What-if: Bombing Reaction Prices

Industry Gameplay Center Science & Industry
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So a funny thought occured to me.

When doing Composite Reactions, almost everyone does Complex Reactions.
You first react Moon Materials to get Intermediate Materials, then react them again to get Composites.

This means that trading the Intermediate Materials is an extremely niche thing. The reason is that if you’re gonna have everything at the Reactor anyway, why bother only doing half of it?

This results in things like Fluxed Condensates having a trade volume less than 15K/day → EVE Tycoon

So, in theory, that would mean you can realistically price fix game estimates for these by loop-buying them from yourself, right? You just have to soak the taxes every time.

Now, why would you do that if nobody’s trading it anyway?

Enter the Industry process. When you run an Industry Job, Reaction or otherwise, taxes and Job Cost are calculated according to item values. My understanding is that for manufacturing it uses EIV (Estimated Item Value, value of the item you’re building), for research it uses PTV (Process Time Value, depending on the time of research), and for Reactions it use “Base Item Cost” (allegedly, the sum of values of input materials).

So, allegedly, If you were to loop-buy a lot of Fluxed Condensates for example and the EST price was driven up, then that would in turn increase the “Base Item Cost” for the reaction to make Fermionic Condensates with it. It’s not the most relevant item, but i’m sure there are better candidates.

And, given there is essentially no market for these, that would mean that it is very feasible to engineer these to largely off scale values eventually… And drive production prices way up artificially for these composites.

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So, how stupid and how feasible do you think something silly like this is?

1 Like
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I think, once you bring the price to a level where it has a significant effect, other players would try to jump in and put sell-orders to the market, in the hope that someone buys them. And to make sure they sell, they would probably undercut you. Unfortunately you can’t continue now to raise the price, unless you buy their materials first (because you always buy from the cheapest market order).
Now you could try to just undercut them too and then instantly buy only your own stuff. But that wouldn’t delete their market order nor raise the price even more. And you will have additional relisting fees each time you do it.

So, what exactly do you hope to gain in the long run? It isn’t like other people would now begin to suddenl buy those items for a much higher price, since - as you said - they are intermediate products, those who need them, create them by themselves in the first steps, they don’t need to buy them on the market with the now inflated prices.

So far, I see no real profit-scenario for you.

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Base item cost are not market prices, so there will be no impact.

Only an irrational mind will loop transactions at a negative profit (loss) from the tax - in the eye of an economist at least :wink:

But it leaves room for arbitrage between regions, even after tax, if if you “haul” things around to meet supply with demand and vice versa. Just make sure you make enough money with it to lose a ship here and there.

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Just to add to to the topic of Estimated Material Cost and Base price …