November Financial Report

Following the trend of EVE-fail, I am going to continue releasing monthly financial reports.

November saw a resurgence of trading as the anticipation of Crucible brought me back into the game. With all the PI changes, there were ample opportunities to turn a profit. The change over to Player Owned Offices meant a tax barrier and therefore an increase to PI goods. Now that PI goods are involved in many production chains (POS’es, POS modules, T2 components), there has been an increase across the board.

New to the net value charts is the inclusion of Corp assets as I have taken the CEO role and put a lot of ISK into our ventures.

Here is a sneak-peak at my top trading groups. As you can see Implants far outweigh the other items. When a person goes to replace their implants, you are not only selling 1 implant, but 4 or maybe 5, as people will replace the entire set.

I have not tested the market with Skill Hardwiring implants but now that they are visible on killmails, I may have to parse what ones are popular. Expansions always bring new trading opportunities, you just have to look for them. I might write something to scrape killmails and give me a report on what are the top 10 by volume per month.

There was a large growth in November compared to October due to a renewed effort into trading. I expect that December will be a good month as the introduction of the new Tier 3 Battlecruisers opens up many avenues. They are going to be popular and will die quickly.


Crucible Deployment

Over the past few days, I gave up on Tranquility and have been playing on Singularity. The new features and changes were just too exciting and Tranquility started to feel like a rusty Minmatar barge. While testing out the new cyno/jump graphics, I saw CCP Habakuk in local and wished him luck with the deployment.

I’m too young to remember the boot.ini fiasco, but I do remember some long, drawn-out deployments for some of the ones over the past 2 years. I have to say that CCP did a great job with this deployment. They took note of some of our ramblings from the last deployment and CCP Navigator even notified us about potential issues before it was released. I for one welcome our new proactive and not reactive overlords!

The #tweetfleet has been blowing up with nothing but praise and excitement and the Devblog from CCP Soundwave was just the icing on the cake! Great job CCP, now… on to the Summer expansion wish list.


Hold on a second

Crucible has been announced with the long awaited supercapital nerf, which makes them mostly tools for fighting other supercapitals and/or things that hold still.

A while back, AHARM was caught using a kinda-sorta-obviously-exploit in a certain type of wormhole. For those who don’t know, some wormholes have special effects, like increasing RR power but decreasing local rep power, increasing armor resists but lowering shield, ect ect. These effects go from barely noticable in a C1 class wormhole to holy-shit-this-3xRR-domi-is-stable when you’re in a C6.

One of these wormholes increased damage from all ships(Sleepers included) by 100%, as well as boosting the strength of all types of EWAR, including tracking disruptors. Some bright spark figured out that if you tracking disrupted someone so hard their midslots swapped places their tracking would go into the negative or go below -1 or something similar that wasn’t supposed to be doable. The result of this was that the ship being disrupted gained LITERALLY perfect tracking and optimal range(250k), if you happened to be sensor dampening them at the same time or something.

Rooks and Kings, some nullsec or wormhole or whatever group whose name I only know because they attacked Split Infinity Radio, attacked AHARM in their home wormhole and were a bit supprised by being hit by blaster boats from 250k away perfectly each time. They petitioned CCP, CCP changed the way that wormhole worked and didn’t ban anyone, everyone went their separate ways.

Now some large group has gained an advantage over another MAYBE through an exploit(bots). They are almost impossible to kill and everyone is still trying to work on ways to counter and/or welcoming their new overlords. And since CCP either can’t or won’t detect and remove the bots, they have gained this power “fair and square”.

(Incidentally I use the term maybe because they might have used the bot money for something other than supers. Like titans or candy.)

Supercapitals aren’t being nerfed because the Russians gained critical mass of them through exploits, they’re being nerfed because nullsec stood on the edge of becoming carebearland and/or Russianland. The game has almost been “broken” through some means because one value grew too big using CCP-Approved methods.

So they’re nerfing supercapitals. If I were the DRF CEO or Director that said “hey, we have all this ISK, let’s sink it into SUPERCAPITALS”, I’d feel a bit cheated right now.

Supercarriers are expensive. Right now, on my “list of shit to do on Eve”, “own a supercarrier” is pretty far down on the list, mostly because of the 18 bil cost and that I’m probably going to lose the damn thing the moment I board it. For me, flying the second biggest ship in Eve defines the “endgame”.

My point is, what if instead of supercarriers RUSEve spent it on, say, making accounts or hiring people to fly with them? Okay, they did that with PL and THEN got the supercarriers, but what if they had taken it even farther? What if fighting RUSEve didn’t mean one unstoppable fleet, it meant THREE fightable fleets attacking separate targets with huge subcap numbers, reps and such. You could fight one, and win, but it would be instantly replaced while the other two wrecked whatever they were attacking. Controlling multiple accounts is not hard, and I could probably write a script or program to control an alpha fleet BS(pleasedon’taskmeto pleasedon’tbanmeCCP).

And also, now that the context of nullsec and supercarriers has defined “Overpowered”, can we please have the old wormhole exploit back? If everyone has it it isn’t an unfair advantage, and it would make for extremely weird/fun fleet fights.


Crucible

http://throughnewbeyes.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/winter-expansion-crucible-feature-list/

Go to that website. Note how tiny the little slider bar is. Read those changes, CURRENTLY ON SINGULARITY. If you do not at least once feel that manly feeling of being about to cry, you are eligible for a full refund on your next purchase at Home Depot, you goddamn robot.

I cannot see Crucible flopping. The new Battlecruisers look nice and have an interesting niche, I almost cried when I saw the new nebulae(nebulars? nebulae’?) and all of those modules you wish had t2 versions now do.

In addition, some of the tiny little things you always hated but always felt like a wuss complaining about are gone, like planets mysteriously turning into ghosts as you warped through them, and the session timer is reduced(a little). STILL COUNTS.

I keep thinking though, about the development. ONE team from World of Darkness, Team Papercut, gave us a loot all button, improved the Warp Command, a goddamn alliance jump bridge option to the system map, fixed that annoying thing where AFK cloakers could jam up your anomalies(although it might make salvaging a bit more rushed) and made drones harder to lose.

One Team did this. My hat is off to you guys.

I was joking around before Crucible was announced that CCP should make an expansion “We fixed the things that irked you and some things you didn’t notice before”, and holy shit this fits the bill. I’ve still got almost no isk to my name, classes this semester are “interesting”, but DAMN if Eve isn’t getting more awesomer!

awesomee?
awesomerer?

You know what I mean.


Nullsec Moon Mining

Have you ever wondered where the deep pockets of Alliances get created? Moon goo.

It has been almost a month in our new Alliance and we have started discussing setting up a moon mining network in order to bolster the corporation wallets. Since we have limited knowledge of the reaction chains, we have decided to start simple. Perhaps I will take the time to go up the reaction chain and see what items we can make that would truly be profitable. For now, we’re going to start small and just pull the Moon Materials and haul to market.

In an established alliance, the good moons are most likely property of the Alliance. The profits from Tech, Neo, and Dyspro often go to the Alliance wallets for programs such as ship replacement or war efforts.

Given this, our moon selection list is rather limited and we’re left to claim some of the lower profitable income streams. As with everything industry related in Eve, run the numbers first to see if it is even worth your time for the profit.

Recall that time is very important in this game. Why should I spend hours manufacturing a Drake to sell in a mission hub that nets me a 2-3% markup while I can go shoot NPCs for 100M+/hour (Incursions).

Here is the workup for a typical nullsec moon that we have available for claiming.

Material Profit/Month (M)
1. Hydrocarbons 13
2. Silicates 122
3. Silicates 122
4. Tungsten 39
+296

Using the new fueling price model in the Crucible expansion, running a Large POS is highly unprofitable as it costs 360 M/month to fuel. Income from harvesting basic materials will only be profitable using a Medium or Small POS as they cost 180 M or 90 M/month, respectively, to fuel.

A Small POS lacks the necessary Powergrid and CPU to run 4 Moon Harvesting Arrays and Silos so we need to setup up to a Medium. Even with Faction Towers, I was only able to get 3 Moon Harvesting Arrays and 3 Silos to run so we’ll have to not mine the Hydrocarbons.

180 M to fuel and 283 M profit means a 103 M/month or 24 M/week profit which in my book is hardly worth the effort. We will have to either get a better material to harvest or explore collecting these lower profit materials to react into Processed Materials or continue further down the reaction chain into Advanced Materials.