EVE General Discussion

If you mine, you're dead inside. The dead cannot make profit. Therefore the minerals you mine are free.

Just seems like the "Eve is just a game" vs "Internet spaceships is serious business" crowds.

There apparently is no middle ground.

And then the carebear was a zombie.

You lost all objectivity about what a game is, what an internet game is, and about time/money.

If you're "playing" then you consent "giving" time for something, in return you can have 2 rocks or 1 gazillion depending on the effort you put. No where this "time" you GAVE for "playing" is money for you.

Because if you really think so, you're just an RMT and just admit it by saying so.

Time is money if you come to my office RL and make me spend my time hearing your tears your silly comments and ask for candies.
And because MY time when I'm in MY OFFICE at WORK, is money that you can probably not afford yourself to pay, I can tell you for sure that when you play any INTERNET GAME all you win is self satisfaction because if you assure every one here it's about money, then your breaking the EULA and selling in game items for RL cash witch can bring you some problems.

At least when you bot and break the rules make yourself little and humble, make yourself forget. Instead of posting things like this.

Its because if you sell the ship for less than the cost of the raw minerals themselves then you could have made more isk just selling the minerals at market value. For example. If you could have sold the minerals to a instant buy order for 30 mil, but instead you build a ship and sell the ship for 20 mil, then you have effectively jipped yourselve out of 10mil isk. The value of most Tech 1 items = there mineral cost + a small percentage markup.

yk

I guess all this boils down to what each individual places value on.

You're not prioritizing ISK over fun if making ISK (in the most efficient manner possible) IS your fun. It's not because ISK is of such value, it's because going about getting efficiently it presents an extremely complex and engaging challenge, (like a Rubik's Cube) that some players like pursuing. If you want to make lots and lots of ISK in this game, you have to be smart, cautious, and knowledgable, using RL as well as in-game smarts to net you that ISK.

If that's where the challenge (and fun) is for some people, so be it.

Some people like the challenge of PvP. It is extremely wasteful (from the aforementioned industrialist's point of view) to take your hard-earned money and go about blowing each other up, just so we can say we "own" this territory on the map. (Which, by the way, we do in RL all the time.) Does it make any sense? No, but neither does increasing the size of your digital wallet.

And this extends to RL too, like it or not. "It's just a game" could just as easily apply to anyone toiling over the accumulation green paper to trade in for their favorite molecular arrangements. But now we're getting into Existentialism.

As for me, I just like space, and flying in spaceships, efficiency can be fun (I learned to use Excel because of this game ) but I just like the atmosphere. It's a sandbox game, do what you like, and stop breathing down each other's necks.

Reality check:

Eve Online is a GAME. I play games to have fun. You know what isn't fun for me? Obsessing over profit margins. If I make 5% when I could have made 6.75%, I don't really care. I have more isk than I had and I'm able to move on to other stuff.

I played at being an industrialist early on. I enjoyed being able to mine, reprocess loot, and build ships. I gave it up when I realized just how difficult setting up a supply chain for T2 manufacturing would be for the small corp I was in at the time and I didn't want to have to buy anything off the market because that wasn't the point. I wasn't in it to make a huge profit: I wanted to control the process from start to finish and be able to build all my own gear. Sure I was going to sell it as well, but in my view all it was costing me was the time I put into playing the game how I wanted to play.

This is what you guys aren't grasping: This is his idea of fun. Mining, building, and selling...following the process all the way through. Yeah he could probably make more just selling minerals...but that's not fun for him. Maybe he could make another 2% on that ship...but that's not fun for him. There are probably specific items he could sell to get more isk per minerals...but he might not want to bother analyzing a hundred blueprints and doing cost analyses for days finding that blueprint. Maybe, maybe, MAYBE this guy is happy mining for a day, building a Drake, and putting it on the market with a lowball price to sell it quickly.

Opportunity cost is irrelevant because it doesn't account for enjoyment. Time investment value is irrelevant because the value is worthless if it's spent play a game you don't find fun. When this game starts feeling like a job, it's time to throw on Battleship 5 and take a long break. Go play some Minecraft...then maybe you'll understand building for the sake of building.

We get that. It doesn't change the opportunity cost of his actions. If he wants to mine minerals and then jettison them and blow them up because he considers that fun, that is his prerogative. But, the opportunity cost exists regardless, so those minerals still aren't free.

This is a hilarious thread (the responses, not so much the OP) and it delivers.

Third time's a charm: Opportunity cost is irrelevant because it can't be accurately applied to a recreational activity. The whole premise of opportunity cost is that doing X instead of Y "costs" you Z, where Z=Y-X (yes it's more complicated, but it makes the point). But if Y is something you never would have done in the first place because it's not fun for you, then there's nothing to calculate. And again: there isn't a variable in these equations for fun. What's the cost of doing something less enjoyable for the sake of more money?

The time spent obtaining them is a part of the reward, not something done to obtain the reward. Opportunity cost doesn't apply to games.