I’m just asking people claiming that it is the case to back up their claim with evidence.
Or at least concede that is their opinion and, as such, no one need to necessarly accept it as truth.
So far the best in the way of some evidence of why it is how it is is the town instances of CCP addressing this topic (linked by @Qia_Kare above) none of which mention their reasoning. But everyone and their alt is stating what the reasoning “is” with the most absolute certainty. Well, not gonna fly.
Oh well, I can be easily bothered anyway. Why bother?
It’s okay if you don’t want to discuss the subject matter with me. It’s okay if you don’t like the reasoning, the logic, any of the arguments or the conclusions. It’s even okay if you don’t understand any of it, although not as constructive. You can have your own opinion, disagree, compare and explore view points. Attacking others for not sharing your view undermines your own position, in case you forgot.
Uncompressed ore is much harder to move. Unless the uncompressed ore is near a compression service or near the industry that needs the ore, that ore is stuck unless a lot of effort goes into hauling it to a compression service before hauling it to where it can be used/sold.
You can move it further, easier and safer. To a refinery with higher yield and/or lower taxes. Like the T2 refinery in Perimeter or to lowsec/null where all refineries get extra yield.
I suppose it could depend on exactly when and where you ask the question, but for the when and where I was when I looked into it (That is, around Dodixie perhaps a year ago or so) there was no market in existence for normal ore. Technically yes, it was for sale, but for crazy high prices and very small quantity. Probably for taking advantage of people who don’t yet know that compressed ore exists or how awesome it is compared to regular ore.
And, really, we can’t expect any different. There is literally no downside to compression what so ever. It is 100% efficient, the end result is as good or better in every way, compressed ore is more space efficient than the minerals you get from reprocessing it, and it is required to come at no cost. The only reason not to compress it would be because you wanted to use it at the location it was obtained, and even then only to save yourself two mouse clicks, give or take. It’s not like the decision to compress could ever be a mistake that costs you anything.
If compression were really required to be this ubiquitous so it could be shipped off to centralized facilities for actual use, which seems a highly dubious assumption to me given the whole scarcity thing and lament over capital proliferation, then I have to wonder why ore has to be so large in the first place that it required a whole other feature to resize it back to a sensible figure.
“The government is expanding to meet the expanding needs of the government.” comes to mind.
CCP has a love/hate kind of relationship with systems of large scale and I think that’s why you see this kind of ambivalent decision making. The analogy I’d use is like an old growth forest. The huge trees blot out the sun so young trees can’t get started, but the impressive big trees are all that’s noteworthy in the news.
Compression is silly. It was thrown in as a kludge by people who claim to dislike capital proliferation to avoid an outcry by the people who cause capital proliferation. It was copy/pasted onto structures that are more accessible and so the kludge is now an enormously bigger deal now than it was before.
The question of whether to tax compression is a very Eve question to ask. We are so used to adding layer after layer of complexity onto features crumbling under the weight of their own age we don’t bat an eye. My ideal solution would be to balance the size of ore and minerals so that the desired level of portability is attained without compression being a feature, but bar that I would want to implement some kind of opportunity cost for its use. A tax is one way to do this. Making the compression less than 100% efficient would be another, if people are really worried about the ISK going to a station owner.
Compressed Ores are only supperior over uncompressed ones if you want to “use” or to move them. The advantage when moving is obvious, as you have already explained.
But when you’re having large amounts of it, it’s advantageous to compress the ores even if you want to reproccess them right in the same refinery. The reason for this is that on the longer run, you need to keep in mind that at some point you will likely be evacuating your assets from the refinery… and since it’s eve you’ll be under time pressure at that point, because most likely, your motivation to leave will be the station operator having failed to fuel his station, which disables your option to compress ores at the time you decide to leave, and renders the station more vulnerable, making it a target more worthy of paying the wardec fee (and paying the time / effort of blowing it up). Or your station content goes into of asset safety, and asset safety is always in NPC stations that don’t provide you with the option to compress, either. So it’s better to have the ores already compressed long before you even want to move it.
If you do not intend to use the ores, however, you should keep them uncompressed, because they’re more usefull and potentially more expensive if traded to someone who does not want to “use” them either: ingame oligarchs and NPCs. There are Storyline missions that require standard variants of uncompressed ores (e.g. Veldspar, and not Concentrated Veldspar). You can sell standard ores to mission runners and charge a convenience surcharge from them, especially if you sell the ores at the stations that host the storyline NPCs.
The resource redistribution updates pushed a number of ores that were abundandly available in highsec to be completely unavailable there, but the mission-required ores were not updated to match the “difficulty” of getting the formerly onmipresent Omber/Kernite/… mined (or let’s say to get Veldspar for your lvl1 agent in NPC 0.0). With the prospect of CCP redistributing the ores again in the future, speculation that you can get rich by HODL-ing uncompressed ores arises, too.
I can mine and hek and refine at hek for about 75% yield,
Or i can mine in hek. Compress in hek. And then move it to Jita and refine at 79% yield. Or low-sec for even more yield.
The extra mobility adds value.
Edit-
This is why compression tax helps local refineries over big groups because it makes me more inclined to refine locally rather than compress and move it to jita.
Seems you have more than one problem.