Lend them a firehose?

So there’s been an interesting dynamic lately in North Provi. A cloaky camper’s been hanging out in an ice belt for an inordinate number of days, trying to score some kills (He has more or less failed, spectacularly). He’s tough to catch though, because he’s generally cloaked. But more importantly, every time he decloaks and gets reported in intel, he immediately warps off. So clearly, he’s got intel channel access. Nothing new there, except there are also rumors that he’s got friends in the alliance that runs the intel channel, and those friends have been protecting him. The fact that he’s been able to dock up in their outposts kind of reinforces that. Either that, or the outpost owners don't really care to fix their docking rights.

If the rumors end up being true, that would seem rather problematic for the neighboring alliance. Essentially, there would be blues protecting a red that’s targeting their mates. Doesn’t sound particularly good looking at it from the outside. Doesn’t sound too sustainable, either, at an alliance level. Which would be a shame, as there are a lot of good people in that alliance being subjected to unneeded attacks. Sounds like the alliance needs a house-cleaning, or a re-examining of how they view themselves. At least from my perspective. There’s a decent chance someone from that alliance is reading this and has another take on things. If so, I’d love to hear it. My viewpoint is shared by quite a few others besides myself though, so take note, boys. Things aren’t looking real rosy from the outside. You’re all mostly great neighbors, but there’s a huge pile of crap on your yard and it’s starting to stink.

Ice, Ice, Baby...

So it’s been a little while since my last post, and I’m sorry about that. Who knew that coming up with a fresh topic every day would be so tough? Some major industry-related stuff has happened since that last post, by the way. Stuff that definitely changed my daily Eve activities for the time being. The latest dev blog (and what great reads they are!) talked about the upcoming changes to POS mechanics, so I’ve been altering plans as a result.

First up, the BPO changes: with remote researching out of the question once the summer expansion hits, it’s time to really start cranking on the expensive BPOs and get them researched and ready so I won’t have to pay for outpost research. Getting some of the larger hull BPOs researched, even to ME 10, takes weeks. All of the other BPOs cruiser-level and lower I’ve determined will just continue to be researched in the POS labs. Compared to the overall value of the POS itself, even an 80M cruiser BPO isn’t a huge deal. The trick, just like everything in Eve, is to not be stupid. Don’t put everything expensive in the POS at once, and the liability is limited. I know some will say the whole corp theft thing could become an issue, but Kym’s corp is tight-knit and small enough that all the researchers get their own lab division, so there’s no increased concern there. Plus, nobody’s got anything really valuable anyway, so it’d be comparable to robbing a candy store. Wheee.

Second, the larger, game-changing announcement: no more standings requirements for anchoring a POS in highsec. Hooray! I had just started the standings grind, and for once my procrastination paid off. The new plan for ore compression now is to build a “roving compression camp” of sorts. I’m sure others already do something similar, or have plans to do something similar once the expansion comes out. It’s fairly basic and straightforward: highsec Orca, small POS tower, compression array, and some fuel blocks & charters. Haul everything around highsec in the Orca, including a Miasmos, buy cheap ore, compress it, and get it back to nullsec (no, not in the Orca). Why not use a jump freighter? Scale. And cost. I don’t build at the scales that would necessitate using a JF (yet). This way takes longer, but it risks less ISK and the Orca is a multi-use hull, whereas a freighter isn’t.

Speaking of anchoring POS towers… yes, I know everyone’s going to be doing it. I think there will be less of a supply bottleneck than people are predicting, though, for a few reasons. 1) CCP said, in the comments section, that they’ll figure out a way to take down, or make irrelevant, abandoned POS towers. 2) There will be folks who take down their research POSes. 3) There are going to be thousands of new moons in the 0.8-1.0 systems now available. So in totality, things should remain as they are now in terms of being able to find a moon. Fuel costs, however, are another matter.

There’s going to be a vast increase in demand for POS fuel. I don’t see any other way around it. Unless CCP is going to change the mechanics of ice belts and ice belt spawns, the available supply of POS fuel that exists in highsec isn’t going to dramatically increase, though. Surging demand and a topped-out supply only means one thing: a price increase. And, I’m betting, a big one. Can that demand be met? Yep, but only by exporting more ice or fuel blocks out of nullsec. With the refinery changes chronicled in the first blog, it’s now clear that there will be a) way more ice products in nullsec than highsec and b) a cheaper manufacturing tree in nullsec compared to highsec. Suddenly, nullsec fuel block fabrication looks pretty lucrative to me. So that’s been my focus for the last week: mining ice. It’s something Kym is really, really good at, and a cheap, well-fit procurer can mine ice nearly as well as a much pricier Mackinaw. It’s less likely to be targeted, too. So bring on the ice! The plan is to build and sell Amarr and Caldari blocks on the local market (assuming they sell), and try to work on exporting blocks to nearby highsec too, and hopefully capitalize on that increased demand. I say nearby highsec because blocks are bulky, and I bet folks would rather pay a bit more than haul millions of bulky blocks out of Jita or Amarr. I guess we’ll see what happens. It’s Eve, it’s always unpredictable, and that’s what makes it fun.

Cue the AFK Campers

It’s been about a week since the last blog post and, to be perfectly honest, it’s been boring as hell from an industrial perspective. The market has been totally dead, and nearly my entire inventory (even the missiles) sat. My prices weren’t the problem, nor my selection, etc. It was just a dead week. Why? Theories abound. Spring break. Warmer weather (somewhere). Natural cycles. Or perhaps the afk campers in my constellation nearly all week drove people away, to play Eve in other systems and other regions. I know that’s what I did.

All of the missiles built this week, roughly 200,000 of them, were hauled to Amarr or Jita and sold there for a decent profit. The Orca was completed a few hours ago, and Kym will be able to fly it next week, but that pretty much concludes the highlights in North Provi. Aside from flying back to check on stuff, I hung out in Gallente highsec grinding distribution and storyline missions, mined highsec ice, and did other such boring things. And after a week of that, I’m bored. These campers need to leave.

Reds coming and going into the home system are one thing, and a part of nullsec life. Interceptor gangs, gate camps, and the like are all fine by me. Hotdroppers suck, but they’re part of the game too. What drives me crazy are people who come to the system, cloak up, and leave. They go afk for quite literally the entire day. There is nothing anybody can do about it either. No game mechanic exists to uncloak these people. It ruins the experience for players, and there is absolutely no recourse. Is that really what CCP wants? Somebody going afk for hours at a time, with literally no way for folks to do anything about it? I realize this is a tired topic, but it’s been at the forefront of my mind while playing Eve this week. These people suck. In every other part of the game, there is some sort of recourse for dealing with people. Not this situation though. That needs to change.

Cloaking as a game mechanic isn’t bad. There are valid uses for it. Sitting AFK for an entire day isn’t one of them. Aren’t folks in Eve supposed to hate AFK-ers? The highsec miners, the autopiloting freighters, the drone-assist PvP fleets, and everyone else who undocks, goes into space, and walks away? Why do the cloaky AFK-ers get a free pass when the miners, and everybody else, don’t? It’s been described as a form of botting, of shutting down the ability of people to play the game- and this is the important part- with nothing that anybody can do about it.

That’s gotta change. And it’s really a simple, simple change. First, put a timer on the cloak. Make it an hour. Or two. Whatever. At the end of that timer, the ship stays cloaked. However, it can be scanned down by a T2 Destroyer. Not the Light Interdictor hulls, but a new shiptype. Call it whatever you’d like. A hunter-killer of sorts. It’d be based off of the other racial destroyer hulls, like the Algos, etc. Let it be the sole ship that can fit a new probe launcher, one that can launch probes that’ll find cloaked ships whose timers have run out. Problem solved. People won’t be able to AFK for the whole day any more. I suspect these ships would sell quickly, too. Which will give me something new to build. I think they would be quite popular.

If you like this idea, share the blog! Tell others! It's the player base that drives change in Eve, after all.

Hard Left

I might be re-tooling my shipbuilding plans a bit.

No, I’m not talking about building different hulls for the market. That’s not going to change any time soon, although I actually anticipate some expansion past the current stable of Gallente hulls that I build for North Provi. I’m talking about the plans that I’ve got for my own personal ships. Right now, the largest ship that I’ve got for moving completed ships, modules, rigs and ammo from my manufacturing center to the trade hub is an Iteron V.

Feel free to laugh, I frequently chuckle at the huge discrepancy between Kym’s respectable ability to build stuff, and the anemic logistical capabilities that I’ve given her. There has been a plan in the works for a couple of months to build an Obelisk to haul stuff around with, but to be perfectly honest, I’ve never been completely ok with my plan, mostly because flying a 1B+ freighter around in nullsec is asking for trouble. Even though the plan was to only move stuff with it once or twice a week, and only through a jump bridge at that, it still didn’t quite sit well with me. Plus, I still didn’t get any highsec logistical gains with the freighter- moving it around through nullsec and out to highsec a lot pretty much guarantees a gank, so I planned to simply keep it in null 100% of the time. This plan left me with a very expensive hunk of metal that, in all honesty, wasn’t going to be used to its natural capacity.

Why the freighter in the first place? In a word: hulls. Even packaged, a cruiser is 10,000 m³. A battleship, which I occasionally build for special orders, is 50,000m³- more than an Iteron V can fit, not that I’d want to haul a battleship in an Iteron to begin with. Kym also can’t fly every ship in the game, and I don’t really feel like wasting the time and ISK to train all the subcaps at this point. Not to mention, I’m not building or moving ships one at a time anymore. So the idea for the Obelisk became a reality, and for the last couple of months I’ve been assembling capital parts.

Now that I’m approaching the point where it’s time to assemble the whole hull (capital ships are made from dozens of smaller, previously assembled components, which then get combined into the final ship), I find myself balking a little bit at the plan, and today decided to give it a bit of a revamp after checking out Eve University’s wiki. If you’ve never been, it is probably the best source of information out there for Eve. I find myself frequently going back to read stuff, and it’s taught me a lot about the game. Anyways, back to the post.

I still plan to build the Obelisk, but instead of using it to ferry hulls and whatnot in null, it’ll be flown out to highsec where it belongs and used for stuff out there. In its place, I’m going with an Orca for the nullsec logistics. Why I didn’t choose this plan initially is beyond me, but oh well. What’s done is done, and there isn’t any wasted time or ISK, just a jumbled order of completing things. The Orca’s got a few advantages over the Obelisk, anyways. Cost is the obvious one. I think the hull can be assembled for less than half of the cost of the freighter- and most of the parts for the Orca are already laying around, as they had been built for the Obelisk (there’s a lot of crossover between the hulls). So, it’d be easy to switch gears from that perspective. Training time is a lot less, too- maybe a week from this posting, Kym could be flying the ship. The Obelisk is still about a month away. The Orca can be fitted to have a cargo hold in excess of 100,000 m³ (the primary hold- not the specialized ones)- enough to haul 2 battleships at once, or a multitude of other hulls. 100,000 m3 would be enough cargo capacity for my logistical needs. The ore hold might be a plus once the summer expansion rolls around, too.

Lastly, the Orca is around 25% of the mass of the Obelisk- using the jump bridge shouldn’t  anger the owners nearly as much, since  a battleship’s mass is about half of the Orca’s, and those jump though all the time. Maybe I’ll even set up boosts with the Orca at some point- just not right now.

So I guess I went from building one capital ship to building a pair, it would seem. I'm not quite sure how long it’ll take to get both of them completed, but I think it’ll be exciting to be flying something bigger than that Iteron V  I’ve had for the last 6 months.

Where, oh Where, did my Yield Go?

I think it's been about a week since the DevBlog "Reprocess all the Things" went up, and I've had some time to reflect on the proposed industry changes that are coming down the pipe with the summer expansion. As someone whose only character is a nullsec industrialist, I'm mostly a fan of the changes that CCP is implementing, and I see their reasoning behind it. The question now becomes, how does this affect how Kym does business in North Provi?

Let's start with the negative, just to get that out of the way: Scrapmetal Processing. That's a huge nerf, with the maximum yield for reprocessing loot going from 100% with everything trained perfectly, etc, down to, if I read the blog correctly, 55%. Wow. Suddenly all of that crappy loot is going to be worth about half of what it's currently worth. It's definitely time to clear out the hangars of anything remotely worth melting down. This affects salvagers immensely, and I imagine it'll affect ratters, too. I understand the logic behind such a huge kick in the teeth- CCP wants module compression to go. There is a lot of collateral damage to that decision, though. Folks who don't do, and oftentimes have no idea about, module compression are catching it in the shorts with no way out. I hope CCP revisits this in the future and lets these folks have some sort of option- perhaps the soon-to-be-pointless Rorqual could now reprocess all loot at high efficiency, and let it serve as something else besides a glorified booster and paltry jump freighter. Let it reprocess in siege mode, thereby keeping the fuel and time requirements. This won't impact the smaller salvagers much, but it'll keep the module compression folks bottlenecked.

So that's what i disliked. Everything else about the industry changes sounded good, though. I won't discuss them explicitly here, since that's being done elsewhere. Like I mentioned, the big question for me now is, what changes? Every character in Eve is unique, and the changes affect everyone a little differently. For Kym, doing the math leads to an interesting conclusion.

Kym's got decent refining skills. Everything that gets mined on a regular basis gets refined with zero waste at the Minmatar outpost that currently has its base yield at 40%. Her skills are at level IV for most ores that she mines, and a week of training could get the other ores there easily. She doesn't have every single last ore skill highly trained, though- there is ore that I hardly ever mine or place buy orders for, because there is something more useful or valuable instead. Also, Kym's not a miner- she's an industrialist, who's got mining and salvaging as a fallback career. So there was never a plan to maximize all of those skills to V. Anyways, Level IV, plus a 2% implant, gives a perfect yield of 97.5%, which is the highest possible yield (there's a 2.5% tax levied) at the outpost.

That all changes with the summer expansion. That Minmatar outpost is now going to (I believe) have a base refine yield of 57%, assuming it doesn't get one final upgrade to 60%. The "new 100%" is 86.8%- that's going to be the highest possible, with the upgraded outpost, level V skills, and a 4% implant. Kym doesn't have that right now, but I'm not going to focus too much on that in this post. Instead, I'm wondering if I should refine anything at all at the outpost, or whether I should just anchor an Intensive Reprocessing Array at a POS, and refine there. Here are the relevant numbers: The POS would refine at a base of 54%, and the array assumes Kym has perfect refine skills (scary POS code is the TL;DR on way that's the case). The outpost would refine at a base of 57%, and take into consideration Kym's skills, but also charge a 2.5% tax. In order for the outpost to be a better option, I'd need to train the relevant skills to V, which for the ores that I commonly mine means about a month of total training time, give or take. With that extra month of training, the outpost would give me an extra 0.5% yield, compared to the POS. If the summer expansion were released tomorrow, it would make more sense to refine at the POS. 

Follow all that? Essentially, because of the 2.5% tax, the outpost as it exists right now is only going to ever be 0.5% better than the POS. Upgrade the implant, you say? It applies to both the POS and the outpost. Is it worth it to me to spend a month of training to get that extra 0.5%? Right now, that is doubtful. The whole risk/reward also needs to be considered here, too. Warping to a station in Provi is nearly always more dangerous than warping to a POS. Reds go there first, and generally stay away from a POS (fleets aside, but I'm talking about the everyday roaming solo and gang pilots). The minerals also need to end up in the POS eventually, anyways, in order to build stuff. Taking ore to the station and then hauling, again, up to the POS just doesn't seem worth it for that extra 0.5% and month of training time. I can think of a million things I'd rather be training for a month than refining skills to get a 0.5% boost. 

Sounds like I've made up my mind, doesn't it? The outlier here is alliance command- if the outpost gets upgraded from 57% to 60%, then that's a difference of 3.5% compared to the POS- also known as seven times more than 0.5%. In that case, I think spending the month to train V's will be a better return on the time investment. I guess we'll see. For the time being, I think I'm going to hedge and buy that array. If others out there are doing the math, and are arriving at the same conclusion as me, maybe I should buy ten and wait for the price to increase as demand inevitably rises.

:-)

Just a Ho-Hum Week

It's been a fairly ho-hum week, with the market basically sitting still for most of Kym's items in North Provi, so it's been a fun time to catch up on some other stuff and go looking for deals in highsec- one of my favorite pastimes in the game. I scored some cheap minerals in the Devoid and Tash-Murkon regions and successfully got them back to Provi while eluding an Astero tail that Kym picked up somewhere along the Devoid/Tash-Murkon border. Thank goodness for the trio of Hypervelocity Optimizer rigs and the nanos on my Kryos; the Astero never could quite catch up before I hit the jump bridge.

A couple of updates on projects are in order, I think. The resetting of the Thorax hull price has been wildly successful; although the three hulls that I "anchored" at a high price haven't sold (which was expected), everyone else has realigned their prices as a result, and they are finally selling at a reasonable 20% margin. I think my next step is going to involve building another batch and selling them at a price that will compete with the now-reasonable sell orders. I'll still keep the first "anchor" sell order though so folks don't start crashing the market again. It's sort of an aggressive market move to have two sell orders out for the same thing at once, but since it's pretty clear that all of the current Provi Thorax builders are just chasing and pricing off of each other instead of their costs, this is pretty much the only move available to me. Oh well. 

The other project has been the t2 HAM missiles. This has been fun. Although the missiles aren't selling instantly, they are selling fast, and I'm not really able to stockpile them. So while it has been a slow week for other stuff, Kym's been churning out HAM ammo like crazy- and that Augmentation decryptor has definitely paid off in terms of faster build times. Since the missiles are occupying an entire Ammo Array for production, I went and anchored a second so other folks can still build stuff, too. I can see why folks don't like to build these things, though- lots of stuff goes into them. There's the standard assortment of asteroid minerals, but there's also some moon mat stuff like Phenolic Composites, some t2 components, and some PI materials. All for a t2 missile.

Speaking of PI, this week I've finally gotten back into the swing of doing Planetary Interaction (PI) in Eve. It's great, nearly passive ISK but I got really burned out on it about two months back when my corp needed a second tower and we figured we could build it. Most folks don't know this, but all POS structures are built from PI materials. A tower, for instance, requires some of each P4 material, usually a few dozen of each one. P4s are also a huge, royal pain to fabricate- look it up and you'll see why. Anyways, Kym doesn't have an alt, and I ended up building the majority of the tower myself (other corp members did help, I don't feel burned by them or anything. That's just how it turned out, so there's no drama here). The constant switch of resources and routing everything really taxed the limits of my patience for a video game, though, and once the tower was done I didn't even want to look at my planets any more, much less interact with them.

That changed with the t2 HAM though. I need Rocket Fuel (a P2 material) to build the t2 missiles, and that means buying it or building it. So I started building it on my storm planet again, and that let me creep back into PI without wanting to rage quit. I don't have any plans to build another tower, though. Ever.

That's all for now, folks. Enjoy the weekend.

At Mineral Cost

Kym gets requests to build all manner of things in Eve, and from time to time she's asked to build something "at mineral cost". What does this mean, exactly? The more I source, build, and sell things, the more I realize there are multiple ways to define exactly what "mineral cost" is. 

Mineral prices vary all over New Eden. I've seen Tritanium selling for anywhere from the high 3s to the mid 6s, and I've seen buy orders for less than that (which apparently are being filled by miners who don't know any better). Every other mineral has similar volatility. So how does someone calculate what "mineral cost" really is?

I'm sure the standard answer here is "use the Jita prices". Eve Central keeps the going rates for the seven main minerals pretty up to date in all of the major trade hubs, and accessing those prices is quite simple. Even using Jita prices presents a problem though: should I use the sell prices, or the lower buy prices? If I use the sell prices, that doesn't accurately reflect what I spent to acquire those minerals. But, if I were to use the buy prices, it would undervalue what I could sell those same minerals for, too- if I didn't build with them. I'm purposely not including the taxes here, because when something gets built "at mineral cost" it's either being station traded (if I really trust the person) or more often through private contracts. Realistically, the Jita prices don't even reflect what "mineral cost" is, though- because Kym is nowhere near Jita, and isn't hauling minerals halfway across New Eden to build something.

The local mineral market isn't the Jita mineral market. Tritanium sell orders are, at a minimum, 5 ISK. The other bulk minerals, Pyerite and Mexallon, are similarly inflated, while the "rare" minerals are often cheaper than highsec. This is because there are lots of "rare" ores in null and comparatively less common ores than the ratios in highsec (Welcome to null. There are lots of shiny things here.). So that's the first difference. The second difference is volume- If my buy orders for minerals don't fill fast enough, I have to either buy them, mine them, or fly around highsec and haul them. Or wait. All of these things add to the cost. See how complex this gets?

After mulling all of this over for quite some time, I've figured out what works for me. When I calculate my "mineral cost", I do it at the highest price that I would personally pay for the minerals- what is typically the reasonable sell order price in my local market. This means that my "mineral cost" is actually higher than what I paid for those minerals, in most cases. I always check my calculated cost against the local & Jita market prices, and in almost every case, it's still much less than what the item goes for on the market. The one exception I've noticed is in battleships- sometimes they're being sold at ridiculously low prices. To me, that means the seller is either looking to unload assets, or has access to really cheap Tritanium (most battleships use around 10 million trit for a single hull and trit's often the single biggest cost).

I feel this is a fair strategy, especially when I consider what the people would do if I didn't build for them. They could buy it on the market for more, try to find another builder (which they're free to do), or build it themselves. The last option is where skilling and investment come into play. Unless they have the "Production Efficiency" skill trained all the way to V (I think that skill might be named "Material Efficiency" now), they'll have at least 5% more in material costs than Kym, and maybe as much as 25% more in material costs if it's not trained at all. That's a lot, especially on larger hulls or if they want lots of one item. They'd also need a BPO or a BPC, and that costs ISK and time to find, buy, and research. 

Sometimes I feel a bit bad about calculating mineral cost like this, since there is a net gain in my wallet, but perhaps I should realize that if I calculated everything at my buy order prices, I'd risk taking a loss if the mineral price jumped and I had to buy the next round of minerals for my own production at a higher cost than I just paid. Then again, maybe I'm being selfish. Someone let me know!