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| Who expected Hedbergite to become the most valuable standard rock in the game? Chart source: http://bp.kiwi.frubar.net/ores.php from December 21, 2013 |
Despite CCP Rise's intentions to restore the value of mining in nullsec, success seems to have eluded him; nullsec ores are less valuable than ever before. What might be driving such a curious development? Lets take a look at what the Dominix, and what goes into building one.
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| Material efficiency level 100 |
Thanks to the potency of sentry drones, the addition of Micro Jump Drives, and their relatively low cost, the Dominix has become a major doctrine ship for many alliances, and a reasonably effective choice for mission runners. At a mineral cost of approximately 167 million ISK, it is affordable, and expendable. The Dominix is an easy and solid choice for a comparison baseline.
Battleships have long since lost their status as the mainline benchmark for conflict in null security space. The proliferation of super capitals, the evolution of ship capabilities, and the development of new strategies have made Archons one of the most adaptable, capable, and viable tools in an alliance's arsenal. As a capital ship, it's also much less affordable than a Battleship.
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| ME 100 on components and ship blueprints |
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| Rounded to three decimal places |
The numbers are most interesting indeed. Each Archon contains 4.951 Dominixes worth of Tritanium, 5.173 Dominixes worth of Pyerite, a whopping 6.568 Dominixes worth of Mexallon, a comparatively meager 4.514 Dominixes worth of Isogen, 5.134 Dominixes worth of Nocxium, a paltry 4.028 Dominixes worth of Zydrine, and 4.734 Dominixes worth of Megacyte.
The value of mineral bearing ores reflects these disparities to some degree. Nocxium, Mexallon, Pyerite, and even Tritanium bearing ores have enjoyed growing value over the years, while rocks particularly heavy in Isogen and Zydrine at the expense of others have plummeted.
Capitals aren't the end of the story; let's consider the Aeon.
Though far from a complete analysis, these numbers are certainly suggestive; if we want to see an increase in the value of ores in null security space, some significant changes may be in order across a potentially broad spectrum of the game. The balance of battleships, capitals, and super capitals, the distribution of ores in space, the abundance of minerals within each cubic meter of ore, the capabilities of capital ships, the capabilities of battleships; all of these and more could have an influence on the miner's preferred finds and the builder's bottom line.
Where do we go from here? That's up to CCP's designers.
Doesn't tell the whole story. Some time ago I took every "this many built in this time" post I could find, filled in the wholes with my own careful market analysis, and painted a total picture of everything built in Eve. Then I compared these numbers to the numbers Diagoras had been tweeting about ore mined in Eve at various points, which let me paint a picture of supply.
ReplyDeleteBefore the drone regions were nerfed, EVERYTHING was oversupplied. That's why everything was so cheap at the time. Once they removed drone alloys, it cut ~40% of the supply of zyd and mega out, but it also cut 60-70% of the low end supply out, as well. The brief spike in zyd and mega prices after this was therefore purely speculative, but an interesting thing happened. As a result of the spike in prices, enough nullsec mining happened during that time to entirely make up the shortfall of zyd and mega. No such surge in supply occurred for low ends, however.
What this tells me is that high end supply is pretty elastic and can expand to fill & exceed demand far more easily than low end mineral supply. This should come as no surprise, since gravimetric sites respawn instantly once fully mined, so anything coming from those is of infinite supply. While you might then think "But they were revamped to include more low ends!" the fact remains that the sites are disproportionately high end heavy (as they must be). Combine gutter-priced high ends with falling (albeit now stable, from the looks of it) low end prices and the revamps to high end ore content fell flat.