Preparing for Lifeblood

With the Lifeblood expansion announced as arriving October 24th, and people expressing desire for refineries as quick as possible after they go live, I've began planning out based on information on Singularity what I need to prepare.

First thing is make sure I have enough ISK on hand to purchase an Athanor BPO. It looks like the Tatara refinery BPO will be too expensive, in the Foritzar range (40 billion ISK), but the Athanor will be in the Astrahus ballpark (5.5 billion ISK) and thus picking one up on day 1 will be easy. Maybe get two and try to churn out as many Athanor's as possible early on to get that early adopter price gouging.

Looking at the Athanor's BPO requirements, I saw that there was two new structure components: Structure Electromagnetic Sensor and Structure Acceleration Coils. I lacked original blueprints for either of those, and they are available on Tranquility server already, so I scooped them up and threw them in the lab for material efficiency research right away.

With those details taken care of, I went to my spreadsheet to update it with information about the blueprints and get an idea for the raw mineral and Advanced Planetary Interaction item requirements for building an Athanor refinery. Rough estimate puts it roughly on par with Astrahus as expected.

With that in hand, I looked at the wallet and decided to lay down ISK to buy minerals and components to build 10 Athanors right out of the gate. This is to satisfy my alliance mates looking for structures for the moon mining race, and for the open market. With those stockpiled, I can see how much liquid capital is left and start planning out the next purchases.

The Great Moon Mining Operation Migration of 2017

The devs released a blog detailing more information about the upcoming Refinery structures and the changes to moon mining:

For anyone looking for a TL;DR here’s your convenient summary:
 Refineries coming this winter
 New Moon Mining Paradigm
Must extract ore from moon to space, mine and reprocess it to get the moon materials
Refineries use exclusive moon drill service module to extract ore from moon to space
Only one Refinery can mine each moon at a time
New Ores
20 New moon ores that are mined from moon extraction
Reprocessed into 1 main moon material and other minerals (moon or regular)
Only available in asteroids created from moon drill process
Moon Composition and Distribution
Moon composition to be a percentage of different ores
Mix of moon ores and existing ores
Full reset of moon distribution on Expansion Release
Moon Survey Improvements coming in August
Friendlier looking UI for results of Moon Composition
“Copy to clipboard” function
Indication of probe missing target
Timer for results from each probe

We can look at the provided information and make some predictions.

1) The current profit centre of buying raw moon material and refining it in a POS to resell on the market for a profit will cease to exist for all intents and purposes due to the ease and security of setting up a Refinery. No more dealing with POS  mechanics like setting them up, fueling them, and silo micro management. When ease of production comes into play, profit margins decrease.

2) The redistribution of moon ores will cause some upheaval in null and low sec space, not only because the location of valuable moons will have changed, but moon mining operations requires actually miners to extract the wealth for refining, thus alliances will need to be close enough to guard the structures and pilots using them.

3) Small groups (alliances/corps) making money from moons will be more difficult as the number of trusted people needed to run a moon mining operation increases. I.e. operational security is easy when its two people running it, but loose lips/spies will make it harder to extract the wealth without more cost.

4) It will be easy for smaller groups to get into low end moon mining as mid range value moons will actually be profitable. Right now a moon is either valuable or not, but the new model where many ores of different types and amounts will make more moons feasible for mining.

I plan to exploit this moon land rush by building as many of the refineries as I possibly can this winter.

Refining the Numbers

You have it slightly wrong. Being large enough a group to support the activity needed to operate this new moon mining is the new paradigm.
Small groups, individual players, need not apply. 

- Comment by Vince Snetterton on post "Rewards Drive Activity"

How many small groups or individual players participate in moon mining? This is a fundamental question to responding to Vince's comment I pasted above.

My gut feel is that the number is low compared to the overall population of EVE because any valuable moons (i.e. R64 and R32 moons) are typically identified and claimed by the various "super powers" who then use their military might to protect the POS on the moon while the extraction process is run by a small handful in the organization.

Still, there is a large number of less valuable moons still necessary to the reaction process to make the Tech II advanced materials, and I have no feeling for who runs those. An individual might do so but my understanding is that the cost of POS fuel to extract is more expensive than the value of the goo extracted, but POS can do more than one activity so perhaps it is supplemental income.

On the other hand, far more small groups / individuals are involved in the reaction process. The moon owners tend to avoid running the reaction farms to take the raw moon materials to advanced moon materials and instead sell the raw materials on the market where secondary producers purchase the matierals required to run the reactions to refine it. This can be done in any POS farm setup with silos and reactors and does not require access to the valuable moons. They markup the finished product to make a profit and pass along the reaction cost to the Tech 2 module/ship producers. Therefore a single moon mining operation run by a small number of pilots feeds into a lot more pilots running reactions.

In the Refinery structure future, reactions will be industry job based and thus limited by number of pilots, not number of POSes. This still lends itself to a large number of pilots running reactions, but since a reaction farm can be replaced by a single Refinery, large organizations might keep the reactions internal rather than selling to a secondary production market.

TOO LONG; DIDN'T READ

Yes, running a moon mining operation by a small group or individual will be next to impossible in the Refinery paradigm. However, I think that impacts a small number of players.

I suspect that the far larger impact will be on small groups running reaction farms who may face competition as Refineries will make such operations easier for the moon extractors to keep internally.

Rewards Drive Activity

All games come down to a simple equation when game designers are trying to get players to do something:

Rewards Drive Activity.

In more words, if a game designer wants a player to engage in a particular activity they have to offer sufficient rewards to make the player want to do the activity. The main job of a game designers is primarily one of balancing rewards to encourage the desired activity.

The challenge comes from the fact that rewards can be divided into two very different classes: tangible and intangible. Tangible are very easy to understand and measure; they are explicit rewards given to players as part and parcel of the activity. In EVE, examples would be ISK bounties, Loyalty Points (LPs), standings increases, items... anything that can be objectively compared to other rewards regardless of the player receiving them. For example, if I do Activity A and get 300 LPs and another player gets 400 LPs, I can objectively say she was rewarded more than I was.

Intangible rewards, however, are more complicated and are almost always subjective. Doing an activity like mining that Player Charles enjoys because he likes the zen-like nature of being in space alone with the rocks could be considered very rewarding by him, while I find it mind-numbingly boring and thus the reward being far below the threshold that would make me consider doing it.

Enjoyment of an activity is only one example of an intangible reward. Others include prestige in being known for an activity, power over other people, the joy of trolling or griefing or helping other players, etc. The intangibles are as diverse as the playerbase and thus very hard to plan for.

Ok, so what's my point?

POS moon mining had a very tangible reward (moon goo) and an intangible reward that it required very little overall player participation over time to operate and generate income. Refinery moon mining has the same (or similar) tangible reward of moon goo but a very different intangible reward that it requires a team effort working together to generate the income.

This will appeal to different players as some like the solo POS Silo tending whereas others will enjoy organizing and participating in the group effort to mine the moon debris field. CCP weighed the intangibles and decided that making more players be involved and feel their reward was more important than the fewer players that currently are involved and feel their reward. And that's OK as long as CCP has planned for all of that, which I think they have.

The real question is if the latter approach is rewarding enough to drive enough players to that activity to maintain the current prices of Tech 2 modules and ships.