Friday 29 August 2008

Industrial Dilema

Upon checking market prices last night I have ~ 50m ISK worth of salvage. I don't yet have enough of some components to make rigs (and my rig blueprints are unresearched anyhow). My question to myself is should I sell - (as 50m would allow 50m of materials to be purchased to allow my stockpiles for sales to increase to the point I can start manufacturing other items), or should I wait, as I can make a extra profit on manufacture of the rigs. I *need* the 50m stockpile of materials in ~25 days when a certain ship BPO is researched to ML20 as although ships = wafer thin profit, they also equal consistant sales. T1 component sales vary so often that I need to I think I'm going to concentrate on Capacitor control rigs, as if I'm not mistaken these are rather popular?

Oh and someone put a buy-order in for ~ 10,000 units zydrine at my home station. At 3000 ISK. Thats around a 10% market rise since yesterday! Annoyingly there are units for sale at that price on sell orders ~ 4 jumps away so he's just hoping to get someone else to haul.
I've put an order in for another 1000 zydrine... amazing that I'm using 1-2000 zyd a day currently... and also 1000 megacyte. Until recently I didn't use either mineral in day to day production (newer T1 items I'm producing require both in small quantities per item)

A chap I work with in office (but on another continent!) started playing EVE also recently and has been blown away by it all. I think his quote was "This is the game I've been waiting for..." - he's an old school strategy/fps man and is loving the depth complexity of learning how everything fits together. I handed over a load of named loot I keep in reserve for friends + a million isk to get him started on skillbooks, and showed him a level 2 mission and salvagers in operation. Then I gave him some skillbooks and a rough order to train to get some basic "support" and gunnery skills. I'll be updating with his progress over the trial, but I think he'll be signing up for EVE full time. Another convert to the church of EVE.

Thursday 28 August 2008

Mineral availability

Recently I'm having problems getting the quantities of Zydrine and Megacyte I need (at the right prices) for production. Zydrine in particular is causing me production delays as a lot of the modules I produce for market require it in small quantities, and I'm sorry, but I'm not going to pay 3000 isk or higher per unit. My buy orders (best in market price) need monitoring every 6 hours as the shortage seems to be making prices rise by ~200 isk in last week. I used to be able to buy Zyd for ~ 2450, now its 2640 ish...

This doesn't appear to be limited to my region according to this post on the EVE Online forums - can anyone fill me in with any more background to this?

To a lesser extent, Mexallon is also taking a lot longer for best in region buy orders to be fufilled... Are less miners around at the moment?

Can I please ask miners to please help me and fill my daily Zyd, Mex and Megacyte buy orders in the Essence region (I'm generally the highest price)? I would also not be adverse for a direct non-market delivery of minerals per week (thus avoiding sales tax/brokerage for both parties)... remember I'm new at industry so where should I place an advert for such a delivery?

At the moment due to the shortages I'm considering setting my characters up with a new base in an area with higher mineral availability to haul the more expensive minerals back to my current production base. I think hauling is going to become a common thing for my industry character as in addition to the above - I'm probably going to move my production base in the next 4 weeks to a new location. Most places I've found so far don't have the mineral availability and competitive pricing of the Essence market - which potentially means higher profit as all minerals need hauling.

My Industry is now generating ~ 1-2 million isk a day profit after all costs- and I know I'm a small fish in a very big pond, but I'm happy with the growth in 2 months from a corp owning nothing to a corp making profit.... Though I am now extremely limited by the amount of buy/sell orders I currently can have, and I can't see this problem going away anytime soon as when I get Retail to level 5, the next skillbook costs around 65 million!!! So my combat char may be having to train trade/retail up a little (despite the tax etc he'll be charged it may be better for him to put sell orders in for the lower cost products, which generally have a higher % margin (though not profit per item) in any case).

Any tips you experienced industrialists could give me?

Wednesday 27 August 2008

Industrial annoyances in EVE + some suggestions

As an industrialist, 2 things in EVE really annoy.

1/ Downtime delay for items to be returned on cancelled sell orders.

I often have 2/200 items left on market, and a hanger full of replacement items to sell once order expires. This means if I'm away for 20 hours or so, I need to cancel the order, and put the larger quanity on market. When I cancel the sell-order I sometimes have to wait until downtime to get my item back. This doesn't happen everytime, but when it does occur, its annoying. Ditto when a order expires. Its annoying and effectively ties my isk up for ages - or requires me to run a second sell order (meaning I need to leave a few spare to run in parallel).

2/ The 5 minute delay on cancelling an order.

Okay, I admit it I've priced something wrong, or set region wide when I mean system wide. When this happens I don't want to wait 5 mins to cancel. I understand the need for the delay in modifying orders, but I think you should be able to cancel immediately.

Do these annoy you too?

In good news - I'm still buying items priced below my "recycle rate" - thus cheaper minerals than buying even on a buy-order... are people really silly enough not to check the mineral price for an item out prior to putting a sell-order up :) I've found that using market powers, you can force price of an item down to below mineral cost, then suck up all your competitors, up price of your items, and recycle what you've brought for isk, or just keep in stock. On a few items this is quicker than building stuff yourself :) Not that I'd suggest such nefarious market tactics.

Any other suggestions the EVE players of the world can give?

Tuesday 26 August 2008

Missioning

After a out-of-game experience involving paintbrushes, decorating... I got back into game last night.

Time away hadn't hurt DSTIC, in fact, it had meant I had 15 free sell orders (due to items selling), 20 million of ISK (huge for DSTIC to have that amount in wallet, despite the ~200m of assets the corp now has). Production was complicated by fact that pyerite and mexallon mineral levels were too low to be able to produce anything useful to sell, and sell-orders on market were criminally prices. So last night placed buy-orders for 200k Mex, 500k Pye, and 2M trit.. and this morning they were mostly filled - so the fires of industry are rolling again. Brought 4x new blueprints, and they are now in production.

After last weeks missioning led to quick standings gains.. and left DT able to run Level 2 missions, I went on some 2 missions with DP/DT and a trial character called OneStraw who I had met last week... enjoyed playing with him, but gives me a quandary - Should I accept someone else into DSTIC at this early stage.... its as discussed really not ready to supply all a new char needs currently (and won't be until funds available and blueprints for ships are available at ML20 - ~ 20 days)?

After last nights activities, new player development fund stands at 90k, personal wallet of DT at 1.9 mil, personal Wallet of DP at 5mil, Industry fund at ~ 2m after mineral purchases. DT/DP still need full advanced learning skills, meaning 40m is needed offhand in both personal wallets asap - so more missioning with Onestraw is essential, as it should make plenty of cash. DT also could do with some +3 implants.

Friday 22 August 2008

Corporations

I've decided DSTIC will eventually take new members (public, and very limited in number), but only a few as I want growth to be slow, steady and have people we trust. As I've realised just how many corps rip people off compared to a Corp I was in during my last sting in eve.
I spoke to a new player yesterday who had moved into a corp with 25% tax that didn't provide hi, with anything for example, and done no real corp operations (hence why he was grouping with me).

Please comment on my plans for my corp:
  • Will primarily be an industry corp.. focussing in T1 parts inititally.
  • All Corp members should not have to pay for skills that cost under 2mill on mkt, Corp pays (to help startup players).
  • All Corp members should not have to pay for ships and parts that cost under 2 million (subject to a max loss amount of say 5 a month). They should however pay to insure the ships and xfer the cash back to corp upon loss, so the corp wallet doesn't get hugely depercitated by this policy. T1 parts will be free, named and T2 will not be.
  • Flat tax of 5%. This to pay for corp hangers.
  • Corp payback. Corp pays 5% of all profits back to corp members every month. 95% gets reinvested in corp industry section.
  • We will ask corp members to dump generic drops to corp hangers, these will be recycled to industry section to make profit from them, and also for the above ship/equipment policy - they can keep named drops if they prefer to. Salvage is not property of corp, except when on a corporate mission, when it will 50/50 split to corp (for module prodction), and the players in the mission (thus making all missioners extra mission rewards, but also providing some components to corp for rig production).
  • Corp will provide rigs due to above policy at 25% below lowest mkt rate.
  • Corp will run corporate missions.
  • Mining I doubt we'll do as a rule currently, but if players choose to mine, corp will likely buy the unrefined ore (at better than best buy-order mkt rate)
Aims of DSTIC
  • Get to be able to T2 build/research. Which T2 items is still to be investigated.
  • Get a cov ops survey ship and search for low-sec hidden mining opportunties + exploration sites (mining here being exception to above rule).
  • Get a POS for reasearch in highsec (hence corporate missions at day one, and also being picky abuot new members as need corp standings with Gallentite to be v.high).
  • Make lots of profit for its corp members and pay for all combat activities out of industry section
Voice will be required (makes game more fun). EVE voice will be used - yes it crashes if game crashes, but I think the voice quality is really good having tried it...

So would any readers consider the above if they were a new player - I think its a fair system for the player and the corp!

Obviously the corp now need to put some money aside in a Player Development fund to pay for items such as skillbooks that we don't already manufacture.

Thursday 21 August 2008

Industrial Activities to date

My aim when restarting EVE this time was for my industrial character to provide the ISK and parts/ships (eventually) for my Combat character... as eventually (6 months time) I plan to move into PvP with this char.

2 months in, the plan is almost working. I'm making 2-10 million a day in trading and producing.. Deafturrett(DT) only can fly T1 ships and parts currently... the biggest fun I'm having is playing the market. I'm not going to mention individual components, ships etc I'm buying and selling or I'd have competition in the market as other people done the same, greatly reducing my profit margins.

The basics of my approach:

1/Buy low, sell high. Some items I simply do this with as people put sell orders in for less than I know the item will sell for (and still quickly).

2/ Buy minerals: Build items. Sell for 25% profit over build costs... if I can't get 25%, I don't build. Don't build unresearched ship BPO's. A tip: Remember not all blueprints available locally. Some BPO's from other regions when produced locally result in good profit... so a few trips to other areas = profit. Further tip. Use market prior to buying BPO to check demand for items. Don't buy BPO's for low-demand items, UNLESS you combat char gets through lots of them.

More advanced:
As a producer, I know the mineral cost to buy minerals off buy-orders and then to build say a ship (ie what my average buy price is)..... this leads to interesting results. Example, yesterday, competition in Ours led to Incursis's at one point being well below the mineral cost on market (with perfect BPO obviously and perfect refine skills). Simple process when this occurs - buy,refine, sell... Even if your refine skills not perfect like mine its a good thing to be aware of and there is profit to be made ...

I am truely amazed at the denseness of some industrialists on the market - selling any item below build costs is crazy, as a decent refiner can melt that item down for cheaper minerals. On slow moving items also this is useful to know - especially with some of the recent increases in mineral prices (even a .25 increase in pye's or mex for example on a large item has a huge isk difference on items already in market).


The downside to my new found trading activity is at any one point I have ~ 50m + of buy/sell orders outstanding, so my character and corp is still technically poor as all profit is immeidately reinvested.

Back into EVE

Hi, I'm DeafPlasma.
This is just a summary post of who I am/what I do.

About me:
I am a director of DeafStar Technologies Inc (DSTIC) in game... DeafTurret is the CEO.
DSTIC is currently a one man corp (2 alt's, 2 paid accts) - ie both the above are controlled by one man :)

DeafPlasma is the Industry/Trade/Science guy. DeafTurret is the combat. DeafPlasma rarely leaves his home so wave if you see him in space - its rare, unless hes out salvaging for DT.

I've played EVE before and know the basics on combat and industry. This WAS Pre Revalations - so resuming my old character.wasn't an option (he only had 1 mill SP). Both chars are currently 2 months old with just over 2 mill SP each.