Science & Industry

Let's examine the changes to the supply of ozone in the galaxy.

This is a chart showcasing the changes to ice, and the new ice product yield from the ice anomalies.

The very last chart in that picture shows the relative ozone supply yield from mining in each of these systems before and after the changes. The "New" column is including the x2 mining rate, and the "Old" column is still the 1x mining rate. The mining yields compared in this chart assume that the new ice anomalies respawn instantly. And since they don't the actually supply of ozone will be substantially less than shown.

• Lowsec will yield less than 16.18% the ozone it used to
• Bad Nullsec will yield less than 44.88% the ozone it used to
• Good Nullsec will yield less than 59.27% the ozone it used to

Points of Order:

Ozone and the other ice products will rise in value accordingly and you'll still make >= isk/hr
Probably. But the galaxy is still going to be massively shorted on the supply of ozone.

You mine twice as fast so you'll pull in ozone faster
False. You used to be able to mine pure ozone by mining pure Dark Glitter. Dark Glitter now constitutes a very small percentage of the new ice fields. And those ice fields are being artificially restricted with 4hr respawn timers that will restrict the supply of ozone even further.

But you get ozone from the other nullsec ices
True, but those ices are still far less than what Dark Glitter supplied to the galaxy in ozone before the expansion. Therefore the overall supply of ozone will still decrease substantially. The chart is including all those ozone sources in the calculations.

Why does CCP hate lowsec so much?
I don't know. But ice mining in lowsec is about to get a whole lot worse.

Why should we care that ozone is going to be expensive?
As an individual miner you don't need to. As a speculator it's a great time to invest in ozone. Increasing the value of ozone dramatically in relation to the other ice products is contrary to the intended design of sec status correlated ice spawns. As you can see here, ozone was meant to be a common product of low-end ices. While high-end ices were meant to favor an ultra rare and presumably expensive strontium. This is obviously not how things turned out. But it'd still be nice if the ices were restored to a tiered value system where Krystallos was actually the best ice. Inverted ozone output of each ice would have this effect.

It's hard to figure out what assumptions you're making here in this chart but the basic premise is wrong. As it exists now, mining has a clear division: 98.6% of all isotope ice is mined in highsec, and about 94% of all ice is mined in highsec. You work out the numbers, and nearly all of that 6% is dark glitter mining outside of highsec.

The changes seek to upset this "highsec mines isotopes, everywhere else mines ozone" model. The specific goal is that nullsec mines at least ~20% of all ice (or all isotope ice, this is not clear, but let's go with all ice).

So we're looking at a goal of having about 2.3 additional miners for each current miner (20/6). And nullsec is no longer merely mining ozone: it is mining ozone and isotope ice. So the ozone mined should remain about constant once you increase ice mining to that degree or it would be oversupplied.

So that means that null ice mining should produce a little under a third of the ozone that it used to per miner per hour, which is about the case with your "good" nullsec anoms (1.6*3.3 = ~5.3). And there's more than enough of those to supply the galaxy with ozone.

As a side note, your chart doesn't deal with total ozone supply at all and there's no basis for your " The mining yields compared in this chart assume that the new ice anomalies respawn instantly. And since they don't the actually supply of ozone will be substantially less than shown." claim. What matters is the LO production per miner-hour, and what the LO production is once the amount of miner-hours in nullsec has reached the desired amount.

Two quick notes (there are other issues, but I don't have time to delve into all issues): the last Diagoras number was 22,543 towers. Also, you switched larges and smalls between your jita market history and fuel block consumption (you have the smalls consuming 40 blocks and larges consuming 10).

Just correcting these two gives (370+440+1640) = 24.5 blocks, times the correct number, is 13.255 million blocks. And this is with year-old data when the amount of towers had gone up 10% in under a month. I don't have time unfortunately to check what the most recent number can be inferred to be (or a more reliable l/m/s split).

Snore, always spoonfeeding the unwashed masses!

You're quite right. At the last moment I switched the order from L-M-S to S-M-L and then didn't notice. And that tower update is more recent. I've updated the post to include the new data. Thanks for the catch.


The towers size composition numbers involved some assumptions which I explained, and are fairly reasonable assumptions given the lack of information. If you have more detailed information on what sizes of towers are online then I'd be happy to incorporate it.

The chart itself should be simple to understand. It's a flat comparison of ozone yields per hour of mining, before and after the expansion. What you're saying is that it's misleading because it's looking at per miner basis rather than accounting for an "expected nullsec miner increase of 230%". And you're correct in so far as, if you pour enough ice miners into nullsec they'll eventually be able to produce enough ozone to meet the current supply.

I don't have time to explain right now because I'm about to be late, but your simplifying assumptions are also misleading because they're not accounting for the reality of highsec isotope mining being far less, and the sheer number of nullsec miners needing to be far greater than a 230% increase. I'll also try to come up with numbers on how many nullsec miners there are right now after I get home from work. But it's greater than I'd have thought.

Did you have a specific complaint with the numbers that you didn't understand?

The items which Weaselior pointed out and you have corrected. Regardless of the fact that I personally believe that Aryth & Weaselior's interpretations of the data are less error-prone, have better basic assumptions, and are overall better, from a macro standpoint their argument is a slam dunk.

Your arguments are detailed, but incredibly narrow focused. It's really the Washington Lobbyist kind of argument. Passionate about this ONE THING and to hell with everything else. I find the macro argument much more convincing. Even if every doom and gloom scenario you propose came to pass, it would be better for the game.

Should every individual who wants to fly their capital ship back and forth across the universe be able to do so? Should anyone who wants to hang a pos in high sec be able to do so? Scarcity of resources and the cut-throat struggle for those resources are supposed to be fundamental pillars of this game. The proposed changes support that stance better than the status quo.

Is it perfect? It's CCP, so probably not. Is it better than now? All of the indicators I've seen from this and various other threads point to Yes. What happens if Aryth and Weaselior get it wrong and you are right? A lot of people who speculated will profit immensely and it will get tweaked again.

In my day to day job, I've found getting things 80-90% right, then iterating on the remaining 10-20% is more efficient, more cost effective, and overall less stress than trying to get 100% on the first go. This is a video game, it's not a mission to mars. The current changes are overwhelmingly in the right direction and you should recognize that, even if it is personally detrimental to your style of play.

My basic argument is that of course LO will be undersupplied if null mining doesn't go up. All ice will be undersupplied, by at least 20%. Your focus on LO is misplaced because LO is only a big deal if it's undersupplied even if null has managed to boost mining enough to reach parity on isotopes, and you don't ever really start looking at those ratios.

If null mining doesn't pick up, it's just "there is not enough ice mining going on and we have a shortage of all useful ice products", not "we have an LO shortage". To the extent highsec production is not 80% of all ice mining and we need higher numbers of null miners, that weakens your argument: null mining produces much greater volumes of LO for each isotope mined. The more miners are forced into null, the less likely it is that LO becomes undersupplied and the more likely it is that it actually becomes oversupplied.

If you're arguing null mining just won't pick up as much as desired, then it's odd to focus on LO: it's going to be a general ice problem.

This is true. When I get home I wanted to take a look at how many nullsec miners will be expected to have to fill the gap to compensate for the lack of isotopes. And then to examine how much ozone that will produce compared to the current estimated supply. But you're right that the more nullsec miners there are, the better the ozone supply will be. So moving this direction will likely hurt my case for an ozone shortage, assuming nullsec adequately compensates with an increase in miners. When I do the post I'll explain every assumption and you can help me refine the analysis.

'There' not 'Their'

It respawns 4 hours after you mine them out completely.