Tech 2 BPO Returns
Posted: 2012-03-08 Filed under: eveonline, industry, market | Tags: bpo, invention, t2 16 CommentsStirring the Hornet’s Nest
The allure of Tech2 BPOs is high and the history surrounding them is very controversial. If you don’t believe me, perform a search on the forums and you will feast on delicious tears. Industry people have been forum raging about this topic since the introduction and CCP has not dared to make any adjustments to them.
Short refresher for non-industrialists: T2 items are manufactured from an invented blueprint copy that, based on success, comes from a copy of the T1 BPO + datacores + sometimes a decryptor to modify attributes of the end T2 BPC.
Owning a T2 BPO means you can bypass the invention process and manufacture with solely the T2 BPO that has unlimited runs.
Why the bitching? The majority of forum posts about T2 BPOs complain that the individuals who won them during the lottery phase print ISK.
Yes, they were very lucky and didn’t have to put down multiple billions for the BPO. Yes, they had a monopoly on T2 production. Had. The invention system, which was introduced after the lottery system, allows many people to participate in the T2 process. More competition, lower prices.
What’s the allure? For you PVP people, think of a T2 BPOs as a Titan — a giant prize that you can show off, protect, and use to enhance your infamy. When I first started getting into industry in 2008, I thought these were the win button of Eve.
Now the only way to get one is to buy one from another player, which brings me to my research. I want to show everyone that even though they do make money, the return on the investment is very poor in the majority of cases.
The Research
Below is a list of T2 BPOs that have sold on the public Eve Online forums. I used a market program to figure out the yearly profit and divided that by the sold cost to get a return.
Though you may be drawn in by the yearly profit numbers, consider the amount of ISK used to achieve that number.
A few of the BPOs seem to have a reasonable return and might even be a slightly reasonable investment if you can keep it producing 24×7. It looks like some Ammo, Mining Crystals, and Torpedo BPOs will start to turn you a profit beyond the original investment in 2-3 years. I would definitively stay away from the 5+ year items as I think a change to the invention, research, or nerfing of the T2 BPOs will most likely happen soon(tm).
A Loss?
Yes, I have found that a few (maybe 3-4%) of T2 BPOs return a loss. The ability of players to out manufacture with the Invention process sinks the profits below that of a researched T2 BPO. Keep in mind that if you own a T2 BPO, you only produce one item. During the build phase you can’t do anything else with the BPO.
The beauty of the invention framework is that you can be more flexible and can react to changing market conditions. The drawback is that there is an increase in the complexity to produce an item.
Better Methods
If you have piles of cash and want to sit idle in a manufacturing station making sure your T2 BPO is constantly in production, you might want to consider buying some. For the average industry person or corporation, it is a very poor investment.
To compare performance numbers, I am making around 8 B a month turning over 31 B. A T2 BPO, equal to around the same amount of capital, will make you 3.5-7 B a year.
Not a solid investment in my book. Put your money elsewhere.
Rage Against the Machine
I haven’t seen an idea to resolve the imbalance that I have liked yet. More on this later.
It does seem that the market impact isn’t as big as the hype indicates according to CCP Diagoras.
[update] April 4 2012
The Good
93.95% of T2 Gyrostabilizers produced in March 2012 were from invention.
In March 2012, 90.23% of Hulks and 84.17% of Mackinaws produced were from invention.
89.77% of 1400mm II, 82.00% of Tachyon II, 87.34% of 425mm Rail II, 74.23% of Torpedo Launcher II produced in March were from invention.
55.25% of Improved Cloaks and 91.93% of Covert Ops Cloaks were produced via invention in March 2012.
86.81% of 220mm Vulcan Autocannons produced in March were produced through invention.
The Eh
67.85% of Sabres and 65.01% of Wolves produced in March 2012 were the from invention.
72.27% of the 2,005 Falcons produced in March 2012 were produced through invention.
66.13% of Ishtars and 63.53% of Zealots produced in March 2012 were produced via invention.
The Ugly
27.60% of Curses and 22.16% of Pilgrims produced in March 2012 were from invention.
Only 7.07% of Absolutions and 23.62% of Sleipnirs produced in March 2012 were produced through invention.
44.58% of Cerberus and 6.00% of Eagles produced in March 2012 were procuded through invention.
tl;dr
Post lottery, T2 BPOs do make very passive income for a very large price. For the time it takes to get a return on your investment, the capital could better be spent in other areas.
Botting Journey to Deep Nullsec
Posted: 2012-03-01 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: bots, Botting, bubbles, drake, nullsec, pos, ratting 1 CommentAfter seeing JonnyPew’s videos on how to fit a bomber and search for bot activity in nullsec, I set on my own journey to see if I could find them action.
His guide shows how to fit a Hound, which I cannot fly. Luckily the fitting differences between racial bombers are not that high so I changed one or two modules and bought up Nemesis fit. The total was around 36 M, which included four bombs and a compliment of torpedoes.
After looking at a few regions on Dotlan, I found a pocket of space that contained a high (inhuman) amount of NPC kills. You can easily see these by filtering for NPC Kills over the past 24 hours and seeing areas where 10,000+ NPC kills occurred.
I set course and flew out of Jita 4-4 towards the unknown, 67 jumps to be exact.
I’ve spent a far amount of time in nullsec, navigating with large fleets and going on solo roams in cloakey ships so I was confident in my ability to dodge bubble camps. I did have to pass through the N-RAEL system, which is a known hotspot as it connects Empire space to the Great Wildlands. I watched the gate and picked a quiet hour to sneak in after seeing a few industrialists go back and forth.
Pretty uneventful until I got into the destination constellation, where the locals were pretty active. The final jump laded me right into a pile of bubbles. It was clear that the locals did not want a lot of traffic to get around easily.
I found a celestial, aligned, cycled the MWD, and cloaked. When I breached the bubbles, I went into warp. I made a few safe spots and refreshed the directional scanner to get a good feeling of what was around me. There was only one Force Field on scanner, a Drake, and a few frigates.
Note: Count the number of towers and force fields listed on the directional scanner. If the count does not match, then a tower is offline and you might be able to see if any goodies were left anchored.
I’ve been hanging around the deep nullsec system for a week now, monitoring activities and taking names. I haven’t pounced on a ratter yet as every time I login, I see a lonely Drake warp to a safe POS and disconnect.
Stackable Blueprints
Posted: 2012-02-27 Filed under: industry, screenshot | Tags: bpc, bpo, database, Incarna, sql 6 Comments
When I started doing industry jobs, I found it very annoying to constantly look up the item details for each blueprint and I often lost my BPOs in a sea of BPCs.
After looking on the forums, I found that many people were asking for a icon change. CCP’s response was that their look-up query for blueprints was very database heavy (costs a lot of resources) and there would need to be some major reworking of their database structure and query code to give the client the ability to quickly differentiate blueprints.
Here I was in 2008 getting annoyed while I found forum posts dating back to 2004 asking for this change!
With Incursion 1.5 (May 2011), the icon change for BPO/BPCs hit Tranquility and I rejoiced because my industrial life was forever changed. Simple change with a large impact. I believe than when they transitioned to 64-bit numbers for items, some work was done to rectify the database query and code was cleaned up.
I would like to rally all industry people for another change. For any person that does industry, you work with a large number of blueprints. I would love if there was the ability to stack items of similar ME/PE.
Here is a mock-up of two versions of stacking for blueprints:
The version on the left seems to be easier on the eye as the information is displayed in a banner format at the top.
CCP, here is your Agile user story:
As a person that performs industry jobs, having a way to organize a large numbers of blueprints would declutter the UI and simplify working with them.
Put that in your backlog and work it into a Sprint planning meeting.
Community Shout-Outs
Posted: 2012-02-21 Filed under: eveonline, featured | Tags: altruist, ccp punkturis, eve-fail, jester's trek, jonnypew, podcast 5 CommentsWhat sources of player produced content have you been finding really entertaining? Here are a some shout-outs to my favorites over the past few months.
- Voices from the Void Podcast [link]. The majority of the Eve podcasts have fallen into obscurity or undergone major changes. Voices continues to deliver fresh, hilariousness content with dynamic hosts. Listening to them on Monday helps the day move by faster.
- JonnyPew’s guides [youtube]. Cleanly edited video guides on Exploration which have expanded into bot hunting have inspired me to go Cloakey and find fresh targets.
- The Alturist [link]. This PVP-centric blog is full of very technical information. The “Know Your Enemy” series describes in detail a ship class and how they are used in PVP scenarios. For an industry and trading focused person, this blog offers insight into a different area of Eve.
- Eve-fail [link]. Fellow industry and spreadsheet aficionado discloses his methods and bottom line profits for large projects.
- Jester’s Trek [link]. If you need to remain up to date on anything Eve related, this man has you covered. Any news, gossip, fits, or drama will be covered by this robo-blogger within a few minutes of happening.
- CCP Punkturis [twitter]. Best troll and very active UI programmer that interacts with the #tweetfleet community.
3rd Party API Advocate
Posted: 2012-02-16 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: android, api, aura, carbon, csm, csm7, eft, nullsec, pos, pyfa 2 CommentsJason Parks, the creator of the popular Aura suite for the Android platform, proposed a few questions on Google+ in regards to my platform for CSM7. For the past few months we have exchanged a few emails about our Eve projects, which would not even be possible without the wonderful API.
Given our shared passion for development work, he invited me to contribute to the Aura project. The fancy graphs and reporting logic that I have been able to generate out of my Wallet Manager site would be a wonderful addition to his suite (I hope to bring some of this design to the Eve client — more on that later).
Sadly, I don’t have a lot of time to pickup the Android framework so I haven’t taken him up on his offer to collaborate. I would, however, like to declare that given my background in 3rd party projects for Eve, the struggles of developers will be a major source of direction on my part if I become a member of the CSM.
The Questions
Here are responses to Jason’s questions that will hopefully lock-in his vote for me:
POS management redesign
Can you elaborate a bit on this? I made a post here on Google+ that has my ideas (https://plus.google.com/u/0/115407184179295920691/posts/hJyoCgbo6tZ). What do you think about it? Would you push for something like this?
From what I have read from various CCP developers, the code that runs the POS’es is old and terribly maintained. I’m sure it was written years ago with no commenting or documentation and nobody wants to open that Pandora’s box. I need more time to solidify my stance on the POS rework. I need to pull up a recent CCP post about “castles in the sky” (?) and review CCP Greyscale’s Nullsec Development: Design Goals post. Look for a post soon on this.
API
Will you be our API champion? I would like someone to raise the suggestions that many of the 3rd-party devs. I have ideas that I will raise at fanfest when I can again but we have no one to follow through on them. Making a post in on the forums doesn’t help until we have a champion on the CSM.
This sounds like a perfect tagline for me. “Blake Armitage — API Champion”. I would not be so involved with Eve if there wasn’t such an active and passionate 3rd party community. The ability to get data out of Eve breeds innovation and allows us to work with data in ways that CCP wouldn’t have envisioned.
Traders and industry focused people have come up with systems to track profitability, product movements, and margins. Large alliances would not exist if they could not keep track of their POS network, reinforcement timers, and sovereignty information.
The free time that developers put into these applications shows us the depth of intrigue that Eve brings to our gaming lifestyle. Expanding the API, while keeping security and automation exploits in mind, can do nothing but enhance the game.
I do hereby accept the title of “API Champion”.
Representation
Will we be able to engage with you after you are elected? This past cycle we didn’t have CSM contact and I’ve been forced to troll The Mattani and Hilmar 😉
Most definitively. I love to talk shop with the other space nerds.
API Fanfest News
In other API news CPP has a session at Fanfest this year where they will talk about a read/write API called “Carbon REST“. This topic is of particular interest to me and it saddens me that I have a conflict for Fanfest this year.
A developer preview of a new RESTful, oAuth based read/write API for Eve Online – Carbon REST.
link
Carbon… REST…? Carbon (CCP’s new Framework) + REST (fancy client/server software architecture). From what I can gather, there are going to be some advances to the current API structure.
Having the ability to write data to the Eve database opens up a wide array of options for developers. Some of the items that I would like to see exposed are:
- ability to send mail
- add/remove and set standings for contacts
- add/remove/manage calendar items
- update the skill queue
- update personal and corp (role dependent) ship fits. This would allow applications such as EFT, Pyfa, or Aura the ability to work directly with the fits stored on the server. You could walk around with your phone, update your fit, put your phone in your pocket, get home, and have the updated fit on the Eve client. Drag that fit to the market window (thank you CCP) and purchase. No more managing XML files posted on forums
All these benefits do come with a price. First, CCP will have to remain conscious of the ability to script input. Having the ability to update market orders or submit industry jobs opens up a dark sea of automation. Additionally, the mentality of actually making us login to the game will have to remain a priority. If you can do all of your work outside the client, why even login? The social aspect of Eve will suffer as less and less people login. No more posting “creative” images to local while you gaze at a POS bubble.
As with everything computer related, there will need to be a balance between available and security. Given my background in network security I feel that I can keep these interests in mind. Seriously, look at my books at work:
I feel that exciting times for developers are in the works and I would love the opportunity to be a strong representative of the 3rd party development community on the CSM.
tl;dr
“the struggles of developers will be a major source of direction on my part if I become a member of the CSM”
“Expanding the API, while keeping security and automation exploits in mind, can do nothing but enhance the game”
k162space 
