The long and the short of it

After trying longer extraction times, the average across all my planets is that 7 day extraction times produce the equivalent of 2.7 days worth of materials if I was running 24h extraction times. So just over a third the amount of materials. That puts every planet at under 1m isk per day. Across the two characters that's still be over 250m isk a month at almost zero effort.

I did that through necessity (away for a week without Eve access) but it was also a useful exercise. It's clear which planets had seemed good but in fact I was extracting from "nuggets" which have now disappeared, and which planets are genuinely good planets. Nuggets are temporary pockets of resources which don't renew but once they're extracted, they're gone. It definitely takes a few days to see what's what on planets - patience is a virtue when it comes to PI (and Eve generally, really).

There are 4 or 5 planets of my 12 that I'm going to change based on their output so far. That means losing out on having my own supply on a couple of POS fuels, but that's business - my aim to to maximize revenues, not look after my own supply. It's not like I'm in a wormhole - my POS is in high sec where there's no risk attached to hauling POS fuels, and no shortage of sellers either.

PI setups

So far my PI has been largely around producing P2. Typical inital setup is:

• 2 x ECU
• 4 x Basic Industry Processor
• 2x Advanced Industry Processor
• 1 x Launchpad

Everything gets routed to/from the launchpad. There's a screenshot below.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notce there are actually 5 basic processors there. This planet is producing a bit more material than the 4 basic processors would consume, but not a lot more. So my optimised setup is to swap the 5th processor between the two P1 products each day. Note that I don't need to rebuild it, only change the schematic, which is free to do. At some point I will have to build another advanced processor to use up those extra P1, or ship them to another planet to have the P2 manufactured there.

My "best" planet actually has 6 basic and 3 advanced processors, but for most of my planets it's 4 and 2.

I'm also trying out a bit of P1 but that's a pain because of the hauling required. It seems to need emptied every day and a half. Setup is below:

You can see there is only 1 ECU. The 8 basic processors keep pace almost exactly with the 10 extractor heads. Not quite sure how best to optimise this. I have tried adding an extra ECU but then I can only fit on a couple of heads and no processors to actually convert the extra material to P1.

More to come as I optimise the planets more!

PI : week 1

As mentioned I've been experimenting with PI. I've been in high sec space only with two characters (both 5/5 in Interplanetary Consolidation and Command Center Upgrades). PI was only being done for 6 of the 7 days though, since I ended up spending a day moving my operations for reasons I won't bore you with.

So far, I calculated I've produced 80.7m isk worth of materials from PI in the first week. I know I can improve on that.

• That's an average of 1.1m isk per planet per day
• That's low. It took me some time to get exactly the right setup on a planet and get a good balance of materials coming into factories. Now that they are optimized, my planets vary from 1.2m/day to 2.8m/day.
• The worst planet I set up was producing Robotics. I calculated that planet made nearly a loss of 1.5m isk per day compared to selling the Mechanical Parts and Consumer Electronics that I was feeding it. Without that planet I would have an average of 1.3m per planet per day.

So that's the results, what have I learnt (and what can you learn) and what's the next steps in the experiment?

• P1 products seem to be the best so far, better than P0 or P2 (although I have not experimented with P3 or P4). "Optimized" planets producing P1 vary from 1.5m/day to 2.8m/day
• Variation in the "isk per day" amount comes not only from what is being produced but also the individual planets can vary quite a lot in terms. For example, I have 2 planets producing the same P1 but one makes about 300 units/day and one makes only around 220/day.
• So the next challenge is to replace the low value planets by a combination of moving planets and/or changing what is produced.
• This means a bit of market research on the items (always a good thing to do before you start, I would have avoided the costly Robotics mistake). This looks like a very interesting tool produced by player Wyke Mossari.
• However, there seems to be no easy way to determine "better" planets. The planets I mentioned (one producing 300 and one only producing 220) seem almost identical in terms of concentration of minerals. Competition may be a factor, I may just be in a bad spot, planet size may play a role... naturally I'll blog about it once I do a bit more research on this.

If each planet was making 2m isk/day, that would be enough on its own to pay for PLEX for both characters and play the game without real life cash. I'm going to make this the objective of my experiment.

Back at the coalface

After taking a bit of a break from posting and Eve, I'm back doing both. Since there's some new Planetary Interaction (PI) stuff, I thought I'd give that a try for my first month back. I've got 2 characters that can do PI and they're both based in high security space. Naturally I'll post the results here and also any tips I discover and so on. I'm starting with producing POS fuels and also some products required in tech II production.

I have to say the new PI interface is a big improvement, a lot less clicking and more flexibility. However, it does seem that you need the greater flexibility, the resources which never seemed to really diminish to any great degree in the "old" PI now seem to get mined out quite quickly so there is a need to move extractors around more in the new system. Overall though, a (tiny) bit more thought required and a lot less wrestling with the UI are both good things in my opinion.

Lastly, nothing to do with PI but the new character generator produces great results. As always on this blog, my main and my industrial alt will not be displayed but below is my forum character (also the character associated with this blog), the delightful and somewhat cynical Princess Strawberry.

Planetary Interaction markets emerge

I'm going to examine two categories for PI products: POS fuels and components for tech 2 production.

POS fuels: Coolant, Oxygen (P1), Mechanical Parts, Robotics (P3)
Tech 2 production materials: Construction blocks, Consumer Electronics, Guidance Systems (P3), Mechanical Parts, Miniature Electronics, Robotics (P3), Rocket Fuel, Superconductors, and Transmitters.

Both Robotics and Mechanical Parts fall into both categories. Unless otherwise noted, all of the products are P2. There's a slideshow below with comments, and you can click on the graphs to see a larger image.







Broadly, this follows the pattern for new markets from in my previous post (required reading if you're going to make the most of this post, sorry!). This is most evident if you look at the Superconductors, where the player-driven market actually started a bit early in this region, since there were no NPC sell orders. The hoarding and buying/selling between players started when Tyrannis was announced, not when the patch actually happened.

So what can we take from this as a guide to prices?

• We can probably exect to see the "normal" new market price patterns
• The trouble is, with many of the materials it's hard to know right now if they are going to continue to rise (i.e. we have not reached the high point of the initial peak yet) or start to decline
• Volumes traded are VERY much lower than previously
• Interestingly, you can see from some (it's most noticable on Guidance Systems) that volume traded is almost zero and yet the price pattern remains the same! This I find very interesting - the price pattern is down to buyer/seller psychology and apparently not dependent on any significant trading occuring. Interesting for me anyway, doesn't have that much real impact on the actual market.
•  I predict volumes will only return slowly and may never reach the levels they were at before. This is partly because of hoarding, and partly because POS owners and tech 2 producers will have set up their own supply chains. I know I have.
• I think what we'll see is a flattened out version of my "new market" pattern, with a fairly bumpy ride along the way. Like so:

 

Where it's "bumpy" (especially in the coming few months where I predict prices will stay at the higher end but fluctuate pretty wildly) there is money to be both made and lost through speculation, but I would describe this as a high risk strategy. Your best time for speculation was before the market started - I did that, I only regret that I only sunk a few tens of millions into buying up NPC goods, and not hundreds of millions.

Since blog posting is limited for space and I have only finite time available to me, I haven't done all the analysis I could (note: I'm a market analyst in real life). There is one particular thing you might think is missing, but it actually would not form part of my analysis anyway. It's production costs. Largely, I do not care about production costs in my analysis. In a free market, it does not matter what you'd like to sell your product for, the market will decide what it's worth. Also, profits based on production costs at a time when every component is rapidly changing price on a daily basis are really quite arbitrary figures.

That is why I have chosen to specifically look at these products - because they are an end product in themselves with value, not merely a production material for a larger process. Those other PI products which are (in effect) just materials are likely to have their price dictated to by the ultimate price of the new player-built POS structures, and it's far too early to see how that might shake out.

However, if you do want to look at (what I would call arbitrary) costings, then someone did a good job on the forums. Eve forums post. It's an interesting analysis but since I believe the market wil dictate prices, I can't help but agree with one of the comments by another poster: "Friendly advice from someone involved in RL trading: make your tools follow the market, not the market follow the tools." Couldn't have said it better myself.

New Market, Old Pattern

One of the things I often look at in my job as a market analyst is the emergence of new markets. With Eve's new expansions every 6 months or so, this means some new markets on a regular basis. The last big expansion brought new items from wormholes, which seeded the market for components required in tech 3 item production, and the most recent expansion brought with it planetary interaction (PI) which also opened up new markets for players.

Firstly, in real life markets, there is a typical pattern to the cost of goods over time, shown in the graph below.

 New product categories typically sell for a high price initially. This is driven by a number of factors such as:

• scarcity
• new product categories are often seen as "premium"
• cost of manufacture tends to be higher until the market establishes itself and (if the product category is successful) economies of scale start to come into play
• Early markets are closer to a monopoly, so competition effects do not come into play immediately

As the market grows in volume, more companies start to make the product and competition ultimately also drives the price down.

Eve is slightly different since there is almost no scope for economies of scale to come into play, but manufacturing costs tend to be driven down in a similar way - components for production of new items are often introduced at the same time as the new products (for example, sleeper salvage and T3 items) and so manufacturing costs come down as the components required become less scarce and follow a similar pattern to the one shown in the graph.

The Market for T3

So how does this compare to the market for T3? Are we seeing the same patterns? Yes we are. The graph below shows how that market has developed during its first year.

Unfortunately we've missed the very start of the market by a couple of weeks, but I think you can see that the pattern is what would be predicted. You can pick any of the popular subsystems and you'll see the same pattern.

With unpopular subsystems, since demand is low the market for those items, trends don't work quite the same way but this post is a giant already so I'll deal with that another time.

Planetary Interaction

This is a brand new market, less than a month. It's also somewhat different because most of the items were previously available at a set price (set by the designers of the game). Looking at this market I am seeing a number of unusual dynamics going on (although broadly the pattern is starting off in with somewhat similar shape - prices are still rising to an "initial high" for most PI items). I was intending to write about PI in this post but this is quite long already so I will deal with it in the next day or two.