Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Business post: obstacle before SP farming

Well, I was wrong about the SP prices. I was sure that old pilots have lots of useless SP that they sell at any price, while new SP buyers will be in limited numbers. Not really. People are buying like their life depended on it. In retrospect, it's natural. When a Merlin pilot loses to a Rifter the only reason is the missing Acceleration Control 5 and absolutely not the 50mm plates and the small hull repper, so the logical response is buying injectors.

Currently they sell for 650M, while you can get extractors for 270, making an injector cost 380M. Since a perfect remap, +5 implant farmer gets 2700SP/hour, he can get 1.94M in 30 days, selling it for 1477M. The PLEX costs 1190M, so the profit is 287M for a few clicks...

Assuming you already have an 5M SP pilot. If you don't, you need to start one with 500K starter skills and then the next 4.5M SP (9 injectors) can't be sold, making 3.4B loss.So people buy SP farmers for 2.5B to get into action instantly. If you plan to farm SP, keep this in mind.

Recruit a friend or other promotion helps you with the initial cost, but it doesn't make a difference for training noob vs buying 5M SP, since both can be done on a promoted account. Anyway, you must make that 2.5B (-promotion) back before you start making profit and with 287M/month, that's almost a year, so it's definitely not for the "I wanna get rich today" crowd.

PS: considering how profitable SP farming is after the initial cost, I wouldn't be surprised if CCP would once again start publishing "subscriber" numbers.

PS2: Goons came up with an improved version of the medium shield booster carrier doctrine.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

You also have to take into account that Extractor are on sale for now, and soon will increase from 8000 per 10 to 10000 per 10 (I confirmed this by submitting a ticket, they didn't disclose a date)

Gevlon said...

Not really, as that would only mean a price shift up. A fixed cost that affect everyone.

Unknown said...

I was wondering if newbros and conservatively poor FW guys will buy injectors in my former lowsec home region.
They did buy only 4 of 10 CN scrams after 3 months. (40 mil/pc)
They did not buy a single T2 entosis link despite Provi is 5 jumps away. (250 mil/pc)
But they bought almost 40 injectors 750 millions each.
Magic.

Kines Pavelovna said...

Ya demand was the really big unknown variable. I only bought 5 million SP with plans to purchase another 5 to 15 million. I know several people that injected 40+million.

I still think the most efficient set up is to have a full farm account, leach the SP, which covers the PLEX cost and then run PI, Wormhole Gas mining, or production, on three full characters. With my set up, three t1 production characters would produce about 6 billion a month in profit, plus 1.2 billion in SP, for a total of about 7 billion ISK a month. Since in the past my efficient option was to stuff waste SP into a carrier/dred toon and sell it, you can see pretty quickly that I'd have to sell that archon/nag pilot now for more then 3.2 billion per month of training in order for this second option to be merely as profitable as the first, an impossibility at the moment. Since the bazaar market works on cycles of months, if not years, I'd still bet prices will decline long term.

Anonymous said...

Maby CCP should introduce a non skill point PLEX. Just the subscription, for a lower price.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous that is exactly what a normal subscription is, no?

Anonymous said...

Middle age pilots having huge pile of isk with nothing to spend on, they think might as well buy more SP.

Anonymous said...

As an ex-Eve player, injectors are a way to get me back to where I was (100m+ sp) without having to wait 5 years. At the rate I'm burning through injectors, I should be there by the end of the year