Nanoribbons at 2009 prices!

Low-class slumlords take note: your important salvage income from nanoribbons has suddenly got very, very much better, with nanoribbons at 4.3M ISK. You'd better stock up on T3 hulls before they...oh wait, they're already up from 150 to 250M.

I put this down to several factors. Firstly, there's very few people living in C1-3 space. Daytrippers are entirely absent. There's a large glut of anoms clogging up C2 space, which is evidence there's few people running them, especially in vanilla A-D holes (E-N's always being wastelands as usual). C3 space, quite a few U210 holes and almost every single K346 hole is unoccupied. Most D845's are occupied, obviously.

Secondly, C6 space has now almost entirely fallen under the sway of Quaserknocks rental empire. The spike in nanoribbon prices could, indeed, be from an organised cartel deciding not to sell their ribbons to market for a while and exercise Goon-levels of manipulation. True or not it's fine gamesmanship, and I don't particularly care. If this is the case, there will be a brief uptick in price, followed by a dumpstering for max profit, and things will get back to cheap T3's as usual.

Finally, the nerfs to shield Ishtars might be flowing through to ratting behaviour, especially in C2 space. Drone tracking now sucks so abysmally that it's horrendously hard to set up a solo ratting Ishtar. The lack of mids also reduces sig radius so much, and tank as well, that the Sleepers begin swatting your drones. Gone are the days of warp at 50, drop Bouncers/Curators, and make reasonable wages.

The options for c2 ratting are fairly narrow. Which is to say, Gilas or Tengus (as always), with everything else being either lower in DPS and hence lower yield (ISK/hr), more expensive (especially shield lokis and armour Legions) and hence riskier, or requires more niche skillsets and creativity (Atrons in W-R's, Worms in magnetars, etc). The increase in nanoribbon prices should see a lot more daytripping. Combined with the blue poo buffs earlier this year, it's now going to be quite attractive to noobs who can take a reasonable T1 BC or two and pay it off inside an hour, thereafter it being gravy.

C3 ratting is still solo marauders (though you get to cheap out on it, dropping costs into the 1100-1300 range), solo Rattlesnakes, dual shield Domis, or T3's. W-R and Mags can be done in Hecate-Exequrors efficiently, and of course any fucktard can Drake it up in a Pulsar. But there's few DPS-tank-ISK combos here which have good yield, ISK-sensible and low-risk. I would however say that C3's will remain the engine room of low-class nanorbbon production.

C4 production of nanoribbons is also probably a bit restricted with low population, due to the sluggishness of solo marauders (25-40 mins a site) and the requirement for having a bunch of people online (4-6) to do group work. nanoribbon supply isn't going to shoot up from C4 space, let me tell you.

So, we shall see what happens with the C5-C6 engine room where nanoribbons aren't the main game. if there's manipulation behind this spike in prices, we'll see prices adjsut downwards swiftly. If not, in a couple of months we might have noobs to hunt.

lets give them good fights, not dogpile their Drakes with 30 Proteuses and Guardians, hm?