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.

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.

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.

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

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.