Market Discussions

Not a single instant of your life is free.

The real and most valuable currency behind every other currency is Time (which in my own wicked philosophy, does not exist. Time for me is an alias for speed of universe constituents wave reconfigurations).

Your choice to use it for different activities (including ship spinning in a game) convert it into other, less valuable currencies.
The ratio you convert it at is determined by how much profitable those activities are.

So, if you convert Time to ship spinning, you get about zero (> zero since apparently you find ship spinning worth doing so you are converting Time into "fun" currency).

If you convert to mining then you get a value that is bigger than zero and less than doing something else.

If you don't play EvE and flip a burger you have just converted your Time in something more valuable than most EvE professions may offer.

I think it all depends on ones vantage point...

100% Paid Subs vs 100% PLEX Subs vs Mixed Subs

100% Paid Subs:

You've already made the decision to commit resources (RL money + Time) to Eve and as such ingame activities have no bearing or consequence on the perpetuation of playing ...so minerals mined are free.

100% PLEX Subs:

All ISK earnt will have an intrinsic RL value. You can calculate the ISK per hour (based on the time you commit) required to perpetuate playing ...so minerals mined are NOT free.

Mixed Subs:

Something inbetween the above (e.g. 1 paid account, 2 PLEXed) ...so minerals mined are ???? I think this is where the confusion over whether the minerals mined are free.

Ultimately most of us undertake an activity (hobby / vice) with an assocaited RL money or time cost. Normally the output from that activity is not a prerequisite for its perpetuation as one has already assigned RL money or time to the activity.

Hope this makes some sence.

Fly safe. o7

I'd go as far as say it is quite the opposite.With a paid sub it is not free isk it even costed you RL money wich in my book is even ''less free'' then using isk for a plex.

I don't see how RL money factors into it. Like the man said, you use your petty cash (play cash) to pay for EVE, this is the money that you would spend on roller coaster ride, or a parachute jump, or a day in a museum. Its the cash that you use to have fun. But unlike all these activities, you pay $15 for a month, not $15 for a log in.
This allows you to log in, and spend as much time logged in as you wish. Doing things, or not doing things is your problem since it's your dime.

Now, are minerals I mined free if I mined them during my active play hours? No, because I could have been running missions, sites &c. so the price of those minerals is what I could have had if I had done something else.

But if you mine during your passive hours, which are those when you just sit about, chat with your buddies, browse cool looking titans and dream about how you would totally kick ass and chew bubble gum, or not even that because you are hunched down over a load of Calculus II homework, or you're trying to market your small business product on the internet, all the while your EVE is running and you're not making any money. Instead, if you set your miner to mine in your passive time, this will become "a passive income" because then your minerals indeed are free because you are making money, as opposed to not making money.

Tell me if that's not so.

And listen, I do understand what you all are saying, I started this post after extensive debates in my alliance chat. And I wanted to know how other people feel about it. So, Im basically arguing for the sake of Argument.

Most of my minerals are free because I scam them from miners.

Exactly. As I posted above, every breath you take, is one breath less you have before you die (creepy, isn't it? ).

Paying a game (PLEX or sub does not matter) just compounds with the above.

It doesn't matter how you pay for your subscription, nor how much effort or attention you put into acquiring any item(s) in the game even if they are given to you as a gift. Minerals, or any other item, are never 'free' regardless of how you acquire them simply because they have a value if you sell them.

For example, imagine you have one account/toon that sat in a station but was given 1000 units of Tritanium as a gift, and you had another account that was paid for via PLEX and a toon on that account mined Veldspar and refined the ore into 1000 units of Tritanium, and also had a third account that was paid for with real $$$ and a toon on that account ran a mission and refined some loot to receive 1000 units of Tritanium. Regardless of how the account is paid for or how the 1000 Tritanium was 'earned' or how much effort it took to accumulate the Trit, the 1000 units of Trit would have the same value if sold on the market, therefore, in no case are the minerals ever 'free'.

@OP

Long story short, COST and VALUE are not necessarily the same thing.
And you need to realize which of those two things actually matters at any given time.
The minerals you mine are indeed as good as free (in sufficient cases), but their value is guaranteed to be more than zero (in fact, it's more or less whatever local market forces say their value is at that time).
That's one crucial distinction that many people fail to sufficiently and consistently take into account.

Side-note
Here, "free" being defined as "gratis", or "not costing currency", but only approximately/figuratively, not literally.
As in, you discount the fact you actually need to pay a fee to play the game at all, be it in cash or via PLEX with ISK. And you also might somewhat downplay the time/effort investment component of it for reasons to be discussed further below.
If you want, call it sunk costs and use that as reason for disregarding those things, even if technically nothing you do in Eve is ever actually completely free, even by loosely interpreting that definition.
Either way, let's not get side-tracked in semantics, so let's agree that this is an almost completely different and not very crucial discussion for the purpose of this particular issue.
End side-note

As far as opportunity cost goes, yes, comparing mining with ALL other activities possible in Eve-Online might NOT be very appropriate, but there ARE other activities in Eve-Online that can somewhat fit a similar "attention scheduling" profile, things like PI, trading, courier missions, and probably quite a few more activities, albeit a bit more tenuously.
Some of those things can also be done WHILE mining, but possibly at lower efficiencies, so you can't always consider their full estimated revenue magnitude when trying to determine opportunity cost.
The elusive "fun" factor also needs to be taken into account (some people can actually enjoy mining while doing other fun things, but not enjoy doing any of the other ISK-earning things, or vice-versa), and after all, the only truly important currency in Eve is "how much fun you're having" (with ISK being a pretty good facilitator, but not the only requirement) - we have to remember that Eve is a game, an optional past-time, not a full-time job neither a necessity for living, therefore, if something stops being "fun enough" for an individual, he will cease doing it or even quit the game altogether. And that's a huge headache to even begin to calculate.
Basically, opportunity cost varies from person to person, heavily, depending on way too many factors to give a concrete general answer. And it might also vary for the same person at different times. So, it's really complicated to estimate, even on average and/or statistically speaking.

Cost of getting minerals might be minimal (even the so-called opportunity cost might also be minimal) and varies from person to person, but the value of minerals is pretty much invariant (in a certain geographical area and in a limited timespan anyway) and set by market forces (i.e. the combined actions of everybody contributing).
The only thing that really matters therefore in this particular case is the MARKET VALUE of minerals, not the cost of obtaining them (which might as well indeed be as good as "free" for at least some people at certain times).

In other words, you are free to consider mining as "free" for yourself and book all mining income as profit.
However, as soon as you turn those minerals into something else and try to sell THAT instead of minerals, you can't possibly consider whatever income you get from the manufacture product sales as pure profit, you have to "internally book" the VALUE of minerals as COSTS for the manufacture process input... and you might observe that manufacture becomes not "pure profit" (like some rush to claim) but can actually result in a net loss of total asset value if you manufacture the wrong thing, or in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, or a combination of those factors.

Sometimes (usually) it's better to just sell the minerals directly "as is" if you can't manufacture something else that's actually profitable.
Other times (rarely), it might be better to indirectly sell the minerals even at a slight loss via manufacture, but only if you think the volume of mineral trades at the desired level and current/desired price could not be sustainable (i.e. you'd crash the local mineral market if you would sell the minerals directly).
So, even that is (occasionally) a bit more complicated than it might look at first sight.

...

I hope that helps.

Minerals bought off the market in "real life" include on their price more than the time invested to obtain them and a profit margin, they also include insurance, amortization, transportation costs, etc. if they didn’t, all the people that make a business out of their extraction would eventually go bankrupt.

On eve, due to the way the game is designed, there’s no reason things should be any different. But miners are a special breed, and so minerals on the market often include just the time invested to extract them and a VERY small profit margin.

Miners don’t realize their profit is so small because they devaluate their time, simply because this is a game and they actually have fun while mining or maybe they watch a movie, TV , play another game, or they just masturbate. Neither do they value the cost and risk of hauling, and let’s not start with the idiocy of miners who refuse to accept that losses are inevitable, and don’t set aside part of their profits to fund their eventual loses. (Self-insurance)

And so, if you are like the average miner, mining your own minerals will not be free at all, but will be less expensive than buying off market. You will "pay" the time cost of the minerals with your own time, and you just add the profit margin of the mineral extraction to your total profit, since you are not paying it to anyone else. But keep in mind that you will be “paying” the time with your own time at the lowest the market will pay you for it! If you don’t like what the market will pay you, then just don’t mine and buy off the market instead.

Now, if you are a smart person who knows this isn’t a game of perpetual accumulation, but instead a game where both goods and the tools to create them can be lost or destroyed, you will find that mining your own minerals can at times be extremely expensive.

Undocking a ship means putting it in danger, that alone makes your own minerals more expensive. Why would you choose to account for that danger by reducing your profits? Because that’s what you would do if you are a real miner. Part of your profit MUST fund your eventual loses.

So you see where im going with this?

Why would you value your time at the lowest the market will pay you for it, when you know the lowest the market will pay in eve does NOT include amortization costs?

Just buy off market, let the suckers fight each other to sell you their time AND let them carry the cost of potential losses.

It’s almost machiavellian, but that’s the way it goes. You see this on real life too, with countries destroying their own environment because they “are making money and giving jobs”. little do simple minded people know about the real cost of the things they sell.

a miner's minerals are worth exactly what his time is worth.