Market Discussions

Crystalline Carbonide will be worth alot more after the patch, as its used alot and its redicules cheap

With these numbers, the game isn't changing. You need 20 cobalt moons to replace the amount of one tech moon.

Is your POS fuel free?

Today two large towers can produce (for example) Fullerides with 1 complex and 1 simple reactor in both (one simple making platinum technite from technetium and platinum) - 200 units per hour, split to two complex reactors to get two cycles of Fullerides every hour.

In order to replace the output of that single simple reactor, you need TEN large towers with total of 20 reactors doing alchemy. Each reactor producing 10 platinum technite per hour. A two-tower Fullerides setup becomes 12-tower setup and total fuel cost goes from 80 blocks an hour to 480 blocks an hour.

Sure, the raw materials for those 10 large towers will be cheaper than the raw technetium but it sure costs some ISKies to run 10 extra towers (not to mention all the :effort: of shuffling stuff around)

So may I suggest you check your math a bit...

At current prices, it looks to me like alchemy will be a small loss on PoS fuel, but that is mostly due to high cobalt prices. If cobalt prices go down to 1250ish and Tc stays at 100kish then alchemy is break even on PoS fuel costs. Looks like CCP has managed to cut in half the value of most Tc stuff.

The big question is: What the hell are all the rich players going to spend their isk on now??? I think CCP may need to introduce space tears as a T2 / capital ship component mined from asteroid belts.

Quick calc, "initial draft" tech alchemy is 10 Plat Tech = 100 cobalt + (100-95=)5 platinum + 1h of fuel for 3000+tf (which would be 20 fuel blocs or around 350k ISK).
So that's 1 PT = 10 cobalt + 0.5 plat + 35k ISK for fuel (the old alchemy 20:1 tech:cobalt replacement ratios)
Plat Tech used to sell for around 92k ISK lately, but it will almost certainly be falling.

Cobalt used to sell for ~500 but it recently spiked to over 3k, Platinum was around 2.5k and now it's around 4.5k, so that's 30k from Cobalt, barely over 2k from Platinum, 35k from fuel, making PT cost 67k to manufacture.
Add in at least 100m ISK/mo per reactor profit to make it start worth bothering with (7,200 units/reactor/month), so another 14k minimum, and you're looking at a 81k price for PT down from the previous 92k trade level.
Not a lot less, but still noteworthy.
That would cap tech price at around 145k-155k or thereabouts. Assuming Cobalt/Platinum or fuel block prices would not spike, and assuming people would be willing to accept a mere 100m per month from a reactor. So, maybe, tech price won't be going down much in the long run, but it won't go up more as it could have if there was no tech alchemy at all.
Depends how long they'd keep the reactions at that level.

And of course, they could bring the replacement ratios further down from 10 Cobalt and 20 fuel blocks more in line with other current alchemy numbers (2.5 Cobalt and 5 fuel blocs and just 3.5k minimum added expected minimum profit, so the new 5:1 alchemy), which would make it much cheaper (assuming cobalt and platinum would NOT spike even further in price, to a mere 22k per unit of PT). That would cap tech to a negligible price compared to the current level, probably below 40k per unit.
Of course, in that case, I expect both cobalt and platinum to go up more, and I also expect people to want more monthly profit from reactors than a measly 100m/mo/reactor, so before any further changes, we might as well still see tech over 60k per unit (or even a bit higher) even with the VASTLY buffed alchemy reactions.
Depends how much it takes them to implement OTHER changes on top of just alchemy.


P.S. Cobalt might not break 3k, it might even stay barely above the 2k solo extraction fuel breakeven, and instead platinum could go up a lot more. Or they might both not do much. Depends on a lot of stuff I don't have the time to crunch numbers for right now.

Cobalt is so abundant that I don't see the alchemy reactions staying profitable for very long. There will be enough overproduction of fullerides to push the price down to a level where the margins for alchemy disappear, and that's the whole point of alchemy anyway isn't it?

Also, Cobalt won't be worth anything because the only way you'll make money is by doing the alchemy on your Cobalt tower, and your margin will just be the saved fuel costs of conveniently fitting a reactor + miner without upsizing your tower. I see it going back to < 1k soon enough. As the profits disappear Cobalt's value will be the thing that goes.

Let's say you want to get the absolute LOWEST value technetium is likely to settle down at.
So, let's downvalue cobalt back down to previous negligible levels of 500 ISK and assume platinum hovers at only around 5k and with a very pathetic 100m/mo/reactor (be it regular reaction of alchemy reaction, although it's more work to do an alchemy reaction than a regular reaction due to the extra refine and refill step).
1 "regular" non-alchemy PT should be 0.5 tech + 0.5 plat + 0.1 fuel cube + 700 ISK for 100m ISK/mo/reactor profit.
1 tech = 2 PT - (plat+0.2 fuel cube+1.4k ISK), give or take, so in other words, 1 tech = 2 * alchemy PT - 8.8k, roughly.
Let's make that 1 tech = 2 * PT - 9k.

A) for 20:1 alchemy
1 alchemy PT = 5k cobalt + 2.5k plat + 35k fuel + 14k profit = 56.5k ISK
1 tech = 105k ISK minimum

B) for 10:1 alchemy
1 alchemy PT = 2.5k cobalt + 2.5k plat + 17.5k fuel + 7k profit = 29.5k ISK
1 tech = 50k ISK minimum

C) for 5:1 alchemy
1 alchemy PT = 1.25k cobalt + 2.5k plat + 8.75k fuel + 3.5k profit = 16k ISK
1 tech = 23k ISK minimum


Mind you, we're talking negligible platinum price hike from current semi-speculated levels (unlikely but conceivable), lack of hike in fuel block costs (possible, but not certain), cobalt bottoming out to barely pre-speculation frenzy levels (also unlikely, but borderline possible), and a HORRIBLY LOW returns on work expended on the alchemy reactions.
So, those are quite literally the rock-bottom prices at which you would be crazy to sell at, with actual prices most likely well above that.
The previous post was closer to the other extreme, more of a top price in each scenario, whereas this is a bottom.

Also note that as POS fuel is so large chunk of the alchemy cost, even a small increase in POS fuels will really get you...

Then there is the whole :effort: side of things. The volumes of produced PT per tower is just so small (with 20:1 ratio)

Heck, I'm almost certain that this current devblog is a "bait and switch" of sorts; it will cause some price swings, to lessen the full impact when they go "oh, by the way, the alchemy ratio is the same as on highend alchemy, 5:1".

I also wouldn't be too shocked if they shuffled around the R8s to troll speculators a bit.

Dev Blog says;

100 Cobalt refines into 10 Platinum Technite

so surely 2k Coblat would be 200 Platinum Technite

Tech is the current bottleneck, hence ints high price, bottleneck normally indicates that excess demand for the product exists, the question is how much supply would be required until price falls back to production cost plus a resonable profit.

The person who mentioned that there are 400 tech moons, blah ... blah, blah. That does not matter it would problay only require a few dozen tech moons worth of output to in efffect cap the the price of tech.

Right now the 20:1 price would break the cartel benefit, but would still leave the tech moon lords very rich. 10:1 would be a a inconviance and may require a new source of income for the gonnies, 5:1 could inpotenial be game changing as tech more than halves and it could fall more since supplies may be high enough that a new botleneck forms (not likely, but possible).