Crashing Neocoms

About a month ago I wrote that certain planetary products are much less profitable than others, making them a loss in opportunity cost. I started making Neocoms (T3) using Silicate Glass (T2), biofuels (T1) and precious metals (T1). It promised 1B/month with very little work. Now look at the price graph of Neocoms: Ouch! You might be tempted to say "bad luck", but it had very little to do with luck. An advanced factory produces 3 units of Neocoms an hour. 7 factories, 6 planets, 24 hours : 3024 units/day. Now look at the traded amount on the chart! Only 5-10K/day, meaning I produced about half of the Jita-marketed Neocoms! No doubt that such supply boom ruined the price.

This is something we don't see often in a player scale. Honestly, I did not think of it either, and paid with lack of profit for it. Sure, Goonswarm can manipulate an item, but a single pilot (no alts were involved)?!

The problem was that Neocoms isn't a common item. Most PI producers go for "all by myself" production, they produce P4 without buying anything, they extract everything and combine it on different alts. Only a few players bought or sold Neocoms, making it a very sensitive product. I've learned from this mistake, so shall you. Check the volume of the item before starting mass production.

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Finally a business tip: if you are a jump freighter pilot who jumps a lot (doing it as a serious business), I'd suggest to use the training changes of Odessey to train the JFs of all four races, so you'll be able to switch to the JF that operates with the cheapest isotope. Fuel prices will be very hectic and likely to rise significantly.

Cap boosters, T2 ammo and time

Two things motivated this post. One was Sugar saying "I do not think that most people would take a Drake, Hurricane, Ferox, Myrm or any other battlecruiser into low sec at the rate that people are taking Gnosis." The other was a troll commenter saying "PVE ships should never require Cap Booster Charges."

The answer for both: people are still bad at understanding opportunity cost. They don't want upfront costs and thinking ends here. A Drake hull costs 70M. That's lot of money for someone who grinds for it. They don't risk it in a random PvP situation. A Gnosis is free like the noobship, so they drive it boldly to lowsec. They could sell the Gnosis for 200M instead and buy nearly 3 Drakes, but that's beyond their understanding.

Let's get to cap booster charges. A naked Raven Navy with all 5 skills has 19.2 peak capacitor recharge. With a Heavy Capacitor Booster II, filled with Cap Booster 800 charges: 76.3. With 3 CCC I rigs and 4 Cap Recharger IIs: 76.2. The cap booster needed one slot, the second setup 4+3rig.

The Heavy Capacitor Booster II cycles in 12 seconds and needs 10 seconds to reload the 5 charges, so one charge lasts 14 seconds. If you run it all the time (you won't), you can eat 257 charges an hour (that would need 8000m³ cargohold, I told you won't). A charge costs 4000 ISK. So burning cap booster charges as fast as you can costs you 1M/hour. If you can fit something into those freed-up slots that increases your ISK/hour more than 1M/hour, it's a good choice. What can you fit? Webs, Target Painters, Tracking Computers, Omnidirectional links that make those pesky rats die faster. An MWD or MJD next to the AB for cutting travel times inside the mission. Switch to shield tank in ships that allow both tanks and fit more damage modules. Or simply fit stronger tank and decrease gank chance.

Same goes for T2 ammo. T1 is cheaper for sure. T2 does about 15% more damage, finishing the combat part of the mission faster. Since you don't consume ammo when you aren't shooting we should only focus on this. 15% more DPS means 15% more bounty, loot and mission rewards in the same time. If you made 40M/hour, it means 6M/hour. With 8 guns, 5s cycling time, you use 5780 ammo in an hour. If the price difference between the ammos is less than 1050 ISK, you are better off with T2.

Cheap is often the most expensive. Your time isn't free, the gift Gnosis isn't free either. Always mind the opportunity cost.

The perfect limited-gate highsec mission boat

Next week there won't be business Thursday post, because the week will have a series of connecting posts, so this week there are two business posts!

If you have a combat mission to complete, you just drive a battleship into it and it's done. But some missions and complexes have gates that don't let battleships in. The COSMOS missions, with their hoards of faction reputation are such. Now add that you aren't really skilled into combat ships because you are a trader. Or you are skilled into ships that don't fit the damage profile of the rats inside. Anyway, you have a bunch of missions to do with no proper ship to do them. If only there would be a ship that can fire any damage profile, tank any damage profile, fit into acceleration gates, have enough DPS and tank without month-long skill training, have large cargohold, cap-stable while MWD-ing ... And if we are dreaming, why not be bold: this dream ship should be in our hangar for free instead of being a billion-ISK faction-fit T3 to buy. One can dream, right?

And sometimes, dreams just come true: This is an EM/Explo tanking and dealing fit, but you can tank and deal any damage profile by replacing hardeners and changing weaponry. The ship is in your hangar without paying as it's an anniversary gift, but it's not for free, as you can sell it for 200M currently. However that's still much less than a T3 would be. If you are low-skilled, it's even better as you can fit anything that you can use. If you are only skilled with missiles, fit it with missiles, the damage won't be perfect but will be adequate. The drone bay can hold a flight of medium and light drones, so you can always cleanse those pesky frigrats. The hold is large enough for having enough cap boosters to keep that ancillary shield booster running.

Unless you bling it or its price going over a billion (when you'll sell it anyway), you can fly it safely in highsec. Don't forget buffer-tank, being gankable by a pair of Catalysts is plain stupid, along with flying under wardec and other things you shouldn't do anyway.

Dual character training

One of the new features of the next patch of EVE is dual character training. You probably already know that for a PLEX it will allow training of a second character on that account. You probably also know who are targeted: those who need a 2-5M SP alt for some purpose (cyno, scout, manufacture, research, hauling, trading...). Such alt won't need training after completion, so giving it a permanent account is pointless. Without the new feature, you either had to stop your main from training or train the alt on a different account and then transfer. The transfer cost 2 PLEX-es, but you could recruit-a-friend yourself playing 51 days free. So the new feature saves you 1/3 PLEX and the hassle to manage the account, the APIs, the transfer, making it a welcome change.

I want to talk about two things that were not mentioned: the first is the effect on PLEX prices. It's hard to tell, exactly because people used to do the training on a throwaway account that ate PLEX-es, along with the transfer. The new feature will be just a quality of life change for them. The question is: will this feature create new trainings? I mean people who choose not to start a second account and wait with the alt can now choose to start the alt, eating up PLEX-es. There surely will be, but can't tell how many. Also, the feature saves 1/3 PLEX for those who used to use a second account. So I wouldn't take this as an "Oh my God, PLEX will skyrocket, buy, buy, BUUUY" frenzy.

Secondly I'd like to tell that - despite I'm literally swimming in billions - I've never used the character transfer feature. I listed my characters on my 1 year EVE-birthday and you could see that many accounts have more than one character. Yet, I've trained them without transferring, simply stopping other characters on the account. While it was sometimes inconvenient, I did not regret my choice to wait.

You see, an account gives the ability to have a character trained and to have one more logged in. The transfer-train and the new second character training only allows you to use one of the features, losing on the other. If you don't want to have one more logged in characters, you only play a PLEX for the service of getting skillpoints now. The question is, does that character have the utility that worth 2-3 PLEX-es to train now, instead of waiting until the other character can stop training? Or alternatively, does your main really needs to train now so hard that it worth you 2-3 PLEX-es?

In the case of a business pilot, the answer is numerical. Does accounting 5, broker relations 5 saves you 250M before your other characters on the account can be stopped training? If not, then don't train them. Do the extra turns with the smaller hauler, the extra jumps to go to the station instead of setting remote orders cost you so much time that multiplied by your ISK/hour it is higher loss than the cost of the character training?

Remember! One day there will be nothing (that makes sense) to train on your account and you'll be paying only for the ability to log in and your training will go into some obscure nonsense 5. So by enough waiting, you can train all 3 pilots to anything. Since you surely pay to log in, you get the SP for free then. The question is: is the waiting bad enough to warrant paying? I already gave my answer: for me, no. I always choose waiting and did not regret it. Also keep in mind that people who can wait have bank deposits, those who can't wait have loans. The dual training feature isn't from the Devil, but think before you jump on it!

Keep it simple stupid! (or the CSM election fail)

There was a massive failure of having significantly less voters this year than the previous: 49702 vs 59109, breaking a long positive trend. While CSM7 wasn't something spectacular, it couldn't cause the loss of voters, it could only cause the loss of votes for the CSM7 members re-running. If I find the president horrible, it's more likely to show up for voting next time.

I saw two reasons for failure: one is the over-complicated voting process. The other is the PR of nullsec blocks which tried to make everyone turn away from voting to increase their power. Ironically they decreased their own voters, probably because a "highsec carebear" finds more fun in figuring out a complicated voting process than a "let's shoot stuff" guy. The null blocks meta-gamed since ever, so even the second cause is CCP fault: creating a system that could be communicated as over-complicated, obscure, simply because it was.

Now, before someone would comment: STV is better than first-pass-the-pole voting. It represents the wishes of the voters better and decreases the losses via votes on losers and overvotes. The PR they finally made up "42299 votes affected CSM8 while only 31801 affected CSM7" is true.

However STV needs serious, committed voters who fill up the ballot with well-thought candidates, and this was something they could surely not expect, considering the low voting tendencies. Even CSM7 votes were 15-25% of the total vote-able accounts. CCP tried to save partial votes when large majority of the votes were lost by never being cast. The same effort to publicize CSM, to give CSM in-game tools to communicate with people, to run opinion surveys, to send the CSM "tickets", questions and town-hall-ish requests would have caused much more votes, therefore much wider support.

But still, there is no reason to not optimize the voting system. However their own results shown that most exhausted voting happened on 1-3 long ballots, while almost 40% of the ballots had this short length. It is obvious (and was obvious) that serious amount of people don't have a long priority list. He might like one or two candidates but not more. Interestingly, the 1-long ballot-"winner" was Greene Lee, who did not get on the CSM8.

CCP should have kept it simple. "Simple" is not the opposite of "optimized", as we can have both. Most IT systems offer "simple" and "expert" modes. Even the sell and buy windows of EVE market have it. The CSM election screen should have been a simple mode one, having only one slot and the candidates alphabetically, allowing the casual voters to cast one vote. Besides the "cast vote" button, should have been the "expert mode" button that leads to the current STV screen.

Of course this would have created lot of 1-long ballots, and those had 52% exhaustion value. However such vote still has 48% power, compared to the zero of the uncast vote. Finally "simple mode" wouldn't have to create 1-long ballots. There are two ways to increase the power of simple votes. One is simple ballot copy: if I simple-vote for Mynnna, I express that I trust Mynnna alone. This case it's rightful to create a 14-long ballot for me: the exact copy of the ballot Mynnna casted. Remember, I gave all my trust to Mynnna with my simple-vote. If I'm not happy with that, I can custom-vote. This system would also save lot of time clicking for bloc-voters: "just simple-vote for X guys!". The other method is not processing 1-long ballots as ballots, but directly subtract their number from the quota of the candidate, allowing the longer ballots to exhaust less. This case a simple-vote is 100% used, unless a candidate is elected alone with simple-votes or not elected at all.

Having optimized systems is good. But having simple front-end when you deal with simple people is more important. I hope CSM9 elections will be better organized.

A good example for traders

Sugar Kyle who runs her own blog has a shop in Bosena, Molden Heath lowsec. Her little business is pretty successful, despite obvious mistakes (get a JF already!)

Is it some miracle? No. The lack of formal economics knowledge is irrelevant compared to the proper attitude. She has it, so her fate is to become damn rich. Her example is important exactly to show that being successful in business is not about using the proper tools, having proper item selection, time efficiency or other know-how (though they clearly affect the magnitude of success), but having the proper mindset:

1. Wants to serve her customers: This is a make it or break it issue. If you are in to rob everyone and run away with huge spoils, you have like 5% chance to make a great heist and 95% chance to leave busted. If you are interested in mutually profitable cooperation, you have 100% chance to make some profit.
2. Does what she wants: everyone, including corpmates, commenters and JF-obsessed goblins tell her what to do. She ignores them and does what she plans. If these people had a good idea how to run a lowsec hub, they'd done it themselves. So she is completely right to listen to the one who has the most experience in running a lowsec hub in Molden Heath: herself. Listening to people's opinion is a social mistake, most people have great difficulty learning to ignore them.
3. Doesn't want to market-PvP: people tend to spend great resources to defeat this or that competitor. They usually succeed, at the cost of losing much more money than it would cost to just coexist.
4. Doesn't want to get rich: another crucial thing, such ambitions just lead to overwork (which leads to exhaustion and multi-billion mistypes) and also leads to risky investments (that end up as a disaster). Working on your own schedule, working for the thing itself is the best way to have a steady income.
5. Focused on graphs, trends instead of direct income (or opinions): Rome wasn't built in a day. If you can't find joy in the decreasing price of Light Neutron Blasters II, you won't last long here.

So the business tip for today: subscribe her blog and try to absorb the above.

The rise of the non-aligned voter (and fail of the null leaders)

Thursday is generally for business posts, and there was one for today. But it will be shifted to Friday to give space to this recent development.

The CSM election ballots are finally published and you can download it too. Many people did to calculate ordered lists, but I was interested in something else: the power of the blocks. Mynnna wrote: "Null bloc votes, as identified by Two Step: 9823+10957+5999 = 26799, 53.9% of the votes. Null bloc candidates: Five (Myself, Kesper, Sort, Sala and Progodlegend), which is about 35% of the council. I suppose you could count Malcanis as well, as the HBC ballot was instrumental in electing him and he is technically part of the bloc, but even that's only 42%. Basically, I'm saying that I think the people who were claiming that STV is all about rigging it for nullsec (ya'll know who you are) can put down their tinfoil hats. If anything we're under represented. "

Mynnna is wrong. He is wrong because Two Step was wrong identifying the voter blocks. Part of it was that he only looked for a few patterns, and looked for it everywhere in the ballot, while only the first spots had serious effect on the outcome. Below you can see a spreadsheet. Its fields show how many ballots have a certain candidate or pair of candidates in the top 7 places. I choose 7 because according to CCP that had 98.26% of the power of the ballots and because former CSMs had 7 Icelandic positions, so many people considered this an important number. The green background ones belong to one character, you can see that 12672 ballots had Mynnna on one of their top 7 positions. Next to it you can see "925", saying 925 people had both Mynnna and Ripard Teg on their top 7 spots.

Can you see the shocking result? Or just a bunch of numbers? Let me clear it up for you. At first I divided each line with the self-vote result, so every number of the first line was divided by 12672. From there the first line shows how big percentage of the Mynnna voters voted also for the other winner candidates. Then color-coded the fields, with the average value being white, below-average is red, above average is green. Finally I rearranged the candidates according to their cross-votes:
Now it's clearer, right? It shows that Mynnna, Kesper, Sort and Sala voters placed the other 3 to their ballots with high chance, though far from 100%. Only 75% of the Mynnna voters voted for Kesper, not really a good thing for CFC leadership. The cross-CFC-HBC votes were even smaller, though still high. What is more important here is that the rest of their lines and columns are red, meaning that those who voted for the CFC-HBC block ballot were unlikely to vote for other winning candidates (likely voted for non-winning block ones) and also that the voters of other winning candidates were unlikely to vote for them.

Following them comes the WH-pair. Their columns are red, so the non-WH voters were unlikely to vote for them, but their out-of-block lines are not red meaning that the WH voters were likely to support Mangala, Ripard, Trebor, instead of the WH 5 as instructed. Since the WH5 was a 5-long ballot, all of them fit into the top 7. According to the instructions, all WH pilots should have placed the 5 WH candidates to the top 5 positions in some order. Let's check it out: Ouch! If everyone would follow the instructions, we should have seen 100% everywhere! The chance that a voter of a WH candidate also supported another WH candidates was around 50%! It seems the cooperation of the candidates is not enough to make their voters cooperate! Did it matter? To see that, you should know that STV runs in rounds, every round eliminating one candidiate. The ballots that had this candidate at the top position move to the next one on the list, so the rest of the candidate gain votes. Let's see how did it happen with the Wormhole 5: The first eliminations gained 27 votes to the wormholers from voters who placed someone else first and wormholers behind. Then Cipreh got eliminated. At this move the WH top votes decreased by 155, which means that out of the 590 Cipreh voters 155 did not place another WH-er behind Cipreh. They gained 48 more voters with further eliminations and spillovers until Ayerson got eliminated, draining 310 out of 737, 42% of the Ayerson voters from the WH pool. Looking at the end of the run, it's likely that even that wouldn't get a third WH-er in, but still you can see the point. Same for the HBC-CFC block vote: when Kaleb Rysode was eliminated, 17% of his votes went to people who are not on the block list, half of it directly to the unaligned ones. When Banlish was eliminated, 41% of his votes leaked away from the null block.

After the two WH winners, there is a huge green field: the unaligned ones. See how these voters supported all candidates. They also got support from WH and Progodlegend voters, but gave no support to out-of-block candidates. It shows a huge number of votes supporting all of these candidates. Please note that the HBC member Malcanis belongs here. Despite what Mynnna wrote, the HBC votes were not getting him the seat. The Sort Dragon voters barely gave him more votes than they gave to Progodlegend and this was mutual. Those people supported Malcanis who supported the other unaligned ones. The null block was simply outnumbered by the unaligned ones. They were not simply voting randomly, they seem to like all these CSMs.

At the bottom corner sits Progodlegend all alone. His column is red, showing that no other winner had significant amount of voters who also supported him.


Hubris made nullsec leaders tell that they could place a basketball to their ballot and win. It seems their line members were not really motivated to support a basketball and many did not vote, or did not follow the official ballot! I was in TEST for months but never heard of Banlish, and probably other TEST voters neither. At least Sort and Sala often bridged me. For CSM9 the null leaders should take their own members seriously. Maybe they should run pre-eliminaries, finding candidates that have the real support of their members. Same goes to the Wormhole people. If those WH people who had no affiliation to any candidate had the same 50% "cross-support" as the affiliated ones, many WH votes were cast on non-WH candidates, mostly on the unaligned block. With 3 widely accepted candidates, they could get them all in.