Nocxium: 633 - Zydrine: 648 / The inexorable march continues

Noxcium continues to rise at a precipitously high rate. Mineral markets are notoriously hard to manipulate for any extended length of time and it seems unlikely, at this point, that the numbers are being pushed by market manipulation. In Jita alone, there's about 120 Billion isk in market orders on each side of the buy/sell divide. Again, not impossible to manipulate but certainly difficult. But, perhaps more interesting, is the comparison to Zydrine. There is more Zydrine being sold in EVERY MAJOR MARKET, then Nocxium. Meaning that there's just an absolute GLUT of product on the market. What's causing this?

I think it's two things:

1) We hit a Nocxium bottleneck because the drone minerals are finally sufficiently worked out of the system. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem. Pyrox actually provides more than enough Nocxium, relative to Tritanium, to fuel ship production ratios needed (about 1.3% vs. a need of about 0.3%) but Nocxium isn't the only thing needing to be supplied. Hi-sec must supply Isogen and Pyerite. Let's say that you wanted to build one of each battleship in the game right now (the mainline T1 versions... not faction variants). You'd have to mine Kernite 22.2% of the time, Pyrox 39.3% of the time, Scordite 30.5% and Veldspar 7.9%. You wouldn't actually touch Plagioclase and you'd still end up with 1.4million extra Mexallon. Those are, needless to say, not consistent numbers with the supply of roids in hi-sec. Certainly Pyrox doesn't begin to even approach 40% of roids in space even in 0.5 and 0.6 space. And it represents NONE of the roids in 0.9 and 1.0 space. (note: just for completeness, if you're Goons and building just drakes, Pyrox needs to be 52% of your ore intake to make it work... ouch!).

2) So null-sec needs to step in and help supply the Nocx and some of the Iso. And here we get the other half of the problem. A random mixture of ABCs produces far more Zydrine then is needed. ABCs have, in aggregate, a composition of approximately 75.6% Zydrine and 24.4% Megacyte. The same battleship basket as identified above has a composition of about 69.7% Zydrine and 30.3% Megacyte. Now consider also, as Nocxium has risen in value, Hedbergite, Hemorphite and Jaspet have all become stellar mining options. These three also produce a fair amount of Zydrine (Jaspet not so much... but still a small amount). That further pushes Zydrine into the surplus category.

Now I suspect mexallon hasn't fallen because our mineral basket isn't quite right (Drake building, in fact, comes very close to evening out the mexallon count... though it still has a surprlus). But the real market crash will continue to be in Zydrine until Crokite gets far enough down that it drops out of the mining basket. Null-sec miners need to start viewing Crokite like Spodumain... so crappy then in all but the most aggressive strip mining operations, we're skipping it. Once that happens, you should see the prices on Zydrine normalize. At present, Crokite isn't there yet. In fact, it's still a respectable 91% of the value of Tritanium (Bistot is 97.5% and Arkonor 106.1%). The other thing that needs to occur is the null-sec miners need to start mining Hedbergite, Hemorphite and Jaspet like they used to mine ABCs. Those ores are proving to be critical in the post-drone world.

Finally, I suspect that some of the professional refiners need to adjust their spreadsheets. The spike in Nocx and Isogen has to have changed the equation significantly on what you can pay for which modules to just reprocess for money. There is a significant database hurdle to fully understanding that market and I suspect that tweaking it for signficant mineral price shifts is non-trivial. That may begin to alleviate some of the Nocx price pressure (while simultaneously, reducing the flow of Zydrine into the economy).

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