Market Discussions

You might want to factor this in:

Before the barge changes, the solo miner flew a Hulk in asteroid belts. The Mackinaw was the domain of the ice miner. Different ships, different purposes. Being that both of these ships could easily cost you 250,000,000 ISK each, for many miners it was simply one or the other, not both.

After the barge changes the solo miners traded in their Hulks for Mackinaws, thus the sudden spike in Mackinaw prices right after the change. These days when you go into belts and see solo miners they're either in Retrievers or Mackinaws. Now here's how this effects ice mining: The same ships can now be equally effective at both roles. The same solo miners that work the asteroid belts can switch over to mining ice simply by changing their strip miners. This is a tiny investment compared to having to buy a completely different ship to switch roles.

So before there were two different classes of miner; regular and ice. Now every miner can switch roles at will. This has led to a massive increase in ice mining. Yes, there are plenty of bots, but also factor in that the number of solo miners that have taken up ice mining as a side hobby as well. There's more of them than you think, and collectively they add up to quite a bit.