OMNES UNA MANET NOX
Now, a lot of MD regulars (and not only them) are fully aware of how the mineral market works, and have been aware of it for at least 3 years now, but it seems a lot of people either choose to remain clueless or simply never came across a proper explanation.This thread is here for the benefit of those that wish to be educated, and for the benefit of people that just want to link to it instead of having to explain it all over again in painstaking detail to people that seem to be clueless.Right now, and for a few more weeks (at least), until the insurance system is modified (if it will get modified), the mineral market is NOT purely driven by "natural" supply and demand, but instead heavily influenced by the insurance system, more specifically, the platinum payout value.Most of the time, unless some new types of ships get introduced which cause a sudden demand spike for minerals, the supply side of the mineral market ends up being heavily over the demand level, which exerts a downward pressure on mineral prices. WHY the supply side is so heavy is another story, and it has to do with the way mineral availability has been constantly increased during the game's history.However, instead of getting constantly decreasing mineral prices, there is a mechanism (now dubbed IER : "Insurance Exchange Rate" ; previously known as "insurance fraud") that acts as a SOFT bottom for the "basket" of minerals typical of T1 ship building, in particular high-tier T1 battleships.This mechanism might be revised in future expansions, but for now, it's based on some ancient ass-pulled mineral baseprices (2/8/32/128/512/2048/8192 ISK for trit/pye/mex/iso/nox/zyd/mega).Whenever the price of minerals plus a reasonable extra amount (for the manufacturer) goes around or below 70% of platinum payout (30% of payout being the insurance fees), it starts to become profitable to self-destruct the ships, especially if you also collect the salvage.Since ramping up ship manufacture is not instant, and because moving minerals around takes effort, just like insuring and destroying the ships also takes effort, the bottom is not "hard" but "soft".Typically, the "basket" of minerals settles at worst somewhere around 5% below the break-even point for IER, but occasional spikes or sumps are not uncommon even if nothing changes gameplay-wise, just due to ongoing conflicts which ramp up demand.Bottom line, if you select a representative "basket" of minerals needed to build ships, you can estimate with pretty good accuracy just how much the total price will be in times of "stability".But how exactly does that help you guess what the individual mineral prices will be ?Well, you have to take into account where minerals can come from (mining/ratting/mission-running ; highsec/lowsec/0.0/wormhole space) and how each of the sources changes in popularity for some reason or another.It is easy to see however that whenever one particular mineral (or a combination of minerals) either becomes easier to gather for some reason, that particular mineral (or minerals) will become LESS valuable, while THE REST WILL BECOME MORE VALUABLE, since the "basket" price will soon return to the "steady hover" level.Drone regions introduced ? Zydrine and Megacyte went down in price, Tritanium went up. Veldspar respawn rate buffed ? Tritanium went down, and before things could settle down properly, the new system upgrade ABC abundance pushed Zyd/Mega down again, so pyerite went up. And so on.However, you have to take into account yet another factor : LOGISTICS.Minerals all have the same volume per unit (0.01 m^3), so 1 mil tritanium will be just as hard to move as 1 mil megacyte.You can compress them via modules, but that also takes effort.So, overall, the more valuable a mineral is, the more volatile its price will be, as it will be easily imported while lowends will usually have to be obtained locally.
