Industry Expansions Will Never Happen...

Well, I was going to write something about wormholes, but that can wait.  This happened.  That industry expansion everyone assumed would just never come is coming this summer.  Or at least round one.  I can't wait for the NDA'd minutes to come out and see what level of involvement the CSM had.

There is a lot said in the dev blog linked above, and more to come.  I don't have much to say at this point, because it looks like it will take some time to find out how all of the changes are going to fit together.

Off the top of my head the most exciting parts are:

• Removing wait times on all manufacturing and research.
• POSes in HS will no longer require god-awful standings grinds.
• That interface.

Again, how this all plays out will be interesting to see, but I think the changes to research waiting will really open up the field to players looking to get into industry.  Now you can trade isk for time without building a POS, something that is currently a pretty big advantage for older players with the skills to research outside HS, or set up POSes to research, or who had stacks of BPOs researched to high levels.  Now instead of waiting to build a POS or waiting for queues, players can just get researching as soon as they buy the BPO.  The copy mechanics changes, shortening the time to copy BPOs, will also make positioning of all aspects of the process more interesting.

I am excited to learn more.  Looks like I might have alts doing a fair amount of research this summer...

PI Challenge - Final Results (Edited to Respond to Mabrick)

Edit:  Mabrick responded to this post, and I want to share/respond to some of his thoughts, as I may have not been clear about some things. 

• I made isk, 134m isk specifically.  I did not lose any money on this.  HS PI will MAKE YOU ISK!
• In Mabrick's initial post, he gives a specific skill set.  I DID NOT use this skill set.  I tried to note this below, and in the previous posts, giving my skills, and revised estimates for how much might be earnable.
• Even given the above, based on my experience, Kao's results, and Mabrick's own writing, I stand by my claim: Mabrick's original and revised amounts per month, and my own revised amount per month, are false given the current state of PI in High Sec.
• I did wholeheartedly try to make as much as possible, and was in no way trying to sabotage Mabrick's claims.  I only wanted to test them.
• I am in no way opposed to the "passive" playstyle.  I have an alt that only does industry, and did this challenge.  It is my opinion that for a brand new player, however, spending the first 2 months of the game training skills that are entirely passive is not the best use of time, nor the best way to make isk.  Each player will have their own take on that, I only tried to explain why I thought other uses of your first 2 months might be better for a new bro.

I would like to give a HUGE thank you to Mabrick for being the impetus of this project, and for engaging in conversation on both ends of the project.  Go read his blog, but more importantly, go buy his stuff in game!

I began the 30 day PI challenge on 3/8/2013, Eve time.  I just sold off all the excess product I had as of 02:09, 4/8/2013 Eve time.  That's just over 1 month of in-game production time.  I had 2 days where mis-clicks in the interface stopped production on a planet, but I also ran R0>P1 production starting on 3/5/2013, so I will call it a wash.  Here are the final results of my efforts:

The net profit after 30 days was 134.7m isk.  In his original challenge, Mabrick claimed that a new player, trained to the skills listed below could make 500m isk in 30 days, in High Sec:

• Planetology to Level IV
• Command Center Upgrades to Level V
• Interplanetary Consolidation to Level V
• Advanced Planetology to Level III

I modified the challenge to shoot for 50%-75%, or 250m to 375m isk, with the following skills:

• Planetology to Level IV
• Command Center Upgrades to Level IV
• Interplanetary Consolidation to Level IV
• Advanced Planetology to Level III

At this time, unless there is information I am missing, or there is something I did fundamentally wrong, I am going to say Mabrick was considerably overestimating how much High Sec PI can produce in both cases.  Even ignoring the costs of setup, which would not be present in subsequent months after starting a high sec PI setup, profit would still only reach roughly 175m.  I derive that by subtracting the Planetary Construction costs from the Total Revenues.  Taxes would still have to be paid.

Mabrick's Original and Modified Hypotheses: False, by a long shot.

It is important to note that I did make 134m isk.  Based on the claims, I was just hoping for better!

*****

Commentary and opinion time.

Let's look at a different metric, return on investment, or the ROI.  Simply put, ROI is your profit over your costs.  In my case this is about 208m in revenue over 74m in costs.  That gives an ROI of 2.82.  I made 2.82 times what I spent over the course of this project.  Let's compare that to my 30 day market challenge.  I invested 5m isk, and ended up making 1461.8m isk.  That's an ROI of 292.36.  For a little more effort each day.

Let's look at another option.  My skill-set takes about 13 days to train, and made 134m isk in one month.  In two months, the training time for Mabrick's skill queue, you could roughly train a given race's Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, and Battelcruiser, and the racial medium weapon system and support skills to 4, along with Drones 5.  I strongly doubt that extra planet and level of CCUs in Mabrick's plan will add ~370m to the total.  If we look at my setup and add 1 planet at the same rates, we are talking ~30m more isk.  Given synergies of upgrading product, lets round up the monthly profit to 200m.  How does this compare to missioning one level 4 a day?

Throw in another 3.5 days, and you can have Salvaging 4.  In two months you would be able to grind up to level 4 missions, and salvage them, getting 10-25m isk per mission, along with LP. 5-10 missions would get you the same net profit as my month of PI.  In a Drake, a level 4 takes about 45 minutes per mission. Do one mission per day, with salvage, and I would wager you will make at least twice what my PI efforts made, and possibly more if you are lucky and smart about selling the salvage.  Buy some basic rig BPOs that require no research, and you would do even better.  Of course, that would entail extra industrial training, but not 2 months worth.  More like a week to get to a decent point to make small rigs.

The point of my comparisons is this:  PI in high sec will make you some money, this is absolutely true.  It is also boring, tedious, and less profitable than almost any other active play style.  For a brand new character, taking 2 months to train PI skills is an utter waste of time.  A smaller, modified schedule might do some good, and strike a balance between passive income and active income.  If you are a new player and have access to nullsec or WH space, this may differ.  But you need a lot of specialized equipment to survive in WH space.  And the two months of PI training is time you won't spend getting the skills for those ships.

I would recommend any new player to train their ship, fitting, and turret/missile skills before embarking on a long PI train.  At the end of the day, Eve is about internet spaceships, and having fun in those.  Most of the rewarding parts of the game were built around being in space and doing things.  If and when you feel that you can take a break from the "core" skills, invest some time in PI.  It will make you a bit on the side.  But unless you are in the situation where you have access to extremely rich planets (read: not HS), 2 months of PI training is not going to get you as much as almost any other training program you could follow.

Mabrick's PI Challenge Day 1

I set up all the planets for the challenge, 3 barren, 2 lava, and have the production planet going.  I also have a sheet set up to track the costs by line item.  I loves me some Excel!  Without further ado, here are the costs incurred in buying the command centers, setting up the planets (including a few mistakes in placing and rebuilding PI buildings), and transferring the first production loads from the resources planets to the production planet (also including one mistake):

The Customs Office interface is still horrible, and you can easily transfer crap back to a planet when you think you are loading it to your ship.  Why?  Because CCP decided that the CO inventory screen should not be part of the unified inventory.  That's great.  That cost me about $500k isk.  Remember to open your ship inventory and drag the items from to CO to there, and not hit the Transfer button.

The PI interface still leaves important info out of the equation when placing buildings.  So if you click the wrong facility, you cannot check what it makes until after you spend the money on it once you are in that process.  Yes, I could right click, show info, and then choose and place it.  Perhaps the Build Panel could include a PX > PY note right on the screen.  So be careful if you are setting this stuff up.

Accounting note:  My production planet came online on Eve-day 3/8/13, so the challenge will run until I sell products made withing 30 days of 3/8/13.

Precocious Pod-Dweller Planetary Puzzle Day -1

As mentioned, I am giving Mabrick's proposition a shot.  From the latest post, there a few things I am unsure of, namely, if his 500m isk/month claim was based in HS or WH space.  But, here are the conditions of my experiment:

• Skills:  
• Command Center Upgrades 4 
• Interplanetary Consolidation 4 
• Planetology 2 
• Remote Sensing 3
• Production
• Final Product: Robotics
• Planets:
• 2 Barren R0 > P1
• 2 Lava R0 > P1
• 1 Barren Production Planet P1 > P3
• All planets are in one High Sec system with standard Customs Office rates.

A few other notes.  I am not taking up the challenge as presented mainly because I don't want to move the alt, and it has about 30m skill points.  Those are almost entirely in mining, production, and recently combat.

Here are the Planetary Management skills, IC 4 will be done soon:

Here are the planets, pending the production planet due to IC 4:

Here is the pattern used for all of the R0 > P1 planets:

You'll notice that the extractors are much further from storage than Mabrick indicates.  This is because HS planets have crap for resource distribution, so the R0 > P1 chain is located central to the hotspots I judged to be closest together on each planet.  Notice the bands I used on the scanner, to give you an idea of the resource density here:

Mabrick contends that something around 500m isk is viable each month.  Many readers disagreed.  Given my skills, I'll shoot for 50%-75% of his estimate.  Thats 250m to 375m isk in one month.  I'll start my timer from the day I get the production planet up and running.  I am going to have ~2 days of P1 production already created by the time that happens, but given the nature of resource depletion, I'll use them and consider it to be a wash.

Initial Costs:

• Setup of 4 planets with level 5/6 Command Centers: $23,720,000.03.

My Daddy Was Tritanium Miner Like His Daddy Before Him...

I never thought mining, drones or salvaging would become the hot topic they have lately.  To read the blogs, you would think Eve is going to implode in a few weeks...  But oh what a beautiful implosion it shall be.  A few things about the incoming changes.

Short Term
Buy you gear now.  I mean it.  I've been quietly building a small stockpile of minerals, and the value is increasing just by letting it sit.  Weapons, modules and ammo haven't caught up yet, ships are already starting to.   Thinking of moving to that WH?  Buy your Drakes, Retrievers and haulers now.  Maybe some fuel...  I think in a few weeks weeks you'll be wishing you laid in supplies for a hot summer.  Speaking of which...

Update Your Queue
Want to gank some shiny hulks?  Best get those last few skills ready now.  I predict miners are going to be hiding for most of the summer.  Better get in on the initial kills, because Hulks are already ~50 mil more than they were this time last year.  Can't wait to see the price on those pop up over 300 or 400 mil.  Want to be ready for the clear(ish) skies after Hulkageddon?  That takes a bit of training.  And if you want to use those minerals you will eventually be mining.....

Research
Want to cash in on resupplying all those ships and mods?  Get your BPOs or BPCs before that chain gets hit like a brick.  You know those manufacturers are going to have a field day trickling out the nuts and bolts of New Eden, so you might want to have your own supply chain going, and get a jump on some of the slots if you are a high-sec-er.  And if you make a lot of your cash from salvage...

Inventory
Take a look at your hangars.  Do you need all that stuff?  Is your Noctis worth hanging on to?  Have you moved things to useful locations?  If Jita goes down and the minerals dry up, a lot of things are going to change.  Hulkageddon often has casualties beyond just the barges in the belts.  Should you start stocking up on things you know will sell if a few weeks/months?

A lot of markets are going to change soon, so you better get out in front of the changes, or get ready to pay a bit more for your bottles of Space Perrier, er, Quafe.

PI Redux

I recently moved back to the same chunk of space where my PI installations are.  I never took them down, so I decided to visit those command centers, clean out the warehouses and reemploy my minions of production.  Mostly I wanted to see if my predictions of doom and gloom were actually true.

Well, they mostly weren't.  The reactivated planets are pulling in a nice little profit, even with the new taxes.  I think it may even be more profitable than before, but I can't be arsed at this point to dust of the spreadsheets and try and do the analysis at this point.  However there is still the sticker shock of looking at that export fee!  <<834,456.00 ISK>> to get a small pile of plasmoids, yeouch!

The export fees do represent a little bit more of a barrier to casual players who may be cashed-strapped though.  Getting your planet set up costs a few millions, usually, and I wonder how many players have set up a planet and then come to pick up the goods only to be oddly disappointed and discouraged by the taxes...  Perhaps the costs could be defrayed by installing a planetary shuttle structure and shifting costs to the actual running of the PI structures (like manufacturing)?  You sacrifice a little PG/CPU to skirt the NPCCO/POCO by running a private shuttle network?

Regardless, I was partially wrong in my assessment of the changes to PI, but the whole system could still use some work in order to be enjoyable.  I wonder how Dust will interface with PI?  That could be interesting indeed.

KOTM: Turberfield Edition

Of The 843 Exhumers destroyed in Jan 2012, 409 were in high sec, 10 low, 406 null and 18 wormhole space. - CCP Diagoras

If I am reading this correctly, somehow 409 Exhumers were killed by high-sec belt or mission rats in January.  What?  How?  I have a Hulk.  With literally any shield mod you care to throw on that ship, this should not be possible.  You can walk away for fifteen minutes and come back to find a belt full of high-sec rats plinking away at your shields to no avail.

I have no further words for this.


Update:  Apparently 121 of those were in Incursions, I assume doing that mining thing I've heard about.  But that still leaves 288 taken out by other NPCs

Forum: Industrial Might

I'm starting a new feature:  Forum questions, where I ask you to respond to some crazy idea I come up with!  Without further ado, here is my question:

What if a new industrial hull was added that had a slight buff to tanking ability and more turret slots with a negative "bonus" to those turrets?  Something like:

Honey Badger

After years of plying the space lanes, Caldari industrial interests decided to update the tried-and-sometimes-true Badger to take into account the realities of cargo transport in New Eden.  While not intended to pose a true threat, the Honey Badger has a bit more bite than previous versions with the ability  to mount a semblance of firepower, while at a reduced cargo capacity.

Caldari Industrial Skill Bonus:

• 5% bonus to shield resistance
• 5% bonus to cargo capacity and velocity

Role Bonus:

• -25% turret rate of fire

Give it 4/6/3 layout with 4 turret slots, same general stats as the Badger Mk II.

Discuss!