Science & Industry

Basically I've been running a lot of numbers recently and for a lot of T2 ships I can't make them profitable. Is this the famous, "we can't compete with BPOs" or is this more likely the result of unstable T2 production lines?

Basically even with maxed skills, and putting out buy orders on components as cheaply as I can that will actually get filled, I can't seem to make any money on a great many T2 ships. I just wanted to know if I'm missing something in my calculations.

Prices are coming from Rens, using EveHQ Prism to calculate required quantities.

Please help this newbie industrialist.

Also look at the price histories of the components to spot recent market manipulation. Your new builds could be competing with pre-manipulation pricing on components containing neodymium for example.

My calculations included decryptors.

Running these same ships through my other tool comes up with radically different numbers for the same parameters. I guess I'll have to figure out why that is.

At this point I believe it was a misuse of one or more of the tools I was using. Re-running the numbers with a slightly tweaked data set fixes the issue I believe.

Figured it out finally. I was including the cost of the item twice, once for the item and again for the meta item even though it was meta 0.

One blog post you really want to read is: http://k162space.com/2012/03/08/t2-bpo-returns/

I have not seen any similar numbers for any more recent months.

The TL;DR summary is "it depends on the item and the market".

Changes in what is popular, combined with changes in ships (such as tiericide), change what is desired by other players. These changes mean that what is profitable one month can quickly become a money loser the next. Ship changes this summer will make some ships easier to get into.

There is truth in what previous posters have said about BPO raw material advantages and market swings. But never underestimate the power of human stupidity and laziness. There are many, many, producers out there who are stuck in the meme "materials I produce myself are free." This is most obvious with miners producing minerals for T1 production, but there is an element of it in T2 production as well. Many of the subcomponents that go into T2 items come from Planetary Interaction, and I have seen producers develop the same "materials I produce myself are free" meme with PI as asteroid mining. One would think that most people extracting and reacting moon minerals would be cognizant enough of POS fuel costs to leave that meme behind, but I don't doubt there are players so eager to "make stuff" that they happily run POS's making moon materials at a loss without understanding they are doing so.

You simply cannot pick up a random blueprint in Eve and expect to be able to make the item at a profit. Ships are a particularly dangerous minefield of the market, making ships seems to be "sexier" than humdrum stuff like drones, modules, and rigs (which consistently make way higher profit margins) attracting exactly the sort of clueless producer who can't be bothered with doing cost analysis. Around half the items in the game cannot be made at a profit. Most of the rest make profits so slowly they aren't worth the time and effort. The first, most crucial step of any Eve industry is to identify items that can be made at a high enough profit to be worth bothering with. This takes careful research. People don't refer to Eve industry as "spreadsheets R us" for no reason. Fortunately, talented players have developed third party tools that vastly speed up the "find out what's worth making" stage. I am personally fond of Eve IPH. There are numerous others out there to choose from if Eve IPH doesn't suit you.

http://bp.kiwi.frubar.net/

Hi there.

I'm sitting with 30 billion in my wallet, ALL from t2 invention.

that link is worth it's weight in gold.

If it says it's not profitable, it just ain't.

Fair warning: I was a t2 RIG inventor almost exclusively.

You have to scroll thru each decryptor to see if ANY are profitable. Takes about 30 seconds.

btw: Some Mag Sites in null drop ME 0 Rig BPCs so sometimes you are fighting against explorers too.