Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If you haven't noticed, mineral prices and compressed ore supply are askew and are not going to get much better without CCP involvement. The reason for this is the vast imbalance of ore distribution in null. Yes, the market will adjust somewhat, but the aspiration of localized nullsec supply will not be attained, and "high end' ores will continue to be awful isk/hour sources.

Edit: I am modifying this to stress that the primary issue is the supply of ore in nullsec. The isk/hour is a reflection of the supply and isn't the primary issue.

There are two Major Problems:

• The changes in compression means that it is harder for null producers to source the appropriate amounts of low/med tier minerals (especially super producers). Producers halting their production because of an inability to source minerals reduces overall demand for all minerals, dropping prices.
• Nullsec Ore Anomalies have entirely too much high end ore as opposed to the low end output. In order for local miners to fulfill the mineral needs of local producers, they would need to cycle belts, producing a surplus of high end minerals. That, or they simply cherry pick the high ends and leave everything else in the belt. Specifically, nullsec producers have issues sourcing Mex and Isogen in meaningful amounts.

These problems are leading to high end minerals plummetting in price, while the low-ends are fluctuating as high sec struggles to fulfill the demand of null producers. If null miners were to cycle belts in order to meet the mineral demand of local producers, the high end market would crash even further, reducing the already sub par isk/hour of mining. In reality, mining is already one of the lowest isk/hour activities, and it is only going to get worse. There are ships specifically designed to "cherry pick" or "ninja mine" ores- neither of which is a viable profession because of the current ore/mineral imbalance.

Potential Solutions:

• Re-balance the distribution of ores in the existing ore anoms. Reduce some of the m3 of high end ores and replace that m3 with Kernite/Plagioclase/Jaspet (even Veld?). This would reduce output of high end minerals as well as enable nullsec miners to be able to supply the much needed minerals of local producers. Reducing output of high ends will lead to a rebound in price for the high ends, making them more valuable and making things like "ninja mining" and "cherry picking" a thing again.
• Suggested by one of the J**bal members: completely remove existing ore anomalies. Replace those with smaller anomalies that have only one (or few) types of ores, with more anomalies spawning as the industry level increases. This would make ore anoms function similar to existing combat anoms, with more numbers of "low end" sites and only a few "high end" sites (such as with sanctum distribution). These sites would be much smaller and more condensed than current ore anoms, and could respawn on a timer, such as 30 minutes, to negate some of the effects of cycling one type of belt over and over.

Both of the above solutions aim at reducing the output of high end ores from nullsec and rewarding leveling a system to industrial level 5. Additionally, the removal of the high ends would be refocused to increased supply of low end minerals, enabling nullsec groups to source their minerals locally in meaningful amounts. Arkonor, supposedly the "most rare" ore in the game, is the least valuable ore in the game to mine right now. Yes, the market will adjust some, but the overall supply of high ends is "too damn high!"

Despite all of the recent changes to compression, most ore and minerals are still being sourced out of Jita in the form of compressed ores (at least in the CFC).

Edit2: Please also see Mynnna's Comments and Ideas regarding this issue.

lawl he thinks mex is our problem

I'd like to see more high end ore in high sec mining anoms. Whether it was unique ores (as per OP, far as I can tell) or the present spread, it would be good to see them go higher in the scale. Right now plenty of anoms have the same ore as the systems where they pop (how about some Omber! ... in a system where Omber constitutes a third of all rocks...woohoo!). It's pretty weak. The most recent patch appears to have addressed this a bit but the best you see in high sec anoms is, like, 2 or 3 minerals higher up the chain than the local (so omber goes to kernite, kernite goes to hemorphite... and that's about as good as it gets... even in a .5 system).

Seems like the OP's problem could be resolved by trading common/valuable null sec ore with high sec sources whose common ore is not regularly deemed valuable. You can set up hubs wherever you want for that, just set up contracts with ore trades. I could certainly use more zydrine, megacyte and such when I'm building in high sec and i've got trit/mex/etc out the yang.

any ore that's mined the most will be [awful isk/hour sources], regardless of location or what minerals are in it.

if people want to sit in null sec with its near infinite supply of ore and drive down the prices of zyd/mega that's not something that needs fixing by ccp.

Overpriced veldspar or scordite or plag isnt the problem. The problem that the Plag and Omber are such low supply that you simply cant get enough of the stuff. I was thinking trit would be the problem. But after buying ores for 2 weeks in Jita, litterally buying everything. I ended up with 8 billion trit, 1.5 bill pye. 100 mil mex 15 mil isogen 30 mil nocxium. Now can you spot the problem with these numbers?

Yeah there is about 600 mil mexallon too little and 150 mil isogen. That is quite a lot missign to simply just haul with a jf

I am suggesting that this IS a problem. My solution would mean that there would be less high end ore available in nullsec, and that it would only slightly scale as the industry level is raised. On the same note, it would provide more low end ores for nullsec miners to mine locally and supply local builders with minerals.

Industry levels of systems are public information, so when nullsec entities are mining in "upgraded" systems, those are significant targets for roaming hostile gangs (more content!)

The current state of mining in null is an absolute joke because of the abundance of high end ores compared to the demand of the high end minerals. Even if we wanted to use the current ore distribution to seed local producers, the market would be flooded with Zyd and Mega and crash the prices down even further.

Why can't nullsec miners simply mine in belts?

This is a serious question. Are nullsec belts equally broken?

Actually, imho the problem with nulsec belts is that the ore in them is not grouped closely. Therefore, ten or more locations are required to mine out an entire nul belt. Not that I have actually mined an entire asteroid belt in nulsec, it is just not worth the time required. If anything, miners will probably mine one or two ores in a belt then head to ore anoms, or move to the next system.

Compared to most highsec belts and ore anoms, there is typically one or two central locations where most of the ore in the belt can easily be accessed. The most a typical highsec belt requires is 4 to 6 central locations.

I am not saying this needs to change at all. On the contrary, I like how spread out the ore is. Nulsec miners can simply mine in belts, it just is not as easy as mining in hs. After all, nulsec is difficult and the rewards are higher. Demand is what set my mining priorities; importing highsec ore was my fallback, especially when prices of mexallon increased in nul vs hs.

Some further info to add to the OP.

The root cause here is, I believe, the fact that nullsec mining sites respawn almost immediately upon being mined out in full. Now this in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing and does have some advantages from a supply perspective - namely the ability to get from a small patch of space with my miners what would otherwise be coming from the area defined by roughly "all of highsec" that previously supplied me. How much space I have is thus not an issue, because I can always get enough ore from so little as one system.

Note that I said supply perspective, not so much balance.

Now the problem with this is that despite continual buffs to the amount of low ends contained in the six nullsec ores (Spodumain, Gneiss, Dark Ochre, Crokite, Arkonor and Bistot) to the point where they actually provide a pretty decent mineral basket (Mexallon shortage notwithstanding), they still supply way, WAY more high end minerals than the low end mineral content actually require. The excess is naturally shipped off to empire, to match up with what gets mined there.

So it's not hard to see the situation this creates. Low ends are collectively the bottleneck in the mineral markets, because what amounts to an arbitrarily large supply of high ends can be produced. This will actually always be true so long as the amount of high ends in nullsec ores is proportionally larger than the amount of low ends. When I say "proportionally larger" here, I mean that any sufficiently high level module or ship (especially ship) requires a relatively similar mineral ratio, so while you may have enough low ends in a site for ten battleships, you have high ends for fifty.

I should note that all of the above is purely a theoretical look at things, but the markets and how they've reacted over the years, plus what data IS available (mainly stuff from CCP Diagoras back when he was active) supports the theory.

Before moving on, an interjection: high ends with a low price or low ends with a high price is fine. When looking to adjust mining and mining income and so forth I'd rather look at the big picture than cling to a decade old notion of what mineral prices "should" be like, and if that means throwing out the old power of two rule of thumb that governed minerals when they were bought and sold by NPCs and embracing 1000 isk/unit Megacyte, so be it. 8k/unit Megacyte made cherry picking a thing and screwed over anyone who didn't get there first anyway, or who didn't have access to the best ores. I'd rather aim for all the nullsec ores to be within about 20% of each other, so there's value in getting there first but you're not completely hosed if you don't.

So, from that perspective, there are a couple of different solutions, some of which could certainly be combined, and probably should be.

Restrict the spawn rate of anomalies. Ice belts provide the obvious model here, though I actually hate that model, especially for nullsec, because it means every respawn you don't get is 20% less of the potential value of the system. The resource becomes effectively time zone locked - unless you have enough miners in AUTZ, RUSTZ, EUTZ and USTZ to clean each spawn up in the requisite amount of time (which I think is 45 minutes if you want to get five spawns but I can't recall for sure) you lose spawns. But something like "respawns immediately when mined up to X number of times" might be okay.

One potential issue here is that if enough mining is happening in nullsec, then high end supply could still outstrip low end supply because of the higher proportion of high ends in these sites.

The other issue I do see with this is that it restricts availability of supply and effectively makes it dependent on how many systems you hold, which again encourages sprawl; any given anomaly does not have THAT many minerals in it, all things considered. Of course that's also a good thing as it makes guarding your mining system(s) important and makes them a source of conflict. Going this route would mean balancing these factors and possibly adjusting the mineral content of anomalies to suit.

Change the game wide mineral balance If cratered high end prices are due to oversupply, the obvious solution is "fix the supply." I suspect that it isn't "oversupply" that is the problem, but rather the degree of oversupply, but I'm at work and so don't have the information I need to check that handy. Still, if true it means that simply adjusting the ratios in the mining sites can accomplish what needs to be done.

It's a fact little appreciated that the buffs nullsec ores received to their low end content, primarily back in Odyssey, we're actually substantial enough that upwards of 90% of the low ends in a nullsec site are actually already in the six nullsec ores, which also comprise the majority of the site by volume (there's one site that's the exception to one or both of those, but again, don't have the info in front of me, can't remember offhand.)

So, to re-propose what I've suggested before, just take the empire and lowsec ores, everything between Veldspar and Jaspet, out of nullsec sites.

When I had initially made this suggestion it was with an eye to making nullsec mining a bit more attractive, and so I'd also said "and then adjust the mineral content of the nullsec ores so that the overall mineral content of a site remains approximately the same." As you'd remove 10-15% of the volume of the site, yet retained the total value of the site, the isk/hr from mining would rise accordingly. At least at the time it boosted mining income up to be roughly on par with low effort ratting, which I think put it in a reasonable place. I'm not sure if that's still true with current mineral prices, though. I'm not sure sure if that's true with current mineral prices though...but there's more. I've somehow rambled on to four thousand characters though, so "more" comes next post.

Yes, the cause of the problem is the mechanic which forces null-sec miners to mine out an entire anomaly to get the next one to spawn.

However, changing the mineral composition of ores is not the best solution. Will CCP need to repeat the process every patch as each mineral, one by one, becomes the one with the shortage?

High sec miners are able to cherry-pick whichever ore is worth the most. They are also able to move from region to region if they don't think they are getting enough isk per hour. Null sec miners should also be given the option to cherry pick whichever ore is worth the most or contains the minerals they need.

Possible easy solution: Double the size of anomalies. The next anomaly spawns when the first is 50% mined, rather than fully mined out. The old anomaly then despawns (perhaps after a short time delay.) When someone has a glut of megacyte, they would then have the option to let the arkanor asteroids despawn while they mined something they actually needed.