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.

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 :)

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