I play Eve for the challenges of the marketplace. Over the past 9 months or so, I have found it harder to turn a profit. At this point, everywhere I look I am finding finished goods (ammo, ships, what have you) to be selling for less than the cost of the materials that go into making them.
For example, at Jita prices Covetor costs roughly 64M to buy and the minerals that go into making it cost almost exactly the same. Why bother building it? A Hulk costs 318M and the materials 307M leaving only a 3% profit margin. This is nuts!
The problem seems to have suddenly gotten much worse. I was 2/3 of the way through a Charon build at the beginning of the week, then everything changed. Suddenly, the cap components require new PI materials making them more expensive and the Charon BPC itself requires additional, VERY expensive components. Admittedly, it requires fewer of the original cap components, but the cost of the new stuff is staggering. If you have a lot of ISK in pocket, buy freighters because their market value is going to explode! Again, this is going to make manufacturing them for profit far more difficult and less rewarding.
I feel like I am being pushed out of the game. PvE missions are much more profitable and lower stress. Mining and building, buying and selling, the entire indy game play model is getting sucked down the vacuum tube.
Build costs went up immediately but people still have old stock that they are selling which was built with the old way so they can easily undercut till they run out. I have easily sold some ships I had laying around for triple or more the cost I paid for them.
Also as more people make the components the prices will eventually go down. Things will be more expensive than before for sure but the prices will settle down to an equilibrium eventually.
No @Scoots_Choco, I have been paying attention to it all along. I am not really directly addressing the scarcity of materials or the increases in build costs.
What I am talking about is the odd ways the market has responded. I would expect prices to rise sufficiently to allow reasonable profit margins. Instead, I am seeing many items sold at or below the cost of the inputs and very few opportunities to sell at an attractive profit.
If it wasn’t the case, everybody and his dog would buy the inputs (rising the prices), assemble those (rising cost index) and sell the end product in Jita (crashing prices due to high volumes available), making things unprofitable. So, everything is fine.
Great image, but to follow on that and add to the gripe of market conformity and participant scarcity, (some can make do with less) , the profit margin, trade off of quote unquote trading for a profit, still means A. most people lose money, B. production is king, C. Surplus is fractional when the self sufficiency model is sufficient, and when participation lags, the wealthy have no customers, competition, and everybody quits. AND, it’s still trading fish for fish for more fish later. Space sucks!
To “win,” things and words and ideas like cooperation and innovation are thrown around, and yes in a perfect world they work… and yes, with enough participation and perseverance we can have our cake and eat it too, but the silver lining is that this is just enough to keep me coming back to mastery at the craft.
I just read a post about average Incomes in the area of 250 to 500mil/ day averages, which we know has become the norm. when plex are cheap relative to dollars, this might seem good, normal, or bountiful, but in the business world where trade offs are made this conversion can cause a lot of grief. A solid business might barely make ends meet month after month to pay that money back, while a professional ratter can make it in a day. When it comes to winning, not only is it up to the player, but also shifts towards mysterious market forces, evolution of prices, participation, new and old dynamics, and moon goo. When players finally understand the value of moon rocks on a computer simulation, we will get what we deserve.
DO NOT, buy materials in Jita, to build and sell in Jita. By doing this you add no value or convenience to the product, thus negating the simple concept of profit. Using this as a method to calculate industry profit is just the dumbest thing you can do.
A faction BS worth 2b, a capital worth 6b+, considering ISK income is halved at the moment, cap ship is worth half a year of subscription. I am really starting to think that people making those changes are not quite sane to say the least.
So either they foreseen it and intentionally made ships roughly 12 times more difficult to get so the fights involving those ships will be 12 times less common, thus forcing players to fly t1 ships and such like crap, or they did not expect it and are thus incompetent, whatever variant you like friends.
Markets fluctuate during patches as people figure out what’s going on. You’re overreacting. If you need, take a break and come back, things will be better if you give it time. It’s irrational to be whining and crying about it like this on the forums given that almost every major patch like this has upset the markets short term as people speculate around.
I heard someone calculated that if all planetary products existing in eve are collected they will be enough to build two titans. Two. So unless they seriously expect all players to run planetary colonies, and that is the pinnacle of boredom i ever seen in online games, or the intentionally want players to stop using half the content of the game that is called pvp.
First they nerf and nerf and nerf supers and now make them worth their weight in gold, jesus f christ, i’d love to know what idiotic reason they come up with to justify that.
And if some like me I am coming back after a long break. 4 to 5 years. I am selling off stock that by value of the inflation that happened in this game while away was already working in my favor. With this change…its jsut icing to the cake for me. On items when I left I said I wasn’t really needing this.
Come to 5 years later…I say I didn’t care about this for 5 years either. Sell it. I have a more defined need of what I need. And I always hated jita games. Reasonable buy order? I am like fantasy island. I make wishes come true.
Or I sell order game it. Hope a real player gets it. If not and its the guy I am undercutting getting the deal…isk is isk to me.
either manage your costs better or find other stuff to build. it’s possible that your preferred stuff will be more viable in a month or so. find something else to move in the meantime.
I think you’ll find things are progressing more or less as planned and as expected by those of us who have been through other major rebalances. Mineral prices spiked with people trying to build ships before the patch - they’re on their way back down now. All the ships that were built will flood the market - driving down prices until blueprints for the new materials can be researched to reasonable levels and raw material stockpiles for the new components build to reasonable levels.
Prices will find a new equilibrium - large ships and pirate ships will be relatively more expensive - as intended, but people will still buy them, they’ve been way too cheap for the past 4-5 years.
The current industry rebalance is a long way from complete we still have T2, dynamic redistribution and a few other goodies to look forward to. As an industrialist, I have been able to find stuff I can build and sell profitably. It takes more work and there is risk if I miscalculate - as there should be!
