mining. It is in a sense a no-risk occupation. I think the claims of miner ganking are dramatically overstated. Nullsec is even safer for these people because the entry nodes are policed by their own alliance. It's really only lowsec that is overly dangerous for miners as the mechanics of lowsec are irredeemably broken. By forcing miners to - by necessity - move to other areas of space in order to get paid you are opening this passive and tedious career to risk. I won't speculate on how the risk is overcome but I will remind everyone that ships need minerals and to allow mining to stop because it's inconvenient will only mean your empire inconveniently stops working.

For me sitting here it would be fascinating to get some hard facts on how many capitals there are in the game.

How many would there be in a mineral crisis? An *actual* mineral crisis? Would we see titans/dreads/supers being trashed or burnt just to free up minerals for other exercises? What about highsec and the hundreds of offline POSes? They would become valuable merc contracts - not initially maybe but eventually. Huge stockpiles of ships everywhere would need to be depleted in order to free up minerals and recycle them.

In my mind I see the initial 6 months as a universe-wide frenzy of killing. Desperate nullsec blocs recycling their ships and launching raids in to highsec to kill ships there as well, all in a bid to have access to more minerals.

[citation needed]




I'm not Dr EyjoG, but our proposal is awful.

No no, see, you have no evidence to back up virtually everything you wrote there. More minerals entering the game than leaving? No evidence. Demand disproportionate to supply? No evidence. Prices on basic ships are too high? Pure opinion.

The funny thing is that there's actually a decent bit of evidence to suggest that you are completely wrong. I invite you to examine what happened to mineral prices (and thus ship prices) after CCP removed the mineral fountain that the drone regions represented, for example.

In any case, there are a lot of reasons beyond a shaky foundation why this is an awful idea, but I don't have time to get into them right now. Perhaps I'll remember later.

I feel I should throw this in here while I'm still thinking of it

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2970310#post2970310

Tiericide reputedly has used mineral costs as a means to increase the costs of ships. But to what end? Curb inflation? Rise specifically cites increased player income and claims that new players should be able to afford it. Those are his claims and some metrics released today should confirm it over all?

Citing FW as being a major source of ISK for new players is a bit of a straw man since you need some pretty substantial isk already to buy the big stuff. Where does a 14 day old character make MOST of his money? As in CSM summit minutes: when does a new player stop being new?

Also, does "static mineral quantity" mean the sum of raw minerals/ore + ore yet to be mined in asteroids + minerals contained in ships/fittings/etc is fixed? Just raw minerals/ore + ore yet mined, and to make more respawn you have to use it? Please clarify .

Yes prices rose but what else could be expected? It's the same situation as today, but we observe it accurately because it was one major event affecting one source and happened in the space of one patch.

Freezing the mineral count in game is one part of a three-pronged attack on the games economy. It forces a redistribution of man-power and industry to high-value locations which eventually deplete and then require mobilisation again. The mobilisation creates weaknesses that can be attacked as static defences are now no defence by association of the need to move resource collection away from it.

The second prong is limiting operational areas for markets based on only being able to sell where you have a store ergo forcing people to move their retailing to other locations and thus decentralise markets and finally by extension lower logistical costs for those whom it concerns. When a given station runs out of corporation offices it creates a very real demand for realestate. We observe Jita being the biggest market place in the game but only due to convenience. If 4-4 became a kick-out station, or, if it had the number of out-in pipes cut to 3 people would just find somewhere else to trade.

The third prong,is again, the dissemination of inactive corps, accounts and their assets. By creating a tax that needs payment monthly where the failure to pay is the dissolution of the corp you reduce inactive corps. By creating a kill-timer on inactive players you achieve a reduction in placeholder toons who have no purpose and most probably will never return to the game. If the corporations assets are not claimed by a suitably titled (and active) corp member then the assets are deleted from the game completely (which is realistically the same as sitting unused for the rest of time) and this overall affects the mineral volume available to players (post bulk aggregate projection reduction). This third prong directly affects the first two.

But again it all hinges on having a static mineral volume for the game. Things do, in a sense, only get cheaper to manufacture in EVE as toons raise their SP in related fields. Research and high standings cut the waste down further. There doesn't seem to be a lot of objectivity from industry players about whether or not their production volumes are beneficial to the game. The production volumes that tie in to an (I assume) infinite supply of raw material that beyond being unrealistic, promotes turtling and leads to the stagnation I see being complained about by ex nullsec players. With no reason to fight what else is there to do except go back to theme-park gaming such as FW or wardecs? Pay a fee and shoot your enemies for a week - awesome. In the end not much of an accomplishment really. Nothing that would go down in the history books.

Tying back in to my earlier comment about the caracal -over 2 years net sell orders static, buy orders reduced. This is a trend that suggests oversupply.

Basic cruise missiles showing an increase in supply and static buy orders.

I'm not going to do a breakdown on the entire game here it's interesting for me to see that many items aren't showing a corresponding rise in buy orders along with sell orders which says to me that people aren't interested in bargaining for items. Prices have increased universally but people aren't haggling. Someone eventually will return to Rise's comment about ISK generation being higher than ever across all player ages but with a reduction in bounty payouts, the incursion nerf and drone alloy nerf I find it hard to believe this is the work of genuinely new players and not alts.

This is an even worse idea than your base idea. There's no better way to ensure that people who quit or take a break don't come back than to delete their character(s).


The savings you get in manufacturing from SP has a cap that is very easily achievable. The savings from research also have a cap, and have diminishing returns as well, rather harsh ones in fact. A Megathron at ME0 costs 160.7m isk to build. Spend two months researching that to ME20 and the cost is 149.5m, which is reasonably worth it. That next point to ME21 only saves you 25k isk, and taking it to ME200 would only save an additional 500k isk over ME20. So, no, things are not getting cheaper and cheaper... and even if they were, didn't you say one of your goals here is to make things cheaper?

You did, so explain to me how starving the game for minerals achieves that? Remember, the drone regions were a massive drop in supply, and prices rose. You're proposing the same thing.


Oh, that's right, you seem to think there's some sort of massive stockpile of *goods* sitting around that enables people to charge huge markups. There isn't, and people don't. Need proof? I already cited the build cost of a Megathron, compare that to the market price (currently around 160m). That doesn't really jive with the whole 500-10000% markup thing.

With your data points in particular, the caracal volume information is flat out broken and none of the cruise missiles actually show what you're suggesting. They've actually all been surprisingly static up until the recent buff they got.


The fact that you want to make nullsec more active and interesting is laudable, but there are better ways to do it than wrecking the game's economy.

While this is true, you have proposed an excellent way of facing and exceeding that challenge.

What's so funny? That's literally how the economy functions, npc seeded items and LP stores aside. Traders don't just take their money and flush it down their space toilets. Destroyed ships are lost currency. The market is merely redistribution.



We're talking about a game that was based on the idea that no more than 5 or 6 titans would ever be built based on the costs alone. Had the mineral market been frozen then at that point in time it might have come true. Now even piddly little alliances have titans. I'd love to know your impression on that point. There is a catagorical oversupply of inexhaustible mineral deposits in this game and it makes things that should matter an exercise of having enough people and enough time. I've seen titan losses be trivialised by both aggressor and victim with statements alluding to the remaining hundreds that are left.

NPCs are functioning like a defacto bank, providing extra money to the system in place of debt through non-reparable bounties. Minerals are from what seems evident to me (thanks to titans and supers alone) an uncontrolled resource as well. CCP have just recently adjusted mineral output UP in some asteroids, I'm guessing to help oversupply the market more and drive prices down again. It might work, but I doubt it because its still the same people mining it and manufacturing from it.

If freezing mineral supply to the game seems outlandish and implausible as a way of fixing the game because of crashing the market and being hostile to new players (wherever they are) then that's exactly what I want to hear. It's exactly what I want to hear because losing a super or titan will actually matter. It would change the whole scope of how fleets are created.