Greedy Goblin

Monday, September 29, 2014

Mining missions: Thukker LPageddon

The graph shows the value and volume of Thukker Tribe Loyalty Points, calculated from the Jita market history on Mid-grade Nomad Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Omega implants, weighted by their costs. The other items in Thukker store are either normal Empire faction items or have no volume. As you can see, it's been decreasing in the last 4-5 months, crossing 2000 ISK/LP for the first time ever.

Considering that the traded volume doesn't show anything extraordinary, this isn't trading or manipulation related. The reason for the continuous price decrease is my mining mission farm post. For proof, we have the dotlan ratting data (example):
The ratting in Hodrold grew by 400% in the last 8 months. Hodrold is a back-end highsec-island system with not many PvE options. It has no security agent, nor a fixed complex. The places where you can kill rats are mining belts (including an ice belt), random anomalies and scannable sites. Why would anyone go to the end of the World for doing what he could do literally anywhere in continuous highsec (except for the ice belt)? There is no reason, and you can see that the neighboring Hroduko did not get any attention. But Hodrold has the only highsec lvl4 Thukker Tribe mining mission agent. Mining missions spawn rats that your drones must kill, or they take out your barge.

The good news is that people respond to published moneymaking opportunities. Hodrold was practically empty when I started mining there. Now it has 40-50 on local and dscan is full of Retrievers and Ventures. For some reason CODE. never shown up, only a Goonwaffe member contributes to the discussion on local.

The first bad news is that you've missed the party. The total Nomad implant volume is around 2M LP a day, which can be collected in about 160 hours of running missions. With 40 pilots on local, it's that's just 4 hours, mostly AFK. So Thukker LP is going down to 1000 ISK/LP, the standard Highsec LP cost. There will probably be a plateu on the graph around 1500 when the security mission runners quit for SoE, decreasing the production volume, but eventually the mining mission runners will grow to the point where it'll be more profitable to buy standard Empire implants than Nomads. If you bought Nomad implants for speculation, you are going down. These are the expected prices for Mid-grade Nomad implants:
  • Alpha: 50M
  • Beta: 67M
  • Delta: 162M
  • Epsilon: 285M
  • Gamma: 99M
  • Omega: 554M

The really bad news is how immature the game economy is, considering its age. This opportunity was here since Venture was introduced and no one jumped on it. The Thukker L4 security missions were here since ever and yet people underused them so much that they had 2-3x higher LP/ISK ratio than random empire factions. Why does anyone run missions for standard empire corps when Sisters of Eve is all over the news? The solution is that dumb players are just as common in EVE as in WoW, despite they are so full of themselves, believing to be the pinnacle of MMO players.


PS: If you are a pirate with the genius idea to camp Frulegur to catch the ships full of Nomad implants, you're up for a disappointment, everyone with a brain flies to a Thukker station in continuous highsec with an empty ship and buys the implants there.

PS2: a bonus ISK making idea from Phil Alexander available even for genuine newbies (1 day old players)

PS3: New doctrine in the CFC! Solo, spider-tanking, blinged slowcat.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's right, calling people dumb for running missions for other corporations thatn SoE??

Only a complete moron & idiot would do that.

Why do people run missions for other corps than Thukker or SoE?

Because not so long ago,faction standing was needed to anchor POS in empire space.

People were interestd in running the faction epic archs, standing for certain corporations was needed in order to get rid off taxes for refining, trading, or to make cloning possible.

CBT for example owns the most stations with cloning facilities in empire space, so it would make sense to raise standing there, even though they absolutely have no interesting LP item...
Oh, and CBT has stations in every faction territory...

Gevlon said...

Faction standing can be risen in a week. I have 9.8 with Caldari State. So why would anyone continue to run missions for the empires? His industrial alt sits in the POS while his missioning alt works for SoE.

Anonymous said...

Lots of loot and drones go unscooped in lowsec. It's not very consistent income, but for new players it's excellent. Especially if you're willing to die a bunch and learn from your mistakes.

Anonymous said...

The real question is, why would someone run missions at all. The income is terrible and while you can say "It's AFK", you still need to be about and do a few clicks every 10 mins or so.

Considering you can make more than enough isk to do anything you want while fully AFK station trading, running mining missions for all eternity seems like a peasant job to me.

Anonymous said...

The problem with Thukker has always been that nobody wants nomads, so while on paper the LP conversion is really high, you can make far more LP solo than the market can handle, so when people all leap onto Thukker missions (which happens once or twice a year), the market gets a sudden influx of implants which don't sell. So how do you get around this issue?

There's a big difference between the theoretical income based on straight LP conversion and collection stats and the real, effective income based on how much LP you can actually convert to ISK (not product).

It's much like in that video at the bottom of your post. In theory he was working out that you can make up to 200m/hour ninja looting in a rookie ship, but when you factor in finding fights that have taken place, cherry picked loot, loss of your own ships filled with loot, systems without stations, inability to loot because of people on grid, docking time, transporting the loot safely out of low sec, etc, you end up with considerably less than a lot of other professions, hence loot being discarded.

Gevlon said...

Last time I've checked, you need to set up market orders with clicks when station trading.

There is always a fallback of normal implants with Thukker. If your Nomads don't sell over 1000/LP, you can just buy Empire items.

Anonymous said...

"There is always a fallback of normal implants with Thukker. If your Nomads don't sell over 1000/LP, you can just buy Empire items."
But if you've already bought nomads, you're now sitting on product, and if you go back to standard stuff, you would be better off farming for a core corporation.

This is why SoE is far superior, because you generally get more than the average corp can offer, and SoE specific items sell enough to keep above that mark long term. Thukker is good from time to time, but it certainly doesn't provide enough benefit to use in bulk.

Gevlon said...

Thukker was never below 2K so the situation of "can't sell Nomads" (above 1000/LP) never happened before.

Anonymous said...

"Thukker was never below 2K so the situation of "can't sell Nomads" (above 1000/LP) never happened before."
Sure it has. The only reason it's above 2k/LP is *because* they don't sell and therefore very few people bother with them. If across the entire game we generated more than about 4 nomads a day, they would be oversupplied. The income from them has a low cap and is not scalable. If you could make say 5 nomads per day on your accounts and 20 people could do this, there would be 100 nomads a day being generated, and they simply wouldn't sell. Therefore their real income, and the theoretical ISK/LP are completely different.

So the calculation for Thukker LP/day has to calculate LP at 2k/day only up to the limit that the market supports, then further LP must be calculated at the price that could be regularly fetched. If you run those calculations, you'll see that thukker's 2k/LP for nomads and 1k/LP for everything else is no match for the scalable SoE LP conversion.

Gevlon said...

Increased supply decreases price is obvious. However until you are at the point when price drops below SoE, you should go with the more expensive.

Also, SoE doesn't have mining agent, and mining missions have much higher income/effort. Good luck running 3+ SoE mission running accounts without a bot, which is trivial at mining missions.

Anonymous said...

Have you tried the prospect in nullsec? Iirc it was made so am ab orbiting with mse ii could tank the nullsec rats, with a cloak and depot it seems perfect for the null mining missions.

Anonymous said...

Goblin, don't you think that now when capitals will be able to jump gates, we see much more need for nomads? Or will they prefer ascendancy sets?

Degini said...

Dont know if you look at old posts but it seems the freighter changes have drove the price of these implants up bigtime