EVE Diary: Hisec Mining and Market Inefficiencies

Two things I love: economics and gaming. Naturally, economics influences the types of games to which I am drawn. One game that was suggested to me over and over, was EVE Online. Of course I was always aware of EVE Online. It's the game that makes for perhaps the most awe-striking headlines of any:

One day, I finally jumped on, and even bought a subscription.

Brief Intro to a Fragment of the EVE World

If you know anything about Eve, you can probably skim this section.

Space MMO

Eve is a game that takes place in space. You play as a character (with unlimited clones to respawn with) and fly around in a spaceship. The map is a giant interconnected set of solar systems that you can jump between, in a sort of sparsely connected graph. 

The game is an economy driven “MMO” (massively multiplayer online). Players collect raw resources and produce through the entire production chain, all the way until ship hulls and ship parts.

There are a huge number of the ships in the game, specialized for different tasks including both economic and battle. You can kit them out how you’d like, and trade with other players. 

Security Rating

Every system has a “security rating.” The ratings span from 0 to 1.0. The map is generally split into 3 ratings:

1. Hisec: Ratings 0.5 to 1.0

2. Lowsec: Ratings 0.1 to 0.4

3. Nullsec: Ratings 0 (and below)

These different zones define how the Non-Player Character (NPC) empire reacts to hostile actions between players. In hisec, hostile players will be sought out and destroyed by the NPCs. To put it simply, the higher the rating, the safer the zone is as you are at less chance of being attacked by another player character. 

Corporations

The “guild” equivalent from other MMOs, is a corporation. A corporation is an alliance of players that can work together for mutual benefit. The corporation can itself own assets, and organize economic activity. Corporations can also become hostile between each other and make war.

My Start: Hisec Mining

The start of the production chain is often mining, where the players mine asteroids with lasers. The game takes place in space after all! This way, the miners collect unprocessed ore.

One option is “Hisec mining,” which just means mining the available asteroids in hisec. Generally, hisec mining is very safe. Eve is a game full of “opportunists” looking to blow up your ship and steal your hard-earned goods. Since it takes place in hisec, there are a lot less of these type of players flying around. 

This makes hisec mining an area that “newer” players love to get started with, and eventually move away from (due to there being more profitable per hour or “fun” activities). I was no exception.

Veldspar and Scordite

The two most common minerals in hisec are Veldspar and Scordite. They are identical in experience to mine, and all mining ships can mine both. They are found in asteroids at a few different “purity” levels, but in general mining Veldspar is a better use of your time than mining Scordite. When you go to sell your goods in the market, the Veldspar you spent an hour gathering simply sells for higher than the Scordite you spent an hour to gather. There is a yield discrepancy in your time spent.

Snippet from my excel sheet to calculate mining efficiency. Simplified for explanation.

This doesn’t take a very long time to notice, and I found myself focusing more on mining Veldspar when I could, and leaving behind Scordite asteroids. Others obviously used this trick as well, because sometimes you would fly to a new asteroid field, just to find it void of any Veldspar, with only the lower value Scordite left behind. 

You would expect players to compensate like I did, and mine more Veldspar, until the yields are more equalized. This leads to the question: If the players were to be efficient, what is driving this yield discrepancy? 

Hypothesis 1: Limited Supply

The first hypothesis to naturally form is that the higher-yield Veldspar is limited enough in supply compared to the “supply” of hours that players want to mine for. After players mine out the more profitable Veldspar, they move on to the lower-yield minerals. 

This was my first thought, but there were a few things that didn’t sit right about this hypothesis.

Veldspar is actually much more common than Scordite, and asteroid fields regenerate daily. Typically, Veldspar was not even fully mined out before the regeneration. I only infrequently saw “mining out” of asteroid fields on higher activity days (like the weekends). 

So, it didn’t seem satisfactory that this single factor could drive the huge discrepancy in mining efficiency. There had to be other factors at play.

I moved on, focusing on other aspects of the game, wondering if my question would ever be answered…

I had always heard that EVE was great for community, and that some people enjoyed cracking a beer and mining together. I always wanted to see what this was like. 

One day, I was mining in a new system, and came across a large group of miners with the same corp tag. I used the system chat to ask them what they were up to, and learned more about their corporation. They were a corporation targeted at newer players. It was very interesting, and it seemed to operate almost like a charity, where older, more experienced players helped newer players get started with the game. They viewed themselves almost as a “stepping stone” corporation.

I joined a mining group, and they even had one player who had a (relatively expensive) ship that gave us all a mining bonus.

When the Veldspar was all mined out, and only the lower value Scordite remained, I asked them, “All the Veldspar here is gone, should we move on to another asteroid belt?”

The most experienced of the group replied, “We don’t do that round here.” (I couldn’t help but imagine this in a thick southern accent.)

I asked them why not. They told me that it was “bad manners,” and they liked to mine out an entire belt before moving on.

There is some sense to this. I mentioned those fields “void of Veldspar” before, and it was always quite annoying stumbling upon these patches. When you completely mine out a belt, it disappears from the points of interest, and no unlucky player will travel there any longer just to find low yield Scordite. 

I happily stepped in line and helped them completely mine the full asteroid belt. But this was the birth of my second hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2: Etiquette

Mining out a full belt of course means you mined much more Scordite compared to Veldspar for what the market demanded. These players seemed to be happy to overmine Scordite in order to “complete” the mining of a given belt. 

I would never come to learn if these practices were common. If they were, it would lend a good theory to why the discrepancy in Veldspar and Scordite yield efficiency existed. These two factors combined at least closed my obsession with causes for the yield discrepancy, and I was able to sleep easy at night once again.

It birthed new questions though, about the real world economy. Ever since, I have been looking out for these types of market inefficiencies in real life, wondering if they function just as they do in the game. The economy in Eve feels very real after all, so you would expect there to be many transferable phenomena to real economies.

I may write more about some of the parallels, so please subscribe if you would be interested in that. 

I could never find anything online about the reason behind the yield discrepancy. Perhaps there is a more obvious reason out there. I only played EVE Online for a few months, so please forgive me if I missed something more obvious. Feel free to inform me in the comments, as I would be delighted to learn more after so long thinking about this problem.