Wo sind die Industriellen? ¿Dónde están los fabricantes?

Something a little different today. It's been about 3 years that I've had this blog, I thought I'd take a little look at the readership. Where are the industrialists in Eve physically located in the real world?

Top 10:

1. USA: 39%
2. UK: 18%
3. Canada: 6%
4. Germany: 4%
5. Australia: 4%
6. Austria: 3%
7. Sweden: 3%
8. Netherlands: 2%
9. Spain: 2%
10. Finland: 1%
11. Others: 17%

Out of the others, it's Europe (mainly Eastern Europe actually, hello Latvia in 11th place!!) and the only non-European / non-North American country to appear at all is Singapore. Nothing else in Asia, nowhere in Latin America. I know there's a language barrier, but that still surprised me a little. Also a surprise, no France in the top 10? France was waaaay down in 17th place. Unfortunately I also don't know how this stacks up relative to Eve's overall user base, but anyway I thought it was interesting (even if it is a bit of navel-gazing on my part!).

T2 production changes and predictions

Well I'm back playing Eve again. I think over the last year there have been a lot of changes and a decen shift in attitude from CCP regarding listening to players. That plus a decent reactivation offer means I'm giving it a go again.

Been reading up on the forums and it seems like there has been a lot of activity, inflation on minerals and ships especially, Hulkageddon and the Goons are much of the chatter recently. I'll write more on that later, for now a simple post on how all the changes have affected the module I've used as an example previously: the Cap II Recharger.

So, still definitely profitable but not as great as it was in 2011, back to 2010 levels. More costly to build but the price has increased. Costs have gone up quite dramatically, I've analysed that below as well.

A big change in minerals and construction components. Both, it would seem, down to the Goons, or at least in part. Hulkageddon and Burn Jita seem to have provided a either a smokescreen for, or were part of, the mineral market manipulation recently which seems to have been driven by the Goons and followed by many speculators. However, there have also been some quite significant changes to loot drops so CCP's actions have also been a key driver.

OTEC (which includes the Goons and other corps) have driven up the costs of construction components drastically. However, Technetium is so scarce anyway that I wonder how much affect OTEC's market manipulation really had - the trend in price increase seems steady and goes further back than (I believe) OTEC has been attempting to manipulate the market. I could be wrong there, I'm not an insider to OTEC, but it seems to me that the scarcity is the prime reason for the increase and manipulation has only a minor effect.

So looking forwards and making some predictions:

• Will mineral costs change further? Has the market manipulation ended, if not when will it settle? I also see forthcoming changes to the game with ring mining and that will undoubtedly have an impact later in the year. I think by the end of the year, prices will have dropped somewhat but will still not have stabilised.
• PI will continue to fall; I predict that basically the floor's the limit on that since the skills required are low, leading to oversupply. If it weren't for the increased taxation on PI I think prices would be down even further.
• Construction components will continue to rise. There's decent margins in T2 still, basically the market can accommodate a price rise and this is the most scarce building material.
• Datacores I expect to drop in price with the changes to faction warfare LP stores, and looking at the prices recently that market does seem to have turned the corner and prices starting to decline already. However, this decline may be short term and down to users cashing in research points with agents before the nerf, thus flooding the market. I personally am predicting a slight decline though, ending up below Feb 2011 levels.

Strawberry out.

Captain's Quarters make me sad

Incarna has made me completely lose interest. NEX exchange is not interesting, I don't mind one way or the other about microtransactions, but it's not a player-driven market (which is why I play Eve) so it's simply just not of interest. But it's the Captain's Quarters which is truly appalling. It's not often an expansion to a game makes it worse, but CCP has managed it.

As an industrialist, I spend most of my life in stations. My choice is now wait 20-30 seconds for a terrible 3D environment to load every time - a 3D environment which actually lacks the functionality to be usable (for example there is no way to look at your items in a station), or alternatively I can stare at a picture of a door which doesn't open. I don't want to do either, so I'm not. Maybe I'll come back to Eve in the future, right now, no.

Dumb.

Dumberer.

Being profitable isn't enough...

Now that I'm back producing T2 items, I updated my own spreadsheets to check profitability and got cracking on manufacturing the most attractive looking items. More recently I've obviously been trying to sell them, and since I've managed to almost double my output, it strikes me that there's more to building than just choosing the most profitable items. Once you can produce a decent volume, you have to really worry about how fast you can sell.

So I played about with my spreadsheet a bit and came out with this:

To explain as simply as possible:

• The Y axis (side) is just the daily sales volume in Jita. (I changed it into a logarithmic scale only because it's easier to view the output). Further up the graph = higher number of units sold per day.
• The X axis (bottom) is the millions of isk per hour profit I make. This is calculated by dividing the profit of the item by the time it takes to build. Further to the right = more profitable.
• Each little blue diamond is one item I can make. They are not labelled here because I'm not giving away all my secrets! The point of this post is to show you how to build useful tools, not give out freebie advice.

So in the end we have 4 quadrants, high volume/high profit quadrant (top right) containing the best items to make.

The most profitable items don't sell many units per day, so I've got a bit of an overstock of them that will probably take me a while to shift. They end up in the bottom right quadrant - low volume but high profit. I do want to keep manufacturing them, but if I devoted all my slots to that I'd make more than 10 times what I could sell and end up with a lot of T2 stuff hanging around my hangar floor.

Building a spreadsheet like this is extremely helpful when deciding what to manufacture - it wasn't until building this that I can really focus my efforts. If you know how profitable your items are (and you should!) then all you need to do extra is find a source for the volumes. I used Eve Tools. It's really not hard to do.

I hope this sort of analysis helps other budding Eve entrepreneurs!

February in review

The wallet journal downloads seem to have gone a bit wrong (thanks CCP!), which is going to make my corporation reporting a pain. Here's a few basic things this month (it'll probably take me a while before I can do the full reporting I did previously):

• My POS got blown up when I was away, my own fault really, I forgot to refuel. Had to relocate as there were no moons left in my old home, and also buy a new POS. Bummer.
• Despite this I still managed to increase the corp wallet by around 200m isk.
• Partly this was down to dumping my stockpile of PI products, bought back when they were not PI products, for a sizable profit. A one-off divestment to counter my (hopefully) one-off investment in a new POS.
• Other than that I've been doing some PI (and blogging about that this month) and that averaged 1.6m isk per planet per day, 20% below my target although that includes a 7 day cycle.
• Invention is working nicely with the use of base items to boost my chances. I ended up with 62% success rate (112 successes out of 181 attempts to be exact).
• And of course I've also been selling T2 as well, which is generally up in profitability as discussed in the last post.

In summary: a lot of fiddly tasks done (anchoring a POS, much hauling, setting up planets) but things are set up well for March when I should also be able to bring more manufacturing online and work through the backlog of T2 blueprints that the use of base items in invention has allowed me to generate.