How did Moon Mining come to Highsec?

Communications Center General Discussion
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Yes, that actually makes sense. It would possibly lead to players providing a higher supply of the lower end (R4) goo after a while though. And I mean that is, what I thought, the sandbox part of the economy. It would have found an equilibrium either in the way you say, by a limited T2 production or excess high tier moon goo dropping in price - or players adapting and sourcing more R4 in nullsec.

Yes, also makes sense. But, did the rarer stuff in fact rise in price?
The R4 defs dropped in price, not sure about the other effect.

Hm, not sure. I see that Null potentially made a lot of profit, by these changes effectively lowering their opportunity costs on T2, by outsourcing the cheap labour to Highsec. That being said, Highseccers are anyway not in any form a potential competitor for Null, at least surely not for the somewhat larger groups. Or are they?

But if you followed that line of thinking/claim, it would effectively lead to a point of rapid decay of EVE and I don’t see that happening. Sure, there are balance issues of different kinds that are in the way of quicker self-rejuvenation, but CCP pre-choosing a winner, would be like signing their own dismissal letter. If one group wins EVE too much by means you describe, the victory will be short-lived, as others would simply drop out of the race they can’t compete in. So why would CCP do that? Why would leaders of Nullsec alliances want that?

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I’m not sure about the actual profit, but something tells me that not running my computer instead of mining highsec R4 ore, would grant me savings on my electricity bill which I could turn into PLEX and might make more than mining.

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lol I don’t think it’s that bad to run a computer, or electricity is quite expensive where you live. Any ways…

The argument that if there had been too much formerly valuable goo and not enough normally common goo, the valuable one would drop in price and the cheap one would rise, then things would be mined in balance and everything would be fine seems compelling, but it doesn’t actually work. It fails to consider the total volume produced, which changed as well as moongoo extraction went from a passive thing to actually requiring a bunch of people to be online.

When moongoo stuff used to be done passively in POS, one person could control a huge amount of extraction. Now even though you can mine a lot in rorquals in LS and NS, there is still a maximum one player can mine, which is probably much lower than what one person could extract with POSs before. I think CCP released moongoo to HS because they realized that not enough would be mined in LS and NS in total. The balance of which goo was mined doesn’t matter. If the total is lower than before, the price of everything T2 would have to go up. Then CCP decided to spread the minning in an effort to keep T2 priced from raising too much. You can look at T2 ships and modules and see the spike and the relaxation after HS moon mining was introduced.

The argument that CCP wanted to give the NS mains more isk is ridiculous. If they did (and if they do play mostly in NS, I doubt it… sometimes I even doubt they play the game…), they would have kept moon mining to NS and T2 prices super high to make a killing through industry. Or increased the yield of moon asteroids so that T2 prices would go down but isk/hr of mining would stay high. Similarly, if they wanted to afk mine, then we would be able to mine in 1.0 space too. People need to stop playing the victims to “evil corrupt ccp” and either play to have fun or stop playing…

Also, as Steve mentioned, once you change everything about moon mining once, I would hardly call changing things a bit more a big change. It was relatively minor tweaking. The sandbox “breaking” had happened already, by completely changing the rules once.

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The main driver behind the introduction of refineries was to change moon mining from a passive to an active process. It was also intended the best financial returns would come from players that co-operated better.

I do not know what lead to this decision, or its later expansion to hisec, but we can look at some potential causes & effects. Starting with fact that R4 moon goo has limited value and even more limited utility - relative to effort to mine it. Last time I looked at isk / m3 for 0.5 moons it was:

gneiss, brimful coesite, arkonor, coesite, spodumain, brimful sylvite

bistot, crokite, jaspet, sylvite, plagioclase, pyroxeres

hemorphite, kernite … brimful bitumens (and don’t think zeolites were much better).

Markets have changed since ie moon goo is probably all on second line now, with gneiss still as king, ABC ore at least as good as R4, and all minerals compressible whereas moon goo is not. So, main value from 0.5 moons is from formerly lowsec minerals.

To get added value from moon goo you have to process on spot (as you cannot compress to haul) then run reactions. Reactions only occur in lowsec and in refineries that only corps can launch. So, you have first concentrated all the lowsec minerals (which no-one mined anyway) into 0.5 space. You have also concentrated the best minerals you can now get anywhere else in hisec into 0.5 space. And, you have made it a mechanic that you have to actively mine those moons but anyone else can access your belts and mine them before you. The best way to do your own mining before someone else does would of course be via the use of covetors / hulks / haulers… best suited to a fleet, as belts only last 2 days by default. And all in 0.5.

So, you have concentrated all the best mineral mining in lowsec / hisec into 0.5 border zones. You have also made it a mechanic that to get full value from the separate moon goo you would need to take the proceesed end-products into lowsec.

Hisec moons is as much about “forcing” co-operative game play as it is about anything else.

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it was suppose to only be better high sec ore, we got a lot more.

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Once upon a time daddy refinery and mommy moon decided that they should have children. So daddy refinery and mommy moon went out looking for places where they could have their personal fun time and create off spring out of it. Over millions of years, the species developed towards planets being the best environment to create offspring, so that is where their natural instincts naturally draw them towards.

Now, as we all know, there are a lot of mommys and daddys out there, so a lot of them went to find places and some of these naturally were occupied already … and because group sex and orgies are not common practise in this species, every couple needed to have its own place.

So, eventually, they moved to highsec. :slight_smile:

And that, my child, is why we have moon mining in highsec.

:blush:

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Maybe I was a bit quick in my assumption, that you must be wrong.

“Aryth brings up that he would like to see the R4’s being balanced. Fozzie says that these will be
going into high sec and wormholes …”

Source: CSM Winter Summit Minutes

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wait…wait wait…so I can buy a bigggg assssed lazer…and shoot it at a moon…

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Yes. Some unknown lore event led to mankind becoming more stupid and unable to use automated tools to do mining for them. Now you can (and have to) shoot lazers at moons.

Somehow we can still fly spaceships faster than the speed of light with free fuel and don’t have to eat, but we can’t build machines that are able to drill holes, melt ore and separate its parts without manual control.
:thinking:

I hope this is just the beginning of re-stupidisation of EVE. Why shoot spaceships when you could shoot chickens?

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