Greedy goblin

Would I welcome the IMMORTAL module?

2012-05-25T07:00:00.005+02:00

Rohan figured out how could the "I just skip the boring part" argument for PLEX turned back: let's introduce the IMMORTAL module. It is made of PLEX and has one effect: making someone immune to PvP. Of course it's not God mode module, it only works in high sec (so you can't even scout with it) and make one unable to use smartbombs or target other players (so can't repair or scramble either). You can't use it if your corp is in war either, be in an NPC corp if it bothers you.

This module is the perfect counter-argument against those who think PLEX trading is an OK way to play and not just an alien element that CCP uses to limit illegal RMT and keep bad players in the game. The logic is simple: if one is allowed to skip one part of the game for real money, why shouldn't one be allowed to skip another part. Please note that this module doesn't help at all with PvP, it just make you avoid it.

I doubt anyone can come up with an idea why IMMORTAL module is not OK while buying ISK via PLEX is OK.

However the real value of the IMMORTAL module is to make the main point of the PLEX discussion clear: who would benefit from the module? On the first sight, everyone who don't enjoy blowing up random strangers. For example my main will clearly never attack anyone, so if I ever participate in PvP, it can only happen as gank victim. The module takes that out, I should love it. And indeed if it would be introduced, I would buy one as not having one would be serious disadvantage. However would I be happy about it? Not at all. My money comes from proper risk assessment. I know when it's safe to fly and when it's not. This is what separates me from my competitors who lose cargo to pirates or stay away from hauling. This is why I got 1B extra on the weekend of "Burn Jita". The IMMORTAL module would get rid of that. Any random guy could effectively compete with me autopiloting in a shuttle. Hauling would become another fixed ISK/hour grind without the risk of pirates.

So the IMMORTAL module would help the bad haulers, bad miners, bad missioners to get away with being bad and keep competing with the good ones. It would be dumbing down the game by letting people skip competitive content. Now it's easy to see who is the good and who is the bad trader: the one who gets the cargo where it sells highest is the good one, the one who runs with cheap crap or gets blown up is the bad one. For this reason I actually wish as many gankers, griefers and troublemakers in highsec as possible (I mean, as a player who wants to win. I still think it's preventing EVE from growing.)

Now I wish someone could tell me how the same doesn't apply to PLEX? Because I'm sure that PLEX is the IMMORTAL module for those who are stupid to the economy. Without it the good pirate would be separated from the bad as the good one could keep flying as he has lot of loot and little losses, while the bad one gets his hardly farmed ship blown up and back in a Rifter. With PLEX it's just like autopiloting with IMMORTAL: every living body can afford PvP ships and have easy kills. A good pirate should wish for as harsh economy as I wish for more griefers for the same reason: the harder the conditions are, the bigger the gap between skilled and M&S.

Finally one more question: would IMMORTAL make the game unplayable? Probably not. Since it's made of PLEX, it would seriously increase the demand for PLEX, increasing its price so probably wouldn't be that popular as you'd guess. However it would clearly make the game worse and less enjoyable for everyone, except those who are currently farmed by griefers because they are too dumb to learn some really basic moves like "don't use an untanked Hulk during Hulkageddon".

EVE Business report: Friday morning 27.8B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

A market I won't miss

2012-05-24T07:00:00.038+02:00

One of the things I tried out in the last week was trading +5 implants. Any time you check on them, you find the average price somewhere around 115M and the difference between buy and sell orders to be 8-10M. After broker fees and (old) taxes you could make 8M on a sale on average. The quantity is huge, in Jita 100+ sold every day, 50+ in the other hubs. That's a perfect item to get really rich, right?

Surprisingly the answer is "yes, but not for me". The problem is that the prices fluctuate a lot within the same day and there are 20M humps on the price history graph. So your plan is to log in, see that Cybernetic implant is for 120M sell, 110M buy, you set up a buy order, log out, next time list the item for 120? Forget it. Next time you either find the market at 120/130, with your buy order is unfilled of course, or you got the implant and find the prices to be 100/110.

The reason is simple: both the buyers and the sellers are individuals with no market knowledge and even less patience. He got the implant from the LP store and want to cash it. Now. Or, he wants to pull a new alt and fit it with full +5 set. Now.

The 2-3 week long "humps" are made by those who find the item good for cashing LP. Then the item becomes the "LP-cashier of the week", everyone start using it, dumping the price, moving to the next.

Since the margin between buys and sells is there, you can make the profit. There are two ways and neither one fits mine. The first is that you decide that you'll buy on 110, sell on 120 and invest in 5 items. You set up the buy order at 110, regardless price and wait. Some time it will fill. Maybe in a minute, maybe a week from now, but the price will swing to that number. Then you set the sell for 120 and wait. It will sell. Again, maybe in a minute, maybe a week from now. "Maybe" isn't my favorite word and if I assume that the distance between buy and sell is 5 days on average, with (old) taxes I make 49% profit on the capital every month. No thanks, that's veldspar money (not mining you silly, buying via regional orders and courier contract them to Jita).

The other way to make money here is sitting by the market window and updating the orders, keeping like 100K distance from the second highest. If you buy, instantly sell and make sure you are the lowest seller. This way you can farm OK-ish money every hour. I could get up to 90M/hour with only 1B investment (one is in buy, one in sale, 5 implants), if we translate this to profit/capital/month we get some stellar number, but we can't as it's not investment profit but farming. No doubt that 90M/hour farming totally safely is good money. But I hate farming and hate nothing more than being bound to the computer. My business ways are all designed to allow me to AFK or log out any time I want.

Before you'd have ideas about grabbing 10B+ capital and enforce monopolistic prices by buying out everything below your price and relisting above, I remind you that since it's an LP item, it can be produced in near-infinite quantities, so if you rise the price, you'll be flooded with thousands.

So here is a field with lot of money and surely no competition from me. If you have large unused capital or don't mind updating prices every 5 mins, +5 implants are your best pick.

The more general advice today: ISK/capital/month and ISK/hour isn't the only metric. The business must fit your schedule and taste. There are so many fields and items, there is one for everyone. With real life example: just because plastic surgeons make good money, you don't have to be one to be rich. There is money in finance, industry, agriculture, everywhere. You don't have to stick to anything or "trade X or doing it wrong". Find your own items and get rich without doing anything annoying.

EVE Business report: Thursday morning 26.6B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

Hey guys come and play with me!

2012-05-23T07:00:00.061+02:00

When I wrote the post detailing what I'm doing, I really did so in the intent to let others find these fields. I expected the competition to rise and the profits go down. I considered it a cost I must pay to make the blog more useful.

What happened was a complete surprise: my profits increased on these fields. Last week report was "Wednesday morning 21.8B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt)" while the most recent is "Tuesday morning 25.7B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on carrier/titan alt) ". 4.1B in 6 days, that's 680M/day.

I guess I could try to make it look like an evil scheme working out, but it's completely unexpected to me. I really believed that competitors show up instead of disappearing. But no one wants to play with me! I asked around on the goblinworks channel for explanation and got some first-hand ones.

They found this market after my vague and generic statements. They were simply looking for a field where they can be best applied. And - go figure - it was the field where I applied it. They were surprised on the level of competition but made OK money. Now that I came clean that I'm on these field, they simply found it's easier to apply the market ideas on a less competed field than keep undercutting with me. After all there are so many markets in EVE.

So the result of the "blogging my profit away" series is much better than I expected:

You can speak up about your business, giving details. You won't lose money on it. Actually you can gain money as others might choose to look for maybe less green, but much less grazed pastures. It's great to inspire more industrialists and traders to start to blog and comment
There are many untaken fields in EVE. Part of the "a newbie can never catch up with vets in eve" myth is "every market is taken, leaving only mining veldspar to newbies". It's completely untrue. Even a newbie with no skills or capital can make good money on a field no one cares about. The EVE economy is huge due to every region has its own markets and there are price differences even between systems of the same region. There is place for you.
Another proof that M&S isn't in short supply in EVE. The above myth is based on the "common sense" that if it's profitable, someone must have taken it. Yet many-many fields are untaken, because the amount of people who sell to a ridiculously underpriced buy order is too high compared to those who create those buy orders.
You aren't bound to a few "large" fields like it was the case in WoW. There you were selling glyphs or doing it wrong. Here you can trade items related to whatever you do anyway and get hundreds of millions for it. You don't have to go out of your way to make money, you can make money on anything.

So come, play EVE, get rich, blog and comment about it! EVE is full of positive surprises. OK, considering how bad name it has, it isn't hard to surprise one positively.

PS: and don't worry about the tax increase in the patch, it increases the taxes of everyone else too, so the margins will open. It's a VAT so it will ultimately hit the consumer not us (after the prices equalize).

The moron of the day is CCP:
No, not for having a queue as I could log in in a minute and there were only 24K players online, so it was a temporary login server overload. Why would such thing on major patch day make them morons? Remember this?
EVE Business report: Wednesday morning 26.2B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

The Diablo 3 "game over" issue

2012-05-22T07:00:00.052+02:00

You might noticed that the Diablo 3 related blogs are removed from my bloglist. It's not because of the quality of the individual sites, I simply don't consider the whole Diablo 3 topic interesting anymore, as the final endboss was already killed, proving that gathering gear (therefore playing the AH) is pointless. Diablo 3 cannot be "played", which means competitive actions in a simulated environment. Of course one can "consume" Diablo 3, the same way you consume a movie. We will surely as the world created by the developers is really nice. However - just like WoW leveling - Diablo 3 is an interactive movie and not a game.

Many things had been messed up in designing Diablo 3, much much before they coded the popup that informs the player about Error #37. Actually they messed it up on the first meeting when they decided what kind of game they want.

If you'd want to know an exact moment when WoW started to downfall, it would be when one of the devs replied to angry customers over the issue that Malygos, the endboss of the unpatched WotLK expansion was killed 3 days after launch. He said "so you say that WoW is too easy since other people who are not you have finished it?" The problem isn't the arrogance that no corporation can have towards customers they want to keep. The problem is the total ignorance of the problem of the customers. "Corporations sell solutions to the problems of customers" is a cliché repeated million times. Blizzard clearly don't understand their customers.

I wrote a post half year ago that didn't get enough attention. I believe if someone at the Blizzard leadership have read and understood it, they wouldn't lose the millions of dollars they expected to get on the RMAH cuts. Because I doubt if there will be significant trading there.

I wrote that a good game focuses on one of the skills of the players. Let them hone it, compete with other players in it and have fun being proficient, effective and productive with it. Below I list skills that can be used in games aimed at 14+, with some clear example in parenthesis.

Physical strength and endurace (marathon running)
Dexterity, reaction time, hand-eye coordination (tennis, Super Mario)
Thinking (chess, Civ4)
Social skills (Black Jack, Poker played at a table)
"Work ethic", "hamstering", "completionalism" (Everquest, vanilla WoW)

A game must focus on one and only one. The worst thing a developer can do is creating a game where you can advance using different skills. The player who is playing for skill #1 will feel either cheated by those who beat him using skill #2, or disgruntled for being forced to do #2 which he don't enjoy. Imagine a variation of chess where you can save your piece from being beaten if you can pick it up fast enough when the opponent touches his piece in order to kick yours. I'm sure chess players would be less than happy if fast reacting but otherwise terrible chess players would start to beat them by being invincible to losing pieces. The same thing is not just OK, but it is the gameplay in a Mortal Kombat.

What would FPS players say to a feature that allow opponents to "grind up" skills by shooting NPCs, making their guns much stronger? This was the gameplay in original WoW, and raiders AoE-ing randoms in Alterac Valley was considered well-deserved reward for their superior progression.

Finally imagine the reaction of poker players if you would simply stand up and punch them into the nose to distract them. Everyone would consider that not even cheating but a criminal activity, despite it's the gameplay of boxing and countless other martial arts.

When the players of WoW went to the forums outraged that Malygos is already dead, they couldn't properly tell what their problem is. Customers almost never can. It's the job of the company to find what exactly the problem is and find the solution. The perfect example is the medical industry. The patient comes in with the problem "my tooth hurts". Isn't really scientific right? They pay exactly for the knowledge of the dentist to be able to identify the exact problem and use specialized equipment to solve it. On the side of the customer the process is "I sit in the chair and don't move my head". Similarly from a player the "I'm not having fun" or "I'm not happy that they could already kill Malygos" should be enough. The developer is paid to figure out what the problem is.

They failed and attributed it to trolling or l'art pour l'art forum crying. Let me help. The correct interpretation would be "The customers who expect the game to be a hamstering game are unhappy that they were beaten by high-dexterity players and now consider further hamstering pointless. They don't want to learn dexterity-moves, they rather leave the game". The opposite also happened. When someone "whined" about "no lifers playing 20 hours a day beating him", he meant "I'm unhappy that low-dexterity players can beat me simply by grinding gear".

The problem is unsolvable in the sense of satisfying both of them. The designer must make a choice what kind of game he is making and communicate it explicitly.

In Diablo 3 it wasn't decided what kind of game it should be. It could be a Super Mario like jumping game, which can be completed in 5 minutes with perfect movement - just as a developer of Diablo 3 told in response to the customers outraged over Inferno Diablo being killed in 4 days. Super Mario wasn't a bad game and no one completed it in 5 minutes. I guess the guy who completed one run in 5 minutes must have practiced the moves for hundreds of hours, and I have no doubt that he had fun watching his dexterity improving and seeing how much more control he had over his body than other people.

It could also be a hamstering game where bossfights are gear checks and the challenge is to find the optimal way of gearing up. Those who'd progress in that game would be very happy seeing their character becoming stronger, being able to kill larger and larger monsters due to their busy and properly planned work.

From the fact that they planned the RMAH to be the permanent income source, we can assume that they wanted gear to be meaningful. "Don't stand in the fire!" is incompatible with that approach but perfectly fit to the "hamster all the gear" approach. The bosses must have been tank and spank (and unavoidable AoE) that depend only on gear, and trivial on the clicking speed.

Alternatively the bosses could be "dancy" and every level the appropriate gear is provided by vendors and merely a cosmetic signal of ones progress which solely depend on fast reactions, jumping away from boss attacks.

Since the current Diablo (and WoW) mixes skills, it's unfit for competitive, "serious" playing, so there is no point talking about it. Consume the content and move on!

On the same basis we can see why EVE is holding its customers. It's a thinking game where the outcome depends on calculated decisions. Shall I fit this or that? Due to the long module cycles, reaction times have little effect and one can gank away what you mindlessly farmed for days. Mining is the odd-one-out activity as it's grinding, so everyone avoid it as much as he can. It should be fixed to be similar to PI where you set it up and let it run. Mining ships should be able to automatically fill cans and Orcas, and switch to the next targeted asteroid if the old one is done. By running AFK, mining would be a decision-making thinking game "how to fit my ships, what ships shall I use, jetcan or Orca, leave them totally AFK or guard them in a combat ship" and so on. Strategical decisions with no known optimal solution (I mean if no one comes, guarding was waste of time, but if pirates come it saved you a billion).

EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 25.7B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on carrier/titan alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss business ideas with 60-80 fellow traders.

Implants and remaps

2012-05-21T07:00:00.020+02:00

In EVE you learn skills in real time, online or not. The amount of points you get depend on your attributes that can be modified by implants and remapping. The question is how far should you go, how much should you sacrifice to advance faster?

At first let me show the numeric values, the chart shows learning time vs implant level for three remaps. The worst means you have zero points in the relevant attributes. The average means 2.666 pt in each attribute (which is impossible as it must be full number, but if we average for various skills, we get that). The best means perfect remap for that skill, 10 pt in its primary and 4 in its secondary. 100% is the time you can get with average remap and +3 implants, something that more or less can be considered baseline:
What is the price? For implants it's simply ISK. A set of 1 cost about 1M, a set of 2 15M, a set of 3 50M, a set of 4 100M (now as 2 parts of it is in the gift package), and a set of 5 is about 550M. Of course you can lose it by being podded. Also you must dedicate time first. To have +1-3 implants, Cybernetics 1 is enough, but to use +4, you must have it rank 4 which is about 3 days and to have +5 you need rank 5, which take about two more weeks. Since the time gain between 4 and 5 is about 5%, it will take almost a year for this investment to repay. Also, it will make you vulnerable to grief-ganking, as being podded means losing these expensive implants.

For remaps the price is much less obvious: you lose your ability to ad-hoc learn skills. For example I'm now in my P-W remap, learning ships, being unable to learn industrial or trade skills for months.

So the question is before making a change in your attribute is "would I be fine sticking with my skill plan for months?". If the answer is no or even "I don't know", stay with the default remap. With +3 implants the perfect remap would be just 18% faster. With +4 implants, 16%. That's not that much. Of course it means 6/5 days in a month, 65/58 days in a year. It's not something that someone can call "better". So you aren't doing it wrong if you run around in the starter remap. But you should think about the alternative.

I'm an organized guy who is fine with long term plans. While I curse sometimes for my remap, I'm generally fine with it and did not regret having it. My main and trader alts are having just +4 implants though as I couldn't justify the 500M/pilot investment.

My Carrier/Titan alt is obviously in +5 implants, they were easier to get as I am in a 10 Int, 4 Mem remap since day one, learning necessary support skills first. When I finished, I'll do a P-W remap for ship skills. 70 days from now I'll be able to properly fly an Amarr Guardian and I'll start looking for a nullsec home to learn nullsec first hand. My main will remain in highsec forever, trading, maybe helping out now and then with a jump freighter.

EVE Business report: Sunday morning 24.2B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on carrier/titan alt)
Monday morning 25.0B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on carrier/titan alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss business ideas with 60-80 fellow traders.

Diablo 3 market is "37"

2012-05-19T07:00:00.022+02:00

One could think Blizzard can't mess the market system up better than the start servers. Well, they either managed, or my girlfriend is the biggest market genius:
As you can see practically all of her items are yellow (it's the "epic" of Diablo 3, act end bosses throw it). Also she has a bunch of yellows in her stash that she flips. I don't do business in Diablo 3, simply because it's a joke.

The reason for the messup: no items are destroyed (in EVE we have explosions, in WoW we have soulbinding that forces the owner to vendor his old items). So in Diablo3, no matter how slow the item generation is (about 1 yellow/2 hours), soon we'll be drown in them.

Diablo 3 tip: every 5 levels (preferably 10, 15, 20 ... ) go to the AH and buy a new set of yellows. Don't pay more than lvl*100 gold for an item. Sell your old yellows. Don't be greedy, rather sell two items cheap than one high and one unsold, because you only have 10 selling slots and can't cancel auctions. Vendor the blues for gold, except the really well itemized ones. The best stat in the game is the +experience until you get to inferno.

And for God's sake, don't take the game any seriously! It's not even WoW with endgame raiding and arenas. Enjoy the scenery, kill Diablo, don't miss out on the pony level and come back to EVE!

EVE Business report: Saturday morning 23.4B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt) Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss business ideas.

Why socials can never be rich?

2012-05-18T07:00:00.207+02:00

Syncaine is considered a troll, but I always thought differently. However I couldn't see his post about me anything but trolling for links, which he got from Evenews24.

However I felt his post somehow horribly wrong. The trolls are deliberately making posts that are wrong in obvious points and his weren't like that. Took a few days figuring out how: he accuses me with doing honest work. His proof of my utter failure is that I don't do anything that other people couldn't do. Since the purpose of the blog is to teach moneymaking tips, goblinish ideas and to prove that anyone who is poor is a moron or slacker who deserves nothing but a kick in the butt, my "failure" was inevitable. However he was hoping that I'm actually getting my money in some evil scheme, manipulating people into their doom or stealing from them. Because taking money from people is "owning them" while getting the same money from work is "sucking". Getting much more money is still sucking.

Well, he is safe from failure in real life, asking readers to help him find a job.

Syncaine is not a troll. He is a social. And this is the point when talking about M&S and market rules are not enough. A social can know economics inside out, can have 150 IQ and able to focus for 8 hours, he still be broke as he considers working a failure in life. You can tell that "work isn't a shame", but it's a lie. People really think getting a 10M worth of modules in two hours killing people in lowsec is "awesome fun" while spending the same 2 hours hauling and sorting skillbooks needs "inhuman tolerance for mind-numbing activities". The fact that it nets 40-50x more ISK with practically no risk means nothing to them. ISK means nothing to them until they can't repair their Rifter. Then they go to whine about "the grind" or ask "freindly heplfull peepz" to carry them.

A social is unable to find any fun in any technical activity, as his definition of fun is "receiving positive feedback from peers (real or imaginary)". Optimizing a distribution chain, finding out different way of doing it, finding weak links isn't something that he would try. He grinds, doing the activity mindlessly, repetitively, counting the minutes until it ends and he can finally do some "fun". No wonder that the quality of his work is terrible.

This feeds back to the "nolifer" idea, since if he can't earn more than 20M/hour, I must be playing 22 hours to get 440M a day. He can't care less that I gave exact details what I buy and sell so he could check the margins himself. I must be a nolifer and it needs no verification (just like the uselessness of a perpetuum mobile plan), since the lowly act working cannot provide great results. Only "awesome ownage" can provide billions.

As long as you wish for "the people" like and respect you, you'll be poor. You can't be rich and liked. You can't be rich and respected. Rich people are despicable in the eyes of socials, not because "they exploit people" (socials actually find that "awesome skillz" as long as the victim is not from their in-group), but because "they do and force others to do the ultimate suck: working".

To be rich in EVE (and RL) needs nothing more than saying "I don't care if everyone think I'm the biggest loser". Easy isn't it?

I remain a loser who miss on the awesome fun of roaming in 50M cruisers, blow up total strangers until podded, instead I'll do the horrors of exploring new fields of industry, making at least 15B/month (hopefully much more) and will first fly a logi, then a triage carrier, finally the titan. I never said I give up on it, I just said triage carrier first. Carrier - unlike poor titans - will surely be fielded. If it's lost, I'll just reship to another one, and jump back. In one thing he is right: I won't make anything "remarkable" in EVE.

Hopefully my ideas will. I planned and will prove that anyone who isn't a moron or slacker can make more money than he spend. I hope I can show as many people as possible the fun of creating something for themselves. To show them how enjoyable it is to set out a plan, work on it, and see it succeed. To understand how a system works and be able to predict or even control it, instead of just suffering its actions. I really hope that people would gain the real life skill of finding flow in creative work. I love my real life job and the reason why I have so much time blogging and playing is exactly that I'm very successful in it. My boss can't care less that I'm typing this from my office. The tasks he wanted from me are already done, way before they were due, with some more projects no one asked me to do, I just started them because I was interested in the problem. I can do all this not because I'm better than the average guy. Anyone can do this who can look at his work as a challenge to be overcome, a task to be completed, puzzles to be solved.

Which field could be better to learn this than a game which was designed to be fun?! A place where nothing smells, requires hard labor or demands you to perform in a noisy, hot/cold, small environment. A place where the competition is fair, where everyone starts in the same noobship or lvl 1 orc. Too bad that a social can't even find working with dragons or spaceships fun if it doesn't provide (preferably immediate) peer respect or liking.

EVE Business report: Friday morning 23.0B, that's 600M more than yesterday, I farmed 30 hours today. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to be with 60-80 fellow no-lifer losers who just can't have fun.

Dealing with game server overloads

2012-05-17T07:00:00.116+02:00

Diablo 3 start wasn't good for us at all. Blizzard choose a "hands off, God will separate them" approach to handle server over load: players spammed the login screen, some were lucky, some were not. I was lucky, got in in 10 minutes. My girlfriend, who logged in the same minute from the same router was not, and couldn't log in Tuesday at all. So I was walking around in Tristram waiting for her while reading blogs and collecting Cynosural Theory skillbooks in EVE (not bad profit for Alt-Tab once a minute and press one button). In the meantime I was thinking how could one handle the server overload more properly.

The obvious idea: "buy bigger servers" is obviously stupid. As a comparison, EVE has 350K subscription and I've never seen Tranquility population above 45K, while EVE is typically a hardcore game, unlike Diablo 3 that someone can play with much less time without missing out on events or stories. So I'd say after the first 1-2 months the ratio of concurrent logins during peak time vs total games sold will be below 10%. Of course on launch week people want to play much more, so it's expected to rent some extra servers to support the extra population for the first two months, but to rent enough servers for everyone would be some serious waste of money. We are talking about tens of millions of $.

The second obvious idea is waiting in queue instead of randomly getting in and out. It's even worse as it motivates players to make more server load. The best way to get in is to log in earlier and to not log out unless you really must, since you might can't come back. The result is even more server load, on the top of being very unfriendly to casual gamers who don't know such tricks.

Then I figured out the solution and I hope that it somehow reaches the ears of future game developers. I know that some Blizzard guys must read me as they responded very fast for the WGClean idea. At first it needs a login queue, which alone would be 6+ hours and I've just written that queues are bad. The idea is whenever the server is above 90% capacity, a timer starts to roll for every player logged in. This timer measures how much time you spent playing during "peak hours". On launch day probably every time is peak time. When the "approximated wait time in queue" reaches 10 minutes, the server starts to make room by sending a message to the players who has the longest timer: "You played [timer] time while others couldn't log in, it's fair to let them play. You'll be removed from the game in 5 minutes, place your hero out of harms way." A countdown starts and if the player don't log out in 5 minutes, he is kicked, making room for someone who played less. Regardless timer, the game shall always provide one hour uninterrupted play, so if you could log in, you can only get this message 55 minutes after that. The timer is counting of course.

The timer never resets, but it's irrelevant when there is enough server capacity. If someone with timer tries to log in during peak hours (which he can do instantly after being kicked to make room), he is placed to the queue but the queue is sorted according to the timer, with one trick: time spent in the queue decreases the timer.

Example: the game starts at midnight, with 10 slots, 19 players want to play. They are called P1,P2....P19
00:00 the game starts P1-10 get in, P11-19 wait in queue. Since the server is above 90% load, P1-10 all gather timer.
00:55 P1-9 get the "you'll be kicked in 5 minutes" message
01:00 P1-9 are removed, P11-19 gets in.
01:01 P1, P2, P3, P4 and P5 requeued. Since there is queue, P10 gets the message.
01:06 P10 is removed, P1 is back
02:30 P20-29, new players enters the queue. Since they have no timer while P1-5 still have 31 minutes left, they get to the top of the queue
01:55 P11-19 gets the message
02:00 P11-19 removed, P20-28 enters
02:01 P1 gets the message
02:06 P1 is out, P29 is in.

Why is this system optimal? Not only because it distributes the limited resource fairly, but because it motivates people to play in off-hours when they gather no timer. It also motivates them to log off during overload when they don't really want to play.

As a bonus, this system would allows the game company to sell one time timer nullifier service and premium accounts that don't gather timer.

PS: the EVE developers welcomed the terrible start of Diablo 3 with the following joke:

Diablo 3 business report: none. I see no point doing business yet, time best spent growing up. Buy gear in the AH, it's cheap like crap. From the gold a zone provides, you can buy better gear to every slot than the pieces you can find in the same zone. Sell everything at the vendors except really-really good items. Essences are cheap too.

EVE Business report: Thursday morning 22.4B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt) Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

You must station trade what you haul

2012-05-16T07:00:00.021+02:00

Well, actually you don't if you are fine with hauling for buy orders. This case you lose serious profit. If you are the station trader of your own item, you skip the sales tax and the broker fee for the transaction between the two. However your profit won't just be haul_profit + station_trade_profit + fees, if we assume that the item is currently not "properly" station traded.

Let's talk about the generic X which cannot be mass-produced but created by many individual sellers. Its also not mass-bought by industrialists but individual consumers. Perfect example is an implant. Its equilibrium value is 75, meaning that if all the buyers and sellers would be gathered together in an open bidding auction, the bid would stop at 75.

The buy orders therefore must be below 75 since if they would be above, the buyer would be flooded by X that he can't sell. The sell prices must be above 75 or the seller is bought out and his order disappears. How far they are from 75 depends on the competition or the brain of the monopolist. I mean if you are the lone station trader and set up buy orders at 5, you probably won't get a single item as sellers will rather make their own sell order or haul it to other hub.

But what is really interesting is that the prices are usually not symmetrical. I mean they are not 65-85, rather 50-80. The reason is that sellers are usually more patient than buyers. The one who sells X is more likely sets up a sell order, than a wannabe consumer setting up a buy order.

To make it more strange, the average price, the one listed in the price history window is usually also not 75 but higher. The reason is the same: the consumers are more likely to buy an overpriced sell order than the sellers to sell to an underpriced buy order. You can sell X for 149 but you can't buy it for 1.

Why is it important for you? Because as a hauler if you don't station trade you are bound to sell to the underpriced buy orders. If you just set up a sell order but don't station trade, you'll end up undercut since the sell price of an "unproperly" station traded item is usually way above the equilibrium, so the 0.01 punks can keep up undercutting you for long and still be with profit, while your profit is limited by your buy price in the place you haul from. You can easily end up at a loss, buying for 80 since you see they sell for 110 but when the undercutting ends, your item sells for 78 and for this -2 you hauled, updated prices for days and kept your capital locked.

How to "properly" station trade an item? By setting up buy orders in a way to ensure that the average sell price is 75 and the buy-sell region is symmetrical. How to do it? The safe but slow way, that involves no guessing is to make 2% steps. So if the buy orders (several 0.01 things) are at 40 and the sells are at 100, then the step size shall be 2. You buy at 42 and sell your first haul at 98. The exception is if the buy order is already below your hauling pickup price. So if you buy the item for 50 somewhere, you shall set the buy price to 50. It would be stupid to haul if you can buy it locally for the same price, right?

After that every day you update your prices if undercut. Since the distance is 60 and you make 2x2 step every day, in two weeks you'd reach zero profit, which will not happen as the 0.01s will give up and the individual buyers-sellers will accept your actual price before it happens. For example at 60 buy 80 sell the individual sellers will accept your buy order, supplying you with items. Whenever you have enough items to sell, don't haul. As the sell price keep dropping, more and more 0.01 punks give it up and go away. After their stocks are liquidated, they are removed from the sell side, so the sell price go up a bit. Finally you reach something like 70 buy 80 sell.

If you are happy hauling for your own buy order price, do, if not, don't. Please note that if you are busy hauling, the price will decrease due to the increased local supply. Whenever your buy price is below your hauling margin, stop hauling, just station trade. Calculating hauling profit with your sell price is a mistake. Imagine that you can buy for 70 and sell for 80 saying "I made 10 by hauling", while you could buy for 70 on the same station, making the same profit without any movement.

Moron of the day: I went to bring some Electrolytes to my coolant producing planet. I warped to the customs office and switched planet mode to make adjustments on the planet. Soon I heard the shield warning sound. Switched off the planet mode, and just in that second I was in the pod. Warped away and started checking who was the idiot who shot me for mere 8M cargo and 2M fittings. His name was Ammatar Navy Admiral. Since my last visit to that planet I was busy increasing Minmatar standing, therefore decreased my Ammatar standing below -5. Also did not notice that my planet is not in Minmatar space. Anyway, I got a diplomacy book and after rank 2 I could go back to loot my wreck and manage the planet.

Still, I'm not the moron of the day. While my action was really dumb, I'm nowhere near these two idiots who shown up when I was creating new bookmarks in Jita in an empty shuttle: EVE Business report: Wednesday morning 21.8B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

Blogging my profit away

2012-05-15T07:00:00.061+02:00

On April 30 I had 16,7B. 2 weeks later, May 14 22,7 + 0,8 spent on the Orca. That's lame 6.8B in two weeks, 480M/day. What happened? Did I forget to trade or my skillpoints started to decrease? Neither, nor I made some epic fail losing billions in a minute. I simply started to get competitors. Especially after my post on transport interceptors. Also I kept talking too much on the goblinworks channel, so the profit margin on my favorite items dropped significantly.

To prevent that I must be much less concrete on the blog, must not tell anything that reveals my items and restrict myself to talk only about general economic theories that you could read on wikipedia. This way I can prove that only a few people can be rich and you must born into their circles to be told the golden secrets. After I proved that there is nothing left than getting a Guy Fawkes mask and squat on the Wall Street as it's clearly the only way to stop the chosen few to exploit the unlucky 99%.

Screw that! From now on, every month 15th will be the "blogging my profit away" day. I will give detailed info on the field I was working on the previous month. This way I not only give direct and clear examples how the economy works, but also prove that I can keep being rich without the secrets. The source of wealth is hard work, knowing the laws of economy and not wasting money on lols. I will prove that anyone and everyone can be rich. The world (of New Eden) can be full of billionaires! True, it will come at a cost. I can't be dirty rich. Probably I won't be a trillonaire in a year as I can't optimize any business, I must always enter new fields. This price I'm ready pay, so I postpone my titanic plans, my alt will train for triage carrier.

So this is my first blogging my profit away post:
On the left you see NPC-sold books. There are two kind: one is limited stock like Logi and Cyno. The NPC station has 5-6 of them and if you buy them out, the next batch will cost much more and it take time for the price to decrease back. So these are "farmable" books. You can't just pick 20 of them 2 jumps away, you must find a station that has a low price on them. The other bunch is faction sold. I hope you can figure it out which regions sell Amarr Freighter skillbooks. You buy them, put them to your interceptor and fly them to the other regions.

On the right side you can see station traded books. They are random drops from NPCs or LP rewards. Some are sold by NPCs too, but the running price is below the NPC price so people buy in the hubs from other people. With these you just set up buy orders in the hubs, sell what you bought. Of course you should mind the other hubs and if X is bought for 5M in Jita and sold for 6 while bought for 5.5 and sold for 8 in Rens, you should just send your Jita pack to Rens instead of selling.

That's more or less what makes my almost PLEX-a-day. I do some PI but that's about 7M/day profit and the baby phases of my new fields. I'll work on them now, so my old field is yours! ... You believed that? If so, I can tell that I'm a Pandemic Legion recruiter and you can join by sending me a billion! In business you must take everything. Good luck! And don't miss the post tomorrow which will be an economic analysis with important results on this field.

EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 21.6B. The reason of the drop is buying 3 PLEXes. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.8B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas. (50-80 people on peak hours)

Miners, manufacturers, refine!

2012-05-14T07:00:00.051+02:00

Now that I have my Orca, I checked out the business that helped me get my starter funds. Considering that now I found it slow and low ISK/hour, the memories of doing the same with a Badger II lost a lot of their golden nostalgic status, despite I still consider my newbie steps enjoyable exploration. But I won't return to this business. Maybe with a Charon. But what is the business?

I typed the Jita mineral prices into an Excel table that calculated the breakeven ore prices. Then I opened the market window and checked for ores that are way below them. Flied out, bought them, refined to minerals to compress them with 96%-100% efficiency as I had all the refining skills and the "we take" part was 0-4% depending on my status (with Connection 3, 4% is the minimum). Then I flied the minerals to Jita and sold them. Now I repeated it. 8 jumps away from Jita I found some underpriced ore. Spent 129M buying them out before my ship filled and in Jita I gained 135M for them. I was unlucky as I had the minimum standing with the station, providing 96% yield. If I'd be lucky and get a 6.66+ standing station, the sell price would have been 140.5M. So in ideal case my profit rate was 8%, which isn't bad for no-risk flying of 2*8 jumps. Actually I could skip the flying as the ores would fit into a freighter, I could just buy them remotely, set them into a courier contract and Red Frog would have delivered it for 4M to Jita where I could have perfect refine. Oops, sorry, I have to go...

OK, I'm back from Sobaseki, checked the Lonetrek ore prices, found a moron who sold various ores 5-10% below Jita mineral price, bought them, they will be in Jita by tomorrow, thanks to the frogmen.

Anyway, that's not the point, besides the business idea of fishing for underpriced ore and freight them to Jita. The point is the stupidity of the miner for not doing it himself. He is always "lucky" with the stations as he can choose which system he mines, so he can always pick a place close to a station where he gets perfect refine. Please note that there is absolutely no reason to not refine it. The ores cannot be used for any other purpose than refining them. Every ore will be refined. By doing it himself, the miner cuts the middle man with a single click. Unlike a third party refiner, he doesn't have to fly to pick it up as he already has the ore in his hangar, nor he have to pay sales tax and broker fee for selling it to himself.

If you are a miner and you sell ore, you are doing it wrong. You shall sell refined minerals, even if you don't want to haul them yourself to a hub. Minerals are smaller and more advanced products so they can be picked up by generic haulers or even producer buyers, not just refiners.

If you are a producer who uses lot of minerals, you can exploit the stupidity of the miners who don't know the above: you learn refining skills and set up buy orders for ores on the station you manufacture. The dumb miners will be happy to fill your station with cheap ores that you can refine and use without moving them. If they don't send you enough, you can find them yourself and courier contract them to your base.

Finally if you are a hauler with a freighter looking for something to carry that surely won't be shot down, pick up ores and carry them to the station where you can refine it. Then carry the minerals to Jita and sell them!

The UI suggestions page has been turned into a permanent page, feel free to discuss and add.
EVE Business report: Saturday morning 21.0B. (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Sunday morning 21.9B. (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Monday morning 22.7B. (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time)

PS: moron of the day is #1 in the comment section.

The caveman bias and the IQ of EVE vs WoW players

2012-05-11T07:00:00.058+02:00

If you ask anyone where did our prehistoric ancestors lived, he'd answer "in a cave". Most of what we know of them is from cave painting, fireplaces and graves found in caves. However caves are in short supply and completely non-existent in plains areas. The available caves simply couldn't support significant amount of population. Therefore only a small percentage of the prehistoric men could live in caves. Yet we call them cavemen, because we found nothing about the non-cavemen, their remnants were washed away by the tens of thousands of years, while the caves preserved the relics of the tiny minority who actually used caves.

Why is it important in an MMO? Because of the long-standing stereotype of player "intelligence" in different games. "Intelligence" rather mean to being informed and prepared than actual IQ. The consensus is that players of hardcore games like EVE are much smarter than of player-friendly games, especially WoW, which is dubbed as a collection of retards.

The above consensus cannot be explained by self-magnifying group bias ("the players of my game are awesome, so I'm awesome too"), as it extends to all players. I mean a skilled WoW player would accept without question that he is a rare breed and most WoW players are dumb like a piece of rock.

Most would ignore the question itself, claiming that the explanation is simply "this is the truth". Maybe would add that even a medically declared retard could level up in WoW if he is capable to press buttons without breaking the keyboard, while only a smart and well-informed person can survive in EVE.

I believed that too, but the "Burn Jita" event forced me to rethink. This was a ganking event when several players - lead by the player group Goonswarm - went to the "capital city" of EVE, the Jita star system and killed everyone they found there if he was in a weak ship or carried worthy cargo. More than 10000 players were killed during the event, granted it includes gankers killed by the NPC police. But still thousands were slaughtered. The event was all over the EVE forums and blogs for a month, so everyone with more than one brain cell could avoid Jita.

Who were killed then? People with one brain cell maybe? But how can be so many idiots in the "game of highest IQ"? Similarly how can anyone gank a Hulk in a small destroyer? With the fits and advices available, no destroyer-ganker should kill anyone. Actually a solo Tornado-ganker shouldn't kill anyone. The fact that people in throwaway ships can effectively gank means that there are lot of idiots in the game. And unlike in "Burn Jita" you can't even pull the newbie-card. Learning to drive a Hulk takes more than a month.

I believe that the average knowledge of players in EVE is one of the lowest while in WoW one of the highest! The reason while people believe the direct opposite is the caveman bias. In WoW, due to the random group finding and the fact that people of your faction cannot harm you in any way, people are mixed very much, pugging missing people or the whole group. They are exposed to large amount of players which include terrible idiots.

This has two effects: at first the bad players are often called on their mistakes, therefore given a chance to learn. If you are a fire mage spamming nothing but ice lance, I'm 100% sure that within an hour someone will tell you that you are doing it wrong. Maybe he won't use nice and friendly terms but you will be told to stop it. In EVE you can fly an Amarr ship equipped with railguns and nothing but warp stabilizers in low slots for years without anyone telling you to stop it. Therefore the average player in WoW, while mediocre (by definition), isn't so terrible. "Bad" in WoW is defined as 50-60% effective. I don't say they aren't bad, considering the amount of resources available, but they aren't 5-10% effective like in EVE.

However the second effect of mixing players of different skill is that you are often exposed to the failures of other players. You regularly see yourself on the top of the damage meter, followed by the tank and 2 "idiots" who do half of your damage. To make it worse, they can't be removed after exposing themselves, you can't even kick them from your group, let alone blowing them up like you would in EVE after their first line in the chat. While a semi-competent player makes no impression, an epic moron is remembered. Therefore you come to the conclusion "this game is full of idiots".

In EVE and other "hardcore" games players avoid each other. They play solo or with their known friend group, considering every stranger a possible ganker or spy. This means that informed, intelligent players (who are the opinion leaders on blogs and forums), are surrounded by other good players and even their enemies are similarly good ones otherwise they couldn't even play against them. The swarm of idiots are invisible as they live in high-sec, doing solo missions or mine. This also means that the idiots are not called on their idiocy, they keep remaining idiots while being sure they are great.

This is exactly the utopia I mentioned as perfect design of MMOs. This is the recipe for the ever-growing happy MMO: players stay with their own kind, everyone in your sphere is someone like you. Why EVE is not the #1 on the market?

Enters the ganker. A good player, who for some out of game reason (mostly because he is a slaving underdog in real life), choose to spend his time harming other players, despite the game punishes that. And he is terribly successful. He can devastate targets with 100x more expensive gear and could do it endlessly if the NPC Police wouldn't take him out after every gank for a some time. Ganking is the living example of the utter stupidity of the average EVE player. I mean how many times have you seen a WoW-player with no combat gear, equipped only with a fishing pole or mining pick farming semi-AFK in the middle of a PvP area? And how many times you see Hulks with no combat fitting, semi-AFK mining during Hulkageddon? Any more question which playerbase is dumber? As a general rule, as long as grief-ganking is not a sporadic event, we can surely say that the average EVE-player is dumb like a piece of rock.

Another evidence: I did pretty well in WoW, making 5-10K gold/week. That's about 2.5-5 Euro at the goldsellers. And I reached this peak after years of playing. In EVE, only after three months I can get 3B ISK/week, that's 90 Euro. OK, official shop prices are higher, but even if we half it, I still make 10x more ingame currency in EVE than I did in WoW. That tells a lot about the ratio of smart competitors vs mindless grinders in the two games.

This is the reason why CCP should make high-sec (or rather part of it, the 1-0.8 systems) totally safe. It would soon be populated by swarms of happy morons, skyrocketing the subscriber count. Just don't make low-null safer or the people will start to mix and the magic goes away!

The UI suggestions page has been turned into a permanent page, feel free to discuss and add.
EVE Business report: Friday morning 20.6B. Oops! I either made an accounting error and tomorow I'll have a peak, or I made some epic fail that you can soon laugh on. (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time)

Fails are fails

2012-05-10T07:00:00.011+02:00

If I had to call one ability that separates effective people from the ordinary Joes it would be "recognizing his own non-fatal fails".

Besides the obnoxious idiots everyone is capable to recognize a slap in the face. When he loses something valuable. When his house burn down because of letting candles unattended. When he crashes his car. They might even learn from them. After all - again, except for obnoxious idiots - most people manage to avoid the Darwin award. Hell, they might even learn from the fate of less "lucky" fellows and avoid doing Darwin-class fails.

Since games have no real consequences and most games have no ingame consequences either, most fails are acknowledged with the usual "lol" statement and the M&S specimen moves on his epic quest to get the next shiny the developers placed into the current content patch. However some games have consequences. In EVE you can lose the product of weeks of grinding if you do it wrong. Between such circumstances the previous paragraph applies: most players learn from the idiotic mistakes of themselves and others and don't make really bad moves.

However avoiding mining in a 0.5 system connected to lowsec in an untanked Hulk makes no one rich. It merely make him not totally broke. Not being an epic idiot isn't winning, it's merely ... not being an epic idiot. The difference between the mediocre, dime of a dozen moron or slacker and the effective, rich person isn't handling huge mistakes. It's about handling small, merely relevant mistakes. Because there are lot of them and their combined force is enough to keep one being "constantly out of luck".

You probably don't remember the moron from a month ago. He bought 46 pieces of books for 70K higher than vendor price. Many have defended him that "he could afford it" and "when I'll have hos much ISK I'll do the same". Well, I just did. I bought 30 books for 21.65M instead of 21.60. That's practically rounding error. It's nothing compared to the profit I make with that (they sell around 24M). Still, I miss that 30*0.05 = 1.5M, despite that's just 0.0075% of my total wealth. I know that I made something silly and it's not "lol", it's something to fix. I also know that time is money, so I have to figure out a path that allow me to buy these from the 21.60 vendor while not putting too many extra jumps to my path.

Another "honest mistake". By the way, I hate the term itself. Accepting these and ignoring them is the best way to make them by the dozens every day, making sure that we remain averagely poor. This time I was updating the price of an item and noticed that a nice bunch is sitting in my hangar, thanks to the buy orders. They were selling for 24.99999 M, so I typed in 249 and started pressing the zero key until the above/under regional price counter moved to the +-50% region and hit enter. No new line appeared but my money count jumped up. I checked transactions and recognized my "honest mistake": I misclicked, so sold another item that I wanted. I sold it for 249M while the running price was 330M. Nice way to say goodbye to 80M. But hey, it's not so bad when I make 500M a day. And it's a "game lol", who cares?

I do, because I don't want to make such fails. I kept thinking until I figured out a protocol to avoid that happening again: every time I sell something, I press the magnifier icon on the sell window. This will update the market window for the item. If it's a wrong item, the update will show its own market details, so I'll sell it for the proper price.

I'm also notorious for leaving the items I meant to haul on the stations. "my ship iz empty lulz" - the M&S would say, along with "i turn back lol". Except I know that time is money and I don't want to turn back. So I created the protocol of having the assets window open while hauling. If it has more than one line, I left something, so I can turn back after one jump instead of a dozen. It's not perfect as it doesn't protect me from leaving stuff on my home station (as I always have something there, so it always has an asset line), but it's better than nothing. I just double-check before leaving that station.

Finally when I was capital-limited I prioritized Orca over Retail 5. Now I'm sitting over 5B cash, unable to invest it as I have 53/53 market orders. Is it so terrible to have "only" 4-500M/day income because the 5B makes no profit? Of course not. But it's still a fail. I should have planned better, especially as my second account alts would take 3x more time to all learn it.

So the way to get rich to take your small fails seriously instead of finding excuses like "I can afford them" or "others do more". Both are true. But you have to decide if you want to be just like the "others", who are mediocre by definition. Also, you have to decide what you want to afford: mistakes or a titan? You can't have both.

EVE Business report: Thursday morning 20.5B(2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project) Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

The secret EVE and Diablo 3 power item shop

2012-05-09T07:00:00.022+02:00

There is few things that players hate more in a game than an item shop where they can buy power. These games are called "pay to win" where playing and becoming better in playing is usually seriously sub-optimal way of winning. World of Tanks is an infamous example: you can be the best player in the game, if I have gold ammo (and I'm not a total idiot) you don't have a chance. These games are making their income from short-playing casuals who spend in the shop for a time to "be awsom lol" and then move away to the next shiny after they got bored of oneshotting anyone. MMO and power item shop don't match as the main selling point of MMOs is the community which can't exist if people rotate in an out in a month.

However there is a clear demand to buy cheats which is usually filled by illegal goldsellers. There is a way for the company to harness this: the PLEX-trade of EVE and the RMAH of Diablo 3 are good examples. In these no powerful items are created, they are traded between players. From your point of view player A buying currency or item from player B for game time or real money is no different from B gifting it to A who is his buddy. While living on charity of others is by definition being a leech and a loser, it doesn't change the fact that such RMT between A and B did not damage your game. Actually made it easier as the power moved from the good playing B to A who sucks therefore will be an easy target for you.

This would be a pointless repost if World of Tanks wouldn't turn me into a paranoid. You know, they probably rig the matchmaking and the random generator calculating penetration to keep even the most atrocious players over 40% winrate. What if they aren't the only shady players on the scene? What if CCP and Blizzard are secretly running the most hated thing in a game: a power item shop.

How could they do it? By placing server-side characters to the marketplace who get resources from nothing and trade it "legitimately". For example a legit-looking EVE char having trillions of ISK and buying up all the PLEX in Jita below 490M. Or a Diablo 3 character that sells extremely powerful items by dozens and "giving" the real money coming in to the developers. These simply can't be catched by players without extreme amount of third-party data collection, which is impossible because the system is benefiting the bad players who will obviously won't submit data. And even if they somehow could collect representative data, the developer can always point finger towards illegal RMT bots.

Using the secret item shop in Diablo 3 the bad player can buy top gear that wouldn't be available yet because legitimate players have not farmed enough for him to sell and the few they did are extremely overpriced. The infinite supply coming from the developer push down the price to the level the developer finds optimal, which is by definition something that is accessible for most. In EVE server-bot prevents the PLEX price to drop to the level where one had to convert a dozen to fit a semi-decent ship. Also, by constantly removing PLEX from the playerbase they limit the multiboxing that makes the life of the bad players harder.

If it exists - and I'm not even sure if I believe it does - this system would be very profitable to gaming companies as they have a good item shop without the negative consequences. Just like in World of Tanks, players live under the assumption that they could do better if they would be better players, instead of recognizing the truth: you must pay in the item shop. Granted the system is not so blatant as "The One Ring for $10" as every power the shop sell is something that some players do reach legitimately, so it is (at least theoretically) possible to outperform someone who pays a lot in the shop. In EVE it isn't a high barrier. I mean, with the current price a bad player has to spend 500 Euros a month to outdo me in making ISK.

What to do then? I stopped playing World of Tanks after figuring out that it's probably a cheat. Shall I stop playing EVE and Diablo 3 too unless the companies don't prove that they are free of cheats? (for example by getting a third-party audit, or in Diablo publish a complete item database by telling that Ubersword has 1854 pieces ingame, followed by a list of telling every items unique ID and a complete ownership history of it) No. There are two questions to ask. The first is: "do I enjoy the game as it is now, as I am in it now?"

While playing World of Tanks, we very often did not enjoy the game. We were upset about our performance, or even worse, blamed each other with my girlfriend for sucking to the point of recording and replaying practically all the matches to figure out how could we suck less. We kept on playing under the assumption that if we become really good in the game we'll enjoy it greatly. The cheat destroyed that hope and we stopped playing. The important lesson is to never have hopes about a game because there can very easily be a cheat somewhere making it impossible to fulfill your hopes, even if they were otherwise modest and reachable.

I'm enjoying playing EVE and find the current PLEX price acceptable. I don't think it breaks my plans in EVE. If the price would jump to 2B where I could no longer reliably claim "learn to trade and you can be competitive even with the PLEX-buying losers", I'd stop playing since I couldn't hope that with better trading strategies it can be turned. The point is that may be I could come up with strategies that allow my readers to keep competitive at 2B (after all, I'm making nearly 20/month), but the possibility of cheating on CCPs side makes it irrelevant as they can rise the price to 5B overnight. For the same reason I play Diablo 3 only as a content-game for fun with my girlfriend: we play to complete the game, to kill Inferno Diablo. I won't use the RMAH in the first month until the prices settle and I can see if the prices worth serious attention. I can still post some Diablo 3 goldmaking tips using the gold AH.

The second criteria is "equal playfield". Even if CCP really buying up PLEX and pour ISK in its place, that affects everyone alike. The inflation doesn't hurt you more than the next guy and this applies to PLEX buyers too. So competition can exist and a better player will win over the worse (even if the RMT-er is better off assuming equal playskill). Such games can be played for win. The other kind is unfair, helps the bad players (and those who can effectively game the system). World of Tanks punished you for being good, being better just increased the unfairness towards you and not your winrate. If you have even the suspicion that your game is doing that, you should uninstall that in that moment. You won't have fun playing that game because you don't receive feedback for your actions (which is necessary for the flow), as the response of the program depends on a the cheat and not your actions (simple example: imagine an FPS where the bullets hit totally randomly regardless where you aim).

The moron of the day was sent without signature. The sender is buying skillbooks from NPCs and sell them in other regions where no NPC sell them. The competitor came up with the "great" idea to buy them all out and relist higher. Well, let us wish him good luck to buy out the Science and Trade Institute:

EVE Business report: Wdnesday morning 19.9B(2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

The One Empire: structure, culture and drama

2012-05-08T07:00:00.022+02:00

The killer of most gaming groups besides the ones that recruit random newbies is not gaming failure but social drama. This is something completely unrelated to the game, therefore the leaders who are mostly proficient in the game itself can't handle. Everyone can cite hundreds of events, they are all common in being completely ridiculous to outsiders and a total disaster to everyone in the same group: they know it's going to blow and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

They say there isn't a group without drama, well I managed to make one in WoW, I simply banned every non-game related chat in the channels of the group, so the members could not form any kind of social relationships with each other, therefore there was nothing to blow. However this success wasn't exportable and assimilative. Since the social person wants peer respect and acceptance, they can't have fun in an environment where they can't harvest these. They call this a "work", and I finally understand that their definition of work vs fun is "we do SOMETHING" vs "WE do something". This is not something any leader can "fix" as only a small group is ready to take the "work" approach - and surprisingly this group emerges as elite in every field. However to be more than a small elite PvP group that may do some really awesome videos but generally irrelevant for the future of the game, one has to accomodate socials.

To have The One Empire, one has to assimilate socials too, simply because they are the 99%. If it has socials within its ranks, it will have drama. If it will have drama, it will explode. If it explodes it fails. Result: The One Empire can't be built.

While the above is true, it isn't accurate. Its inaccuracy isn't obvious. Accurately: "a homogeneous empire cannot be built". For most people homogeneous is trivial as there is one proper way of doing things: his way.

The solution to build The One Empire that is not riddled with drama is to be heterogeneous. Will it be an empire at all? Will it have a character? Yes, since the problem is social at the first place so the differences are social, ergo game-irrelevant. The One Empire will be homogeneous regarding ingame issues, but will tolerate various "cultures" within the different corporations.

How? Well, the people in the alliance are members of corporations too. There isn't any difficulty having corporations of very different social cultures. One can be an all-male one that constantly send porn pictures and tell disgusting stories how "all girls are bitches" while the one next to it can be totally respectful towards women. There isn't any problem of the two to trade, pay tax for the supercap fund or fly in the same fleet - as long as the FC is capable to keep offtopic crap out of the channels, which can usually be enforced during a few hours fleet operation.

The ruleset that can make it happen:

The members are members of the alliance first and not of the corporation. The members must answer for their acts to the alliance and not the corporation. So if someone breaks the rules of the alliance and kicked by any of the council members, the corp leader can't keep him. He gets the mail from the council member, he has to kick the guy. Also he can't invite anyone who don't accept the alliance rules or on the alliance kick-list.
The corp leader don't have the right to kick anyone without making sure that the member lands within the alliance. There is a "default corporation" within the alliance as temporary holder for members who are in the alliance but not in any corp. All corp leaders must have an alt with inviter rights in this corp. If they want someone out of their corp, they must re-invite him to this default corp. The former member can also ask any other inviter to invite him, who will do so after verifying only that he was recently removed from one of the alliance corps without being kicked by the council. In the default corp the offtopic chat is forbidden. This corp is not destined to be the home of anyone, it's just a lobby till one finds a corp that fits him.
If the alliance finds a corporation leader breaking its rules, the corporation is kicked from the alliance, but the simple members can move to other corporations.
Besides alts of the officials doing official jobs, no alts get auto invited. Since there is no API way to verify, every pilot is considered on its own, to track who is alt of who would be a spreadsheet nightmare.
The income source of the alliance is the tax paid by the corps. It's their business how to get the money from their members. If they fail to pay, they get a warning, then they are kicked out. Of course the non-leading members can go to the default corp and then find another corp. The tax has 3 elements:
- Fixed: this is paid for the pure existence of the corp. Its purpose is to prevent lolcorps linger. Pay, be kicked or dissolve. Any corp can dissolve at will, moving the members and even the leader to the default corp
- Member: it's a fixed number multiplied by pilot count (again: all alts are counted individually). The purpose is to prevent useless freeloaders linger in the alliance. The corp will collect this tax from the members, those who can't pay are kicked from the corp and moved to the default corp to prevent abuse. In the default corp the tax collector is a council member who is authorized to kick members from the alliance.
- System: Star systems are assigned to corps that request them. PvP corps don't need systems, industrials do who can pay the tax from the profit made in the system. The system tax is not just a huge income, but motivate the corps to give up systems they can't properly utilize and let the systems be assigned to corps that can.
Only the members of the corporation that owns the system can harvest resources there. Of course all alliance members can fly, dock, repair, refit, trade, clone and so on in any stations, and kill enemies in any systems but only the owner corporation members can mine, rat or refine in their system. A thief found in non-owned system is kicked out of the alliance. The point is to keep the industrial corporations competing who can utilize the space better. A thief would break it as he utilizes a resource that someone else pays tax for.
The tax collected by the alliance are reported on a monthly basis on the forum.
The collected tax money is distributed to the following branches, and reported similarly:
- To the one of the fleet commanders (or their administrator alt) who use them to pay out for ships lost in fleet action or salary for doing something "not fun" like camping a gate. Such payments are public info and must be all published to prevent corruption and accusing with corruption. (easiest way: administrator alt has full API key made public)
- To the supercap division head. This money is used to build supercaps. All supercaps are individually named and their price tag published.
- To the head of intelligence. He buys intel and pays traitors of enemies along with salaries of deployed spies. While the names of the recipients are obviously anonymous, otherwise he had to publish complete report on the forum with items like "9B paid for the password of the POS at X-99999" so members can speak up if they think it's a waste as blowing up the POS would have been easier.
- Secretary of state: usually to pay mercenaries and buying systems from alliance leaders who rather go away with cash than join or fight. Fully reported of course.
The Empire is money-neutral, the above branches must spend all the tax the next month (besides a small safety amount which is clearly defined). If money starts accumulating, the next month tax will be linearly smaller for everyone. It prevents anyone sitting on too much ISK to have ideas about illegal RMT and also motivates everyone to spend. Like "Hey FC, we are bored and saw there is enough in the wallet to replace the ships, lead us into enemy space, let's make some terror among them" or "Random roamers blown up 32 Hulks this week in our space. We see you can afford to place a bubblecamp to our entrance in peak hours, so please do" or one of the FCs in the council meeting: "I see that with the current spending 4T will remain in the end of the month, so if you don't mind I'd order 12 titans and 30 supercarriers as I'd go for a capital-supercapital fleet"
The FCs are on alliance and not corp level, they belong to a special corp "Imperial council". Only they are allowed to organize official fleets and pay from the tax money. Of course others can lead fleets but only on their own money. FCs will differ in combat style, some will run huge-fleet battles head on, others will specialize in hunting enemy roams in our space, there will be avid gatecamp-commanders and elite PvP-ers who bring their well-choosen few deep into enemy space, so everyone who wants to PvP can find an FC fitting his style.
In official fleets the rule is "no bullshit". Those who behave unprofessionally by telling jokes, talking offtopic or do anything that would annoy members who don't share their culture are to be punished by ISK fine first, kick from the alliance for repeated or serious violation. In the fleet you are to blow up ships and not to socialize. If you can't shut up for a few hours when you should be shooting flashy reds anyway, you have no place in a fleet. Reliable info that proves that the FC failed to keep the comms clear of crap can lead to him losing his FC status.
The corp leaders are not council members and council members cannot lead corps even on alts. This guarantees that the corporations that has a unique culture cannot force this culture on anyone. The alliance members have the right to belong to the alliance and they can do so without question in the default corp. Belonging to a "real" corporation is a volunteer action of the member and accepting him is an equally volunteer action of the community of that corp.

So the key is having a homogeneous alliance level where everyone is equal and subject to the law, while allowing corporations to be the place of social interaction in a fitting community. The member is free to find or form one that fits his taste and hang out while having to act professionally where he is mixed with people of different tastes: the fleets.

EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 19.5B Ouch! Insuring the Orca and not playing on weekend hurts! (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

Comparative advantage and highsec PI

2012-05-07T07:00:00.104+02:00

Comparative advantage is my favorite economic idea. It's a really nice thing, it says "everyone who is ready to do some work has a place under the Sun". How does it tell it? By saying that anyone who have a relative advantage of producing something can profitably do so, even if someone else is better than him in that. Let me tell it with an example.

Smartguy is producing 10 item A in an hour or 15 item B. He wants to consume 20 A and 20B daily. If he is alone, he must spend 2 hours producing A and 1:20 producing B. Slowguy is producing 5 item A in an hour or 5 item B. He is half and 1/3 as good in producing. If he is alone, he must spend 8 hours to get his 20 A and 20B every day. Slowguy clearly sucks compared to Smartguy, why should the latter bother trading with him? Because his sucking rates are different, he sucks in creating B more than A, compared to Smartguy. So they can set up a deal: 4 item B sells for 3 item A. Now Smartguy creates all 40 item B which takes him 2:40. He sells 20 to Slowguy and receives 15 item A. He creates the remaining 5 item A in half an hour, so he'll work 2:10 every day, saving 10 minutes. Slowguy will create 35 item A and nothing else, which costs him 7 hours, saving 1 hour! Both of them won!

You might ask why there is unemployment in the World if comparative advantage is so great? Because of welfare. In the real world Slowguy won't work 7 hours creating item A, but watch TV and drink beer he bought on your tax money.

But it's an EVEBusiness post, so back to EVE, shall we. Highsec PI sucks. The valuable raw materials like Autotrophs are nearly non-existent in highsec. OK it's not true, my beginner post features an Autotroph extractor, but it was some time finding the planet. Also you have to pay 10% tax for transporting items up and down between the launchpad and the customs office. In Low and nullsec there are more valuable resources and you can place tax-free player towers. If you are doing PI in highsec, you are Mr Slowguy.

What can you do when you are behind the low-null people in every field of PI? Find the fields where your disadvantage is the smallest. There are two such fields.

One is production. Your command center and factories are just as good as the nullsec ones. So you can cut the extractors which produce seriously less materials than their low/null counterparts, buy all the P1 materials and produce them to P2-3-4. This is my coolant factory, which takes 8 water (200 ISK + 25 tax) and 8 electrolytes (480 ISK + 25 tax) and process it to coolant (8000 ISK - 900 tax). This PDF give you a complete list of production chains. The storage is there to cut the management frequency to half. I transport the elecrolytes down to the launchpad, expedited transfer them to the storage and transfer the water down too. Such production plants have two advantages: as they need no resources, they can be placed on any planet, conveniently close to your base. Also, they are pretty generic, the above could be changed to produce any 2-material P2 if the coolant prices would drop.

The pictured factory gets 1260 ISK on a coolant and produces 18*5*24 = 2160 every day. That's 2.6M profit. However it's extremely sensitive to prices, a mere 12% drop of coolant price would put it out of business. This points to the the other comparative advantage in Highsec: mine cheap crap and use it for higher quality products. Take Coolant for example. It's pretty expensive because Ionic Solutions are hard to find, especially in Highsec. Ionic Solutions can be refined into Electrolytes. I buy these, transport them to my planet which is abundant in Aqueous liquids. It's not hard to find, highsec is full of oceanic and terran planets that has nothing but water on it. Therefore water is cheap and no one bothers to mine it. I do. I send the Electrolytes down, skip paying tax for water as I mine my own, combine them to Coolant and sell it. The trick is that the lowsec guy is better off extracting more Electrolytes than using CPU and Power to mine his own Water. Actually he is better off extracting more Electrolytes than using CPU and Power to run a factory that combines Electrolytes with hauled highsec Water. The plant below has 2800 ISK profit on every coolant but produces only 6*5*24 = 720/day, providing 2M/day profit. It's lower than the previous, but the same 12% price drop would only cut the profit to half but wouldn't kill it, so I don't have to check prices often and do the tedious work of reprogramming the factories one by one to another product. Since water is really common, I managed to plant two such factories 1 jump away from Rens.

There is no EVE business report today as we were on a Holiday on the weekend and still are when the post is published. I guess I didn't make much ISK this weekend, but I'll survive that. Hopefully.

PS: Jester posted a 63 items long list of his ships. I have 3 after 3 months (transport frigate, Badger II, Orca), but I'm sure that even after years I won't have even 15% of Jesters. I'm currently in P-W remap and learn now all the ships. Then remap C-M-I and never look back, practically locking myself out of new ships for a year. Here is the list:

Bustard: for picking up some random stuff
Crane: for picking up stuff in lowsec
Orca: jack of all trades, master of hiding cargo
Stiletto: "I'm in Rens in 20 mins"
Buzzard: "lowsec implants here I come"
Charon: because lot of crafting is lot of tritanium
Rhea: when my alt will be in a nullsec alliance, I can give a hand now and then
Basilisk: to fly with my girlfriend

The hangar of my alt will be even smaller:

Guardian: nullsec alliance small fleet
Archon: nullsec alliance large fleet
Avatar: nullsec alliance capital fleet boost

Expansion suggestion: multi-character client

2012-05-04T07:00:00.035+02:00

This idea has been bugging me for some time, so I just introduce it. I know some CSMs are lurking around, I hope they find it worthy to show it to CCP. It's something that serves both players and CCP

What would the multi-character client do? Simply after you logged in the game you could select your characters to enter the game. This one client would handle all your characters and for this reasons accounts in the hand of one person would be merged. The client would support logging in with multiple characters concurrently, assuming your subscription method supports that. Instead of Alt-tabbing between clients, you would get a bar that shows the other characters face and most important data: shield, armor and hull HP, what he does (warping, approaching, shooting/mining, being docked, idling in space). You could switch to the char with one click.

That's alone handy but here comes the real stuff: multiboxing support. If your pilots are in the same system, you could link them to one of your pilots, they would orbit that pilot and the master pilot would get extra buttons/hotkeys: order supporters to lock that target (available on overview and selected item too), open fire on that target (assuming it's locked), fire at will (shoot whatever is red, practically aggressive drone mode), heal that target (use repping modules on the target if locked). Obviously it wouldn't be as effective as having individual players behind each pilot, they would be just glorified drones, but still it would allow much better multiboxing. Also with one click you can switch to the other pilot to micro-manage.

The client could also support "perfect multibox" which is available if the ships are the same type and fit. This case everything the leader pilot does is mimiced by the supporters.

The concurrent login handling is convenient. The multiboxing support would get some customers to buy more accounts. However it seems to affect only a small playerbase that doesn't really justify the developer resources. So here come the big deals.

Only one client can run on a computer. Since the client would handle all your characters, it's pointless to run more than one client. However banning to do so would be a serious hit on account sharing, illegal account selling and illegal ISK selling. Why? If I have two accounts, I can let some buddy play with one while I play with the other. If all my characters are on one account, I can't give him one, just all at once. Also, he can't play his own account while he is playing on mine as the client either runs my account or his. If you have an illegal pilot (botter, exploiter or whatever) on the same account as other (legal or not) pilots, being caught and banned would mean losing them all. Having the illegal pilot on a different account wouldn't help alone, as playing that account would make it impossible to play other accounts on the same computer. This would significantly increase the costs of botting and other illegal activities as every pilot would need a separate computer to avoid the risk of more than one being banned at once.

Finally this client would allow much more customized payment methods which would allow CCP to make offers that more players would accept, increasing both customer satisfaction and CCP income. Currently if you buy an extra account you get one pilot who learns skills, two who don't and one more concurrent logins. This is the offer, take it or leave it. Many choose to leave it. For example if you are a trader with your main in Jita, the two alts are on Rens and Amarr, you won't pay a full subscription to have one more pilot in Dodixie. With this client CCP could sell the following separately:

Concurrent logins
Pilots learning skills
Pilots not learning skills

When you activate a PLEX, you get 300 "time points" on your account. Every day a concurrent login would take 4 pt, a learning pilot 4, a non-learning 1. I just made the numbers randomly with only caring that if you use the current account you get exactly 4+4+1+1= 10/day= 300/month. The player could make changes in the client which take effect at server downtime, so can't be changed more often than daily. With this client the above trader could create his Dodixie alt (happy), while paying 1pt/day = E1.5/month to CCP, which is profit they wouldn't get otherwise.

This client would remove the all-or-nothing bar from buying another account, luring customers into it step by step. For example the above trader first just buy his passive Dodixie alt. Then he is unsatisfied by training speed (as only 1 out of 4 pilots can learn skills), so he buys one more training pilot spots. Soon he'll have enough skill points to train one more alt to freighters and to have two freighters in space he'll buy one more concurrent login. Also, the client would make the account management simpler: you just buy time points from money or activating PLEX and you do the micro-management within the client.

I'm sure that the above system would significantly increase the amount of players who use more than one PLEX for playing time (paid by themselves or by the guy who sold a PLEX on the market), even if most of them would only pay 1/3-2/3 PLEX more. However if just 1/3 of the players would choose to spend 2E/month more, that's 2.9M E/year income to CCP while actually making all players happier or at worst neutral.

EVE Business report: Friday morning 18.2B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project). The reason of the drop is that I bought myself a 650M ship and also decided that my trading alts have much more to learn, like PI and manufacturing, so the first one got Cybernetics 4 and 3 +4 implants. The remaining 2 will come from the gift. Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

Spreading information is never in vain!

2012-05-03T07:00:00.057+02:00

Tobold wrote about something really important. He said that it's not a good time to start an MMO blog. The topic is discussed to the death. There isn't anything to write that haven't been written down, except for personal fluffs and feelings that no one cares about. In the scientific sense, he is correct. I doubt that there is a sane question one can come up in the MMO world that you can't google up an answer. Everything that you could say is repetition (or irrelevant rant). Why bother?

When I started EVE, I was worried about things like that. I was a newbie trying to talk about something that others are doing for almost a decade. Why should anyone read my posts? Will I write anything worthy? And above all: will I do anything worth mentioning or will I be noob_mining_veldspar_#548154?

The answer for both is pretty clear. My blog visits were constantly declining along with the subscribers to WoW. In 2011 Aug I had 178K visits, in 2012 Feb, only 137K. Then I started writing about EVE and got 155K in March and 153K in April (April is 30 days, if I'd be 31 like March, it would be 158K). But the stunning thing was my income in EVE. In only in my third month of playing I reached the income worth 1 PLEX (E15 in the item shop) every day. Few players have achieved it after years. I'm already in the top 10% earners of the EVE players, probably in top 1%. My ideas about making money in these game indeed work.

How? How can a new player outdo most veterans? The same way as the Goons managed to shoot down anyone in their Jita gank event, despite it's been on the blogs and forums for a month: most players are terribly uninformed. If I'd have to guess, I'd say 80% of the MMO players are virgin land for bloggers. Someone to inform. Someone to write to. "OK, if he'll ever be interested about reading something he'll Google it up, you aren't needed" - Tobold would say. He is wrong, because people are not like him. Not nearly as smart and not at all rational. They have average logic and they are socials. Both statements open fields for you to blog.

"Average logic" means "unable to follow abstractly proven points". Let me give an example. Two months ago I wrote that the proper way of transporting small but valuable items in EVE is in a small, fragile but fast ships. I explained that the pirates have very little time to click on them, scan them to evaluate if they worth attacking and perform the attack. For me, this data and the logical conclusions were enough to determine it's the proper way. But look at the comment section: 95% wrote that it's extremely dangerous and plain nonsense and you shall use a huge battleship. They also linked examples where people lost their small ships with expensive cargo. And these are the published comments, this post received extreme amount of trolls with variations of "lol 1mo n00b talking nonsense" and "ur ass will be ownd if u do this shit".

Two months passed. Most of my profit is made by interceptors carrying 1-2B worth of cargo around. For smaller loads (below 100M) I am too lazy to relog and my main carries it in the same T1 frigate I used back then. My main was targeted some times, probably because I'm somewhat famous. My alts, never. Obviously I lost no cargo to pirates. I also googled up the "examples" that prove I'm wrong. Every one of them were autopiloting (very slow) or wardecced (police don't help him). I also figured out why no pirate even tries to catch me: because the time needed to identify my interceptor alts, figure out when they are full and when empty and waiting for them to actually show up (as I play in pretty random schedule) simply don't worth it. In the same time he can catch a dozen idiots who autopilot on the Perimiter gate with 500M+ in the hold and less than 10K EHP.

My post isn't any more true than it was when I published it. The logic and reasoning is the same. One could Google that post up, why to write it down again? Because people with average logic wouldn't believe it. It doesn't feel right to carry value in something so small. Also, "most people" disagree, so it's surely wrong. Now I can say "I have huge income from it and never been ganked. It works." It's simple proof. They are capable to accept this. If you do the same experiment, you can provide proof to your readers. They don't want theories and logic what Google can find, since it's abstract and debated. They want simple proof.

Them being socials opens another important field for you to blog. While evaluating a statement on its own is one of the most basic steps of rational thinking, most people are incapable to do so. Socials value a statement after the speaker. The internet is full of ad hominem attacks and reductio ad Hitlerum because it works on socials. If the social views a person "evil" or "wortless" he doesn't believe his statement, regardless of its value. On the other hand he is ready to believe the most ridiculous nonsense if he likes and values the speaker.

In the scientific world repetition is pointless or even plagiarism. It's already written, anyone can find it. But out here, in the World littered with partially civilized apes, repetition is extremely important. If you are a good writer and get a readerbase, they will accept truth from you that they wouldn't from me or Tobold or some random guy Google threw up.

Is the time to write something new and shocking about MMOs have passed? Probably. Is it passed to teach the general public? Never. If you can write, you are needed. If you write in my field, send me a link in comment after having a dozen or so posts. If they are good, I'll link it. That's probably a couple hundred redirected visitors.

Moron of the day was sent by Garak the Tailor: This book sells for 31.5 at vendors. Please, don't turn off the warning for setting a price out of the range of the regional price.

EVE Business report: Thursday morning 18.2B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

Planetary interaction for beginners

2012-05-02T07:00:00.089+02:00

Planetary interaction isn't a really profitable enterprise. However the "newbie-version" is a "printing money" scheme more or less. You set it up, you let it run, you collect money. It need very few skills, so it's something I'd happily suggest to a real newbie, one who just finished the career agents:

Remote sensing 3 (x1 int/mem)
Planetology 3 (x3 int/mem)
Command center upgrades 3 (x4 cha/int)
Interplanetary consolidation 3 (x4 cha/int)

All these skills take 192K points which can be gained in 4 days. Even they are not necessary, as the last one allows creation of 4 colonies, you can run with 3 if you only have rank 2 and with a bit lower output you can run with command center rank 2. The official video tutorial shows very well how the colony UI works. You should watch it or you'll have problems with scanning, placing the items and so on. The price of creating a full colony is below 5M ISK.

In short: you build command center to produce energy and CPU. You build the extractor to get raw materials. You build basic factory to refine the raw to level 1 product. You build advanced factory ...

Except you don't. The problem is on the following graph: As you can see on low level command centers you have relatively more power than CPU. So you shouldn't build items that eat your little CPU. You must build one, the launchpad to be able to get your products. Therefore you are better off building just an extractor and basic factories, despite the pro guides all advice for high quality products. They are right, except they use top level command center. You simply can't follow their advice. Instead use a colony like this: It features one extractor (the top), which is connected to a storage (the box icon). The raw material comes here. The storage is connected to the basic factories (the yellow ones) which refine it. They are connected to the spaceport that collect the product. So you set this up, let it run for a few days (make sure that the extractor program is longer than your expected return) and you collect the product.

Don't jump on the first planet! The planets differ in material availability a lot. Scan several planets. Also the prices of the P1 products differ a lot:
Bacteria 160
Biofuels 150
Biomass 460
Chiral structures 400
Electrolytes 500
Industrial fibers 500
Oxidizing compound 350
Oxygen 200
Plasmoids 320
Precious metals 400
Proteins 450
Reactive metals 180
Silicon 500
Toxic metals 320
Water 250
Note: the above are Jita prices from Monday, they are just for guidance, check the prices before you make your choice!

So make your choice, scan planets, find the one with a good hotspot featuring your material and build your colony. Low maintenance, low profit. The colony pictured above creates 2.5M income every day (2 more factories were placed after making the screenshot). Since you can have 4 colonies with Interplanetary consolidation 3, it's 10M/day. 300M/month, so this beginner colony pays more than half of you subscription.

One more thing: the spaceports I mentioned. You can get your products by approaching the customs office of the planet and interacting with it. At first you have to move the items from the launchpad to the office, you have to pay tax for that, then simply move the item to your cargo like you'd loot a box.

The beginner colony is not just a free money print, it's also an introductory for the "pro" PI. We will get to that soon.

EVE Business report: Wednesday morning 17.9B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

It's not grind they skip! (and ISK sellers)

2012-05-01T07:00:00.086+02:00

I am in firm belief that anyone buying PLEX for real money is simply a bad player. My favorite example is that if I buy my way into heavyweight boxing, paying managers to let me fight the champions it won't make me a top boxer, just a moron paying money to be beaten up (I'm not talking about illegal buying wins, just buying the matches themselves).

However the bad players and supporters keep telling that they just "skip the grind" as it's more "time efficient" to get $15 with their real life job than 500M ISK in EVE.

Finally I found the proof why it's bullshit: EVE is not WoW. In WoW to level 85 and get full honor gear is just matter of time. Anyone who is not serious mental patient can reach the level cap. You have to be very skilled in the game to artificially create a gear/talent/rotation that cannot defeat monsters of your level. Random picking will still steamroll. I soloed 5-man leveling dungeons 4-5 levels above me. Getting honor gear is even easier, you can do it completely AFK, just create a keyboard macro that jumps every 3 minutes to prevent being kicked from the battleground.

"The grind" is defined as trivial but lengthy process that is created either due to bad design or to create content where morons and slackers can feel heroes. Skilled players hate the grind as it's just a waste of time. Leveling to 85 and getting full honor gear doesn't make you better in arenas or rated BGs at all and also it's impossible to fail in it, except for not having time to do it. One who buys a honor-geared character doesn't do anything that increases his chance to win in arenas, simply skips a timesink.

Getting ISK in EVE is anything but trivial. You cannot create a "do this and this and this" guide that provides you ISK without the chance of failing. Mining? Along came a Tornado and you are 350M behind in a second. Missioning providing 100M/hour? A scanner neut alt, 3 Tornados and your 1.5B Tengu is history. Trading can obviously go wrong. There is simply no way to make ISK without getting into trouble.

Saying that "I could make 500M if I'd have 5 hours" is just as true as "I could have a 3:2 kill:death if I'd have 5 hours". You must prove it to reliably claim it. You can only skip content without being cheater if everyone agrees that the mentioned content is trivial. No sane WoW player would claim that you couldn't level up yourself. However many-many players are broke in EVE and for this reason buy PLEX from real money. Maybe you are not among them. Maybe you really could gain ISK if you'd have the time. But making that claim without proof is empty bragging. Anecdotal evidence that "I once ran missions for 50M/hour so I could do it again" is just as good as "I killed a Hel (3% damage done), so I can kill supercaps regularly". Maybe you were just extremely lucky that one time. Or times have changed and the opponents got smarter over the years.

You can only skip grind. If you skip competitive elements, you are cheating. Skipping any competitive element is cheating. Otherwise you are on the slippery slope of "I just skip one more element" until the point of you skip it all and buy a pilot with top killboard stats and peacock around without actually killing anyting yourself. That's not against the ToS either.

There is one exception of the above: if the goal of the player is not competitive with the others. For example if your aim is to have a planetary colony in every planet of Lonetrek and you buy PLEX to start it up faster, you defeated nobody in the process, so just bought convenience for yourself. Unless of course there is a planetary community with third party sites running with benchmarks and you climbed high with your purchase. Then, you are a cheater.

A related topic: illegal ISK selling. Buying illegal ISK is cheaper than PLEX. So many of the above cheaters do it. They shouldn't as their illegal transactions are reversed and now they are with negative wallet. Seems CCP really fight ISK selling. I wrote several articles back then why do Blizzard openly tolerates goldselling. I even found a blatant goldfarmer and reported him with no effect. Why? How come that the small CCP can do something against ISK selling and Blizzard cannot. The answer is simple: according to the dev blog, 1268 accounts were banned and 4.2T ISK seized. By removing this ISK, the customers of the ISK sellers could get their ISK only from CCP, by buying 8400 PLEX-es (4.2T/500M). 8400 is much greater than 1268. So the solution is that by selling PLEX, CCP is a competitor of the ISK sellers, so motivated to stop them. Blizzard, and all other MMO developers who don't do RMT themselves can't care less. You'll see that in Diablo 3, where official RMT exists, the same Blizzard that was impotent to catch the obvious bot I reported magically will be able to catch botters.

EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 17.4B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

PS: Comment on Hulkageddon from my girlfriend: "it's overrated" My comment: with proper skills and Orca support the income is around 10M/hour which is far from being stellar, but safe (10 alpha Tornados needed, 12 if the pilot is at keyboard and overheats, ship costs 3 Tornados) and also it allows lowsec mining operations for much higher income assuming proper combat support is present as the miners are better tanked than the escort.

"Burn Jita"? Rather burn M&S!

2012-04-30T07:00:00.052+02:00

So the "Burn Jita" event of the Goons has ended. Several freighters and other valuable ships were destroyed in Jita and the surroundings.

But surprisingly it had little effect on the market. I saw no price peaks. Also, I made 2.5x more profit in Jita on the first day, nicely pulling up my income, despite the prices did not rise on my field. It seems that some of the traders chickened out, and others who did not overestimate the Goon annoyance were taking their share of the profit too. On the second and third day everything went back to normal, probably even the most jumpy traders returned to their schedule. My transport interceptors were happily hauling in and out from Jita during the event, with the only complication of having one extra jump: from Perimiter to Niyabainen first and then Jita. The Goons only camped the Perimiter-Jita gate.

However the huge red ball on the "ships destroyed last hour" map shows that the Goons did not fail. They held probably the largest massacre in the history of EVE. 5K+ ships were destroyed every day in Jita and the neighboring systems. Still Jita did not burn, actually did not even blackened from the smoke. If you were sitting inside 4-4 watching the market and ignore the TiDi sign you couldn't figure out that anything was going on. It was a usual weekend business day in Jita.

How can the two both be true? Because the trade is mostly ran by professionals. Players who are informed, planning, finding ways. The massacre affected random idiots who were living under a rock and managed to not know about an event that was all over the news for a month.

My own extra profit shows that the trade system has large reserves. I guess if even half of the traders got scared of the Goons, there wouldn't be any signs on the outside, as the other half could pick up the slack. The total failure of the event to affect the trade proves how robust the player ran economy is. Of course the Goons will claim that all they wanted is to have fun, and even I wouldn't question that they had a lot. However this event was probably the last when the Goons or anyone will make claims of affecting the economy with anyone giving a damn. OTEC? Bullshit, Tc price is rising since months, The Mittani just noticed it and claimed it to be his doing. Well, the last peak on the end probably is, but not by doing any effect but by scaring some morons into a buying spree. I doubt that anyone will ever be scared of such claims once more.

The Goons and others are massacring morons and slackers. Players who can't be arsed to read up even the most obvious sources or dumb enough to make proper precautions. Of course everyone can be hunted down, but if you are not a moron or slacker, it takes incredible amount of time and resources, something that even the largest alliances don't have in the necessary amounts.

EVE is a safe and nice place. Anyone who claims differently is probably a moron or slacker who got ganked because of his own stupidity and laziness. I was ganked, but not because "EVE is evil" but because I went to lowsec with a T1 industrial. I'm capable of learning from my mistakes, the M&S cannot, since they never make any: they are just unlucky or victims or unfairness.

EVE Business report: Saturday morning 15.5B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Sunday morning 16.0B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Monday morning 16.7B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

It's being the last day of this month, I created a chart of my income. It's not my full asset count as I added the ISK spent on the titan/triage carrier pilot and the PLEX-es that make my main account free (as the normal way is to pay one subscription to the company). Obviously the PLEXes used for my trader alts are not included since that's operating cost. So it's rather a "how much money would I have if I'd make money and not spend on fun and convenience": I managed to increase my assets from 3B to 16B in a month. That's 490M/day average income which is nice on its own. However what's really promising is the second order fit placed on it. It says "titan money in 4 months". But even if we go with the linear fit which is definitely an underestimation, I'll have money for a titan in 8 months. Or, if I go that way, a dozen deadspace fitted triage carriers. Are you convinced already to stop grinding and start trading?

Jita gank survival guide

2012-04-27T19:48:00.003+02:00

While the Goons are busy ganking anything that moves in Jita, the business must go if we want income. So the hauling to Jita can't stop. Remember, your competitors are either docked or dead, so this is the time to make some good money. I'm having some really good sales today. How?

At first forget freighters and Jump freighters. They are capital ships, therefore can be rammed. The Goons don't have the manpower to blockade everything but they have bumpers on every gate. The bumper crashes with the capital ship, pushing it, preventing it from aligning while his buddies arrive. They can't do it with an industrial or a small-shiny transporting frigate. Use a standard industrial instead.

If you really have to carry a freighter-load of stuff to Jita, pay an orca to distract the Goons. It shall arrive in a far gate with full tank, while they rush and kill it, you can make your jump. Have a ganking tornado escort who can alpha any bumper. If you have to carry a freighter-load out of Jita, I'd suggest to use Jump freighter. Have a cyno ready in a safe low-sec system, undock and jump to it instantly, even if you have to freight to high-sec. But the general rule: don't! Use an industrial.

Open up the map and set the system view to statistics/ship kills in last hour. The interesting thing is not Jita, we know it's red. It's the neighboring systems. If Perimiter is red too, don't use that gate, right-click it and check "avoid Perimiter". The autopilot finds another way.

Have instant undock and dock bookmarks. Starting turning front of Jita 4-4 is a bad idea. Instant undock can be created by undocking in a shuttle or MWD-frigate and fly without turning to 150-200km. Bookmark this place, as you can instant-warp to it. The dock bookmark can be created by jumping away with your shuttle, warp to 10km, approach and keep flying until you are really close. Bookmark this place, if you jump here, you can instantly dock.

Scout your gate before jumping. Leave your stuff in the last safe system, jump in and if you arrive safely, return and pick up your stuff.

This site give you a time chart on kills so you can pick a safer time.

Good luck, and good profit!

While the freighters who got themselves killed are bad enough, they can't beat this moron! It's a tank fitted Abaddon carrying 1.5B loot. He had 109K EHP according to EFT. His rigs are bad enough, if he had just T1 versions of Trimark Pump instead, he'd have 145K. But the great is the low slot. He had an armor repairer which worth exactly zero against alpha Tornados. If he fitted some faction nano membranes, he'd have 135K (170 with proper T1!!! rigs). How could he get faction nano membranes? The damn failure had 25 in the cargohold, that was the 1.5B cargo!

The proper profit metric

2012-04-27T07:00:00.125+02:00

Live moron of the weekend post. Did they spent the last month under a rock?

People having trouble making ISK with trading. Some rather go missioning assuming that if you have a really good ship and know the missions inside out (like which exact point they will spawn), you can get more ISK/hour.

The first problem is the "ISK/hour" metric itself. It's an employer-way thinking that runs under the assumption that the action has only the income as result. I run a mission, I have X more ISK, end of story.

Trading needs businessman thinking. Here much time is invested without any profit. For example when I run missions for faction standing, I often gain negative ISK as I have to pay someone (usually my girlfriend) to do the security storylines. Yet it creates a lasting effect: lower broker fees for the rest of my life.

The second problem is that trading income mostly limited by capital and not time. When someone has 1-2 B, his ISK/hour can easily be worse than the income of even a miner. But doing the same moves, simply with one more zero typed into the quantity field, the income grows largely (even if not 10x). The guys who were laughing on my first posts stating that I'm just picking breadcrumbs after rich people who can't be arsed to make 2 jumps for 100K went silent some time ago, probably when I hit 10B before my third month in the game. Or when I first passed 200M/hour. My business did not change since the first month, I'm picking the same breadcrumbs, just a lot with one click. One to measure his trading/manufacturing profit must measure the profit against capital and not time spent. The latter is maybe more interesting for the player, but it will naturally grow over time, unlike in missioning or mining.

The third mistake is the metric used for profit/capital. The commonly used is completely bad. It measures profit earned over one item. If I bought it for 100M and sold it for 120M (after taxes), I got 20% profit. It's surely better than selling another 100M item for 110, right? Absolutely not! You must factor time into the metric. If you buy the item on Monday and sell it on Sunday, you got 20M during the week. If you buy an item every day and can sell it for 10M more on the evening of the same day, you got 7*10M income! To see exactly how the calculation shall go, let me show you an item from my wallet. Actually it's the wallet of all my alts, merged and sorted by time (I trade on Jita, Rens, Amarr and my Dodixie alt just started up, hence the jump in income this week).

Date	Transaction	Price (M)	Stock
2012.03.26 14:49	2	-180.00	2
2012.03.27 04:32	-1	96.03	1
2012.03.28 16:17	-1	94.05	0
2012.03.29 18:27	2	-180.00	2
2012.03.30 03:47	-1	97.02	1
2012.03.30 05:43	-1	97.02	0
2012.03.30 11:57	2	-180.00	2
2012.03.30 17:05	-1	97.02	1
2012.03.30 18:06	1	-90.00	2
2012.03.30 19:17	-1	95.04	1
2012.03.30 19:44	1	-90.00	2
2012.03.31 01:44	-1	95.54	1
2012.03.31 04:24	1	-90.00	2
2012.03.31 05:54	-1	95.24	1
2012.03.31 06:50	-1	95.04	0
2012.03.31 08:11	3	-270.00	3
2012.03.31 12:47	-1	95.34	2
2012.03.31 13:31	-1	95.34	1
2012.03.31 13:35	-1	95.34	0
2012.03.31 13:51	3	-270.00	3
2012.03.31 15:28	-1	95.34	2
2012.04.01 03:45	-1	94.05	1
2012.04.01 06:07	-1	94.05	0
2012.04.01 08:05	3	-270.00	3
2012.04.01 13:23	-1	94.05	2
2012.04.01 17:06	-1	93.56	1
2012.04.01 19:47	1	-90.00	2
2012.04.01 20:30	-1	93.06	1
2012.04.02 04:19	2	-180.00	3
2012.04.02 06:02	-1	99.00	2
2012.04.02 15:40	1	-90.00	3
2012.04.02 18:21	-1	92.57	2
2012.04.03 11:42	-1	92.07	1
2012.04.03 14:06	2	-180.00	3
2012.04.03 15:06	-1	92.07	2
2012.04.03 17:28	-1	92.07	1
2012.04.03 17:44	3	-270.00	4
2012.04.04 03:17	-1	92.07	3
2012.04.04 04:10	-1	92.07	2
2012.04.04 04:13	-1	92.07	1
2012.04.04 04:45	3	-270.00	4
2012.04.04 09:26	-1	92.07	3
2012.04.04 12:09	-1	92.07	2
2012.04.04 13:54	2	-180.00	4
2012.04.05 20:47	-1	91.58	3
2012.04.06 00:47	-1	91.58	2
2012.04.06 04:55	-1	91.87	1
2012.04.06 15:05	-1	92.57	0
2012.04.07 05:37	1	-90.00	1
2012.04.08 06:38	-1	95.04	0
2012.04.08 12:55	1	-90.00	1
2012.04.08 14:18	-1	94.94	0
2012.04.08 14:50	2	-180.00	2
2012.04.08 15:12	-1	97.02	1
2012.04.08 15:45	-1	97.02	0
2012.04.08 15:47	1	-90.00	1
2012.04.08 15:52	1	-90.00	2
2012.04.08 18:10	-1	98.01	1
2012.04.08 18:33	2	-180.00	3
2012.04.08 19:15	-1	98.01	2
2012.04.08 19:36	-1	98.01	1
2012.04.08 20:25	-1	98.01	0
2012.04.09 01:58	2	-180.00	2
2012.04.09 07:07	-1	98.51	1
2012.04.09 12:21	-1	98.51	0
2012.04.09 14:47	1	-90.00	1
2012.04.09 16:24	-1	98.01	0
2012.04.09 18:11	2	-180.00	2
2012.04.09 20:20	-1	97.02	1
2012.04.10 01:33	-1	96.03	0
2012.04.10 07:41	2	-180.00	2
2012.04.10 11:54	-1	96.03	1
2012.04.10 13:46	-1	96.03	0
2012.04.10 17:33	2	-180.00	2
2012.04.10 19:44	-1	96.03	1
2012.04.10 22:10	-1	96.03	0
2012.04.11 01:19	2	-180.00	2
2012.04.11 02:18	-1	96.03	1
2012.04.11 07:37	-1	95.54	0
2012.04.11 13:00	2	-180.00	2
2012.04.11 13:55	-1	95.04	1
2012.04.12 03:35	1	-90.00	2
2012.04.12 04:28	1	-90.00	3
2012.04.12 04:28	2	-180.00	5
2012.04.12 14:43	-1	93.56	4
2012.04.13 11:34	-1	93.06	3
2012.04.13 20:26	-1	93.56	2
2012.04.13 23:47	-1	93.56	1
2012.04.14 04:04	2	-180.00	3
2012.04.14 09:03	-1	94.05	2
2012.04.14 10:26	-1	94.05	1
2012.04.14 14:41	2	-180.00	3
2012.04.14 22:44	-1	95.04	2
2012.04.14 23:57	-1	95.04	1
2012.04.15 04:10	4	-360.00	5
2012.04.15 05:01	-1	98.01	4
2012.04.15 05:46	-1	95.44	3
2012.04.15 08:48	-1	95.44	2
2012.04.15 10:42	-1	95.04	1
2012.04.15 14:15	1	-90.00	2
2012.04.15 18:27	1	-90.00	3
2012.04.15 18:38	1	-90.00	4
2012.04.15 19:48	-1	96.53	3
2012.04.16 02:59	1	-90.00	4
2012.04.16 04:03	-1	107.91	3
2012.04.16 06:15	-1	95.54	2
2012.04.16 09:00	-1	95.54	1
2012.04.17 16:27	2	-180.00	3
2012.04.17 19:06	-1	107.91	2
2012.04.18 04:49	1	-90.00	3
2012.04.18 08:48	-1	107.91	2
2012.04.18 15:35	-1	97.02	1
2012.04.18 19:14	2	-180.00	3
2012.04.18 19:14	1	-90.00	4
2012.04.19 04:15	-1	108.90	3
2012.04.19 15:42	2	-180.00	5
2012.04.19 20:02	-1	94.05	4
2012.04.20 03:37	1	-90.00	5
2012.04.20 06:20	-1	107.91	4
2012.04.20 14:25	2	-180.00	6
2012.04.20 15:32	-1	93.06	5
2012.04.20 20:00	-1	92.57	4
2012.04.20 21:09	-1	93.06	3
2012.04.21 12:13	-1	90.59	2
2012.04.21 15:41	3	-270.00	5
2012.04.21 17:13	-1	92.57	4
2012.04.21 22:11	-1	92.57	3
2012.04.22 02:39	-1	92.57	2
2012.04.22 04:49	1	-90.00	3
2012.04.22 05:32	3	-270.00	6
2012.04.22 10:09	-1	107.91	5
2012.04.22 13:35	-1	92.07	4
2012.04.23 01:23	-1	92.07	3
2012.04.23 01:39	-1	92.07	2
2012.04.23 15:49	3	-270.00	5
2012.04.23 16:57	-1	97.02	4
2012.04.23 18:16	-1	97.02	3
2012.04.23 18:35	-1	97.02	2
2012.04.23 19:02	4	-360.00	6
2012.04.23 23:35	-1	97.02	5
2012.04.24 01:24	-1	97.02	4
2012.04.24 20:00	-1	96.53	3
2012.04.24 20:55	-1	96.53	2
2012.04.25 03:40	3	-270.00	5
		76.94	2.24

The first column is date, the second is item amount bought or sold, the third is the price after subtraction of taxes. The last one is critical, it's the stock size. It increases whenever I buy and decreases when I sell. Multiplied by the price of the item it tells the capital used for this item in that moment.

The "76.94" is the sum of the buys and sells. Watch out, it's not the net profit, as I have 5 items in stock (last row, 4th column), which worth at least their buy price, 90M each. So the net profit is 526.9M.

The "2.24" is the average of the stock. So on average I have 2.24*90 = 201.6M capital locked down in this business. Actually this isn't accurate since it should be weighted by the times. If I buy an item and hold it for a month, my stock size is 1, if I sell it in a minute, it's near zero. However the distribution of buys and sells are random enough to let me be lazy and use EXCEL instead of coding.

Now the real metric! The one we have to know evaluating this item is the monthly profit per capital. Luckily the time frame of this table is exactly one month, so I just divide total profit by capital locked, getting 261%. Nice profit.

To see the importance of this metric, lets see a much less fortunate item. The one I bought 110 instead of 10 by accident:

Date	Transaction	Price	Stock
2012.04.02 19:03	2	-20.00	2
2012.04.02 19:29	1	-10.00	3
2012.04.02 20:12	-1	11.79	2
2012.04.03 05:09	-1	10.89	1
2012.04.03 08:47	5	-50.00	6
2012.04.03 09:19	-1	10.89	5
2012.04.03 15:32	-1	10.89	4
2012.04.04 13:43	3	-30.00	7
2012.04.04 19:58	-1	10.89	6
2012.04.05 07:19	-1	10.89	5
2012.04.05 10:08	-1	10.89	4
2012.04.05 16:02	-1	10.40	3
2012.04.05 16:24	-1	10.40	2
2012.04.05 16:56	-1	10.40	1
2012.04.05 17:39	5	-50.00	6
2012.04.05 18:19	-1	10.40	5
2012.04.05 19:52	5	-50.00	10
2012.04.05 20:22	-1	10.40	9
2012.04.05 21:08	-1	12.87	8
2012.04.05 21:12	-1	10.40	7
2012.04.05 21:43	-1	12.87	6
2012.04.05 21:47	-1	10.40	5
2012.04.05 22:42	-1	10.40	4
2012.04.06 01:58	5	-50.00	9
2012.04.06 05:39	-5	51.98	4
2012.04.06 15:07	10	-100.00	14
2012.04.06 17:24	-1	10.40	13
2012.04.06 18:50	-1	10.40	12
2012.04.06 21:04	-1	10.40	11
2012.04.07 09:30	-1	10.40	10
2012.04.07 20:13	-1	10.40	9
2012.04.07 22:55	-1	10.40	8
2012.04.08 05:32	-1	10.40	7
2012.04.08 05:43	-1	10.40	6
2012.04.08 07:11	-1	10.40	5
2012.04.08 07:40	-1	10.40	4
2012.04.08 09:08	-1	12.87	3
2012.04.08 09:29	-1	10.40	2
2012.04.08 12:46	-1	10.40	1
2012.04.08 15:02	-1	10.40	0
2012.04.08 16:14	10	-100.00	10
2012.04.08 17:58	5	-50.00	15
2012.04.08 20:07	-1	10.40	14
2012.04.08 23:43	-1	10.89	13
2012.04.09 15:56	-1	10.69	12
2012.04.09 19:58	-1	10.40	11
2012.04.09 20:02	-1	10.40	10
2012.04.10 03:46	-1	10.40	9
2012.04.10 14:02	-1	10.79	8
2012.04.10 14:49	-1	12.87	7
2012.04.10 17:24	-1	10.40	6
2012.04.10 19:47	-1	10.40	5
2012.04.10 20:10	-1	10.40	4
2012.04.10 20:27	-1	10.40	3
2012.04.11 00:17	-1	10.40	2
2012.04.11 06:42	10	-100.00	12
2012.04.11 08:50	3	-30.00	15
2012.04.11 15:44	-1	10.40	14
2012.04.11 16:32	10	-100.00	24
2012.04.11 18:48	-1	10.40	23
2012.04.11 19:45	-1	10.49	22
2012.04.11 20:19	-1	10.40	21
2012.04.11 20:55	-1	10.40	20
2012.04.11 21:19	-1	10.49	19
2012.04.11 21:39	-1	10.40	18
2012.04.12 01:20	-1	10.40	17
2012.04.12 05:01	-1	10.49	16
2012.04.12 14:50	-1	10.40	15
2012.04.12 15:59	-1	10.40	14
2012.04.12 18:19	-1	10.40	13
2012.04.12 20:19	-1	10.40	12
2012.04.12 20:34	8	-80.00	20
2012.04.13 01:17	-1	10.49	19
2012.04.13 02:53	-1	10.40	18
2012.04.13 08:42	-1	10.40	17
2012.04.13 09:15	-1	10.40	16
2012.04.13 22:10	-1	10.40	15
2012.04.13 22:51	-1	10.40	14
2012.04.14 01:30	-1	10.40	13
2012.04.14 01:41	-1	10.40	12
2012.04.14 02:10	-1	10.40	11
2012.04.14 02:38	-1	10.40	10
2012.04.14 05:14	5	-50.00	15
2012.04.14 07:42	1	-10.00	16
2012.04.14 07:58	-1	10.40	15
2012.04.14 09:38	-1	10.40	14
2012.04.14 12:34	-1	10.89	13
2012.04.14 13:50	-1	10.89	12
2012.04.14 13:56	-1	10.30	11
2012.04.14 17:38	-1	10.30	10
2012.04.14 18:00	-1	10.30	9
2012.04.14 21:46	-1	10.89	8
2012.04.15 02:47	-1	10.89	7
2012.04.15 06:31	-1	10.89	6
2012.04.15 12:14	-1	10.89	5
2012.04.15 12:50	-1	10.89	4
2012.04.15 12:57	-1	10.39	3
2012.04.15 12:59	-1	10.10	2
2012.04.15 13:38	10	-100.00	12
2012.04.15 13:44	110	-1100.00	122
2012.04.15 19:00	-1	10.00	121
2012.04.16 00:21	-1	10.84	120
2012.04.16 10:53	-1	10.89	119
2012.04.16 14:36	-1	10.84	118
2012.04.17 03:35	-1	10.84	117
2012.04.17 14:08	-1	10.84	116
2012.04.17 16:31	-1	10.00	115
2012.04.18 06:40	-1	10.84	114
2012.04.18 09:30	-1	10.84	113
2012.04.18 10:13	-1	9.95	112
2012.04.18 13:14	-1	9.95	111
2012.04.18 13:31	-1	9.95	110
2012.04.18 13:57	-1	9.95	109
2012.04.18 14:18	-1	9.95	108
2012.04.18 19:02	-1	9.90	107
2012.04.18 21:26	-1	9.90	106
2012.04.18 23:01	-1	9.90	105
2012.04.18 23:11	-1	9.90	104
2012.04.18 23:14	-1	9.90	103
2012.04.19 03:36	-2	19.80	101
2012.04.19 05:22	-1	9.90	100
2012.04.19 12:20	-1	10.05	99
2012.04.19 16:08	-1	10.05	98
2012.04.19 18:14	-1	9.90	97
2012.04.19 18:48	-1	9.90	96
2012.04.19 21:02	-1	9.90	95
2012.04.19 22:23	-1	9.90	94
2012.04.20 03:42	-1	9.90	93
2012.04.20 05:17	-1	10.00	92
2012.04.20 05:59	-1	10.84	91
2012.04.20 07:11	-1	10.00	90
2012.04.20 07:41	-1	10.00	89
2012.04.20 17:01	-1	10.00	88
2012.04.20 21:06	-1	10.00	87
2012.04.20 21:58	-1	10.00	86
2012.04.21 07:53	-1	10.00	85
2012.04.21 08:10	-1	10.00	84
2012.04.21 08:45	-1	10.00	83
2012.04.21 09:40	-1	10.25	82
2012.04.21 11:54	-1	10.00	81
2012.04.21 12:15	-1	10.05	80
2012.04.21 14:27	-1	10.00	79
2012.04.21 14:28	-1	10.00	78
2012.04.21 14:55	-1	10.00	77
2012.04.21 19:52	-1	10.00	76
2012.04.21 22:11	-1	10.00	75
2012.04.21 23:32	-1	10.25	74
2012.04.21 23:50	-1	10.25	73
2012.04.21 23:58	-1	10.25	72
2012.04.22 04:28	-1	10.00	71
2012.04.22 04:43	-1	10.00	70
2012.04.22 07:58	-1	10.00	69
2012.04.22 10:00	-1	10.00	68
2012.04.22 13:47	-1	10.00	67
2012.04.22 20:59	-1	10.00	66
2012.04.23 11:29	-1	10.25	65
2012.04.23 15:52	-1	10.00	64
2012.04.24 02:00	-1	10.00	63
2012.04.24 04:02	-1	10.00	62
2012.04.24 04:51	-1	10.25	61
2012.04.24 13:59	-1	10.00	60
2012.04.24 15:47	-1	10.00	59
2012.04.24 15:52	-1	10.00	58
2012.04.24 17:16	-1	10.25	57
2012.04.24 18:55	-1	10.00	56
2012.04.24 19:52	-1	10.00	55
2012.04.24 20:10	-1	10.00	54
2012.04.24 20:59	-1	10.00	53
2012.04.24 23:14	-1	10.49	52
2012.04.25 06:50	-1	10.49	51
2012.04.25 07:47	-1	10.00	50
		-439.27	41.73

As you can see, I still have 50 items. Since one piece costs 10M, the net profit is 60.7M. The profit per item is 607%, better than 526% of the previous item! Except on average 417M of my capital is locked down in this thing, making my monthly profit per capital to 20.5% (the timeframe is 22 days). Ouch! Also, before the fail the average was 8 items on stock, with that my profit rate would still be just 106%, so this item would be worse than the first, even if I hadn't fail with that buy.

Unfortunately to create these calculations I had to copy-paste the wallet table (before that fishing in the CSV returned by the API) since no program provides this data. However knowing it is necessary to figure out proper stock size: the less items you buy at once, the higher this metric will be at the cost of less overall profit on the item (as you lose sales when you are out of stock). The perfect situation is when all your items have the same profit/capital/time and no other item (the ones you don't trade) has higher, even with one item on stock. It also means that as your capital increases, you can include more and more items or higher and higher stocks, your profit increases but with diminishing returns.

Making the same calculation for manufacturing is even harder as you have to assign the materials and the production costs to a project, define clear entry and exit points (which are obvious for trading). However I'm sure that most industrialists would be very surprised to see that their pet ship business brings some joke profit, like 20-30%/month.

If you are up to coding and want to create a useful tool, make this and I'll make it "famous" on my blog. Just make sure it's open source and doesn't need closed source programs (besides ones in control of CCP). I won't suggest or even use closed third party code that require my wallet API key for obvious reasons.

EVE Business report: Friday morning 14.5B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

Limiting AND empowering ganking: the social solution

2012-04-26T07:00:00.140+02:00

For people living in high-sec, ganking is a constant problem and they demand more protection from the developers, especially during/after a serious ganking campaign. The other part of the community answers that there is already the stupidly overpowered CONCORD and sec status and certain weapons are unusable in highsec, so "carebears" already have too much protection and still they whine more.

Both sides are right. CONCORD is a joke as they are so strong that they could easily conquer the galaxy, but for some reason they are fine with doing nothing but killing gankers after the act. On the other hand, ganking is also very easy, a Tornado, which costs pocket change to an established player can oneshot the whole property of a new player (or a dumb miner).

The problem lies in how "crime" is handled in EVE. In real life, the jail isn't the only problem a criminal faces. Actually one faces it only after committing some serious crime, which most people never do. The smaller crimes are handled socially. I mean watching child porn pictures isn't a serious crime in the lawbook. You pay some fine and get into the list of sexual criminals. The real punishment for it is that you will lose your job when it's revealed, and there is a good chance that your friends and family (even your closest family) will sever connections with you. There are actions that don't even considered crime by law like talking neo-nazi ideas. Most people still don't do so (outside of anonymous forums), as the "lose your job and friends" is still there. The society handles those who violate the accepted norms, the Police only comes to the picture when the criminal is really bad.

In EVE the society is completely unable to do this. The coding prevents you from rejecting criminals in any way. The miners and traders cannot hold a "no minerals to gankers" event when they order their brokers to don't sell any minerals to those who were involved in Hulkageddon. I can't exclude gankers from public fleets, nor I can fight back until they fire first, no matter how much evidence I have that they are gankers. In EVE the consequences of ganking is completely paid to NPCs and the community is locked out of the loop: CONCORD will blow your ship and you must rat your sec status back. If you do these, the code decides that you are forgiven, no matter what other players think.

The solution would be not an even stronger anti-gank coding. CONCORD and magical weapon disabling could be removed, the faction police should be enough. Maybe they need some buffing on the escalation side, so over time they should be able to overcome any player intrusion, but in short term they shouldn't be stronger than random players and any prepared criminal should be able to resist them for a few minutes.

The consequences should be social. I suggest three self-defined player and corporation statuses: "lawful", "amoral" and "pirate". Lawful players refuse to trade or team with pirates or even with amorals. The market and contract system respects that. Amoral and pirate players can't bid on your auctions or contracts nor can you on theirs. You can't send or receive ISK or do direct trading with them either. Obviously a lawful player can't commit crimes in Empire space (he gets a "this action would be criminal" message whenever he tries to). Lawful corporations can accept only lawful members, can only form alliance with other lawful corporations and blue only other lawful corporations/alliances. The starter NPC corporations are all lawful. Lawful players can attack only war targets (including faction war) and pirates.

Amoral players and corporations can trade with fellow amorals and pirates too. Being amoral means not having problems with pirates, but staying within the letter of the law so they still cannot commit crimes. Amoral corporations can accept amorals and pirates, can form alliances and blue each other. There should be some default amoral NPC corporation for such players if they leave their player corporation.

Pirates can attack other players without wardecs. However as soon as someone declares himself to be a pirate, the high-sec wouldn't have him. Any player can attack him, he cannot dock in high-sec stations, his high-sec assets are confiscated and the faction police and sentry guns attack him on sight. He can join amoral player corporations or NPC pirate corporations (Gurista, Serpentis, Sansha and so on). What? Being forbidden from high sec? Isn't it too harsh? Well, it was explicitly told you during training that if you want to be a pirate, you must go low-sec:

Also, the low and null sec is not different from high from NPC standpoint. If everyone would "play nice", the difference between 0.5 and 0.0 would be the same as between 1.0 and 0.5: different minerals. Pirating players make low and null different from highsec. It's completely fair to expect them to eat what they cooked. You like ganking? Fine! Then go and live with fellow gankers!

This system would make security status useless and removed. The player is free to declare himself lower assuming he has 3M skill points to prevent players using disposable pirate alts. Changing status on the other hand takes time, both to prevent exploitation (flipping back and forth, smuggling items between communities), to emphasize the importance of the choice and to make one pay for his "crimes" the same way as in the real life: time. Change can only be initiated while docked, and doing so would log the pilot out, and place a "changing from X to Y until [date]" message on the character selection screen. Entering the game with that pilot before the change is complete cancels the change. No skills are learned during state change. I think the proper times would be:

Lawful-amoral: 1 day
Amoral-lawful: 1 week
Amoral-pirate: 1 day
Pirate-amoral: 4 weeks

The purpose of the coding is only to prevent fast switching, disallowing "being pirate for an hour", making it a meaningful choice. One is supposed to spend his life in one state, the one that fits his chosen ingame persona. For this reason 1 week would be added to the above times if you are doing the same change the second time. Make up your mind!

With this system the players would have social means to handle ganking. If they are fine with ganking, they can choose to be amoral or even pirates themselves. If they reject it, they can choose to be lawful, punishing pirates and amorals by boycotting and shooting them. Pirates wouldn't be stopped by the godlike CONCORD but by other players - if they choose to stop them. Maybe only a few "carebears" would choose to be lawful and they would be ridiculed, wardecced if in player corps and hunted as abominations. Maybe the pirates+amorals would find that they are a 10% minority and they have to pay huge premium for purchases and can't find an open incursion fleet as the vast majority boycotts them. Either way, the community would decide. Obviously one could still chose the other way, playing the hunted pirate who refuse to behave or the noble hero who stands resolute in the sea of evil.

Please note that being lawful or amoral wouldn't lock one to "carebear" state. Player-null and wormhole space is not policed, anyone can shoot anyone there. They could also fight against declared war targets in policed space. They would only lose their option to gank random people in policed space.

The economies wouldn't be completely severed, pirates can obviously obtain items from lawful pilots by stealing their can or looting their wrecks. Items can also move between the communities as the assets of pilots changing states, but that would be limited by the long changing times.

PS: little fun story. My girlfriend said she don't really like EVE since she always played classes with pets in games and she can't do it here. I love how a gift of a simple skillbook solved this problem. Since then she happily runs the L1-2s with the Rokh. This game has much more choices and possibilities than any other I ever played. Try it out! The M&S has so much money, it's our sacred duty to separate them from it.

EVE Business report: Thursday morning 14.1B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

Where does the PLEX-money go?

2012-04-25T07:00:00.050+02:00

We know that there are about 100K PLEX bought every month. So about 1/3 of the 350K accounts are not self-sustaining, they need constant ISK influx in form of selling PLEX on the market to keep on going. It also means that about 1/3 of accounts are played for free and only 1/3 of the accounts are PLEX-neutral, playing the "normal" way: the player pays to the company monthly subscription and does no RMT.

This last 1/3 can be called "casual". My girlfriend is a perfect example. Looking from "professional" way, she is bad. She spent almost whole day playing last Sunday with about 30M income as she was doing L1!!! securities with a destroyer simply because their story looked fun (the Minmatar-Gallente air show for example). Her activity wasn't really affecting anyone in the game and she had fun, so her subscription money is well spent. However you must notice something important: she earned ISK, no matter how little. Also her expenses and risks were near-zero: some small projectile ammo was used and worse case she could lose a destroyer with fittings worth 3M (half of it being the tractor beam). Compared to this, her income isn't that bad and she can clearly continue to play that way without ever buying ISK.

I gave her 400M ISK as gifts, since I received the same amount. Half of that ISK is still in her wallet, another half was spent on a Rokh battleship that she can barely fly and for that reason she doesn't like to fly. That ship is practically only used when I hire her to help me finish security storyline missions that I get after 16 distributions which I do for faction standings. Since she is months from even fitting it properly (she can't even fit large turrets) she finds it more fun to fly a destroyer. The point is that the 400M gift did not increase her game enjoyment at all, so she isn't even motivated to buy or grind ISK.

The first 1/3 is anything but casual. They - unlike the casuals - can't sustain themselves. Why? How? I doubt if they have less knowledge of the game than my girlfriend. If she doesn't need ISK, why do anyone else? Not for gaming fun, that's for sure. Shooting frigate enemies in a frigate isn't different from shooting battleship enemies in a battleship. It applies to PvP too, the success of RvB proves without doubt that frigate PvP is fun.

The "sucker 1/3" are socials who want to be respected by peers. They want "awesome ships" that make everyone say "woot". Unfortunately people rather lure their expensive shinies into traps. They also want to earn respect by having high killboard ratio (because RvB is for noobs). Of course when they go lowsec they lose their ship because "the other guy spent more on deadspace fittings" or simply "bad luck" and surely not because they are just barely better in EvE PvP than a random 1 week newbie.

So the sucker 1/3 constantly try to fly things they shouldn't and try to kill enemies definitely out of their league. They have constant losses and have to replace it by constant ISK purchases. The simple way of being PLEX-neutral as a casual player makes it crystal clear: anyone buying ISK is a moron since he is keep trying to play in a league where he does not belong. His skills destine him to run funny missions or do frigate PvP but he neither accepts it, nor learns to be better but for social reasons insists to play with the "big boys".

However the really interesting part is the remaining 1/3, the ones who play for free. I guess these accounts don't mean so many players, rather 3-4 accounts/player. I have 3 accounts. One "main", who is a trader/industrialist/freighter-pilot/wannabe logistics pilot. The other account holds two active and one learning station traders for Amarr, Rens and Dodixie. On the third account my future titan/triage carrier pilot sits on a station learning skills.

Obviously I wouldn't have these accounts if I couldn't play for free. I'd pay for one account to play a game, but would find it stupid to have a second account to increase my ISK income when my main is already having a lot, and even more stupid to pay for an account that does nothing for 8-12 months. I have the extra accounts because they are free. They cost me nothing but pixel money.

The second account helps me make more ISK. About 6B/month comes from these characters, so the 0.5B/month for PLEX is well spent. If I wouldn't have this account, I wouldn't have the income. Since I'm trading, I introduce no ISK or materials to the playerbase, every ISK I get is an ISK someone loses. So by having a second account I'm taking 6B/month from the other players. My third account also has an effect: to sustain it, I must not slack (not like I would), so I'm more motivated to make ISK, and we already established that it means taking ISK from others.

So the fun thing is that every PLEX the morons and slackers pour into the system per month means an extra pilot existing in EVE with the sole purpose of preying on them either in a PvP ship or on the marketplace. The harder they buy boost from CCP, the worse position they get into, causing them more and more losses, "forcing" them to RMT more.

If only they could accept that they aren't good and do what my girlfriend does, the endless income for good players would stop, diminishing our ability to devastate them. But they just can't accept being worse than the Joneses. They must look competitive. Good for us.

However this is the reason why CCP can't go for full RMT like Blizzard with Diablo 3. Imagine we could sell PLEX we earned to other players legally. The end user would still use it as game time so CCP would keep getting profits as the only creator of PLEX. Great business for everyone, right? Not really. With this scheme, my current income would be $6000/year. It's 150% the minimal wage in Hungary. If I could sell my PLEXes for money, I'd be tempted to quit my job (you know, Atlas shrugged), get 4-5 more accounts, 2 more computers and earn $30-40K/year (still top 2% of my country) playing a game. Of course it would mean that I'd spend my day taking ISK from bad players. They would be so exploited (not just by me, of course) that they simply couldn't keep up, quit the game and the whole system would collapse. In Diablo 3 you don't take value directly from worse players, you just give them loot they couldn't earn but you can easily grind. So Blizzard don't have to fear that the good players simply destroy the bad ones. Of course it means that the illegal RMT will flourish in EVE as good players try to somehow cash in the vast amount of ISK they get from the bad ones. Remember, 100K PLEX/month is $1.5M/month. Even a shard of it is good money.

PS : I had my first lowsec haul. Managed to buy 450M worth of wares in a highsec island, surrounded by lowsec. Scouted it, jumped back and forth empty and then made the haul and lived! EVE isn't that scary place, come and try out!

EVE Business report: Wednesday morning 13.0B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.