The first ship that I flied after the beginner missions was the Badger, the smallest Caldari transport ship. The first photo on my first EVE post illustrated this ship:
The Badgers are still close to my heart. For this reason I started to buy them up. For the sake of nostalgia maybe. Or rather:
To increase the profitability, I do the same with Cormorants (Caldari destroyers). The reason why newbies are selling their strongest combat ship is again beyond me, along with the near-infinite demand for them in Jita, but again: my place is transporting instead of asking questions:
My business plan is simple: I fly to the newbie system with a shuttle carrying a cargohold expander I module. I assemble the Badger, fit the expander on it, put the shuttle and the Cormorant into the hold and fly it back to Jita. 450-500K profit over 900K capital for a 2x4-jump high-sec transport which can be done by autopilot? Yes please! As a bonus, I can carry a few odd books that the newbies sold too on the Badger (of course not an expensive one that would get pirate attention).
Buying them is easy, I set up buy orders for the ships in the newbie systems, so I never have to worry of running out of Badgers. Actually, the situation is quite the opposite:
Seems I got myself into the same situation as before: I have way more Badgers than I could handle and new ones are arriving while you are reading this. However this time I was prepared, which leads us to the industrial system to learn today:
Reprocessing is the act of turning a product, a mineral or ice into raw materials. You can see on the picture that I don't get all the materials. Some lost to "unrecoverable" and other bunch to "we take". The first is affected by skills using the following formula: SC+0.375*(1+R*0.02)*(1+RE*0.04)*(1+SP*0.05)
The "we take" field is affected by your standing with the station that can be increased by doing missions to them. It's 5% at 0 standing and linearly decreases, reaching 0 at 6.7 standing.
Please note that raw materials are very small in size, only 0.01m3 and some are pretty expensive. 500000 Noxcium fits into a Badger and costs half PLEX. So rather don't transport 500K Noxcium in a Badger. Take several turns instead to avoid pirates. If you want to implement it, remember that Badger is Caldari, there is similar ship for every faction.
The Badgers are still close to my heart. For this reason I started to buy them up. For the sake of nostalgia maybe. Or rather:
To increase the profitability, I do the same with Cormorants (Caldari destroyers). The reason why newbies are selling their strongest combat ship is again beyond me, along with the near-infinite demand for them in Jita, but again: my place is transporting instead of asking questions:
My business plan is simple: I fly to the newbie system with a shuttle carrying a cargohold expander I module. I assemble the Badger, fit the expander on it, put the shuttle and the Cormorant into the hold and fly it back to Jita. 450-500K profit over 900K capital for a 2x4-jump high-sec transport which can be done by autopilot? Yes please! As a bonus, I can carry a few odd books that the newbies sold too on the Badger (of course not an expensive one that would get pirate attention).
Buying them is easy, I set up buy orders for the ships in the newbie systems, so I never have to worry of running out of Badgers. Actually, the situation is quite the opposite:
Seems I got myself into the same situation as before: I have way more Badgers than I could handle and new ones are arriving while you are reading this. However this time I was prepared, which leads us to the industrial system to learn today:
Reprocessing is the act of turning a product, a mineral or ice into raw materials. You can see on the picture that I don't get all the materials. Some lost to "unrecoverable" and other bunch to "we take". The first is affected by skills using the following formula: SC+0.375*(1+R*0.02)*(1+RE*0.04)*(1+SP*0.05)
- SC is the station constant, it's 0.5 for NPC stations
- R is the Refining skill
- RE is Refinery Efficiency skill, it needs Refining 5 to be learnable and takes 3x more time to level up than basic skills
- SP is special processing skill. It's not one skill but many, like Veldspar processing, Scordite processing. The basic ones are easy to learn, but the rare ores, ice and scrapmetal processing (ships and modules count as scrapmetal) are all learnable after Refinery Efficiency is rank 5. This skill takes 5x time than basic skills to learn
The "we take" field is affected by your standing with the station that can be increased by doing missions to them. It's 5% at 0 standing and linearly decreases, reaching 0 at 6.7 standing.
Please note that raw materials are very small in size, only 0.01m3 and some are pretty expensive. 500000 Noxcium fits into a Badger and costs half PLEX. So rather don't transport 500K Noxcium in a Badger. Take several turns instead to avoid pirates. If you want to implement it, remember that Badger is Caldari, there is similar ship for every faction.
21 comments:
The reason why certain T1 ships are popular is not necessarily because they're the "best-in-slot" for a certain job, it's because they're used as ingredients when building the T2 models. For example, a Badger is required to build the Crane, a Caldari Blockade Runner.
Not sure 100% about this since I don't do industry, but I would guess some of those purchases for destroyers and badgers are for tech 2 ship production - Crane haulers and interdictors. Any T2 item requires the base T1 item as a building material. Read about it.
"my place is transporting instead of asking questions". Also, you may want to fix this at some point. You should understand what each ship, module, raw material does, the nature of it's use, what the most bought/sold/blown up stuff is and why, how it all ties together etc etc etc. Correct me if I'm wrong but I assume understanding this is important if you want to do business.
Like say for a small example, this T1 hull is used to build T2 interdictors -> what do dictors do? -> critical part of any fleet combat, and they die more that any other ship -> so maybe there's a constant demand of x magnitude for this item. That sort of stuff... I'm sure the indys here would know more about this. Life was simpler when you knew all hunters just needed the Serpent Sting glyph, ha?
I'm not sure that the knowledge of Badgers being materials for Crane construction helps me a bit in selling them. I mean I respond to immediate market factors and not planning for long-term investments, so all I need to know is how much they sell for and how much are they bought for.
Can I just point out that Eve is a nine year old game. The fact that there are enough new players still joining to allow you make a profit from trading with them is quite remarkable. Any other mmorpg I played, the newbie zones cleared out after a few months.
By the way. I read about a big CCP crackdown on mining bots. Apparently that is likely to result on price increases for some minerals but I don't know which.
"And if they buy little Badgers since they can't afford the big, why can't they do a 4-jump trip to the starter solar systems, where the newbies who got this ship as a mission reward are selling it for peanuts?"
Gevlon, if you will stick to EVE and will look back after a year to your posts, you will see how naive you sound. There are shitload of players for whom the value of several hundred thousand ISK is much much lower than going 4 jumps. I myself make 300-400mil per day from industry. If I needed Badger for some reason, I would gladly pay even 500% mark-up and get in the same system.
@IO: if you make money from industry, you never need a Badger. You need 1000 Badgers. 200K price difference on 1000 Badgers is 200M
"Actually, the situation is quite the opposite"
this is the key point of your article. though you gloss over it.
right now you are mostly in the transportation buisness. people are happy to pay you 62.5k per jump. as you increase you cargo ship flying skills you might even make more per jump. have a look at Red Frog and Black Frog hauling corporation for their fees to get an idea of how much you can make.
actually you are also adding liquidity to the market and the opportunity cost needs to be considered.
as for the why; trial accounts cannot train the [racial] industrial skill required to fly t1 haulers but they can do the career agent missions which give them as reward. they littterally cannot fly them to market. as for the buyers, it wouldnt suprise me if they are buying in bulk and have a higher valuation of their own time than you do.
You asked a question, we answered. While your current day-to-day operations may be arbitrage, you did make money in WoW by preparing for future changes. If you know the uses for certain products, you can do the same in Eve.
For example, if you know what kinds of ships are used (and destroyed) in the yearly Hulkageddon events, you might make money by stockpiling ships before the event and unloading them to the market after the prices spike.
Even if you make your money doing industry, you might need that one Badger for some fun. Or to complete that last mission to have X standing and your combat agents all don't like you right now. Or sentimental reasons, of course ;)
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Many EVE players I know (in High Sec)"grind" their ISK to afford their monthly Plex at the start of a month and then go on to do what they find fun to do, often just breaking even or even losing some ISK in the rest of that month.
Of course, if you get all your fun out of making ISK - more power to you ;)
You seem to have trouble understanding the value of distance, time, and convenience in EVE, despite until now you have made money exactly from it. Hell, it's actually the same as in real life - importers, transporters, storage, supermarkets, etc.
So if I need 1000 badgers in bulk, or 1000 battlecruisers for the next critical battle of my 0.0 war (and I need them all delivered to my staging system, yesterday), I'm not going to spend hours running all over the galaxy in a freighter collecting them at the most optimal price. I have a war to fight, or a nonstop production chain to feed. I'll just go to the supermarket and buy them in bulk in one spot. That price will include the value of having those goods built, transported, stored in bulk, delivered to one single spot - where I can just go once, fill up 3 jump freighter, jump-jump-jump, done.
I suppose that people buy Badgers in Jita instead of goint 4 jump for the same reason that you buy potatoes in grocery shop instead going directly to farmer which may save you 30-40%.
Your time costs more than you would save.
@Steele
'So if I need 1000 badgers in bulk'
Sorry for the inconvenience I discovered they were worth more scrapped. Also the minerals are easier to sell and transport.
but they are not worth more scrapped.
newbies sell them for 255k in starter system only because they cant fly them without the skills and also dont have the processing efficency skills to get perfect refine.
reprocessers can turn them into 382k of minerals (but still has to transport and sell them)
the jita price is 450k which is higher than their scrap value. which is as it should be.
Gevlon, you might want to look into RedFrog Freight, it's a player corporation that does hauling and only hauling (in high sec, for low/null sec see BlackFrog). They have fair rates and if you need to haul large amounts of goods and don't want to spend time on it, they are they way to go. Usually, you can use the time used for hauling more profitably and they finish most jobs in under 24h.
http://red-frog.org/faq.php
http://red-frog.org/jumps.php
I have to say as a combat pilot I hate destroyers. I will fly either the top combat frigate or a cruiser. A destroyeris a bastard child of a ship and only most powerful for a very narrow window.
@Anonymous 11:47
"but they are not worth more scrapped."
That depends on how you run your operations. While directly selling Badgers looks more profitable, you still need to go and buy them, and then haul them to Jita for sale. They take 20000m3 of space, so unless you are capable to use freighter, you can only haul them around one by one, each Badger will have to make its own trip to Jita. That's OK, while you running some small-scale operation, it's a nice way to make some money for a newbie, but it gets a little complicated, when you have, say, 200 of them (and, if you look on that screenshots, Gevlon already have 136 of them in 4 different places). If this is the case, you may consider scrapping all and hauling the mats more profitable, as it takes only fraction of time, needed to haul them all as they are. Time is money, remember?
..Gevlon, as others have said, when you have say 50m legit ISK, flipping nooby badgers via hauling them for 100% returns is the cats ass.
But when you have 10b, and you have logged an insane amount of jumps as a pod pilot, you will pay a primum on buying a badger from the station you're in.
And as for the industrialist maybe needing 1k badgers for his operation? And paying 200m more for buying them in Jita? Jita (or another major hub with a mark up) is the only place where you could find 1k badgers.
If he went and placed buy orders to get them, then he is not making his money from construction, he is making it off of trade, and could make far more trading in a more profitable item.
If he went and hauled his newly acquired badgers from their location to his manufacturing station, then he is making his money off of transportation, and he could make far more with much less risk by being a pilot for Red Frog.
But...
If he buys the number he needs, hires red frog, and utilizes his vast amount of industry SPs by creating the manufacturing job, and then waits the week or so it takes to produce a large batch of T2 ships, and then hires red frog again, then he is an industrialist. He made his ISK from nothing but being a good planner and manufacturer, and the only time he spent was the few minutes it takes to buy the mats, hire the transport company, and start the manufacture job.
Instead of jumping all around the region, he is out enjoying his isk on his PvP alt, blowing up pilots who are transporting Badgers in Badgers, one by one, to make 200k.
Sometimes you don't have to learn all the details and design the most intricate plans to be successful. Actually what Gevlon is doing is applying the few simple principles he holds true to the new unknown situations he finds in EvE.
I think the goal of most of Gevlon's projects is exactly that: "let's apply some principle I deem fundamentally correct to some scenario (be it WoW raiding, PvP or more recently EvE) and let's see what happens".
Just a thing I remembered, if you are doing business with minerals and reprocessing, you may want to know more about compression: http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2011/04/replicators.html
There are so many Badgers and Cormorants on starter planets because the tutorials reward you with them. People will frequently do all the tutorials for cash and free skillbooks, and then sell the ships they have no intention of using. The advanced combat training gives you a free Cormorant, and I think two of the tutorials give Badgers - the production one and something else.
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