Did I ruin my region or did CCP?

[MyLoudVoice]

Being tired of shooting I started in October 2019 with a “buy ore, refine it, sell the minerals.” idea.
And that in a region that is rather quiet on all fronts if you look at the economic reports. And in High-Sec. Solo of course. And hence on a small scale. My working budget was 10 billion but I never even got close to spending it all.

In November 2019 I bought for over 2 billion in ore. (yes…I know…peanuts for some). Mainly from cherry picking reasonable sale orders. And if I noticed I bought several times from someone, I contacted them to see if they would be willing to contract me their stuff directly. Which a few of them did. I refined those ores I could do at 78.2% and stockpiled the rest for december when my skill trainings for the rest finished. And I put out some mineral sales orders in some strategic Upwell stations that also allowed manufacturing (or have one close by). With a reasonable premium of course for the convenience.
They sold.

In December however things got already worse. The number of reasonable ore sale orders diminished. People who contracted ore to me directly got tired of mining. So I was obliged to put up my own buy orders at a reasonable price to still get some ore. That seemed to work although I only bought 1 billion of ore that month.

And now in January, it’s a complete desert. I bought for 400 million ore. Ore Sales orders have dwindled or are having prices that are economically insane. My buy-orders are only getting filled with very small amounts (even though there are not really any competing ones for some ore types) On the upside : I have I sold for 2.5 billion minerals this month.

So it’s not the sales part that is an issue, but rather the buy part. My stocks are naturally dwindling. So next month I probably have to close up shop. Or see if I can get my ore from another region.

So the question is : what did I do wrong? Every step I took seemed so reasonable. So how did I ruin the market in my region? Or did I forget something critically? Or it just CCPs intervention in the game that has made miners move away? …

[Far_Wanderer]

You didn’t do anything wrong that I can see.

Because there are fluctuations in the marketplace, pilots need to be ready to adapt.

You simply need to adapt to a situation that requires you to find ore outside of the region you have chosen to do business in.

Based on the description of your business model, this does not to me seem to be something you’d have difficulty doing. Pick another region carefully, get clones in place, and then rule the market.

[Cap_James_Tkirk]

Also with moon mining changes, I’m going to assume folks are hoarding ore for market uptick.