Wait a week and it will fall off

So goes the punch line to a joke heard back in the days when I worked in a factory.  I will let your imagination fill in the rest (it will probably be better than the original anyway).  Until CCP pushed back the release day of the Tyrannis expansion, tomorrow was set to be the big day. Once it does go live will miners see their butts drop off due to the bottom dropping out of mineral prices?

Now, of course, there are two big days: May 26^th and June 8^th.  The more interesting of the two dates will be the second, for that is when the virtual land rush to grab a planet of your own will start.  Will there be a mad rush after down time June 8^th? Will the servers be able to handle the pressure? Or will it be, as the immortal bard once put it, full of sound and fury signifying nothing?

This is not to say that the release date of the expansion itself, May 26^th, will not be without its advents. Even before the virtual land grab there will be changes that will elate some players and put a massive size crimp in the play style of others – Minerals and ship insurance.

Now at this point there will be some players who simply yawn,  consider their opponents (whether player or NPC) and repeat the words of Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) from the movie Aliens…

“Look, man. I only need to know one thing: where they are.” 

More remarkable to me than the changes themselves, are the fact that it even bears considering how they will change “the market.”   This is a testament to the depth of the game that CCP has created, with which I have long had a love/hate relationship.  To paraphrase the words of Gandalf from The Fellowship of The Ring, “Eve Online really is an amazing game. You can learn all there is to know about it in a month, and yet after years it can still surprise you.”

Mos Eisley has nothing on Eve

In the first Star Wars movie, Obi Wan describes Mos Eisley Spaceport as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.” As all Eve fans know, Mos Eisley has nothing on Eve – if there is a way to stay safe in Eve Online there will be some player who will come along and make it dangerous. Eve is the only game where the art of “the con” not only thrives, but is considered “part of the game.”  The low end of all this is insurance fraud. Well sort of, it works like this…

Blowing up ships for fun and profit

Recently I crafted a battle cruiser in Eve Online.  I was proud of my battle cruiser; after all, I pulled the minerals to make it out of the asteroids myself.  Now mind you I have flown other ships with which to compare it. Lately I have been flying a Minmatar Hurricane, on previous occasions I have flown a drake.  But this is the first time I ever flew a Caldari Ferox – and the last.  Unfortunately I didn’t research how well the ship performed until after I constructed it. Long story short, it’s performance stank like last week’s fish. Lesson learned.

 Question: What to do at that point with a ship that I hated flying?

 Answer: Blow it up or sell it. Blow it up makes more money.

 Why? Here is the “official” explanation of insurance rates in Eve Online:

The basic insurance covers 50% of the “base price” of your ship, standard 60%, bronze 70%, silver 80%, gold 90% and platinum 100%. When calculating your basic ship price the NPC mineral value is used(2 isk per Tritanium, 8 per Pyerite, 32 per Mexallon, and so on up to 32768 per Morphite), not market price. For most tech 1 ships, the base price is much higher than the market price, but for tech 2 and faction ships it is much lower.” – Evelopedia

Now the cost for making the ship for me was minimal, as the bulk of the materials I mined myself, and enjoyed myself doing it. Even had I purchased the ship it would only have cost me 16 million isk in my market, and about the same to sell it. The problem (and mind you it is only a problem if you view it that way) is that insurance prices are not tied to “live” mineral prices, but instead based on base price. The result, depending on the cost to build or buy the ship, is that it is worth more as a pile of scrap blown to bits (mind you that is only true for some ships called “tech 1″).  And this is the game mechanic that allows the virtual equivalent of a school yard bully who will only fight his opponents when the odds are 100 to 1 in his favor – the suicide gank.

 “Our new insurance system recalculates the value of all ship classes which includes Tech 2 and Tech 3 classes establishing the base material cost of the ship.   To this we have added the ability for us to define more precisely how much of the total material value of each ship class should be paid out.  Our intention is that we can make certain ship classes pay out much less, some closer to the full value.” – CCP Chronotis, Eve Online Developer

At face value we can probably kiss the days of blowing up ships for fun and profit a fond farewell – and with it maybe even that canker sore on the butt of Eve Online the suicide gank (time will tell). So what has this got to do with the price of tea in Britain, or more appropriately the price of tritanium in Jita?  By establishing an insurance rate that is based on the “static ship values decided at the launch of Eve”, as CCP Chronotis put it, that has not changed relative to the market cost of a replacement ship, this has established sort of an “artificial floor” value of minerals – basically the value of a given ship blown to smithereens.  Remember the Ferox battle cruiser I built? All this means that it is more profitable for me, as a miner/industrialist, to build a Ferox and blow it up than to sell it.  Come May 26^th this just may change:

 “So ship insurance will be marked to market? Yes, ship insurance will now revalue itself periodically based on a trimmed mean of the ship’s manufacturing materials global market weighted average prices.  This means the insurance quote when you are buying insurance will be now estimated and may change if the payout occurs during the next insurance period.”  – CCP Chronotis, Eve Online Developer

 Currently there is much speculation as to the actual payout of insurance at the release of Tyranis. The only reliable source I have found to date is that cited above in which CCP Chronotis indicates, “we want to payout for each ship class which generally is 100% for Tech 1 ship groups, 20-60% for Tech 2 and 100% for Tech 3 ships.”

 Now add to these lower quantities of minerals available by reprocessing loot dropped from NPC’s.  Minerals available from refining ore dropped by rogue drones will change but not in the same way:

 “The fundamental focus of our changes are to alter both the quantities dropped of each drone compound from the NPC entities but also change the quantities of minerals they reprocess to, so they more precisely fit with the ratio of materials required by manufacturing and therefore the market demand.”  – CCP Chronotis, Eve Online Developer ()

The Fly in the Ointment

 So what does CCP expect all this to accomplish? Way back in March 30^thof this year, here is what CCP Chronotis told us:

 “In the short term with just the changes to loot and drone compounds, you would experience increased income but only until the economy re-adjusts and more miners return to the arkonor, bistot, crokite asteroids. The initial changes will introduce higher amounts of low end minerals such as tritanium, pyerite or mexallon to low sec or certain null sec ores ensuring you can make it worth the effort to mine these as a viable alternative instead of purely mining the ABC asteroids constantly.  .”  – CCP Chronotis, Eve Online Developer  

The fly in this particular ointment is the intent expressed by CCP Chronotis to get players to mine what are called “high end ores” such as arkonor, bistot, crokite.These are ores that are found out in the lawless lands of 0.0 security space – out where battleships dare to roam.  Recently the alliance of which I am a part moved out to 0.0 security space, with it went the pvp arm of our corporation, but not, notably, the industrial arm.  As one of the Orca  pilots (a capital industrial ship and the only capital ship allowed in high security space) put it, “The only way I am bringing my Orca out there is with a fleet escort.” CCP may try and entice Empire miners to go where the profits are great, but odds are they will be waiting a long time.  Even if CCP increases the insurance payout on Tech 2 ships to 60%, a miner in his or her exhumer will still risk losing 60 to 70 million isk every time they cross in to low security space. Odds are also that even with a fleet escort, said Orca pilot would have a difficult time making out to the land of 0.0 where the isk flows.

 So will the mining industry lose its collective butt when Tyranis goes live? For the definitive answer to that, even the developers at CCP will only be able to respond “after May 26^th, we will see.”

The No Prisoners, No Mercy Team

For those interested in mining and industry in Eve Online, the acknowledged, definitive guide is Halada’s Complete Miner’s guide, that as of this writing may be found here: