EVE General Discussion

This may or may not be relevant but ...

When I get bored I mine. Instead of hauling my take back through the shipping lanes where there is a good possibility that I'm going loose my product. I simply offload what I mine at the local market station for a lower price. Yes I may be gimping myself but that is better than the alternative, which happens to be a ship in pieces and no cargo.

I like this guy. He gets it.

When I first started I did a little experiment to give myself the "proper" mindset for a future industrialist. It was this: For my first month I made a point to buy absolutely nothing but BPOs and skillbooks. For that month every ship I flew, ever weapon & module, ever laser crystal... everything I made entirely myself from minerals that I mined myself. If I needed a losec mineral I'd just reprocess rat loot until I had enough.

I am lucky, though: I subscribe. Moreso, I subscribe and don't worry about it. I don't PLEX and therefore I am not tied to the PLEXer mindset of "ISK per Hour = GOD." When you are free the looming debt of a PLEX quota hanging over your head then you can actually (gasp!) enjoy the game and build things because you want to build them.

In the past our company has sold items to favored friends at discounts that would make an ISK counter cough up their skull. We've even done outright donations to people we like. Why? Because friends are an investment, too - probably the best investment one can make in EvE (look no further than Chribba if you want proof).

When you are free from the burden of the PLEX, when you see your subscription as paying for skill points instead of ISK grinding time, then you completely remove that petty, bean counting mindset from your conscience. And it this liberated mindset that can and often does say "Minerals you mine are free" because, for such a person, it is true.

How much did it cost me to build that Abaddon? It cost me sitting through several good movies on Netflix while I hoovered up the minerals that I needed, and about 10,000ISK of factory time. At this point I could sell that thing for 10,000,000ISK and you know what? I've still made a profit. Because that's still about 9,990,000ISK more than it cost me.

Honestly, people spend too much time buried in their spreadsheets around here. You know what that thing is really worth? Yes, yes the mineral costs, but where do mineral costs come from? Does CCP seed minerals into the game at fixed rates to prevent inflation? No? Hmmm, so where do miners get their prices from? They get them from other miners, that's where. Where did those miners get their prices from? Are you sitting down? They made the whole thing up!

I want you to think about that. If some millionaire decides to sub fifty accounts, PLEX free, and start isoboxing tritanium into the market for 1ISK per unit you can bet that's going to drive down the average price overall. If every miner did the same thing then yep, tritanium would cost 1ISK everywhere. The reverse is also true, or until someone starts undercutting you.

"Everything is worth what the buyer will pay" - This is the reality of the prices for everything in EvE.

The only wrench in all of this is the PLEX. By setting PLEX at a set amount of time (30 days) and dividing those days into hours a PLEX has a quantifiable price per hour. So the PLEX miner must then earn equal to or greater than that "PLEX per hour" in the form of "ISK per hour" to keep his little bot-fleet going. Therefore the price of tritanium ultimately come down to the price of PLEX.

But then even here we can see what really happens: Does CCP seed PLEX into the market at a fixed price? No? We're back to square one then, aren't we? If some millionaire comes along and decided to play Santa Claus with ten thousand half-off PLEX, well even the Jita market bots can only try to resell so many before their liquid money pool is gone for the day. The overall price would drop, even if it recovered again the next day.

So in summary: There are no such thing as any inherent ISK value to anything in EvE other than the willingness of one person to part with their ISK to acquire it. If no one buys because the price is too high, tough crap, price comes down or the seller is stuck with a dusty warehouse. The PLEX adds a gravitational field, metaphorically speaking, that drags the prices of everything into it's orbit, but even this field only effects those who live off PLEX. Again, subscribers are immune to the economic gravity of the PLEX and are free to sell at whatever price suits their fancy.

I subscribe, and thus the minerals I mine are free.

Don't you think that's a fairly common view? How many home owners can you think of who factor in their own personal hours into the ROI on a home improvement project? Every one of my friends with a home essentially considers his own labor to be free, and he believes he is saving money he would otherwise pay a contractor.

I'm not sure the "opportunity cost" viewpoint is that common. It is especially not common if your base wallet is closer to zero. It seems like to me that hisec mining (excluding botters) generally are the poorer of EVE players. These players would generally consider their labor to be free.

What you are talking about makes more sense for a player who could be earning millions an hour doing incursions or WH ratting and so forth.

Not all opportunity costs are equal..

/蘭

You miss the point.

The original post was not about people building their own ships.

It was about people mining minerals they could sell in their current mining system for no effort for 10 million ISK and then turning around and taking the time and effort to build a ship with it they sell for 9 million ISK. ... and doing it again and again ...

A better real world example is someone that takes timber they own which the guy up the road will give them $100 for and instead spends all weekend making a table he then sells for $50.

I wouldn't worry. The MIMAF (Minerals I Mine Are Free) crowd, which is pretty much everyone in Eve who manufactures but doesn't understand economics, will be optimised away in big markets like Jita.

I keep hearing "free minerals".

Please contract all free minerals to me. (not to Falcon, I think flyin Polaris frigs & stuff is OP enough ;-) )

Should you be bothered by the thought, please think about it. They were free, right?
And there is basically an infinite amount of more free minerals in New Eden, right?
So there should be nothing wrong in contracting them to me since you can anytime get arbitrary amounts of new minerals. I unfortunately can't because I never trained Mining Barge, so please help me.

Thank you very much.

In the bad old days before the internets become the in thing and it was still cool to talk in game chat in leet there was a distinction between Noob and Newbie. Newbie was a new player whereas noob was someone that had been playing for years but did dumb stuff like you would expect from a new player.

In the post WoW world the distinction seems to have disappeared.

Value is assigned by players.

To one what is valuable is worth nothing to another.

You need players to assign different values to items or time, so that players can make profit. For those players into that sort of thing.

If everyone valued items and time the same way, there would be no profit.

If we step back and look more philosophically, perhaps we could argue that this is a reflection of how all economies are virtual worlds and mirror back to us our values, no matter if the economy is "real" or "virtual".

Guys my curiously online-and-order-updating-23-hours-a-day reprocessing business is going to take a hit halp

No more weed for you today.