Greedy Goblin

Monday, August 27, 2012

Why TEST doesn't produce nanotransistors?

Long post, as a reward, you can find really juicy morons at the end!

Danny Centauri, a fellow industrialist made a suggestion how could the largest sov-holding alliance, TEST fix its terrible budget. His main idea is to not sell bulk moon materials but refine it into intermediate products that sell higher. His profit expectation is too large, as the margin between nanotransistors and the moon materials is large exactly because materials are sold in bulk, so if TEST would sell none but sell lot of nanotransistors, it would crash the margin, but still I'd guess they could make 10-15B/month which is something they desperately need.

OK, the director can "just do the alliance a favor and kick whatever neanderthal you have managing the resources right now" but replace him with whom? Middle Management Dino? Writing a excel sheet is one thing. Managing 60 towers and doing JF runs all over the place is quite different. This is what Montolio (TEST leader) mentioned in his reply: "In ~real spaceship life~ things don’t work like spreadsheets. Logistics is messy at this scale."

This "messyness" need explanation. I make 40-50B a month. My recipe for riches is published to last letter. Still I have limited competition because having the know-how is one thing. To actually make the money, I update the prices of 45 items for 5 alts, create transport packages every day, contract them to my hauling partner, open the transported packages and list the wares. That takes about 2-2.5 hours every day. A PLEX gained in less than an hour isn't bad at all. But it still costs time. I dedicate this time to my industry for personal goals: writing this blog, influencing people to have a different view over trading. But why should a random TEST member dedicate his hours to do something like that? Why should he spend his game time hauling sulphuric acid and updating POS-es and filling reports to the management? What does he get? A pat on his back? TEST introduction says "Test Alliance is a Eve Online alliance of like minded corporations brought together with the idea of having fun and blowing shit up." Do you see "managing POS-es" here? Since the members came for this calling, it would be pretty hard to find volunteers for POS jobs. To make it worse, if you'd find some lost soul, he would burn out soon as he would receive no recognition for his work. After all the alliance values are "blowing shit up and having fun", so he isn't doing anything that anyone considers "great". Sure he'd get a "yes, thank you for your work" but everyone would call him the "slave/bitch of the alliance" behind his back and he'd know that.

PvP alliances are doomed to poverty and to fly battlecruisers until the zombies of the end days break into the server room of CCP. The non-Tc alliances figured out a manageable level of poverty over the years that allows upkeeping the lie that "we are PvP-ers, we don't carebear". For example Jester "once a week or so, I jump-clone one of my mains to Empire to handle PvE so I have ISK for PvP". On the other hand the Tc-holder alliances could replace those Drakes from moon profits, so the individual member could be true to the "blow up shit and having fun" ethos.

With the Tc nerf, sooner or later The Mittani and Montolio have to stand front of the members and say "the days of fun are over, you have to grind like everyone else and either pay 30-50M/month into the alliance wallet or pay for your own ships if lost in battle". They desperately don't want that, because they know that this would be the day when half of their members logged out forever. GSF started their news site to "command isk-ad deals from entities like Somer Blink and EOH that we can then plow back into the alliance coffers and avoid bankruptcy." TEST got loans which they spend on daily operation instead of investment, so they have zero chance to ever repay unless reform. And the response of Montolio mentions no reform, rather the "go away with time" nonsense, which is very popular among failed economists by the way, just look up "outgrowing debt". Their damage control can get them a few weeks, maybe even months. But at the end, the "horror" of having to do PvE will catch on them. The No1 economical rule "there is no free Drake" can't be dodged.

On the day when they have to do PvE they may tell everyone to do PvE some, becoming like Nulli Secunda who had to move Empire for a month after defeat to get into ships again. Alternatively they can create an industrial branch for people who like PvE and gladly contribute that way. Of course none of us will do it silently, altruistically. We must get recognition, our own "killboard" and the clear message from the leadership to everyone that "PvP-ers as a class is not better than carebears". If I donated 1B and a PvP-er caused 0.8B damage to the enemy at the cost of 0.3B losses, then I was twice as useful as him.

Considering Montolios response to the bit naive but clearly benign Danny Centauri, I have to stress that I'm not an -A- sympathizer. I'm a CFC-HB sympathizer, simply because I hate the culture of -A- and especially hate MateDot. When I saw the TEST sheet last week I was thinking about sending them like 25B, just to help a good cause out. Finally I choose not to, simply because it would also just delay the inevitable, just like the EU "loans" do with Greece where PvE is just as popular as in Delve. Only PvE can generate ISK and an alliance that openly despises it can only be poor without Tc money appearing from thin air.

A proper industrial branch with 100 top contributors with only 10B/month and 1000 casuals with only 1B/month would mean 2T/month income. That doesn't mean dodging poverty. That means raising an 1000-man all-capital fleet in a month. That means a 500-men all-supercarrier fleet in a year. And above all, that means none of the PvP-ers will have to do PvE again. Ever. I know these numbers are huge for PvP-ers, but so is 100 kills for me, who has zero. A casual missioner/ratter/miner can easily get 50M/hour in null, so 1B needs mere 5 hours/week play (they like PvE), while a serious trader/POS-manufacturer can surely get above 200M/hour, which allows him to get 10B by 12 hours/week play.

Why would they donate money to the alliance? At first because unless you station trade, every kind of PvE is more profitable in null. Secondly because watching your own wallet growing isn't really interesting. An API-verified donation board would be a place for competition for PvE players, manufacturers, traders. Finally because most "carebears" are not happy alone and PvE is a lone activity. I see PvE bloggers closing down or thinking about it. I'm sure most of them would gladly give 1-10B to an alliance they can call home (as opposed to rent a system where they can PvE alone).


PS: After four and a half months of playing EVE Offline:

The weekend was showered with idiots:
The first one was delivered to you by Sugar and her gang.
The worst moron was provided by the Caldari hitting T5.
And another one.
No, the line of happy haulers of the fruits of AFK-orbiting a button isn't over.
I told it's not over.
I don't think it's FW related, rather wormhole, but still a complete idiot.
It seems the black holes sucked out the brain of yet another one who also won the "most idiotic fit" prize. The rest were just dumb, but this one actually planned a fit. A totally useless one though.
This one is actually lacking compared to the previous. No story behind it, just another purple idiot.

You can discuss trading and other industrious ideas on the Goblinworks channel.

There is no report because both Caldari and Minmatar hit T5, so the implant prices are all over the place. If they return near their old value, I made about 20B overnight. If they can keep T4-T5, trading plexing with alts for months until CCP figures out what everyone keep telling since 1.2 and took 4 days to Blizzard, I lost 30B. Until either happens, I simply cannot tell how much my assets worth.
(+0.2 spent on Logi/Carrier, +0.5 on Nyx)

9 comments:

Dave Rickey said...

Back in the day, I tried a different method with my corp: We would set up an operation as a mercantilist co-op, rich members like myself would put up the capital for whatever we wanted to do (from T2 ship-building through a reaction chain to the Z-U station near the end), and corp members that wanted money would supply the labor.

It would run 25-25-50 for operators, the corp wallet, and the investors until it paid off the initial investment, then that shifted to 25-50-25 (the corp getting the 50% cut now). Investors got a passive income, operators got better money for their time than they would earn ratting, and the corp got funds that were generally used for PvP (mostly stockpiling deathstars and keeping our very best PvP pilots in ships to keep our corp at the top of the alliance killboard).

It worked out pretty well (I mentioned that we scaled it up to the point we anchored our own station, in that one there was no operator's share but we kicked 25% to the alliance), but we could never get other corps to emulate what we had done. It all fell apart in politics, the alliance nationalized our station and kicked out our corp, a few months later they realized that kicking out your strongest corps was not the road to greatness and evacuated the region without a fight against the backdrop of the BoB/Goon wars.

Most alliances demand slave labor from their industrialists, and as a result they don't get their best efforts even when they accept the terms.

Anonymous said...

TEST's problem should actually go away over time
their doing their very best to get renter bears to cover the sov bill

and they might drop fountain to let another alliance expand (EO probably)

Kontalaa said...

The cost in TEST will go away.

It was a great hit for the wallet to build a station (40b), place TCU's and iHubs all over Delve and upgrade them..

That is just a one-time-investment (supposed you dont lose em by not showing up at timers..)

Unknown said...

In your computation of relative merit ("0.8B damage at a cost of 0.3B [...]") you used ISK to compare the two players.

However, a central issue of industrialist / pvp cooperation is the industrialists diminishing marginal utility of ISK - the industrialists's boredom at "watching the numbers go up".

If the alliance had a different currency, representing utility to the alliance, then you could sometimes buy utility with ISK, but then the price of utility in ISK would go up (due to the diminishing marginal utility of ISK), and the most profitable-in-utility activity might be pvp labor.

I suggest a simple inventory-based formula.

Anonymous said...

I suggest that anyone who believes the published numbers on Test's spreadsheet are an accurate description of how Test is using its moons, had better take a cloaky ship and run through Delve. Most systems have 5-10 Test POS's in them doing moon mining.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous for an outsider it is impossible to determine whether these moons are alliance property or corp/member owned, so just seeing a lot of mining POSes with a TEST ticker on them doesn't really tell you anything.

Anonymous said...

I am new to trading really, and nowhere near the heights you're at... what does "non-Tc alliance" mean? What does "hitting t5" mean?

Marcus McTavish said...

-Test has recently acquired 2 entire new regions.
-Setting up POS networks is not fun and it takes a while to do so, they may be expanding on it.
-Test didn't have renters. One rented system can run from 500 Million to 13+ Billion. Which is how AAA covers a lot of loses.
-They are supporting a growing coalition against AAA and ROL

Against what you are commited to believing a PLAYER is not an ALLIANCE. An Alliance makes money from its territory and from its members. An Alliance can not rat, trade or generate isk. Only Players can rat, pvp, trade or generate isk.

An Alliances income is limited to what it's member base and territory can offer.

In the same way that you can make more isk with a larger investment, an Alliance can make more isk with a larger number of members or more territory and resources.

Comparing yourself to TEST or Goonswarm Alliance Finances is literally an "apples to oranges" comparison.

Not to boost your ego at all (thats the last thing we need), it is like Bill Gates complaining that the United States Government (NOT EVOKING POLITICAL DISCUSSION) is bad at making money.

I feel like most of your "ideas" to join a nullsec alliance or on how to improve a nullsec alliance, are skewed from the fact that you are attempting to form an idea from outside of its sphere.

You can rationalize and try and imagine things from a Nullsec prospective, but honestly it is not the same. As far as i know, you have no nullsec experience, save for circumnavigating nullsec, which lets face it, Poetic did that! and he claims he was bad (at-least i got that feeling).

If you want to understand why some people dislike you, maybe it has to do with the fact that you eerily resemble those highsec bear who just dont understand nullsec, and complain. Maybe it doesn't have to do with this elevated regard you hold yourself in, for making such large amounts of pixel money, even though with your current attitude i would doubt any reputable alliance would let you in, unless they were in dire condition. Just a shout-out Red Alliance could use some isk, last I heard, they were renting from AAA.

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Surely you can't think that you are the only person capable of making vast amounts of isk. Test and GSF alongside AAA and many other alliances, have groups of people "like" you that can make large sums of isk.

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Additionally i feel you idea of a moron or slacker is quite skewed, for whatever reason it is.

I have a trade alt in jita, i don't spend that much time on it because:
1: My laptop does not have the highest specs, so setting up buy and sell orders lags by a bit.
2: I'm not really in need of isk. I mean I could build my wealth up and buy some shiny ships, and go pvp, but id rather just use cheap ships, they draw less attention. I make enough isk from casually exploring to cover any expenditures i make.
3: Why burn out? I went full force for a 2-3 weeks last year and made a lot of isk, I started with almost a billion, i ended with 3.3 billion, a Chimera, a Rorqual, 5 Large towers, a Macharial and a Charon. I started getting bored and dreaded updating and creating all my orders. I was spending 1-2 hours every day or every-other day.
4. I casually set up orders in Jita now. I put down 2 billion the other day and made a return of 340 million off of it.

Does that make me a slacker? Last time i checked it was not some Epeen contest of who could make more isk.

One last thing, we all know you worship yourself, but could you down the Ego down from God-level to at the least, high.

I probably left some points out and made a few spelling areas, my fault, I was writing this along side studying for chem, so my train of thought may go off trail a little bit. But this comment box setup sucks.

Marcus McTavish

Gevlon said...

Tc alliance is someone who controls a valuable resource a Tc-moon.

T5 means capturing and upgrading the whole faction warfare zone, practically winning FW.

@Marcus McTavish: it's hard to understand nullsec alliances when they tell practically nothing about them besides silly slogans like "blowing up shit and having fun".