First the Skyhooks were changed to be near unrobbable, then the ramping was buffed so their yield is always 100%. and now bump the fuel burn to 88 units an hour? How about just say ‘its 64k units a month’ or even better, over 750 million ISK per month ( Jita says 12.5k a unit right now, but that is going to go up for sure ) of operation in gas alone.
The cost of an entire athanor. This is total BS. Most of the R4 moons out there are barely profitable without the mineral component.
Could have just left the ramping buff off, but no, ya’ll got to screw us over by making things suddenly drop their fuel efficiency, for 0 increase in yield.
Edit:2024 October 24 Patch just dropped, and its even worse.
This is always true though, no matter how much magmatic gas is needed to run a metenox moon drill.
Ask yourself, what is the value of magmatic gas?
A: to run a metenox moon drill
What is the least profitable use of a moon drill?
A: r4 moons
What is the lowest possible value the limited resource magmatic gas can get in a universe with a near unlimited amount of moons?
A: break even with the least profitable metenox options, r4.
The only universe in which using magmatic gas to passively mine r4 is consistently profitable is a universe with so much magmatic gas that the supply exceeds the demands so that people have no idea what to use the gas for other than to open more and more r4 moons until either the profits become too low and R4 breaks even or all moons are drilled.
So why are you surprised R4 breaks even?
Worse, when R4 is profitable the universe has an issue, because it means magmatic gas is not the valuable limited resource it is intended to be.
In other words, if passive R4 is consistently profitable it means CCP made a mistake and should fix it by either reducing supply or increasing the demand for gas.
That is what happened today: CCP fixed the issue by increasing demand for gas.
No, there are NPC buy orders for the magmatic gas. If using the gas to get R4 yields less value than selling to the NPC, that floor price is what the NPC is willing to pay, no matter how low the value of R4 materials go.
If magmatic gas is not limited, its going to be a problem if NPC orders are always able to make liquid ISK out of a market dump. Might as well just remove R4 moons from the game if they are not going to yield more than what a NPC will buy the gas for, as miners have a finite m^3 mining power that is better spent on higher R tier moons.
But R4 is not a price floor, R4 is needed for a lot of things, but if its effective value is 0 like trit it just becomes an irritation to acquire due to time spend moving volumes of worthless items around.
Which would fit neatly into CCP’s latest development theme of creating more frustrating busywork for players instead of enjoyable gameplay experiences.
When I say ‘r4 is a price floor for magmatic gas’ I’m not saying R4 is worthless, just that the price of magmatic gas won’t go below it and that using magmatic gas to get r4 will break even at most.
CCP limits the robbery options of skyhooks and effectively triples the output of magmatic gas.
Go forward three days.
CCP says there is too much magmatic gas and increases moon drill fuel burn by %60.
Did not even try starting off with an incremental boost to the magmatic gas at a 1.5 or a 2.0 rate, nope, straight to a 3x like it some Rust PvP server on wipe day.
The increase in the price of gas will also lead to an increase in the price of r4 materials.
Then the entire manufacturing chain and slowly the price of T2 and faction ships.
