I'll leave alone the basic nuts and bolts of what's in a BPO since that's been covered a few dozen times by other guides and blogs scattered all over this great big series of pipes the late Sen. Ted Stevens so famously described. I would like to talk about exactly how much research to put into a BPO, though. So often I read guides and see contracts with hilariously high levels of Material Efficiency (ME) research that I have to pause and wonder, "why"? These folks will spend months or years researching a BPO, and to what end? If that's their game goal in and of itself, to have every one of their BPOs researched to ME 200, I can appreciate the dedication. If they're selling copies on the contracts market though, the difference for a copy at ME50 vs. ME200 is really, really small. Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself at https://zofu.no-ip.de/bpo - and I'll use a big hull, the Dominix, as an example. At ME50, the hull cost is (as of this posting with Jita prices) 178.2M ISK. At ME200, it's 178.1M. That's a savings of basically zilch compared to the overall hull cost. At ME10, by the way, that hull costs 178.7M. Now consider the length of time needed to research this BPO. ME10 needs roughly 4-5 weeks. ME50? Try six months. And ME200? More than two years. That's a huge waste of a research slot and yes, I have seen batttleship BPCs on the contracts market with that level of research. If someone is building battleship hulls and only making 600,000 profit per hull, they're doing it wrong. Branch out. Diversify. Spend the time in that research slot on a few dozen other BPOs rather than waste time on one ridiculously high ME level.
Perhaps that level of competition exists in highsec- I wouldn't know, quite honestly. It seems like a really good way to burn out, though. I think if that's really the case, folks should concentrate their efforts more on the supply side of things and look for cheaper sources of minerals instead of fretting about their sale price. Train up that Scrapmetal Processing skill and you'll find an enormous stockpile of minerals from every useless module you come across. Or, move somewhere else, like null.
There's a lot less competition in null, even in the busy Providence region. Go further out still, and you might be the only manufacturer. There are fewer buyers, too, but that works itself out. What that means for research is that a builder doesn't need to research a BPO to insane levels. ME5 is, quite honestly, just fine for most things. ME10 is my personal goal for a BPO before I'll switch to researching it for time efficiency instead, especially with hulls. ME10 gives 0.9% waste, and as another builder once told me, "anything under 1% waste is good", and he's been doing this for much longer than me. At that level you can price items close to Jita or Amarr prices, and folks will probably buy them.
Speaking of prices, the Providence region is a bit batty on some things at the moment. Augoror hulls, for example, are selling for way, way less than mineral price- unless these folks are ripping off the local miners something fierce, and that's not really a sustainable way to build in null, where your relationships with other players are usually more personal than in highsec. The Thorax hull is also selling at a very small margin right now- its mineral costs are about identical to the Vexor, but it's selling for 1-2M less than the Vexor. Probably because people are idiots and didn't calculate their costs before setting a price, which is their decision, but man, it's a pain to deal with. So I'm trying to fix that, going off of the hypothesis that they're just pricing off of the local competition's price and making sure they're just a bit lower, in a downward-chasing cycle. So i built a few and anchored them at a price 2M higher than everything else in Provi. I don't expect them to sell any time soon, but I do hope that the other folks see that price and decide to raise theirs as a result, and make it profitable to once again build those hulls. We'll see. It's definitely easier to crash the market than it is to bring it back up again.
That's all for now, fly safe.
In my travels in Eve, it's not far fetched to come to the conclusion that the average pilot is plain:
ReplyDeleteA) Lazy
B) non-curious (or...stupid even, but I dont want to jump to that sort of conclusion often)
It takes effort to calculate profits and the effects of ME. on the other hand, 400 ME "Looks" so much nicer than 200 ME, even though their difference is minuscule or even non existent! As far as dealing with underpriced hulls, how are you determining their mineral costs? is it based off of Jita or local mineral prices? it's also worth considering -where- those hulls are being sold. Personal experience in a different nullsec region (period basis) has shown me that a TREMENDOUS amount of BUYING occurs at market hubs even if another part of the region has the exact same item for much cheaper. then a tremendous amount of SELLING occurs on the same exact system those materials were acquired.
Setting regionwide buy orders is a great way to get cheap mats, and it was a fantastic thing to do in a region like period basis. Though on a much more crowded region like providence, that would be a lot of time/money spent just trying to haul all those goods back to one system.
The unique nature of Providence certainly makes moving things from A to B with a reasonable level of safety challenging. Mineral costs are local , which generally works out to be cheaper than Jita. What I think is going on, is people are just mining the minerals themselves, and playing the "well, minerals are free" game.
Delete