Yea, these guys spend shocking amounts of effort on their religion of miner ganking. Best to just treat them like any other religious group trying to get attention: avoid eye contact and pretend not to hear them.
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funny story
i was raising a new gank alt recently in gallente npc corp
and one person said to me how gank alts have no honor
and somehow throwing a cat against a mining boat shows no honor
yet throwing a t1 frig against a bs shows honor
then i looked killboard and i cringed
turned out it was a regular poster on this board
dont be silly i was best friends with ero and j315 back in the day
you cant claim ccp ip youre asking to get banned
I’m not claiming CCP IP. I’m simply telling you how it is. CCP “owns” nullsec, but alliances are allowed to carve out the space as theirs, right?
CODE. does the same thing in High-Sec.
its a sandbox if thats what you mean
until you get geneva court of human rights violations
then the definition of sandbox shifts a little lol
called moving the goalposts
Which corp awarded that to you?
most probably krypteia at the time
idk we dealt with a lot of stolen corp names lol
im removing that btw
Are you ashamed?
ugh scratch ill answer later
no im not ashamed
faylee
So… words. “Free” means to acquire without cost. “Cost” is what you exchange to acquire a thing. Those minerals probably didn’t magically appear in your inventory. What did you exchange to acquire those minerals? In regards to this conversation, “value” (what a person believes the given exchange rate for any two things ought to be) is irrelevant. “Cost” and “free” by their nature only describe what has already happened and are extremely factual, there is no wiggle room or any room for debate. If you want to debate “value” then start that conversation.
Opportunity cost is entirely the point involved. So if you are going to dismiss “any notions of opportunity cost” then your question is unanswerable. It is like asking “what is water?..any notions of Hydrogen and Oxygen have no place here.”
smh
2 Likes
Strictly speaking, opportunity cost is only tangentially related. There is already a cost of time, it doesn’t matter if that time could have been doing something more profitable, they were already not free before that was even an issue. Opportunity cost is frequently brought up in these discussions to show that time has a potential isk value, but on its own it doesn’t really matter. The minerals already cost time. They were never free.
I suppose you could say minerals are free as in free speech free, but they are not free as in free candy.
if minerals are free you should be willing to give them to me for free, heck I’ll pay the 10k isk to cover the contract cost.
now consider no one has sent me a contract of free minerals in the 10 years I’ve been playing, that signals that minerals aren’t free.
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JC Mieyli8h
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
Because they can do that semi-afk with a supercap umbrella 24/7
but the semi-afk part is what matters. Also, they mine a crapton too much.
I’m going to take the four conditions at face value and give this a shot. Tentatively, I’ll add two of my own. One: for this question to have a single answer, it needs to be applicable to all mineral mining, and not rely on anything optional. Two: even the tiniest cost will make something not free. Excuse me while I think out loud for a bit.
All question of skill point transactions counts as initial investment costs, so that’s not it.
Mining crystals degrade, as someone said above, but mining crystals are optional.
Mining permits are optional, so that’s not it.
Ship replacement counts under #3 and, if you’re good and lucky, is optional, so that’s not it. Repair costs might come closer - I seriously doubt you could have a viable mining career without accumulating any damage - but that wouldn’t affect someone who mines only one time.
Refining and thus refining costs are optional, so that’s not it, and #1 excludes them anyway.
The electricity to power your computer and the cost of your internet connection count under #3, so that’s not it.
I’m stumped for the moment, so let’s try another angle: what an old professor of mine used to call a spherical chicken. The simplest possible test case.
Jim has never mined before and will never mine again. He has a vanilla Venture and all necessary skills. He undocks, mines exactly one hold full of veldspar, and docks up. He doesn’t sell his cargo, because the story ends here: selling it would fall under #1. So assuming this is a logic puzzle and it genuinely has an answer (both big assumptions), at some point between leaving and entering dock, he’s accrued a cost. His ISK ticker hasn’t declined, and no item is being expended by default, so he’s not paying a cost in the present. That leaves past (excluding startup costs) or future.
Future first. Have Jim’s actions set him up for an inevitable future cost totally separate from what he does with the minerals? Jim, remember, will never mine again. His ship is undamaged. He’ll never run afoul of CODE in a mining context, and anyway he might be in nullsec or WH space. Has he somehow made himself less fit to make ISK in the future, in a way separate from opportunity cost? Has he actually and inevitably damaged himself as a player in some way? I don’t see how, unless you want to get into nonsense about bot-aspirants, and again, this was his only mining experience ever. So let’s drop future for a minute.
Has he incurred any related cost - in ISK or items or real money - other than 'initial investment costs to be able to gather them’? The wording focuses on required assets, presumably all required assets, and anything else would not necessarily apply to all miners. If every possible preceding cost falls under 'optional ergo irrelevant’ or 'required therefore not the answer,’ the cost can’t have taken place in the past.
Back to the future. Present and past are pretty firmly excluded at this point, but I think future still has some wiggle room.
What has he done? He’s decreased the supply, reduced others’ access for the immediate future. I’m starting to think there’s a tragedy of the commons angle here: that the cost hasn’t necessarily been incurred by Jim.
And in that vein, now I’m thinking about how much value CCP injects into the game through mining and ratting and so forth - and wondering how they calculate the money they take out for equilibrium’s sake. CCP needs to keep supply relatively steady. Does an infinitely tiny increase in mining create an infinitely tiny future cost carried by all players? Let’s take a look at the monthly financials.
Now, since mining doesn’t technically serve as either a sink or a faucet (an explicit way that ISK enters or leaves the game economy), it doesn’t appear on the sinks and faucets chart. That’s an obstacle, but not insurmountable. Value is value and cost is cost; it’s just in different terms. Put another way, one unit of veldspar is as much 'a money’ as one ISK, in the context of value added to the system ex nihilo.
(To respect condition #1, I’ll leave out the interesting angle of manufacturing as a consistent sink.)
I’ll turn your attention to balance again. It’s clear from the chart of top sinks and faucets that bounty prizes inject a disproportionate amount of value into the system, with no explicit ISK sink to match.
Both mining and ratting are gigantic faucets, so how does CCP remove value from the system? In the end, a good chunk of what’s mined and manufactured gets destroyed, so that’s a factor. Isk-to-plex buys could be another factor, and
Let’s bring this back to Jim and his one load of veldspar. By mining, he’s created a tiny amount of value, and natural and artificial corrective mechanisms will take effect to maintain the stable growth of the system’s total value. They’ll partially compensate for his addition to the system.
Here’s another look at sinks and faucets.
I’m looking for a sink that fluctuates, but that rises over time to compensate as miners and ratters inject more and more value into the system. And I think skill books fit the bill.
Let’s examine a test case. I’ve picked Heavy Drone Operation, a frequently used mid-grade skill book. If you compare prices from the very start of the graph to today, you’ll see a slow but undeniable increase. Even the valleys in recent years are far higher than prices used to be.
I know that correlation isn’t causation, but I believe the CCP and EVE-marketdata numbers bear me out. Over the course of years, sink costs rise to control value faucets like mining. The more minerals get mined, the more expensive skill books and CCP assets become. A cost is incurred for everyone, even Jim, even if that load of veldspar sits in his cargo hold forever.
One billion ISK, please.
How is mining a faucet?
Additionally, you mention refining costs being optional, yet they aren’t optional. The thread has asked how as minerals not free?
Minerals only appear after refining/processing, either ores or items in the game. You can’t get directly to minerals, right?
Veldspar isn’t a mineral. It’s an ore.
To convert it to minerals, cost is involved, as pointed out by Steve above.
I don’t see any way in general, that minerals are free. There is always cost involved in converting something in order to obtain minerals, or manufacturing something in order to support reprocessing facilities.
None figuring out yet he’s trolling
If you’ve had some sort of negative emotional response to this thread, maybe you should check yourself.
It’s a dumb thread, but there’s no need to be upset or pissed off about it. It’s just words.