Blake’s Papercuts
Posted: 2012-09-27 Filed under: eveonline, industry, market, nullsec | Tags: api, bpc, bpo, inventory, me, pe, pos 2 CommentsInspired by Jester’s post about accepting Eve as it stands, I started to record my own personal headaches while performing Industry and Trade related tasks.
Manufacturing/Invention
1. Menu items on Blueprints: I want to be able to Right-click, build or Right-click, invent from the hangar.
3. Batch processing: multi-select right-click, build/invent.
3. Two stage jobs, like capitals that have components that are build from minerals, can be built with one click from the capital Blueprint.
4. Easy display of Blueprints ME/PE from hanger view.
5. Stack Blueprints of equal ME/PE levels.
6. Multi cycle runs. Make 10 items 10 times as long as you have the required items in stock.
7. Pause jobs if they run out of materials and allow resume when sufficient items are placed in the hangar.
Booster Trade
1. Expand profession. Currently I know of a few major manufacturers of drugs and distribute to niche markets. I want to be able to have more players in the market, many more markets, and a feeling of sneaking contraband around the galaxy.
2. Given the limitations on production to POS’es, the barrier of entry for manufacturers is high. I remember a long time ago hearing about how Mittani proposed a drug manufacturing ship; imagine a stealthy ship that arrives out of nowhere, makes you drugs, and retreats into the abyss.
API
1. Expose Blueprint ME/PE/Run/Remaining.
2. Expose tower CPU/Power utilization and any timers such as anchoring, on-lining, or reinforced. (Metagame++;)
3. Expose saved ship fits for read/write to allow developers to create alliance/corp/mobile 3rd party applications for working with fits using XML.
4. Do not allow the buying, selling, modification of orders (I’ve wrote about the potential botting implications here).
POS Rework
1. Grant the ability to move POS’es between characters, corporations, and alliances.
2. Scrap the worthless Refining Arrays. They refine at too high a loss, are cumbersome to load and start refine jobs. In the new system you should be able to create paths between modules like we have in PI to transfer goods for constant production.
3. Add a mechanic for hacking/taking over offlined and abondoned towers.
Unified Inventory
1. Dragging something to the station Item or Ship hangar should automatically place it in the proper hangar. I hate having to drag ships to ships and item to items. The goods are going to my local hangar, just put them there.
General
1. Automatically remove me from my ship, stop skills from training, and initiate the clone jump.
2. Prompt/warn me that my clone is out of date before undocking.
Timers
1. I want to be able to see the time remaining for various things (GCC, etc) in the same fashion as the undock timer.
Kill Reports
1. Add Logistic repair amount.
2. Add coordinate and time data down to the millisecond to allow people to develop applications to replay and analyse battles.
Procurer BPO Speculation Results
Posted: 2012-09-17 Filed under: industry, market | Tags: inferno, jita, procurer, skiff, speculation 10 CommentsIn a previous post, I described the research and assumptions that lead me to speculate on the prices of Procurer BPOs. After 5 weeks, I’ve been able to sell off some of the BPOs for a nice profit.
Market speculation in Eve is high risk and high reward. I always proceed cautiously and try to verify as much of the speculation discourse as possible before making a move. At any moment, CCP could make a change and all your research will be moot.
tl;dr
I was able to offload 6 out of 20 BPOs after the 1.2 Inferno patch for a nice profit.
Quick Results
20 total BPOs purchased at the old NPC price of 450 M:
- 6 BPOs sold in Jita at rising prices for a profit of 3.8 B
- 2 BPOs on sale in Jita
- 2 BPOs in copy slots to make BPCs for future Invention jobs
- 10 BPOs remain idle in the hangar
Jita Market Post Change
The market reaction went as expected. Pre-patch there was a lot of market activity as news got out about the change. Market speculators got in and started to buy up stock.
After the patch, the BPO price slowly rose towards the new NPC price, a few large players came in to reset the price to a new plateau, and the volume of trade decreased as demand went down.
The key to a good speculative move is to get into the market while the price is the same or unchanged and then attempt to sell off your stock before the level of trade leaves you with dead stock.
The top highlight was me winning the 0.01 ISK game of the Jita market.
On the 26th, a trader with a lot of cash came in and reset the price to closer to the new BPO NPC price. I moved 3 out of 6 of my sales on this date.
Here’s a snapshot of my trades including the profit.
The Future
I’m sitting on 10 idle BPOs at this point. Since my pressure to convert these to liquid ISK is low, I will keep them in my hangar. I am in no rush to sell these off and I can put them into other industry ventures, such as copying or Skiff invention.
Minerals to Alpha Fleet Maelstrom
Posted: 2012-08-29 Filed under: industry, market, nullsec, pos | Tags: cloud ring, deklein, freighter, isogen, jita, jump freighter, maelstrom, megacyte, mexallon, nocxium, pure blind, pyerite, tritanium, zydrine 6 Commentstl;dr Using mineral compression enables you to haul the minerals needed to built 344 battleships in one Jump Freighter.
Heavy Industry
When I started playing, I knew that I wanted to be a builder; I wanted to become an industrial gear in the alliance war machine providing materials to advance the cause.
At the height of the Northern Collation, the Alpha Maelstrom was king. The ability to deliver bursts of coordinated damage in high lag situations was the method to win battles.
Over the life of the Northern Collation, I built and sold around 344 Maelstrom ships in Cloud Ring, Pure Blind, and Deklein.
You might assume that these were hauled in from Empire or built from nullsec minerals, but that is not the best way to operate. I’ve wrote about mineral compression before, but now I wanted to disclose my building operations with a concrete example now that my Maelstrom production line has been retired.
Side note: TEST officially announced the end of Maelstrom reimbursements yesterday. RIP bucket of rust with solar sails.
344 Battleships
The volume of raw minerals equals around 48,800,000 m3 (140 Jump Freighters or 55 Freighters) of hauling if you were to bring them in uncompressed. Even given perfect jump skills, this would eat up 2.1 B worth of Isotopes using the jump path I took to my production system, effectively killing your profits.
If bringing in the minerals is a Herculean task, what about bringing in the built ships?
Built ships have a better compression ratio. 344 Maelstroms, if hauled in from Empire to Nullsec, comes out to 17,200,000 m3 (49 Jump Freighters or 20 Freighters). Moving built hulls would bring fuel costs down to 764 M, but you can still do better.
1,000 425 Railgun I’s
Taking minerals in empire, compressing them into modules, and refining in nullsec is the best way to transport large quantities. 1,000 425 Railgun I’s equal 10,000 m3 of space yet produces around 1,407,000 m3 when refined (!).
This screenshot shows what you can achieve in a station with a 50% base refine and high refine skills. You could even push the yield to perfect by getting better standings (details and math here) with the station corporation.
Using only 425 Railgun I’s will leave you with a disproportional lack of Tritanium for battleship builds. Other items, such as the Passive Targeter I, can be used to balance out your needs.
Testing Tech 2 Invention and Production
Posted: 2012-08-21 Filed under: industry, market, ships | Tags: anshar, ishtar, nemesis, obelisk, onyx, phobos, tech 2 3 CommentsExpanding Operations
In addition to trading, I’ve started up a small invention and Tech 2 production line. My initial approach is to start small and see how well items perform. For now I am going to be working with drones, bombers, and some popular modules. I’ve invented a few ships, but am holding off on producing them.
Invention Statistics
I’m saving the invention job history to my database and wrote a small display to show overall and individual item invention success rates. I’ll add this summary to my monthly updates as I’m sure inventors will find it interesting.
Anshar Invention
My first Jump Freighter invention job was successful despite the ~39.8% calculated success rate given my 4-4-4 skills.
Attempting the job cost 36.3 M of items that are destroyed regardless of the job output:
1x Collision Measurements – 7.6 M
64x Mechanical Engineering Datacore – 7.231 M
64x Gallente Starship Engineering Datacore – 21.438 M
Obelisk BPC – Copied from my BPO
Since I am not actively producing Freighters due to their low markup and currently dropping mineral prices, I put the Obelisk BPO back into an open copy slot. It takes around 43 days for one copy in an empire slot so you can see why Jump Freighters are slow to produce.
Further details of Jump Freighter production can be found here.
Inferno 1.2 Procurer BPO Speculation
Posted: 2012-08-08 Filed under: industry, market | Tags: covetor, hulk, inferno, jita, mackinaw, ore, outer ring, procurer, retriever, skiff 13 CommentsBackground
Along with the rebalancing the roles of the mining barges, their mineral requirements were also adjusted. The build requirements for the Tech 1 barges about doubled and therefore the BPO NPC price was adjusted to reflect the new value.
Here is my research on buying Procurer BPOs at pre-Inferno 1.2 prices to sell after the patch.
[Aug 9 update] It looks like CCP changed the NPC price in the Inferno 1.2.1 patch.
ORE Space
Since these BPOs are only seeded in the Outer Ring in two ORE stations, I was able to get a good view on how many were bought by using the market window.
Out of normal BPO purchases in ORE space amounted to 1,264 units starting in late July.
Patch Changes
CCP changed the values before going live. They had a different number published on the Test server and knowingly seeded a different value on the live server. *shakes fist*
Other Barges
I looked considered the increase in BPO price, the new role, market velocity, and added in a little bit of my own gut feeling. This showed that the Procurer BPO was the item with the most potential for profit.
ISK Injection
Given that these were purchased for 450 M and are now worth 0.508 B 0.838 B that means 73.3 B 491 B was created from nothing, or about 0.3% 2% of the normal 24 T ISK faucet amount stated in the 2012 Fanfest presentation. This amount doesn’t seem too noteworthy.
Speculating on Profits
In 76 days about 124 pre-Inferno 1.2 Procurer BPOs moved in Jita slightly above their NPC price of 450 M. If 1,264 out of normal units and around 561 move in Jita in the same time period, that means it will take about 1,118 days (3.06 years) for this stock to clear assuming that demand remains the same.
Twenty BPOs
I bought 20 Procurer BPOs at the old NPC price for a total investment of 9 B. Taking in account the new price of 0.508 B 0.838 B, we can value them at 10.16 B 16.8 B. This shows a 1.16 B 7.76 B increase in the NPC value of the items. I was expecting more profit, but that’s what you get when you speculate on patch day.
I have a few options on how to turn a profit with the BPOs:
- Sell them in Jita. I believe that due to the market saturation with pre-Inferno 1.2 prints, it will be a while before we start to see the new NPC cost in Jita of
0.508 B0.838 B + a good margin. I could slowly sell the stock off as prices rise. - Improve value by researching them and then sell.
- Produce BPCs for invention/manufacturing. As of this writing, there are not a lot of BPCs available on the open market.
I plan on doing all three to help spread the risk and start to get a return on this speculation adventure.
k162space 