Bottlenecks

I wrote yesterday about the expected market equilibrium for minerals and how it relates to the current prices. At present, Pyerite, Nocxium and Isogen are showing significant elevation above what we expect while Zydrine and Megacyte are a bit lower (Zydrine is very nearly worth LESS than Nocxium right now). This is an expecially interesting turn of events because it means that at the current prices, Hedbergite, Hemorphite and Jaspet are the three most valuable ores to mine. While these ores do appear in low-sec (or very, very rarely in hi-sec grav anomalies), they're predominantly mined in null-sec. they represent good sources of both Nocxium and two of them throw off substantial Isogen as well.

So Arkonor and Bistot are now low on the curve. Does that mean something's broken? No, not really. It simply means that there's Arkonor and Bistot (and Crokite) in greater abundance than the current demand side of the equation (there's another possible explanation but we'll get to that). So how does one determine the market demand?

Well, it is fairly difficult even for CCP. One reasonably solid measure would be to aggregate the monthly destruction of minerals that leave the game (through ships being destroyed, reprocessing loss, etc) and add it all up. That would give an amount of minerals that the mining community needs to supply to stay ahead of attrition. We lack that level of database access so we're left with a more difficult task. For us, the easiest thing to do is to aggregate ship hulls, presumably the highest consumer of raw materials, and provide an estimate. Developing this "market basket" is difficult but the currently accepted method is to use a Drake. Caldari ships tend to use all 7 minerals in roughly even fashion. On the other hand, we could get a little more sophisticated and develop a pool of common ships and aggregate by some method. The old EVE economics posts used to provide really good information about this but they, alas, are a relic of the past. I'm going to create the following ship basket based on what I've read and experienced.

2x Drake
4x Zealot (just the T1 minerals)
4x Omen (to power the zealots)
10x Rifter
7x Incursus
3x Ishkur
3x Incursus
5x Kestrel
3x Tristan
2x Nemesis
2x Tristan
5x Iteron V
2x Viator
2x Iteron I
1x Dominix
1x Raven
1x Apocalypse
1x Hurricane
1x Tornado
10x Merlin
2x Vexor
2x Hulk
2x Covetor

this probably shows my bias towards Gallente but since Gallente ships tend to be reasonably diverse in mineral costs like Caldari, I think it should be similar. Either way, we can compare it to the standard 1x Drake method and see if it is too far off.

My basket generates ratios of (Tritanium / Pyerite / Mexallon / Isogen / Nocxium / Zydrine / Megacyte)
3394 / 900 / 203 / 47.7 / 10.2 / 3.16 / 1
the Drake gets
2913 / 729 / 201 / 20.8 / 14.7 / 4.29 / 1

The most glaring difference is the Isogen used. My basket uses Isogen at a rate 135% faster than the Drake does. Given the Drake's numbers putting Isogen and nocxium in such close proximity, this isn't entirely unexpected as it appears the Isogen usage there was just off. I'm also a bit lighter on Nocxium and Zydrine. Of course, all these numbers are based on ratio to Megacyte. It's just as valid to normalize to something else and Tritanium is the most logical one (in keeping with yesterday's equilibrium post). So the Tritanium normalized numbers are:
1 / .26 / .06 / .014 / . 003 / .0009 / .00029
vs.
1 / .25 / .069 / .007 / .005 / .0015 / .00034

So the Drake uses a bit more on the high end side and substantially less on the Isogen side with Tritanium , Pyerite and Mexallon being in roughly equal quantities.


That's interesting. What's also interesting is that mining out a completely random null-sec gravsite yields numbers not even remotely resembling these
336 / 85.2 / 33 / 15 / 6.6 / 3.06 / 1 (normalized to Mega) or
1 / .24 / .09 / . 04 / .018 / .0086 / .0028

so null-sec can quite comfortably supply their needs for Megacyte and Zydrine. If they're Goons building Drakes, they can even begin to approach their Isogen needs (another interesting coincidence). But they're going to fall well, well short of their Tritanium, Pyerite and Mexallon needs.

Hi-sec on the other hand has no ability to supply Zydrine and Megacyte and only the most cursory of capacity to supply Nocxium. But a typical hi-sec strip mining operation supplies roughly
1 / .232 / .059 / 0.00 / .11 / 0 / 0 (in Pyrox space)
or
1 / .256 / .076 / .0155 / 0.0 / 0 / 0 (in Kernite space)

So pyerite is somewhat thin but Nocx gets supplied VERY well (in fact, at double the rate which is good because it's only available in half the galaxy) but isogen is supplied at about half the quantity needed but only in half the galaxy due to kernite abundancy. We're beginning to see the story for why Isogen has spiked so high while also seeing why Pyerite is a bit squeezed. We're NOT seeing why Nocxium has increased, however and that particular mystery still has me baffled. One last test might be in order.

Let's assume an alliance wanted to build a Titan. Let's further assume they had a huge null-sec mining op and a huge hi-sec mining op running 24/7 (well, 23/7 in EVE). What would they need to build their Titan (let's say an Erebus for the heck of it)?

The numbers are, to say the least, staggering:
Tritanium: 3,425,101,200
Pyerite: 833,045,700
Mexallon: 285,320,400
Isogen: 50,209,300
Nocxium: 14,030,100
Zydrine: 2,504,000
Megacyte: 1,245,800
and that all assumes perfect capital BPOs which no one actually owns (they take about 170 years to research to perfection)... so there's probably a hair more Megacyte and a LOT more Tritanium that goes into a Titan. So let's look at what they had when they finally stopped mining. Pyerite would be the last thing they'd have enough of and they'd find themselves with the following excess materials:
Tritanium: 129,140,640 (about 753m isk at today's prices)
Pyerite: 0
Mexallon: 32,668,493 (2bil)
Isogen: 49,788,988 (5.6bil)
Nocxium: 22,867,401 (14.2bil)
Zydrine: 13,170,295 (8.7bil)
Megacyte: 3,866,478 (7.7bil)

Pyerite is the bottleneck in minerals no matter how you slice it. Nocxium, if anything, should be produced in excess. so why is the market going bonkers right now? Maybe my far too long post tomorrow will help. (How's that for a teaser?)

Mineral Price Equilibrium

I wrote about this in general a couple weeks ago but wanted to lay out the math for posterity, as it were.

There is currently a lot of complaining going around about the mineral prices in Eve. Nullsec people complain about the tepid income. Highsec people complain about the flight to hi-sec manufacturing. No one thinks the mineral prices are "right" (for some definition of right) and we have a wonderfully bitter divide between the l33t SOV owners and the carebear empire dwellers. Both side thinks the other is ruining "their" game.

But looking at the mineral prices, is it possible that we're just victims of the values CCP chose when creating the universe? Rocket scientists don't typically complain about escape velocity because it smacks a little too much of complaining to God about his value for g. This is kind of the same thing.

Here's the exercise that you can do at home as you play along.

Veldspar and Scordite work very well to establish a strong price relationship between Pyerite and Tritanium. If you mine out a belt of random minerals, about half of the Tritanium you mine will be from Veldspar and about 27% will be from Scordite. Scordite will also provide 56% of the Pyerite. So these two ores represent the lion's share of those minerals from mining (though, it's possible, not from all sources... we'll get to that in a minute).

Given that Tritanium forms the backbone of industry, it's not unreasonable to establish everything in terms of Tritanium. Because we know that Veldspar and Scordite are equally ubiquitous (appearing in every system regardless of security status) and they each provide a majority of the two most frequently used minerals (i.e. their demand is very, very high) we should comfortably find that they are worth the same amount. And they're close, Scordite is about 15% more valuable then Veldspar at present (on a per m3 basis which is how mining works). Each m3 of Veldspar makes 30.03003 of Tritanium. Each m3 of Scordite makes 16.67667 units of Tritanium and 8.32833 units of Scordite. We know that these two should be roughly equal so (incoming math!):

30.03003*T = 16.67667*T + 8.32833*P
where T is the value of Tritanium and P the value of Pyerite. By simplifying we get
13.35335*T = 8.32833*P
1.60337*T = P

So the value of Pyerite SHOULD be about 1.60337x Tritanium price

Currently, it's not. It's actually a fair clip off of this but we'll get to that.

You can repeat this for all the ores. As it turns out, Mexallon is largely supplied by Plagioclase (using P = 1.60337*T and plugging in we get M = 9.46514*T) and Isogen comes in decent quantities from Kernite (yielding an implied value of 18.1127*T for Isogen).

Because of the distribution of ores, however, it isn't necessarily fair to group them all together, and here's where it gets complicated. Plagioclase only appears in .9 and lower security systems. That's a very, very minor difference between the availability of Veldspar and Scordite so we can hand wave it away without significant problems. But Kernite is only in .6 and lower space and even then only in about half the galaxy. The other half of the galaxy gets Pyrox. The high-ends become likewise difficult as they have nowhere near the availability of the lower end stuff. So what do we do? Well, Excel and Math (hurray!) have combined to give us a great solution, matrix multiplication. As it turns out, this is simply a difficult algebra problem and matrix multiplication is perfect for that.

I've created an excel sheet with all the ores as well as 9 different bands. Why 9 bands, you ask? Well, it turns out that matrix multiplication needs to be square. There are 15 ores so a full matrix needs to be 15x15 and 9 bands are needed because our inputs are going to be the "band" of the ore and then the price multiplier of the mineral. The astute reader has already noticed that 7 (the minerals) plus 9 (the bands) is 16... not 15. The answer is that we're going to peg everything to Tritanium in value and thus remove it from the equation. Essentially, I've decided by econometric fiat, that I don't care about the value of Tritanium relative to Isk. I only care about Tritanium relative to everything else.

So once you do that, you have to decide what band each ore is in. I established the following:
Veldspar, Scordite, Plagioclase: Band 1. These are ubiquitous and nearly always available.
Pyroxeres: Band 2 (limited to about half the galaxy but still hi-sec available)
Kernite: Band 3 (ditto Pyroxeres comment)
Omber, Gneiss, Spodumain: I know that Omber is a hi-sec ore and Gneiss and Spodumain are not. But the fact is that none of these are worth mining right now. If you replaced every belt in Jita with Omber, Gneiss and Spodumain, you'd probably have Jita asteroid belts stay populated all day. They're just that bad. So they get a band for themselves.
Jaspet, Hemorphite, Hedbergite: These 3 are the "good" low-sec ores. They appear in low, low-sec and are fairly frequent in null-sec. They aren't the "big time" stuff of the ABCs but they're still reasonably valued and mined. They also share duty for supplying the galaxy with Nocxium (and a not insubstantial volume of Zydrine) so they're one band.
Dark Ochre: The forgotten "D" in ABC"D" ores.
Crokite: Band 7
Bistot: Band 8
Arkonor: Band 9

You could argue that at least Arkonor and Bistot should be together as they're kind of polar opposite ores in terms of quantity of Zydrine and Megacyte provided. But there is regionality to them (significantly less now that anomaly mining has become the null-sec norm but regionality nonetheless).

Once you do that, you invert the big matrix, multiply by the Tritanium ratios from the ores and, wa la, you get the expected value ratios for both the minerals AND for the ores.

Mineral (algebraic, idealized ratio to Trit) / [actual ratio to Trit]
Tritanium: (1) / [1]
Pyerite: (1.603365) / [2.174194]
Mexallon: (9.465144) / [10.40688]
Isogen: (11.79592) / [19.22667]
Nocxium: (74.11183) / [105.0475]
Zydrine: (126.7146) / [115.0475]
Megacyte: (368.5216) / [348.904]

Create a spreadsheet that shows all the ores (there are 15, not counting Mercoxit). Some really shocking things are implied by the current prices. Scordite is more valuable than both Bistot and Arkonor. Veldspar is more valuable than Crokite (although that particular result isn't actually that shocking, the algebraic equilibrium had Veldspar 10% more valuable than Crokite anyways). So we have to look at the reasons why this would be. There are two: Bottlenecks and alternative mineral sources. I'll post about those tomorrow.

Another slight break from Eve Economics

Sorry if you've been getting your EVE Econ fix from here, I've been on a couple day break while my new corp gets their Indy Station up and running. In the meantime, I've been playing a lot of Starcraft 3. Not the main game, which I'm hilariously bad at and I find to be not at all relaxing and, in fact, very nerve wracking and stressful. Nope, instead I've been playing Squadron Tower Defense. It's the highest rated mod in the Arcade and is very, very fun. Games are relatively quick (about 20 minutes, give or take) and interesting. There is a great dynamic between military and econ (guns and butter?) that I enjoy as well. Essentially, you have a primary resource called Crystals that allows you to build either towers for defense or workers for harvesting the secondary resource, Gas. Gas is what you use to send "extra" troops in the enemy waves while also giving you a recurring, per wave, boost to your crystal production. So there's a feedback that occurs and you have to make tradeoffs. Short term tower security versus long term economic strength.

Letting creeps by your towers has two levels of impact. If you leak a little bit but your teammates clean it up, you lose out on a little bit of income and your teammates (it's typically a 4v4 game in the "classic" mode) and one of your teammates gets about 20% of the lost income if they clean up your mess. If they don't, then the creeps move to the middle, attack your Security Station (which is ultimately the thing you're trying to protect) and when your Security Station kills creeps your opponent gets the income.

Currently in game there are 8 races with plans for 2 more. There's a number of game modes, including a chaos mode in which your race is randomized after each wave which presents its own set of challenges. Each race has 6 different units, most of which have an upgrade or multiple upgrades and each race has a unique racial ability that synergizes with their units.

It's a very well thought out, very well supported game that can provide for nice distractions in roughly 20 minute blocks.

At present, there's only the generic Starcraft art being used so you have to have some detachment from reality when you place your "mudman" from the elemental race and are created with a walker that would be more appropriate in Mechwarrior then representing an elemental warrior. But since it may be asked to attack Space Cows, I suppose we can let it slide.

All in all, a very fun game that I'd encourage other SC3 fans to check out.

--
It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt
-Abraham Lincoln

The problem with Internet quotes is that you can never be certain of their accuracy
-Abraham Lincoln

Kevin Bacon, fame, and growing older

I grew up as a middle class kid. My Dad worked and my Mom stayed home. My Dad's job oscillated between upper middle class and lower middle class (he's in a construction related industry that has always seen some big ups and downs). So I didn't really know any "famous" people. About the most "famous" person I "knew" was an ancestor of mine who invented a gun that was wildly popular for a couple years before being completely replaced by breach loading rifles. I've noticed as I've gotten older that I've become closer and closer to famous people as my connections have grown and matured. Some of them are "niche" famous. The CEO of a big mid-regional Bank. The inventor of a board game. Some of them are only briefly famous like Vile Rat whom I did not know but several of my friends online knew very well. And then today, I found out that one of our oldest family friends is dating Zooey Deschanel (which immediately made me realize that my Kevin Bacon number is now 3 thanks to the movie Sundance Skippy). Through most of elementary school, I was best friends with his older brother (who was quite a jerk to him, even by normal 'older brother' standards). Kind of a weird thing. I'm also reminded at least monthly that just because you think someone is unreachable doesn't mean they really are. There's a fairly large number of interesting people I've "met" on the internet that you would think wouldn't have time to even respond to email. Game creators. Sports writers. Economists. You won't always get a response but there's zero harm in sending interesting people email. If they're so busy that they can't / don't respond then so be it. They probably didn't even read it and even if they did, that probably means the number is so large they can't remember any particular email. If they do respond, sometimes the conversations you strike up can be very meaningful.

So keep making those connections and maybe you'll get your Bacon Number down to below mine ;)

Brilliant War Time Economic Model

Until I started looking into the war in the North, I didn't fully appreciate the brilliance of the GSF fleet doctrine and approach to war.

As ISK has proliferated in game, T2 ships have become increasingly popular and, relatively speaking, cheaper. This is sort of a "quality of life" improvement or a "rising standard of living" and, in and of itself, represents an interesting real world dynamic. But as that occurred, Technetium became more and more of a bottleneck. Leading to the inevitable conclusion of OTEC which was a mutual non-aggression and pseudo mutual-defense agreement in the north with the various holders of 90% of the Tech.

Enter NCdot and their breaking of the OTEC treaty. Their fleet doctrine was beamHAC centered. Lots of Zealots. These are T2 ships. They have significantly higher fitting requirements and cost significantly more than a T1 ship. The Goons, on the other hand, have a lot of younger pilots (younger in the "lower Skill Point" sense of the word). They fly Drakes which you can competently fit and fly after 15 days of training and you can expertly fit after about 2-3 months. They cost about 1/4th of a Zealot and have about 1/2 of the training time (maybe even less).

It's important to note that T2 ships cost tech to manufacture. So as the war of attrition wore on, Goons were, in essence, driving the price of Tech up, making more from their tech supply. NCdot would have benefited from this as well but because they were plowing it back into (now more expensive!) T2 ships, the increase was either break even or greatly reduced. Goons on the other hand were getting richer in real terms. This inevitably lead to the attrition favoring the Goons and the fight slowly shifting to favor them. They've now captured MORE of NCdots Tech moons and stand to come out even further ahead. Since they've begun to take Tech from NCdot, essentially NCdot is paying the Goons to blow them up. Every time an NCdot Zealot is killed, goons get a little bit richer.

I don't know if it's intentional as a business/war model. But it's brilliant if it is. Well done Goons!

--
It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt
-Abraham Lincoln

The problem with Internet quotes is that you can never be certain of their accuracy
-Abraham Lincoln

Eve Planetary Interaction

So the different ways that you can setup your PI structure in EVE are fairly varied but there's something I've noticed.

It seems there's little (no?) reason to do PI on anything other than Enriched Uranium right now... At least at the, "I'm going to built a tier 2 item from scratch and sell it" level. Enriched Uranium can only be built on Plasma planets and requires Heavy and Noble Metals. In high-sec, there's generally enough to keep 1.5 Advanced Processor's going non-stop (technically, you'll be running 2 non-stop then 1 non-stop etc). You need to be able to log in twice a day and do 12 hour cycles (there's some leeway here depending on the planet and if you can pad your output with a couple 1 hour cycles at night or something).

Running 1.5 on 5 planets (what most people have the training tolerance to handle) results in output of 5*5*24*1.5 = 900 enriched uranium per day. At about 10k apiece, that's about 9mil per day or 270mil per month. About half a plex. In theory, you could do that on all three of your characters on one account and fairly comfortable generate a plex per month (even if you dropped down to doing 24 hour cycles and thus were only doing 1 advanced factory non-stop, you'd still be at ~540mil per month which essentially covers a plex.

The yields for everything else are pretty poor. Particularly alarming are the stupidly low prices on Polyaramids, Silicate Glass and Microfiber Shielding. Those three require two planets to produce (making them less productive and incurring higher import/export costs) and yet they cost about half as much as enriched uranium (they also rely on P0 inputs that are the rarest in hi-sec).

With some work, you could probably find a cluster of plasma planets in low-sec that could yield 2-3 advanced processing facilities simultaneously (note, to get to 3, I think you need Command Center Upgrades 5 which is upward of 20 days). A hypothetical "master" PI person could have (again, in theory), 3 characters, 6 planets, 3 advanced processors for a combined yield of about $2billion per month. Those kind of numbers would take a lot of work (short cycles managed relatively frequently as well as jumps into low-sec to grab the goods every few days) but they illustrate the point remarkably well. Enriched Uranium is where the action's at. Unless you've found a working model with high end PI, stick with the low-end stuff and help make everyone's POS's just a little bit cheaper (btw, the market for enriched uranium is enormous. There are 3.5million buy orders in Jita with the regional hubs also showing over 1million each).

Fixing Eve's Economy

This article (http://themittani.com/features/why-risk-free-highsec-would-kill-eve-online) got me thinking about the various problems facing EVE's economy right now. Don't get me wrong, I DON'T think it's broken. In fact, I think it's in a healthier state than any game on the market that I'm familiar with. But I think there are some areas that could use significant improvement to make it really hum. Right now, a lot of the Goons (and probably other null-sec dwellers) are concerned about the relative emptiness of null-sec. They want their PVP fix and they feel like the giant fleet fights are not it. They make the (rather absurd) claim that hi-sec is too safe and that making null-sec more profitable while simultaneously making hi-sec less safe will lead to more industrial players in null-sec so they can shoot them (the article even refers to them as the low rung of the food chain). The problems with that argument are myriad and fairly obvious. Smoothing the risk curve while raising the reward curve has massive ramifications for the game that should not be taken lightly. Further, the risk/reward mechanism is far from broken. One needs only look at the price for Morphite vs. Veldspar. Despite one of those appearing only null-sec and the other being essentially a hi-sec operation, they yield almost the same reward per unit time. There are only two conclusions, either the risk is roughly equivalent or null-sec dwellers are less risk averse than hi-sec dwellers (and therefore demand a lower return for the risk they take on). I think it's a little bit of both. But you can't squeeze "risk averse" people by applying MORE risk. They won't change their behavior. They'll just quit.

I happen to think that the best way to make the game healthier is better regionality. Currently, there are four effective regions of space:

Hi-Sec: Has "relative" safety. Has good proximity to major trade hubs (that's a player driven item not a game created item... but it's inevitable so I've included it). Has relatively free industrial capacity for everything except copy slots and material research slots. Has lvl 4 missions in abundance.

Null-Sec: Has ABC ores (though it shares this with K-Space). Has Morphite (technically shared with K-Space but very limited). Has no police. Has moon mining.

K-Space: Lacks local AND police as well as has the only NPCs in the game that represent a real threat (i.e. it's the most dangerous place in space). Has gas for boosters. Has drops for T3 production.

Low-Sec: Has Factional Warfare

Anyone claiming that Null-sec doesn't have decent rewards is full of it. Tech and other high end moons provide VAST rewards for players (as evidenced by the financial capacity of NC. and GSF to go to war over them). They are incredible material faucets for those alliances that indirectly produce vast amounts of wealth. And they give them something to fight over.

The real problem is low-sec. Factional Warfare provides some incentive to go to a particular subset of low-sec but not much of one. I propose that fixing low-sec will lead to people developing a slightly less risk averse mindset which will, in turn, lead to a migration to null-sec. How would I accomplish that?

1) Strip Nocxium from Crokite, Dark Ochre and Pyroxeres (giving them Zydrine, Isogen and Mexallon to compensate). This would make Nocxium come primarily from low-sec ores. Grav sites (rarely in hi-sec and often in null-sec/k-space) would still have these. If that doesn't prove to be sufficient then removing Hemorphite and Hebergite from grav sites would be the next step).

2) Buff exploration sites. Make the ones in low-sec have lower variance in type (right now, they are quite often full of crap). The "mid-tier" exploration sites should also have a heavy emphasis on skill books (see #3) with datacores, decryptors and interface blueprints also being possible. Save something unique for null-sec though (implants perhaps?? T1 BPOs??).

3) Remove NPC seeded skill books. This dovetails with #2. I'd pull all of the NPC skill books from the market and then buff their appearance in exploration sites. Make this another item that is player driven. They should also be regionalized (you find hybrid weapon skill books in gallente space, for example). It might even be worthwhile to make specific types come from specific regions (what if all the generic mechanics sub-skills came from Bleak Lands, for example).

4) Make undocking less dangerous. The biggest problem facing low-sec right now is the inconvenience factor associated with a lack of trade hubs. No one wants to supply them because of the simple fact that undocking is unnecessarily dangerous. If you removed the danger of undocking, you'd at least begin to see SOME trade being done in these areas (not to mention, there'd now be something for the indy players to BUY... skill books!). That should establish sort of dedicated mini-hubs that would provide useful convenience for low-sec dwellers.

5) Make the 2nd tier of moon minerals, or mostly all, in low-sec (Cobalt, Scandium, Titanium, Tungsten). Moon minerals provide an anchor for someone to OCCUPY space rather than just pass through it. By keeping these moon minerals in isolated chunks, it creates friction and something to fight over. This is also the tier required for the racial carbides and should be regionalized accordingly.

NONE of that involves making low-sec "safer" (other than the undocking thing which is just stupid). In fact, low-sec would now have a group of explorers and miners that would attract PvP. It also move EVE more to having a player run economy which is a very, very good thing.

On a separate note, I'd really be in favor of highly regionalizing the base minerals anyways while also tweaking the build requirements of the ships. It would be awesome if:

1) Caldari space had a lot more Veldspar and their ships used more Tritanium but no Mexallon (or very little)
2) Amarr space had a lot more Scordite and their ships used more Pyerite and little Isogen
3) Gallente space had a lot more Plagioclase and their ships used more Mexallon and little Pyerite
4) Minmatar space had a lot more Kernite and their ships used more Isogen and little Tritanium

This creates a natural trade flow that we don't really have now which would be very helpful to the economy as a whole. You could further split null into Arkonor areas, Crokite areas (which, under the above changes would be primarily Zydrine dispensers), Mercoxit areas and Bistot areas while simultaneously tweaking moon minerals to be more regional. The problem isn't that Tech is regionalized, the problem is that other minerals aren't. MORE regionalization creates MORE friction which is good. It also shouldn't be absolute, however. I would suggest that there should be at least ONE of each moon type in every region of space. This means that no large area is self-sufficient which encourages fights, trading and diplomacy, the hallmarks of EVE.

POS manufacturing vs. Station Manufacturing

For the last month and a half, I've been primarily focused on station manufacturing. As I'm rejiggering my spreadsheets now, I realized that I need to re-prioritize what I build and even how I invent. When you're doing T2 manufacturing in a station, the copy slots are far and away the worst bottleneck. They're worse in many ways than the ME slot bottleneck because ultimately if you're building something like Co-Processor II's, the cost of the actual Co-Processor I's is tiny and if you don't even bother to research it's ME down some it's not a particularly big deal. So with that in mind, you want to maximize the profit from each invention attempt because each BPC is precious. So my spreadsheet is geared towards giving me the Expected Value (EV) from clicking the invention button. It does this by calculating the maximum profit and multiplying by the chance of success and then subtracting off the cost to invent (from datacores and any meta items used). This gives me the EV for each invention attempt and represents, theoretically, how much richer I get every time I click the invent button. Because of this, the +9 run decryptor has been an integral part of my repertoire when it comes to building ships.

However, now that I'm moving to POS manufacturing, the copy slots will no longer be the major bottleneck. The bottleneck now will reside mostly in the actual manufacturing process, particularly with ships. Ships require 6 components to be constructed in quantities that typically take 12-24 hours. The ship then frequently takes 1-2 days to build. So you're looking at tying up 6 slots for roughly a day and then 1 slot for roughly 2 days. So I'm looking at focusing less on EV per invention attempt and more on per unit profitability. That will probably require a shift towards the +2 run decryptors (that also give +4 PL and +1ML). Those decryptors make a nice all around BPC that generally allows a highly profitable production run. As an example, a Viator build from the +9 will be about $14MM in total profit per unit for total profit across the entire BPC of $141MM. On the other hand, building from the +2 run BPC will yield only $64MM per BPC but that's $32MM per unit (and more quickly built).

I need to rejigger the sheet to make sure I'm inventing the right things but it's a mindset shift that's interesting.

Freedom of Speech

A break from my Eve related economics posts but one that I felt was important (and also, not unrelated to Eve if you've been reading themittani.com)

After reading this article (http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012/09/12/after-attacks-in-egypt-and-libya-usa-asks-why/57770610/1), I found myself mentally answered the unasked questions. And it occurs to me that many countries who have never had Democracy OR Freedom of Speech don't understand the connection. They hear tolerance and think that it must be enforced because in their previous political system, the government stood for only itself. So logically, in a Democracy, things would be better. The Government would stand for the little guy.

Americans understand the fallacy of this. Regardless of left or right, the thought of actually censoring this ridiculous video is a bridge too far for any American. It wouldn't shock me if you released a poll asking that very question if the number polled somewhere south of 5%. Americans have a long history of even being uncomfortable breaking up such vile things as the KKK, an organization that actually ACTED on their inciting hate speech. Too actively move against a youtube video would seem to be so fundamentally anti-American as you can get.

There is a saying, attributed often to Voltaire (the source is in some dispute), "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." That phrase, perhaps more than any other, sums up our national philosophy on free speech. We believe that you cannot have true democracy without near absolute free speech. And that speech surrounding political/religious/cultural issues is particularly sacrosanct. We have laws that prevent lies (fraud, slander, libel) and we have restrictions affecting public safety ("fire" in a crowded theater is not protected, nor is "Let's go out and shoot X"). We even have laws (HIGHLY controversial laws) that penalize ACTUAL CRIMES more heavily when they are accompanied by hate speech (If I beat up someone, I may get 5 years. If I do it while shouting racial epithets, I may get 15 years for example). But actual laws with the sole purpose of restricting speech? No one in America wants that.

All this is to say that no one is condoning the video. No one is out there saying, "Yup, that was great!" MOST Americans think that the person who made it is an idiot. On top of that, he MIGHT have some civil liability in regards to these deaths (although that will be very difficult to prove). But to censor the video? To jail him for releasing it? Those ideas seem just plain out of kilter with reality. As a result, there appears to be a very large disconnect from the Libyan (and Egyptian and Yemeni people one presumes) and Americans. They are shocked that a Democracy that preaches tolerance would allow such a video. We are shocked that a Democracy would be asked to censor such a video. And we become two ships passing in the night (shooting at each other to extend the metaphor). In this case, attacking the emissaries of the country that houses the person you're really upset.

For those upset about the video (or any speech that offends you), I offer this up to you. If your God is truly the mighty being that you believe him to be, then his will will be done. Truth will out. Your God is mighty enough and righteous enough that this video will not even be a blip on the radar. Feel free to boycott products. If you don't like America's policies then you can even boycott all American products. You can actively speak out against America. You can vote for candidates that will apply diplomatic pressure. You can build your economy to be an economic rival. You can do ANY of those things. But to take another human life is too far. It would be bad enough if it was the person responsible for the act you're upset by. But to take another's life as a PROXY? That is a line that no God will condone. That is a black stain on your soul that will follow you for the rest of your life and into the after life. I'm far from a theological scholar but I feel reasonably comfortable that that's a true statement for any main stream religion.

I understand you're upset. And I'll defend your right to be upset. But rampaging destruction and death brings down everything and everyone.

Addendum to the Zealot gold rush

It's a reasonable question to ask if there are other ways to capitalize on this fight

I can't think of many.

I'm sure GFS and the rest of CFC have missiles well in hand. T1 missiles are EASY to produce and even T2 missiles are not horrible (though there might be some movement there... I expect they're carrying a 2:1 ratio of Kinetic and EM missiles. That's a completely random guess from a completely uninformed carebear. But my reasoning is that:

A) Drake's get a bonus to kinetic
B) "Lightly" tanked zealots (ones without a full loadout / rig slots all devoted to tank) will have EM as their biggest armor hole (and, for what it's worth, their biggest shield hole)
C) "Heavy" tanked zealots will have kinetic as their biggest armor hole (because they'll use a module to plug thermal and a rig to plug EM leaving EANM's to omni up the rest).

CFC has to play a bit of game theory. If they ONLY use kinetic, the Zealots can plug that hole with triple mods and watch the Drake fleet reduced to nothing. By mixing in the EM's (again, 2:1 may not be the right ratio... but it's close), they make sure that the Zealots can't fit optimal against them. That's my line of thought at least. If they mix less, it's probably still worth the zealots plugging 2 kinetic with EANM's for the rest.

Jita's already seen a 10% increase in cost of Scourge Fury Cruise

Armor Kinetic Hardener IIs have also increased. These are normally niche items with rare moments of profitability. This is one of those. It's not fantastic by any stretch. I don't do weapons (they typically suck for profit) but the turrets that the AHACs use might be of use too...

If there's other things I've forgotten, let me know.

It's a crazy, crazy EVE world

More fighting in the north. More zealots crashing and burning... The Jita buy side orders for Zealots spiked by $10mil... that would be a big enough movement to be meaningful. The Sell orders spiked by a ridiculous $32mil. Yesterday morning, there were 388 sell orders for Zealots in Jita. There's 109 now. That's nearly 300million sell orders that disappeared overnight. That's about 55billion isk dropped onto the market.

T2 ship manufacturing is NOT an elastic market. It is highly inelastic. PARTICULARLY on the supply side of the equation. Getting ships to market takes and inventory delay that is significant. The BEST case scenario is someone prioritizing construction on some zealot BPCs they've got lying around. instead of building from one BPC at a time, they start building from two or maybe three. There are SOME producers who might do that. So they could, in theory, triple their throughput and maybe have new BPCs online by the time the current batch runs dry.

But the vast majority of production will come from people who have some Omen BPCs lying around and invent from them. So you're talking about 1-2 days of invention and a roughly 1/3rd success rate. So if you've got 10 BPCs lying around, you probably get ~3 BPCs. If you used the +9 run decryptor, you get 27 runs but most people are probably going to use the +4 PL decryptor which means they get 2 runs from (so 6 ships). BTW: The price for Sacred Manifesto (the +4PL decryptor) spikes by $1mil in Jita as well.

Note #1 to the NCDot people reading this. Since you lost a bunch of tech moons, guess who's getting ~60% of that $55billion? Hint: It's not NCDot...

Note #2: Perhaps we can negotiate to have a more convenient place for your zealots delivered ;)