Science & Industry

You are getting a C in econ101 aren't you.

Time actually is free.*

Minerals you mine can be free.


* I guess if you beleive in reincarnation time might not be free. This is not truely a problem, however, because the scales are such that the cost would be extremely low.

Your time is free? Then you wouldn't mind mining about 2 billion ISK worth of pyroxeres units for me and trading them to me? After all, the time you spent mining that is free!

Time is not free.

Tears sustain me, that's why.

The minerals I mine free up liquid isk that I would reather use for trading or buying a new hulk when mine gets popped.

Other then that I do enjoy mining. I dont mine 23/7 or anything like that I go back and forth between mining and missioning and low sec roams. This keeps me from geting burnt out on any one thing.

You very queerly insistant on conflating time and activity. Why is this?

Few things:

1) You have treated mining, manufacturing, and sales as some organic whole. This is inaccurate. There is no necessary link between those fields.

2)While minerals do have a value it is not necessarily an inherent value. If a player decouples from the "eve is real"/immersion mentality, then the mineral value is artificial. This sounds like quibbling, until you reconsider the impact this can have on opportunity costs.

3)You have chosen to cherry pick the opportunity costs which you wish to take into account and ignored those which undermine your argument. In addition, you seem to assume that all opportunity costs can be measured in ISK.

Really, Joshua's post contains some very good hints on how MIMAF is possible.... so long as you are able to step back from prior (and common) bias.

Bolded the funny part.

Please choose 1.

edit to make it clear because you are you:

If people assign value to time through wage, and wage is 0, then the "inherent" value is 0.
Therefore you the value of the task of aquiring minerals is 0.

Anyway.... congrats on totally missing the forest for the trees.

you're starving...

His time can be worth what ever he wants it to be worth to him.. but it will still be his time .. not yours lol.

1) I grant that the professions can influence one another, so in that sense they are linked. However, the link is more akin to cell receptors than anything. THere is a possibility of interfacing, but the interface is not necessary. Having no interactions would defintely be inefficient, but would not make any of the professions 100% impossible. You can mine but not manufacture or sell. You can manufacture without mining or selling. You can sell without mining or manufacturing.

2) Actually I would not necessarily chide you for selling at $1000. TO illustrate what I mean let us assume that you turned that troy ounce into jewlery and sold it to friends and family. If the enjoyment of making the jewelry and/or putting a smile on the faces of loved ones is greater than the difference in monetary value ($700) you could make by selling it on a faceless market, then I would only call you a ******* moron if you sold it on said market. The opportunity cost is not any/all actions other than what you chose, but rather the things of greater/equal value.

This is why I said you ignored some opportunity costs. Going back to your widget making example: The player who places the finished widgets on the market for significantly less than current widget price may not be incurring an economic loss. By placing the widgets on the market at such a low price he insures that they will sell quickly and without having to monitor them. This lets him go back to doing things that he thinks are more fun.

If the player considers the "fun" of the game to be something other than ISK accumulation, and by this I mean that if said aspect were removed he would quit playing, then ISK (and anything that can be turned into ISK) decreases in value. This includes the possibility of going to 0 value. Before you object that this does not happen, consider that there always has been/will be people who log in and do anything but chat to friends. The population may be larger/smaller at different times, but it is nonetheless still there.

The largest mistake many people make in EVE is thinking that everything can/should be measured in ISK.

OK, I think I see what you're getting at.

1. yeah, as a manufacturer, I don't need to mine; or as a miner, I don't need to manufacture. However without *someone* mining, I can't get the material I need to manufacture (i.e. impossible). Without someone manufacturing, there's no point to mining (except as a stress-reliever... but we have ship spinning back).

2. Yes, if i gave it to family, there would be additional benefits outside of simple monetary gain. However, within the confines of New Eden, that is more akin to giving the ships to my corp or alliance mates (though I do like to at least break even). The EVE market is more akin to me selling on the faceless market (to which you did agree I'd be a moron).

The player selling an item at significantly less than market value (though, who're we kidding, a million ISK is chump change) is incurring economic loss within the construct of New Eden whether she wishes to believe so or not. I'm not advocating that they become 0.01 isk warriors, but that players at least see the flaw in "mining == free materials" -- I mean, they're taking the time to build shuttles or something, they might as well get the full value of their work, right?

Expanding from a one or two player example, let's say people got into an ISK war for a shuttls (takes about 10k trit IIRC), but the original highest seller was selling at 25K (they're still worth 35k). Between say 5 pilots, we have 100 shuttles going for about 25k apiece. Now, a group of buyers comes along and buy ALL of them in one go. Each of those selling pilots made some ISK and the buyers have ~1 million trit for about 2.5 million ISK. If this keeps up over the long run, this helps promote the depressed prices of minerals and shuttles in that area (probably not region wide, maybe the constellation tops). Since the buyers are getting trit at a discount of nearly 1 ISK/unit, they aren't bothering to set buy orders for 3+ ISK anymore. Maybe a little while after this, the guys selling the shuttles run out of BPC, or realise that they have to cash out a stockpile of trit .. but now there aren't any buyers in the local area because we've all caught on to their mistake and have been fueling our industrial capacity with their under-valued minerals.

Now, obviously a quick liquidation sale or a manipulation is a completely different matter, and I'm not gonna argue against that.