Is it still a hiatus if it's forever?

Alright, when you're all done you can leave by jumping off the tower like a badass...

    And with this, I say adieu. I am taking another hiatus from MMO's.  The final nail in the coffin was Borderlands 2 GOTY edition.  I plan to leave the comunity in good standing with my accounts, characters, and assets intact.  No you may not have my stuff.

    I leave with ~7B isk in total, ~3B liquid, and the rest in ships, manufacturing assets, and various other assets.  Not bad, not great, but not bad.  I started my experiment having a hard time scraping together the 500M isk manufacturing entry capital.  I don't have the numbers, but since I had to sell all of my ships except for the 1 battleship and a couple of mining ships and industrials I kept around to come up with 500M isk, I would say that I had less than 1B in assets.

    As for anyone reading this, I bid you adieu, as both my accounts expire this week.  I may be back sometime in the future.  Lockefox is still trying to subvert my will by talking about Prosper at lunch :)  And eventually he may succeed, but today is not that day.

    Only problem I have is finding another good idea for a code project...:)

Focus Changes

Altering course:

    In the beginning of this blog, I stated that I was going to do this hard mode.  NPC stations in high sec and no real outside help.  Well that was a fun exercise. Next?

    Just a note:  I have been up for greater than 24 hours at this point, so the stream of thought is tending to sputter more than it should.

POSsibilities:

    I went ahead and dropped a POS in a quiet 0.5 system last week.  I got it all setup and moved most of my production there.  It's more expensive to have Red Frog ship out to me now, and I still have to cover an additional 2 jumps to get it into my POS.  I need to train a character into an Orca to make these last couple of jumps in as few trips as possible.   I still have a couple of copy jobs etc. hanging around my old home.

   So now I have all this possibility.  I am training up a component builder/BPO researcher for my own library and to support my invention toons.  This takes advantage of the ME/PE research slots I get for free, and allows me to increase profit margins without reducing ISK/hr of my inventors.

    I have thought about a lot.  I thought about buying all the parts that I would need to start building Orcas.  But with an initial buy-in of 10-12 billion and profit under 10% for a very well researched BPO, it just didn't seem worth while to me.

    All of these possibilities have left me needing better tools.  I find myself spending more time writing tools than playing most nights anymore.

    I also need to find more time to spend in Faction Warfare with my main.  Until I have a steady income with minimal work, I am not seeing a lot of time for it though.

Tool Development:

Overview:

    While the main focus of this blog is not on my tools, they are part of my decision making process.  I have chosen to write these tools in Java for several reasons.

• Cross-platform:
• Java is "natively" a cross-platform language.
• I needed/wanted to learn it for work:
• I work as a sometimes programmer, and was looking to write a cross-platform data extraction/analysis tool.
• I wanted a language with better libraries than Perl or C/C++.
• Perl libraries tend to be a little more unpolished and hap hazard.
• C/C++ support for things like XML and JSON, in the freeware department, Are lacking or non existent.
• Yes I will take flack for this, but after working on a project and compiling all the libraries using mingw through a cygwin terminal (for unix like commands needed by the make files) and realizing that cygwin adds a dll dependancy to your executables.
• Free tools, like Window Builder.

    I started with a simple tool to do invention calculations and spit out shopping lists, has turned into an interlocked toolkit, that just keeps growing.

Rapid Assembly:

    This was my initial tool idea, but a lot more complex.  Lots of options here, but when you boil them all down, the only tool currently with a GUI is my shopping list editor. Lots of options to dial in manufacturing and invention costs.  Has some functions to make historical and other graphs.

   One of the issues using this tool is that the database holding its blueprint information only holds the current SDE release, so you can not automatically see the cost of change of materials.

Profiteer:

    Command line tool to generate statistical information for T1 manufacturing over a period of time.  Output is in the form of csv's with product name/date.

    Groups blueprints by general market groups.  Can be used to filter down the list to a single market group.  Depth of the market group into tree does not matter (i.e. both Ammo & Charges and Cruise Missiles are valid.)

Invention Profiteer:

    Much like Profiteer, but adds in all the variations of the invention process.  It cycles through all available decryptors and meta items for each T2 blueprint in the selected market group.  I need to find some better ways of estimating true velocity.  I tried entering the Large Remote Energy Transfer Array II market, and am still holding onto ~300-500 M stock in sales orders.  On paper, this product looked very good, but the velocity is turning out to be very low.

killPuller:

    This is an attempt to pull kill data from zkillboard.com.  All of the kill data, along with some related price information is stuffed into a giant database.  From the database I plan to get item destroyed data to help with making market decisions.

killAnalyzer:

    This is a tool that I have not yet started working on.  I will need to finish killPuller enough to reliably extracts the large dataset for me before I can start working on this.  This will be the second GUI tool.

    Below is a list of desired functionality:

• ALOD finder.
• Battle finder / reporter.
• Should be able to search the kill data and find large battles.
• Should be able to create different battle reports.
• A per side isk lost over time graph, to give an idea how the battle progressed.
• Summary statistics
• Damage done
• Damage taken
• Kills
• Losses
• Item statistics
• Isk lost (destroyed)
• Isk salvageable (dropped)
• Galaxy Map graphs of various statistics
• Items destroyed
• Kills
• Pod Kills
• Gate camps

Industrial Accountant:

    I need to design a smart application to read in API data to find actual buy/sell prices on a unit by unit basis.

• Trace the material from purchase through industry jobs and finally into the sell orders.
• Categorize other purchases, both automagically and manually.
• Ability to graph data in various was

Conclusion:

    I need to get busy :).  Faction warfare, industrial warfare, and programming.  Lots to do, lets see if I can find the time to do much of this.

September 2013 Monthly Report

Monthly report:

Highlights:

• Spent ~1.3 B isk on faction standings to be able to drop a tower.
• Spent close to 1 B isk on a tower and fuel.
• Overall value down a few billion due to spending.

Plans:

• More agile production plans.
• Looking into alternate products to produce.
• Had some issues with previous products I have tried producing, leaving me with ~500 M isk on the market not selling.
• Without a 2 week lead time on copies, I can adjust to new products on the current cycle.
• Still working on tools to find those more profitable products, or those with acceptable velocities.
• Blueprint research.
• Thinking about putting up researched blueprint kits.
• Perfect ME / PE 15 T2 component packs sell for 80 - 100 M isk each.  Blueprints cost ~45 M isk per type. for a profit of 35 - 55 M isk. This can be completed in a little over 48 hours for all 9 BPOs, but volume of contracts moving is going to be an issue.
• Finishing training on a component builder / blueprint researcher.
• Training my standings inventor into being able to solo L4 missions.
• This will allow me to bring up standings even further to allow dropping towers in .7 systems.
• Eventually I will need to work a standings repair plan to get this character to be able to drop a tower in any .7 system.

Free Minerals...

Nothing in life is free:

   All I can do is shake my head and move on when I see stuff like this:  A Free Tax Cut Recruitment post.  But looking at the market, and the profitability of certain products, especially T1, its obvious how hard people like the above corp are driving the market.

Armageddon:

   Lets look at a specific example of this failure.  Armageddons are selling for 111M isk.  Manufacturing cost is 183M isk.  Looks like market volume is ~100 hulls/day.  All prices/volumes are in Jita using ME 0, PE 0.  That means that you are losing ~72M isk / hull.  A single manufacturer can make ~6 hulls per day.  That is nearly half a billion isk/day lost, or ~18M isk/hr.

    Looking at the above ME chart, anything less than 178M is selling for a loss, and anything less than 228.75M (20% profit) is not very interesting to a manufacturer.

But mined minerals are free:

   This is the greatest failure to understand the market that is prevalent in Eve.  And its not just a miner problem either.  I have heard of logistics directors thinking that moon goo from their POS's that they but into T2 Ships are free.  This is simply not true.  There is no argument, it's just fact.  Whether it's an opportunity cost or the cost of your time, it must all end up in the final equations.

The cost of Free Minerals:

    I was debugging Profiteer earlier today because I could not believe that battleships were losing this much money at the volumes they are moving at.  I will post the isk / hour lost on each of these hulls.  The fact that so many people are losing so much money so quickly is absolutely mind boggling.

Apocalypse Blueprint	(1,852,503.52)
Maelstrom Blueprint	(1,961,225.25)
Raven Blueprint	(2,153,650.45)
Megathron Blueprint	(2,403,525.04)
Abaddon Blueprint	(2,717,849.96)
Cyclone Blueprint	(3,008,283.76)
Scorpion Blueprint	(3,250,852.11)
Ferox Blueprint	(3,632,733.71)
Typhoon Blueprint	(4,361,057.27)
Rokh Blueprint	(5,310,852.18)
Procurer Blueprint	(5,665,502.72)
Dominix Blueprint	(6,364,175.96)
Armageddon Blueprint	(17,770,671.87)

Conclusions:

    There needs to be some kind of education program to keep people from failing as hard as they are.  But, this is Eve, and space is harsh.  I have been lucky to work with Lockefox and have some serious and deep discussions on the realities and maths involved with running a successful industry program.  In a few short months, I was able to start making multiple billions in sales per month.  I was lucky enough to have a mentor who could guide me past the pitfalls of Eve Industry.

   Another co-worker who mainly missions/rats in null expressed interest in Industry in Eve, and the advice that I gave him I would suggest for any aspiring Industrialist who does not have a mentor, Don't do it.  There are a lot of ways to make money in Eve.  High level industry is a form of PvP all its own.  Just like market trading is a form of PvP.  And while PvPers judge themselves by kill board stats and isk values, Industrialists do it with kit buy-ins and profit margins.

    I would like to see T1 industry be a viable thing, and in niche markets, those with higher skill requirements, or that use non-minable materials, there still is some good profit, sometimes exceeding what can be made in T2.  One of the big problems with that is that you have to be agile in what you make as you can easily exceed demand with the amount you can produce.

TL;DR

   Nothing is free.  If you don't have a mentor, don't do industry.

Inventor training plan export

Training plan information:

    Lockefox has a really good write up on starting a new inventor at Everything you never wanted to know: Industrial Alt.  I am just expounding on this by linking the EVEMon training plan I made for a new character to train said plan.  I add 4 common Science skills so that the training plan has them, change these as needed.

   All of my new alts follow this plan initially.  So, I thought I would formalize it by making an EVEMon  raining plan that I could import to a new character day 1.  It also lets me get all the training books needed ready on contract before creating the character.  The last couple of characters that I have made I have entered this by hand.

   Note:  I would call Electronic Engineering a must since its a requirement to build components.  Always check everything you plan on building for required skills before starting your training.

Industry Blank - Inventor.emp

Profiteer Quarterly Plots

Overview:

    This will hopefully become a regular thing.  I now have the ability to check the profitability of products over varying time frames.  So I am hoping to run these 90 day extractions on a quarterly basis to see over all market health, based on Industrial Index.  Below are the T1 results, based on market groups.  Hopefully I will have similar results for T2 product soon.  All charts were run with ME 0.  At most, perfect me will get you a 10% margin.  Add in the cost to sell items, 2.5% unskilled, and you shave that 10% margin down to 7.5%.  That does not inspire me, so anything that is not profitable at ME 0, is just plain not worth my time, IMHO.

   Note, I am far from a market expert.  As everything else in this in this blog, this is more for my reference, maybe hoping for a little community feedback.

Ammunition and Charges:

• Looks like a lot of ways to lose a lot of money in T1 Ammo and charges.
• Looks like a lot of the worst products lost a lot of profitability, but recovered within a month or 2.
• 95% of profitable ammo falls under 100K isk/hr on the index.

Ship Equipment:

• Market looks much healthier in the ships equipment market group.
• A few outliers driving the upper end of this chart are the new relic site only BP's.  I have not found a good way to exclude these, so they are polluting the data set this time around.

Drones:

• Fighters and Fighter Bombers have shown a huge flux, some going from the most profitable to unprofitable within a couple of months.
• Looks like most of the other products had no major shifts in profitability.

Components:

• Moon goo changes forcing component prices to go all over the place.
• Emergent Neurovisual Interface fell like a rock in August.

Ships:

• T1 ships look like another market to lose a lot of money quickly.
• Battleship mineral changes have yet to make most of them profitable again.

Conclusions:

    Please remember, these graphs were not meant to aid in product selection as much as look at manufacturing in market groups in general.  I am also far from a market guru.  Also, if an item had components that could be made, these numbers reflect buying them from the market.

    There are some interesting things to see from this data, showing just how much the T1 market was shaken, and how relatively untouched some markets were.

    Again, hopefully sometime this week I will be able to get some T2 numbers out.  This is complicated by the use of decryptors and meta items that can drastically affect the profitability of T2 product.  That means that I have to calculate 10-50 variations of every product.  A couple of changes made this week drastically increased the speed of my Profiteer, and the Invention Profiteer should be able to take advantage of those same improvements.

August 2013 Monthly Report

Totals for August 2013:

Total
5,599,218,621.99 isk
Wallet Balance
726,472,008.33 isk
Assets
4,081,424,461.66 isk
Sell Orders
791,322,152.00 isk 

    Going with a new format for the report.  I just installed JEveAssets so I am using that now.

Break Down:

• 1.813 B in sales on 1.812 B in purchases.
• This includes PvP ship buying.
• See previous article for more information on what has been happening in the last 2 months.

Future Plans:

• Next Inventor is coming up on skill training complete.
• My main is moving to do Medium T2 ammo.  In station it's a 7-8 day manufacturing time / BPC, so that gives me plenty of time to invention and PvP.
• Starting copying jobs in NPC station for my new products.  These were found using my new Invention Profiteer program.  These should be strong sellers with good margins, all above 50%.
• Looking into dropping a POS.
• Running cost benefit evaluations on different sizes and configurations.
• Looking into standings services.
• Trying to run my standings up on 1 of my alts so that I can drop towers on my own, without standings services in the future.
• Saving money needed to drop towers.  Fully anchored medium towers, with fuel, run around 1 B each.  Although if I take Lockefox's advice and drop 2 medium towers with only a minimum number of labs each to allow future expansion, it will only come to ~1 B.

ZKB Json parsing in Java

Json parsing in Java using gson:

   While looking into pulling kill data using zkillboard's API, I had some trouble learning how to parse Json.  This is partially because its the first time that I was using Json, and partially because I am still new to Java as a whole.  Below is an example of how to parse kill data from ZKB.

    Some notes on parsing data from ZKB:

• You need ~15 second program pause after every call to ZKB.  This is not reflected in this code as it parses a single page of the call.
• Please see the ZKB Api page for more information on how to make the calls you want.

package com.JEves.test;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.lang.reflect.Type;
import java.net.InetSocketAddress;
import java.net.Proxy;
import java.net.ProxySelector;
import java.net.SocketAddress;
import java.net.URI;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.util.List;

import com.btr.proxy.search.ProxySearch;
import com.btr.proxy.search.ProxySearch.Strategy;
import com.google.gson.Gson;
import com.google.gson.GsonBuilder;
import com.google.gson.JsonDeserializationContext;
import com.google.gson.JsonDeserializer;
import com.google.gson.JsonElement;
import com.google.gson.JsonObject;
import com.google.gson.JsonParseException;

public class SimpleKbParser   implements JsonDeserializer {

 public String m_value;
 /**
  * @param args
  */
 @SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
 public static void main(String[] args) {
  ProxySearch proxySearch = new ProxySearch();
  proxySearch.addStrategy(Strategy.OS_DEFAULT); 
  proxySearch.addStrategy(Strategy.JAVA); 
  proxySearch.addStrategy(Strategy.BROWSER); 
  ProxySelector proxySelector = proxySearch.getProxySelector(); 

  if(proxySelector != null) {
   ProxySelector.setDefault(proxySelector); 
   URI home = URI.create("http://www.google.com"); 
   //System.out.println("ProxySelector: " + proxySelector); 
   //System.out.println("URI: " + home); 
   List proxyList = proxySelector.select(home); 
   if (proxyList != null && !proxyList.isEmpty()) { 
    for (Proxy proxy : proxyList) { 
     //System.out.println(proxy); 
     SocketAddress address = proxy.address(); 
     if (address instanceof InetSocketAddress) { 
      String host = ((InetSocketAddress) address).getHostName(); 
      String port = Integer.toString(((InetSocketAddress) address).getPort()); 
      System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", host); 
      System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", port); 
     } 
    } 
   }
  }
  URLConnection.setDefaultRequestProperty("Accept-Encoding", "gzip, deflate");
  URLConnection.setDefaultRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Valkrr Dragonsworn");
  BufferedReader reader;
  String itemUrl = "http://zkillboard.com/api/kills/regionID/10000002/";
  try {
   GsonBuilder gsonBuilder = new GsonBuilder();
      gsonBuilder.registerTypeAdapter(SimpleKbParser.class, new SimpleKbParser());
      Gson gson = gsonBuilder.create();
   reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new URL(itemUrl).openStream()));
   SimpleKbParser[] kills = gson.fromJson(reader, SimpleKbParser[].class);
   for(int i = 0; i < kills.length; i++) {
    System.out.println("Kill: " + i);
    System.out.println(kills[i].m_value + "\n");
   }
  }
  catch(Exception e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  }
 }

 @Override
 public SimpleKbParser deserialize(JsonElement json, Type typeOfT, JsonDeserializationContext context) throws JsonParseException {
  SimpleKbParser ret = new SimpleKbParser();
  int killID = ((JsonObject) json).get("killID").getAsInt();
  int solarSystemID = ((JsonObject) json).get("solarSystemID").getAsInt();
  String killTime = ((JsonObject) json).get("killTime").getAsString();
  int moonID = ((JsonObject) json).get("moonID").getAsInt();
  ret.m_value += "killID: " + killID;
  ret.m_value += "\nsolarSystemID: " + solarSystemID;
  ret.m_value += "\nkillTime: " + killTime;
  ret.m_value += "\nmoonID: " + moonID;
  return ret;
 }

}

I will go through the above class section by section.  I am assuming you will be copying this into an editor so I will be referring to line numbers.

Lines 1-23:

   Your basic setup and import steps.

Line 25:

   public class SimpleKbParser   implements JsonDeserializer<SimpleKbParser> {

  JsonDeserializer is what makes the magic easy an quick.  This basically allows you to have your storage class get 1 element at a time from the series of elements and have to worry about parsing just that one element.  

Lines 33-57:

   I do part of my programming behind a firewall and the other part outside of a firewall.  This piece of code allows the script to auto detect the correct proxy type and use that by default. This requires proxy-vole to be linked to the project, so if you are not worried about firewalls, remove these lines along with lines 15 and 16.

Lines 58-75:

   An extremely basic program for grabbing and printing kill data.

   The key line here is line 67:

      SimpleKbParser[] kills = gson.fromJson(reader, SimpleKbParser[].class);

    This line tells gson that you want to parse the BufferedReader with your json in it into an array of SimpleKbParser objects.

Lines 79-90:

   Here is the function overloaded from JsonDeserializer.  For this example I just pulled some of the simple information out of the json and added it to a member string to be later printed.  Depending on what you are trying to do with this information, you will have to decide what information you want.

int killID = ((JsonObject) json).get("killID").getAsInt();

   You have to cast the JsonElement json to JsonObject, then run the get(Element Tag) which returns a JsonElement.  You run the getAs<Type>() function on the resulting JsonElement to get the value in a usable format.

JsonArray attackers = ((JsonObject) json).get("attackers").getAsJsonArray();

for(int i = 0; i < attackers.size(); i++) {

   JsonObject attacker = attackers.get(i).getAsJsonObject();

}

   For array data inside a json element, you cast as above, but you get it as a JsonArray type.  You can then iterate over that array, getting each object as a JsonObject to make getting values easier.

Summary:

   So, we learned how to get ZKB data into our programs in just a few dozen lines of actual code, less that 100 total lines.  There are some things not covered here to keep it simple, line how to effectively iterate over pages in a query and pretty much any error checking.  All of the coding is done in Eclipse build v21.1.0 using the ADT install package.  Other compilers might have compiler specific requirements that could prevent the above code from compiling.

   My source code can be found at Rapid Assembly.  This include git source repository and an occasional executable of my tool.  I have not made much use of the zkillboard parser yet, but I have plans to do so as part of a product selection GUI.

The Increasingly poor decisions of an Eve Industrialist

The Increasingly poor decisions of an Eve Industrialist:

Product Selection:

   I recently moved my main into faction warfare.  This has been widely regarded as a bad idea.  So I become a war target, and in my noobish innocence I figured I would be safe in my miltias high-sec space... and I was forcefully corrected on this misconception by a war target Machariel sitting outside the dead end  system that I used to do invention out of... to the tune of 500 M isk.

https://zkillboard.com/detail/32099354/

   So Red Frog Freight and I have become very good friends.  For 4.5M I can have 800K m3 of freight moved 11 jumps.  I am sold.  Try to combine as much as possible into a single contract to make the most of it.

   So, my main is now in Black Rise doing Caldari faction warfare with several million skill points in industry just wasting away, so I decide to try some T1 industry.  I buy a Thrasher BPO (ME 10, PE 10) and a Moa BPO (ME 22, PE 15).  Both are doctrine ships in my alliance.  I build 30 Moas and 100 Thrashers and put them up for sale in Black Rise, and ~25 days later, 6 Moas and 5 Thrashers have sold.  FML.  There is 380M tied up for a month for no good reason.

  In this time I spent about a billion isk on PvP ships stocking up doctrine ships I have yet to really use.  I have lost a couple to frigate hot drops in plexes, but have yet to manage to kill anything.  A carebear in PvP is like a seal trying to play fight club in the shark tank, its going to have a bad time.

  I have been working on product selection programs for a while now, both for T1, which is much easier, and T2, which is complicated by meta items and decryptors in the invention process.  My tool told me to look a Covert Ops Cloaking Devices.  So I loaded them up in my tool, and they were showing 6 day build times and 400-500K isk/hour/manufacturing line and 50% profit.  That comes out to something in the neighborhood of 2.6B in profit/month.

   I bought a researched BPO (100,15) for 250M and a copy blank from NPC for 100M.  Then I spent over 500M to buy enough materials to invent 10 T2 BPCs and build an additional 100 units of Prototype Cloaking Device.  Then I went to install my blank to make invention copies, when I noticed the real problem.  Not only does it take 277.78 days to make 20 100 run copies needed for normal invention, but there are additional materials required to make those copies.  The above image shows the copy time, but includes the cost of copy materials.  So this caused me to add copy time to the display of my tool, and also to take the greater of the copy or build time to determine ISK / hour.

   Looking at it with copy time determining isk/hr, it now looks like a much worse product.  You still have > 50% profit, but now with only 100K isk/hr, which comes out to somewhere around 672M isk/month.  There are so many easier ways to make that kind of isk, this is only 200M isk above Scorch M, which has a negligible effort.  So what about using decoders?

  Just reducing the number of runs on the T1 copy to minimum almost doubles your isk/hr.

  Inventing on Augmentation decryptors brings your isk/hr sky rocketing back into an area that I am willing to work with.  You are still making 50% profit, or 100% Return on investment(ROI).  5 day copy time, ~70 copies to make 20 T2 BPCs assuming level 4 invention skills.  As it sits right now, I am sitting on this material, after making 200 units of Prototype Cloaking Device, trying to decide how far down the rabbit hole I want to go.

And then you add another inventor into the mix...

   So, after all of that fun, I have another inventor coming up on completing the invention training plan in less than 3 weeks.  With an 12-16 day lead time on high sec copy slots, its time to select the products for her.  So I spent some time in the last week working on my invention profiteer, see my previous post for more info.  I came up with 3 products, each with ~50% profit and a 1.5-2 day adjusted build time.  Those products I will keep to my self, as I do not want to encourage more competition.

   Below is a chart of the 90 day history of build cost (red) verses sell price (blue) for my 3 inventors.  It will probably take a couple of months to get this into full swing and find a good balance.  My main will have 6-7 day build times, my new inventor will have 1.5 -2 day build times, and my old inventor has 1-2 day build times.  I spent an additional 30 million on BPO blanks for copying for my main and new inventor.

Plans:

    I know in the early posts of this blog, I talked about doing a high-sec T2 inventor in only NPC stations, but that is quickly becoming impractical.  The problem is not invention or manufacturing slots, if you move around and are flexible enough you can find a sweet spot to do that in that will allow you to have near 100% efficiency. The problem is that you need ~105% or more of the T1 BPCs to make T2 BPCs.  You will find that in most high sec areas, you are looking at 8-30 days lead time until your copy starts.  Another trap you run into is that some of the copy slots have costs an order of magnitude higher than the rest.  Normally, my copy costs are in the 140K-280K isk range for full runs and 20 copies, and I'm fine with that.  But you sometimes find a line that will cost you 2.5M isk for the same thing, which I am not ok with.

   So, I need to look into dropping a couple of POSs.  2 Medium POSs will allow me to run up to 8 inventors, doing copying, inventing, and manufacturing at the POS.  This will also run me ~440M isk/month, or almost a PLEX.  I can't afford to do that until I have my other 2 invention lines established.  Not only that, but I don't have any characters with faction standing above 5, so I will have to hire a standings service to be able to drop the POSs.  POS cost is also another problem, to drop 2 medium towers will cost nearly a billion ISK, with only 4 equipment arrays and 1 each of mobile and advanced mobile labs.  This is the minimum needed for 2 characters.  The second tower is so that I don't have to worry about a standings service when I outgrow the first.  I also need to start doing missions on one of my invention characters so that I can boost my corp faction standings myself.

  This is all not mentioning the fact that I have been neglecting my faction warfare duties.  I need to have time to be bad at PvP and run plexes.  Oh well, it keeps Eve interesting :)

Top Invention Products: Modules

Top Invention Products: Modules

   I have another inventor coming up on fully trained and I need to decide what products to invent on her.  So I have been working on a script to give me insight into the best products, in both ISK/hr and volume.  What I came up with was an industrial index, expressed by the following formula:

   Industrial Index = ((Sell Price - (Build cost + Invent Cost + Copy Cost(materials))) / (Greater of Build or copy Time rounded up to the next 12 hour increment)) * (lesser of 1 or (20 % daily sales volume / Volume Produced/day by 1 mfg line);

   What this means is that its estimating the isk/hr based on the actual time it will take most people to flip jobs.  Most people cannot keep a 16 hour line going at 16 hours, so we round up to 24 hours to calculate isk/hr.  The sales volume component makes sure that you are not thoroughly out producing the market.  What I am sharing with you today are the top 50 modules (no decoders or meta items considered) to produce based on numbers on 8/25/13.  There are some products, like 125mm Gatling AutoCannon II that when investigated clearly show they are in a bubble.  There are also a lot of products which had no volume on that day.  But given the amount of time it takes to run this, ~20 seconds / day / product configuration, I don't see me running a 90 day comparison of all products any time soon.

   I will be doing a series of posts that give the same kind of information for different market groups.

   And without further ado, here is the top 50 modules per Industrial Index, sorted ASCII-betically.

100MN Afterburner II
125mm Gatling AutoCannon II
1MN Afterburner II
1MN Microwarpdrive II
200mm AutoCannon II
200mm Reinforced Steel Plates II
800mm Reinforced Steel Plates II
Adaptive Nano Plating II
Cap Recharger II
Capacitor Flux Coil II
Capacitor Power Relay II
Co-Processor II
Cruise Missile Launcher II
Damage Control II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Link Augmentor II
Dual 180mm AutoCannon II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Expanded Cargohold II
Explosive Plating II
Heavy Capacitor Booster II
Heavy Ion Blaster II
Heavy Neutron Blaster II
Inertia Stabilizers II
Large Remote Armor Repair System II
Light Electron Blaster II
Light Ion Blaster II
Light Missile Launcher II
Light Neutron Blaster II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Medium Capacitor Booster II
Medium Shield Booster II
Medium Shield Extender II
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Overdrive Injector System II
Power Diagnostic System II
Rapid Light Missile Launcher II
Relic Analyzer II
Remote Sensor Booster II
Rocket Launcher II
Scan Pinpointing Array II
Sensor Booster II
Shield Power Relay II
Small Armor Repairer II
Small Energy Neutralizer II
Survey Scanner II
Warp Core Stabilizer II
Warp Scrambler II

June Monthly Update

June Monthly Update:

Later is better than never...

• 414 million profit from 2.63 billion in sales.
• 1.6 billion in material costs.
• 29 million in manufacturing related costs (Maufacturing slots, Invention slots, copy slots, PE research slots, and ME research slots.)
• 218 million in skills.
• I decided to "Buy ALL THE SKILLS!!!" and hit the limit of 50 skills in training...
• 40 million on Transaction taxes, upping skills to reduce this.
• 28 million in brokers fees, again upping skills to reduce this.
• 92 million in new BPO's.
• I bought 1 each of Data Analyzer I Blueprint and Relic Analyzer I Blueprint, both 25 ME/25PE, for 25 mil each thinking I might get into the T2 Analyzers, but the market crashed.
• Bought a bunch of frigate/indy BPO's from NPC's and have been using spare slots on my 2 copy toons to do ME/PE research on them.
• 147 mil was spent on Personal stuff.  This includes Itty V's with T2 mods and T1 rigs for several characters.  It also includes my new Anathema for playing with scanning on my main.

As you can see, pretty steady month, no surprises.

Product sales breakdown.  My alt is starting to dominate the show with better products.  Need to investigate better product selection for my main.  Also, looking at bringing another inventor online in another couple of months.

Below is the Sell price vs Build cost of my mains entire kit:

And below, is a similar graph for my alt:

Plans:

• I am splitting my main off of the corp wallet and he is going back to buying/selling all of his own product.  This is in preparation of joining a corp.  He is keeping the money from his current cycle, and maybe buying his next kit out of the corp wallet, but after that, he will have to work on his own capitol.
• Working out of NPC stations, I need to get more agile in being able to move things from one station to another to take advantage of open slots.  My current home, when both my toons are done, there is usually a 2 hour wait on invention slots and a 30 minute - 8 day wait on manufacturing slots.
• Looks like whomever I am sharing the station with either increased the number of people or changed their product line up to include 8 day manufacturing runs :(
• With ~ 30 million in station costs, not to mention the 400K in contract costs moving things back and forth, it's about time I break down and start doing the math on getting a POS placed in high-sec.  My standings are nowhere near high enough to do it, so I will have to use a standings service to game the system.
• POS will allow me to take the 2 copy toons that I currently have and move them into full inventors.
• It will also remove the ~8 day delay in starting copy jobs that I now face in empire NPC stations.
• It will also give me a couple of ME/PE slots without the 30+ day wait time.
• Not sure if I will bother with doing manufacturing in the POS.
• One of my copy alts will need to start doing T1 component manufacturing for my main inventors.  This will cut up to 6 days off the wait to start manufacturing my next T2 cycle
• Most likely this will mean remaining 1 cycle or more ahead of my T2 cycles.
• I will have to look closely at the available Component BPO's and find several to fill this toons manufacturing slots with component and T1 work.
• Will need a report to constantly make sure that prices don't fluctuate from being profitable.

TL;DR

     Made another months profit.  Main is looking for corp.  Looking to make mo money.

Early Odyssey Profiteer Charts

Early Odyssey Profiteer Charts:

   One of the projects that I am working on is an attempt to fish out good products, both in profitability and velocity, from the chaff of available products.  I use a custom app to generate CSV's full of price/Material Efficiency.  I thought I would give you some graph pr0n and have them available for comparison to later graphs as the industry shake-up in odyssey settles out.  One note, is all prices and sales volume are from http://eve-marketdata.com/ and are limited to the forge.  Its also averaged out over the last 7 days to even out price/volume spikes.

   This will be a huge wall of graphs.  Also, please understand that these are Profitability * adjusted velocity.  This means that those products that have a huge profit, but not many sell, are ranked lower than those that have less profit but sell more.  Its also adjusted by how many you can produce in a given time period.  The value is calculated something along the lines of ((20% of Jita Sales Volume/day) / (How many units are produced in 1 day with PE 0 in high sec station with all 5 skills) * (Profit/hour for that ME value).  This gives you a rough idea of what the "Profitability velocity" of the item is.

   Just a note that this is far from the end of the work needed to select products.

May Financial Report

May Financial Report:

Highlights:

• Sold 2.36 B ISK, bought 1.63 B ISK, for a total profit of ~730 M ISK (~31% Profit, or ~45% ROI).
• Manufacturing accounts for 2.1 B ISK in sales and 1.38 B ISK in costs.
• I sold a Raven (148 M ISK) and 2 Gnosis (~112 M ISK each) to make up the remaining income.
• I bought an additional 187 M ISK in BPO's for my alt (A R.A.M. set and a Caldari T2 set)
• Got product to market from my alt late this month, around the 24th.  Should increase my revenue next month if I can get her on a steady schedule.
• Holding off on investing another ~300 million in component BPO's for my alt, using some from my main in the mean time.
• I was using www.myeveapi.com to extract my wallet journal and transaction data, but late this month it stopped working for my journal, so I am looking for another source to easily extract this information.    What that means for this report is that taxes and other costs are underrepresented, but it should only be a couple of million low.

Category Breakdown of May:

• No surprises here, Manufacturing kits/sales make up the lions share of money made/spent.
• Spent about 3.5 million on copy slots and 5.6 million on invention.

Sales Breakdown for May (With products removed :):

• All 4 lines that start early in the month are from my main.  I missed getting my last product to market, so it looks a little low at the end of the month.
• Of the products that I selected for my alt, 2 are not showing the expected velocity.  Looks like all 4 are going to be competitive markets.

And finally the Manufacturing report:

• I invested in another mfg cycle even though I am not complete on the current one.  This is an OCD make the graph pr0n look pretty thing.

   All in all, pretty good month.  I lost a week of play time when my credit card got stolen days before my main account was due.  We got most of the money back, but I had to wait for new cards to be issued.  My alt only had a partial kit make it to market.  I need to look into what she's doing, because looking into the sales graphs, you can see that 2 of the products (purple and dark blue) are selling good.  But the other 2 products (light green and pink) are not selling as well.
   For the next month I will be investing in some components to level out my costs during the first couple of months of Odyssey.  Also need to look into filling out some researched component BPO's on my alt to allow some flexibility.  Still looking for some filler product for both toons to keep their manufacturing lines full, but May was very tight on cash until the last week or so.
   I need to setup some planetary interactions on my main and start using some research agents for both of my toons.  Not sure if I want to add PI skills to my alt.  With my alt's training almost complete, I need to carefully consider what to do with the training time on my second account, especially in light of needing more copy slots to keep up with my invention slots.

Lessons learned:

• When creating an alt, make sure that you have all the BPO's, researched and not, that they need before starting.
• 500 M ISK is not enough to start a high-sec T2 manufacturing business without a lot of hiccups.  You need 500 M ISK or more just for kits.  You will probably spend at least that much again buying researched BPO's to make it efficient.
• Noting the bullet above, have ~1.5 billion ISK available for any new alt.  500 M ISK for implants/skills, 500 M ISK for BPO's, and 500 M ISK for kit costs. (See Locke's Everything You Never Wanted to Know: Making an Industrial Alt for more information on making an industrial alt.)
• All the bullets above being said, I am probably trying to buy too large of kits.  I am doing 4 products at 200 units/product.  Cutting that in half for each kit will be helpful.  Also, my main is doing products with components from all 4 races, and my alt is doing components from 2 different races.  Selecting products in the same race might be a better idea.
• Product selection is difficult...and probably the biggest and most important time sink you will find.  Study your intended market and spend the time needed to determine what the true velocity of your product is. (If you don't know what I mean by velocity see Metrics, again from Locke.)
• Because of the bullet above, I will be narrowing the focus of my alt, unfortunately, in high-sec station invention, this is not an agile process, you're looking 20+ days out to see the first cycle of your adjusted copy jobs come out of the oven (I have been averaging ~10 days/copy job, but I sometimes have to move 10+ jumps to find those stations with only 5 day queues).
• For my main, I had to train another character to do nothing but copy for him.  I will have to do the same thing for my alt, once I finish with the last of the training.  I have them setup for 8 slots of copying, that's enough for for 800 modules every 10-14 days/character.  Trying to maintain 8 slots of copy and still do invention makes for a nightmare schedule.  28 days or so for an 11th slot/character...doesn't seem worth it yet, not with another 3 character slots on my current account still open.
• Need to find a good way to utilize a potential 10 manufacturing slots / copy character.  Depending on how component profits come out in Odyssey, that's one option.  I would like to start producing some ships, but the T1 ship market is pretty upside down.  There are a few T1 products that look interesting, especially if I have the capital to keep them in sale orders in trade hubs, but that is probably a couple of months out.

Chart Fu

Chart Fu

   Just updated my script to make a shopping list, and added a plot for cost.  Just thought that I would make a short post for posterity.

A Comedy of Spreadsheets

A Comedy of Spreadsheets

   I am writing this as a historical record, for the man who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it.  This will be my laugh reel in a couple months or years, as I look back and laugh at the Terribad newb I am.  I expect that no one will read this, and quite frankly, if you're reading this, its not for you :P.


   So a month or two ago, I decided to try my hand at T2 production in Empire space.  I had previously worked with a couple of other Corporations doing invention as part of my duties to the company.  This was before I took a year or so off from Eve for personal reasons.  I had some researched BPOs and decided to make a go of it.

   February and March was clearing out the junk in my hangers and selling it off to make capital for investment.  I raised about 583.31 million Isk.  Still have a Raven that hasn't sold, but that's what you get for selling a Caldari Battleship in Amarr space.  At this time, I was also looking for a new place to live.  I am still looking to join FW, preferably for the Caldari or Amarr, since the Gallente or Minmatar would cut off access to Jita, a bad thing for a manufacturer.
   At this time I also created a second account, and after foolishly trying to mess around with combat training on an invention/trader alt, I finally got down to business.  In the future I need to buy all of the implants, skills, BPOs, and items that the new alt will need and contract them to them in the station I plan on them working out of.  With my alt well on the way to inventing, I realized a few hours ago that next month I will need to spring for another full set of researched component BPOs.  At current contract prices, that will run ~300 million isk.  I also need to change tactics from what she is currently copying and go totally into copying weapons.

   April was my main starting to make Scorch S since it has a high return on investment.  And the day before my first batch of 800 Scorch S came out of the oven, the market crashed from 400K isk / unit to the current price of 199K isk/ unit.  While you are still making about 155K isk /hour, you are very limited in the total isk that you can make.  I had all the knowledge and BPOs (after buying all the component BPOs), so I moved to weapon upgrades, which makes ~ 400K isk/hour.  Its a steeper buy-in for the kit costs, but worth the investment.
   I over invested in manufacturing materials, which includes enough material to build 1000 runs of Scorch S (which produces 4000 units), since I made something like 260 copies of Ultraviolet S before the bubble was decimated.  It also included enough materials for 200 of each of the 4 weapon upgrades I produce.  I was thinking that this should make me look pretty good next month, until I realized that I will need to buy component BPOs for by alt.  Oh well,  when I finally get past the new business hurdles behind me, it will all work out in the wash, and I may even be able to buy a PLEX or two in a couple of months :)

   In May I will be trying to find the long tail.  Reading some recent articles from Prosper and Merchant Monarchy talking about the Big Head and Little Tail (Working Big Head Long Tail Theory), have inspired me to find some T1 products to fill the gaps in Empire T2 production.  The idea being that the Big Head is your main sales items.  For me this would be T2 through invention, weapons mods on my main, and small guns on my alt.  The little tail comes by filling in with T2 components that have a high isk / hour or other products will keep my manufacturing slots full and still making profit when there is a lull to the T2.  These lulls can come from several places, being over invested and not having the liquid capital to buy your next kit, or, more likely, waiting on copies to come out of the oven.  In empire, there is usually a wait of 5-45 days for copy slots.
   For my main, the long tail will end up being the Scorch S stockpile that I currently have.  There are some logistical issues to this, with only 2 slots available for invention, its difficult to keep up with the manufacturing, especially during the week, when I only have a couple of hours to play.

   In the future, I need to look into getting a POS, but with an initial cost of 500 million to 1.5 billion or so, it's currently out of my range to get one.  I would also like to let the fuel price changes from Odyssey work themselves out.  I will be bringing up new inventors in the next couple of months, so I will need to start looking into new products to produce.  I would like to get a toe into some ships, but most of that market has such a low profit (or loss) or such a low velocity, that its not worth buying a researched BPO and making T1 hulls.

   And if you're still reading this (why? no really are you that bored that you would read this?  Yes I am talking to you future self!!), I realize that I have not once mentioned spreadsheets, even though the title is a comedy of spreadsheets.  That is because I am not nice enough (or confident enough) to share those sheets, since most of them were extremely manually to update with new products and prices.

March breaks down kinda like this:

• Skills: 67.5 million Isk.
• Manufacturing Buy-in: 231 million Isk.
• Manufacturing Sold: 26.7 million Isk.  Which puts profit at -204.4 million Isk.
• Personal Purchases: 33 million Isk.
• BPOs: 16.26 million Isk.
• Inventory Cleanup: Sold 583.3 million Isk.

April Breaks down like this:

• Skills: 88 million Isk.
• Manufacturing Buy-in: 888.7 million Isk.
• Manufacturing Sales:  1,071.19 million Isk. For a Manufacturing profit of 183.15 million Isk.
• PI Sales: 15.8 million Isk.
• Personal Purchases: 41.69 million Isk.
• BPOs: 476.45 million Isk.
• Inventory Cleanup: A Bantam listed last month sold for a whopping 415 thousand Isk.
• Total value of Inventory: 2.2 billion Isk.
• Cash on hand: 73 million Isk.
• Total value: 2.27 billion Isk ($64.97 US with a PLEX cost of 524.8 million Isk)

Summary:

   This leaves me upside down 400 million Isk at the end of this month.  With 1.10 billion of income and 1.51 billion of outgoing expenses.  But with production stockpiles where they are