1.) The question has nothing to do what you do with them afterwards.
2.) The question has nothing to with Plexing or paying RL cash for subs.
3.) The question is only in relation to actually gathering/acquiring minerals beyond initial investment costs to be able to gather them. (think really hard about this part.)
4.) any notions of opportunity cost have no place here, see point 1 above.
I will personally give the person that can without a doubt prove minerals are not free to gather 1 Billion ISK.
Your time is not free, unless you consider yourself a slave.
Time spent doing X is time not spent doing Y. Therefore the value of the minerals you mine are directly related to what you value your time spent gathering, compressing, hauling, refining, hauling again to be worth in relation to what you could have been doing balanced against your competition and what they value their time to be worth.
so its no different from farming isk
minerals you mine arent free in the same way isk you farm isnt free
theyre both free if thats what youre doing with your time
im not sure why this is a thing tbh
They are not free because they cost Time, which is a valuable resource that people still have to manage Everywhere. And to a certain degree Isk too. And Fun.
Time to mine the asteroids
Time to haul the ore to the stations
Time to learn proper skills to mine more effectively
Time to learn more skills to properly reprocess the ore to make it more profitable to process the ore into minerals than just selling the ore.
Time to learn even more skills to sell things with lower broker and tax fees
Isk to replace your ganked mining ship, replace hauler, upgrades, skill books, implants (cause you got one to help give more during reprocessing), anything that helps with mining or reprocessing, isk to reprocess the ore,
Fun because you could be doing something far more engaging than pressing a few buttons, although it rewards relaxation for people that enjoy it when others get the exact opposite due to the fact they could be doing something else
youre assuming any of these activities are more profitable than mining
if that was the case why are they fielding huge rorqual fleets in delve even after the nerfs to rorquals
Easy, in 1 hour I can mine Plagioglase worth 20M ISK on the market. But in one hour I could go for an relic exploration run and get loot worth 100M ISK. Hence mining 1 hour costs me 80M ISK, I have less in my wallet.
Minerals have whatever value you assign them, just like anything else. That being said, any kind of object in the game derives its value from what the majority of people determine it to be. If your value is higher than avg, your chances of selling it is little to none whereas if your value is less than what the avg is, you will sell faster. In any case, time is the factor.
If you are not using the minerals to build with as you pointed out in rule 1 then your question is by your own rules irrelevant. Without a purpose for the minerals, the minerals themselves are neither free nor do they contain value, they are pointless. In this regard minerals are not free nor do they cost anything, they are irrelevant to anything without a purpose, ask the question again once you have not ill-defined the parameters in which you ask it, because under current parameters your question, is incomplete and has no answer and thus irrelevant.
Factor in a usage for the minerals…maybe then you can determine how they are or are not free. If the mineral has no purpose afterward then your question is nullified as without purpose the value can never be determined.
Nothing is free, both cost valuable time, but why should I ever chose an activity earning less and be boring as f… over a more fun and more lucrative activity?
There is another aspect I hope nobody disputes. If I sell a produced product made of 20M minerals at 18M for profit because the minerals I mined are “free”, then this is just stupid, because the better decision would have been to just sell the minerals for 20M.
that wasnt the question
i asked which activity was more free
not which activity was less boring or time consuming
if i pay with a sub and produce all my own ships and modules i use in pvp to blow up your ships
which you use to run misisons to farm isk to pay a plex
which farming method is more free
Nothing is free, you missed the point, everything in New Eden costs time … and the only objective measurement of value for this time we have is ISK. The other is fun, but highly subjective.
only if you can be bothered to invest time
otherwise its free
actually id say the only thing that isnt free in game is sec status
because if i kill a pod
thats equivalent to like 10 hours of killing rats to get my sec status back