Category Archives: Economy

Putting the Market in Place

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After a chat with Corbexx a few weeks back, I got to thinking about what could really help POS wormhole dwellers. I had an offhand comment about markets and contracts in my write up. The more I think about this, the more I like it. One of the biggest hurdles in w-space is the logistics of getting stuff in and out. I don’t mean the ships moving around and chain scanning. That isn’t too hard. The hard part is aligning your membership to bring the right things in and take the right things out. Most of Eve has access to a beautiful tool for this: The market. Let’s bring this to wormholes. Imagine this scenario. You live in a wormhole with some 20 other pilots. People are running PI, farming sites, losing ships on hunting expeditions, hauling in fuel, running research, building ammo, all sorts of things. To coordinate any of this currently requires lots of communication and lots of spreadsheets. Much of it has to happen outside the game client. If I want 20 days of isotopes and ice, I have to use some sort of delayed communication to get this info out there. I also need to make Continue Reading →

The Value of (In)security

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I got to reading a bit of the forum thread for the SVT ballot dev blog.  There are some wonderful quotes such as “TEST vote, please ignore.”  (I love that.  Sorry TEST.  It’s just funny, in a dark sort of way.)  There is the usual tinfoil hat-ery going on, even though null blocs didn’t sweep the elections.  There is the important idea that no voting system can represent people who cannot vote.  Most interesting to me is the sentiment that null bloc candidates are bad.  I’m not a null bloc guy, and don’t currently want to be one.  But I don’t understand the sentiment. Sharing time:  I’ve had the fun experience of talking with a wide range of Eve players, with some serious conversations with people from all areas of the game aside from WH space.  But I’ve dipped into that area enough to know a thing or two about it.  There seem to be a few major types of players.  High sec carebears, in the bad way.  High sec carebears in the “I can’t be bothered with that paranoia” camp.  Low sec FW.  Low sec Pirates.  Null players.  Give-no-shits pvpers. Out of all of these groups, one particular mindset Continue Reading →

My Little Corner of the Cluster

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So ice changes, they are a coming.  Not sure how this is going to shake out.  Jester wrote an interesting take on why it might be a good idea to remove ice from high sec in the long run, and why it’s ok for prices to go up.  I disagree. First there is the problem of POSes.  For small group and industrial groups working in non-null space, the cost and effort of maintaining POSes is not insignifigant, and any real consideration of running one has to balance the cost of fuel against the potential profits from running said POS.  For a medium or large, this is already a bit of a constraint for some players, at least from an initial setup and first few months of run time.  Especially if you live in HS or LS.  In high sec you can only do so much at a POS, and in low sec you have to manage the supply chain of getting the damn blocks to your towers.  You don’t have the same intel channels and blue donut protecting you.  You also don’t have the same level of juicy targets to distract would-be attackers. Second, you have the issue of inflation Continue Reading →

Making NPCs Matter – Blog Banter 46

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“EVE Online is a unique piece of science fiction that is ‘participatory’.” – CCP Seagull, December 2012 EVE Online is heading into its Second Decade with renewed vigour and a new development strategy. At the CSM Summit in December, Executive Producer CCP Unifex and Development Director CCP Seagull explained how future development and expansions will be broader in scope than recent “collections of features” stating that CCP “want to create something more inspirational, that players aspire to play.” With the return of Live Events such as the Battle for Caldari Prime, clearly the prime fiction of EVE is back in favour as part of this new thematic approach to expansions. However, EVE’s story is very much a tale of two playstyles, with an entirely player-driven narrative unfolding daily in parallel to the reinvigorated backstory. Often, they do not mix well. How can these two disparate elements be united or at least comfortably co-exist in a single sandbox universe? The biggest disconnect between the lore of Eve and the Reality of Eve, in my mind, is that nothing players do has much impact of the NPCs of New Eden, aside from making an endless supply of red crosses explode. The following Continue Reading →

PI Day 11

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Here’s the update: Trending a little bit better.  I got the Precious Metals output a bit higher, and now Chiral Structures are the rate limiting factor.  This means I’m pulling in an extra 1.4m or so per day on Enriched Uranium sales.  The POCO taxes have taken about 16m in profits at the 10% high sec rate.  That’s not 10%.  That’s an effective tax rate of about 18%. They get you coming and going!  Interstingly, the tax rates are pegged to old values, with P1s going for 50isk/unit and P2s going for 900isk/unit, and P3s for 7000isk/unit.  This results in interesting tax rate anomolies as shown above.  There are a few errors, as I lumped a few things together in the beginning and I can’t sort the out now.  Stupid March 11.  But the overall tax rate of 18% is correct.  If I had no taxes, I’d be at about 51m in profit 11 days in. Edit:  My original effective tax chart was poorly formatted.  I updated it.

Ugh – PI Challenge – Day 8

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Just a quick update on the PI challenge.  I’ve made lots of tweaks to max out extraction.  Last update, I was at about -9.3m isk on the whole affair.  Today’s total running numbers: I broke into the black!  And so far, over 8 days, I’ve averaged a little over 2 million per day in profit.  In revenue, I’ve averaged about 8 million.  8m x 30 days is 240m isk.  For the 500m isk goal, this thing is probably going to be a complete failure.  Assuming no more costs, I’ll be surprised if I get much past the 200m mark. Some mid-challenge analysis.  In 2.5 hours, while working on other stuff, I went mining today.  The sales from that were 29.3m isk.  On another front, I ran a max run of Phased Plasma L ammo.  That sold for 18m isk.  So in less than the time it took me to do a week’s PI, I netted 47m isk into my pocket, for less actual effort than the PI.  I have no idea what that ammo cost me to make, because the materials were lying around, but there you have it. This brings up a bigger question:  What is the most enjoyable Continue Reading →

The Downward Spiral of Depletion

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Warning, this post contains many charts. Edit: Thanks for the link Mabrick! First:  Mabrick stated this in my last comments section: You have extra R) and P1? The way I deal with extra R0 and P1 is to not have any. That may seem a bit arrogant, but hear me out. Robotics is a 2 extractor, 4xP1 and 2xP2 production chain – per planet. When you get to Elite command centers it will be easier to do, but you should aim for 2 extractors each pulling 288,000 m3 of R0 with 2xP1 facilities per R0 type and 2xP2 facilities to take their product. You then have to move one of the P2 products to another planet to make the Robotics. I move Mechanical Parts to my Lava worlds where I have on additional P3 facility in my setup. Precious Metals is typically the weakest producer across all the planets I’ve run and that’s why I produce Robotics on the Lava worlds. All three Lava planets process 1/3 of my Robotics each. I use no silos and I try and keep a day’s worth of R0 in each Landing Pad as a buffer. To keep this working as stated, I actively Continue Reading →

Ever Increasing Complexity – PI Day 2

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In response to my own questions from last post regarding the shortcomings of my production as it was implemented, I went looking at how to use the excess resources from my over-producing R0>P1 planets.  If you are running 4 planets to get the materials for Robotics, you end up with an imbalance among the following P1s: Chiral Structures Precious Metals Reactive Metals Toxic Metals These in turn can be used to create a variety of P2s: Consumer Electronics (used in Robotics) Mechanical Parts (used in Robotics) Enriched Uranium Construction Blocks For nice list of all the PI flow charts, take a look at this.  So the question I had to answer was how can I take my excess PI products and make them profitable, and easy to get to market?  The answer, I think, lies in looking at market prices for the P1s and comparing those to the prces for the various potential P2s, and making the P2s which are worth more than the P1s you started with.  Given the high rate of import and export taxes, this is not a trivial calculation.  I’ll let you run your own numbers, but I was able to find a solid excess line, Continue Reading →

Mabrick’s PI Challenge Day 1

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I set up all the planets for the challenge, 3 barren, 2 lava, and have the production planet going.  I also have a sheet set up to track the costs by line item.  I loves me some Excel!  Without further ado, here are the costs incurred in buying the command centers, setting up the planets (including a few mistakes in placing and rebuilding PI buildings), and transferring the first production loads from the resources planets to the production planet (also including one mistake): The Customs Office interface is still horrible, and you can easily transfer crap back to a planet when you think you are loading it to your ship.  Why?  Because CCP decided that the CO inventory screen should not be part of the unified inventory.  That’s great.  That cost me about $500k isk.  Remember to open your ship inventory and drag the items from to CO to there, and not hit the Transfer button. The PI interface still leaves important info out of the equation when placing buildings.  So if you click the wrong facility, you cannot check what it makes until after you spend the money on it once you are in that process.  Yes, I could Continue Reading →

Mo’ Planets, Mo’ Problems

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As mentioned previously, I am rather space-broke at the moment.  To me this means less that a few hundred million isk in my account, above what is earmarked for purchases.  So I’ve started two endeavors: The first is a relaunch of the 30 Day Market Challenge.  I messed up the start already, after seeding 20 mil, I noticed I had about 70 mil in modules from the last go-around.  Stupid numbers making accounting hard.   I’m aiming to clear 10% margins each day, at least up to the billion isk range.  We’ll see how it goes.  Preliminary actions in Jita seem to indicate margins have gotten tighter on just about everything since the same time last year.  As long as the isk flows, I’ll be happy.  Not sure about daily updates, it may be more of a when I feel like it thing. The second project is based on a post over at Mabrick’s.  He seems convinced that HS planets can rake in 100m isk a week.  I’m starting with 5 planets, and a lower level of command center upgrades, but I’ll be posting my results over the next few days.  You can all judge based on that.  We’ll call Continue Reading →