Market Discussions

put me down for 2 b

I will offer 5B.

I have to put this carefully because you are a valued investor of mine but ...

1) Have you ever raised a loan before? If not, what justifies the size and rate for this one as your first offering?

2) You seem to have plenty of isk but can you give a rough sketch of your NAV and activities in the game?

3) Are you Bad Bobby's alt?

The reason I ask the last question is because you started selling Titan BPCs in January 2011 a day before Bobby relaunched his T4U blueprint sales thread and your thread itself started three days after Bobby accidentally (it seems) burnt one of his blueprint selling alts by creating a direct association with it on the Sell forum.

In addition, you appeared on MD fully formed with a knowledge of the procedures and how the investment market works and Bobby has said in the past he invests in MD using alts. You are clearly the alt of some wealthy player, since you started your life selling Titan BPCs and were looking to buy Titan BPOs three months into your existence.

Also, your portrait bears some characteristics in common with Bobby's . In both cases considerable effort has gone into the smile and the eyebrows, which are features most players don't know how to modify effectively and thus don't bother with. In addition, both have a sideways tilt of the head that is slightly unusual and both use similar backgrounds.

So, tinfoil hat off but I felt I had to ask this now you are looking to borrow isk as I have had slight suspicions for quite a while.

Edit - Might as well follow this to the end:

Also, you both post at the same times of day:
http://eve-search.com/search/author/Blueprint%20Seller
http://eve-search.com/search/author/Bad%20Bobby

This time of day is consistent for a GMT based poster, of which there are many but both you and Bobby share the characteristic of having a reasonable number of posts in the 4-7am window, which is not a particularly common profile for GMT posters. Also, neither of you post after 8pm - going back eight months there were only three days on which Bobby did and none on which Blueprint Seller did. Otherwise both seem to adhere quite scrupulously to exactly the same time frame for posting.

Oh, and while your 90 day posting graphs don't map perfectly, they do show similar patterns:

http://eve-search.com/stats/Blueprint%20Seller
http://eve-search.com/stats/Bad%20Bobby

Contrast mine for a control

http://eve-search.com/stats/RAW23

The gap from the 11th of December on one character and from the 12th on the other character is quite interesting. Neither character posts for at least two weeks after that point. Both are also absent for the first week of May last year and both also stop posting in the second week of February and both post far more than normal throughout March and the start of April. Both are also silent for the first week of January 2013, although this correlation shouldn't be made too much of as a) that is probably a fairly common pattern across the eve population and b) Bobby goes silent for quite a long period (with a few gaps) at around that time, increasing the chance of a coincidental mapping.

A couple more points ...

a) Blueprint Seller was created just two weeks after the T4U scam was made public.

b) And this, I think, might be the kicker ... Blueprint Seller's corp is 'The Blueprint Shop', ticker [BPCS.]. Bobby's old blueprint research and copy corp was Bring Me Sunshine, ticker ... [BPCS].


I suspect the story is something like this. After T4U Bobby decided he needed a new alt to transact business with those who might be put off by the notion of dealing with EVE's most notorious scammer, so Blueprint Seller was born to, well, keep selling the blueprints that had formed the basis for much of Bobby's prior business. Bobby, partly through, I think, a rather gracious desire to not rub his previous investors' noses in the **** and partly due to the inevitable derailing of threads that was attendant on his appearance in them, more or less stopped posting on MD for 15 months after T4U (with a very few exceptions). But we know that Bobby's interest in MD never went away and in the early months of 2011 Blueprint Seller starts posting in investment threads, although almost never contributing anywhere else.

We know that Blueprint Seller has the following characteristics:

a) Very wealthy and in possession of Titan BPOs and a seller of Titan BPCs (at least throught 2011 and 2012).

b) Knowledgeable about MD before starting to post here and a very successful investor (the latter is an extremely rare quality).

c) Creator of a blueprint related corp with the ticker [BPCS.]


On the other hand we know that Bobby has the following characteristics:

a) Very wealthy and in possession of Titan BPOs and a seller of Titan BPCs (at least throught 2011 and 2012). Interestingly, a little digging shows Bobby and Blueprint seller as seeming to have very very similar collections of BPOs. Admittedly there isn't a vast range available but still ...

b) Knowledgeable about MD and with the talents required to be a very successful investor.

c) Creator of a blueprint related corp with the ticker [BPCS].

In addition, both of them post within the same time-frame, including posting at a time that would seem diabolically early to most of us (between 4am and 7am) and not posting after 8pm. In the last year or so there are a number of significant correlations in the breaks they both take from posting and in periods of high posting activity.

Both characters were created by someone who is skilled in using the portrait creator and who has a thing for eyebrows that rise to a point (something also seen on Bobby's Titans 4U character portrait) and slightly crooked smiles.

On the assumption that Bobby does invest using an alt or alts, Blueprint Seller is the best fit for the profile of investing that would be expected from someone as wealthy as Bobby. The only possible exception is flakeys and I have good grounds for being certain that flakeys is not Bobby.

Putting all this together I'm relatively comfortable with my assessment. Of course, these could all be coincidences but damn would that be a lot of coincidences!

Oh, and compare Blueprint Seller's unusual hairstyle to that of Good Bobby.

Indeed! I hope RAW doesn't look too hard at me, he's certain to find things that even I don't know about me.

No. As a rule I try not to borrow. The reason for doing so now is that Kalinda, a regular customer, has come to me with a request at a time when I am overcomitted due to several other loans.


The size and rate are what they have to be. I am offering a collateralised loan to Kalinda at 2.5% while manufacturing from her collateral so I had to set the rate to MD at 2% for it to be viable. I felt that since it was a relatively small loan and as I had helped out many other people in MD that it would not be an unreasonable request, but if I had not raised the 15B here I would have to withdraw my investment from other loans (such as yours, which is why I was asking about the timeframe for your expansion) in order to make the loan to Kalinda.


My NAV is approximately 800B and my primary source of income in EVE is re-selling blueprints, as you will be able to see from my contract history. I also make a lot of loans to MD posters, as you know, but that does not contribute much to my income.


No. But you are not the first person to ask. I know him moderately well, I have been buying BPCs from him for years, I idle in many chat channels that he frequents and we cross paths due to common interests.


Those were probably the same BPCs. I gave up selling through the forums long ago and now I just use the contract system.

I do not know what to say about the rest of this. Reading it myself, it looks pretty convincing, but I am not his alt.

Well , this was a nice read to go with my morning coffee and the tinfoil does sound verry plausible .




MMmmm , think i am gonna dig through my accounts now and look for a char called blueprint seller as he appearantly has the same NAV , about the same source of ingame income and is mostly known on MD for loaning out isk, i'm getting paranoia .

It's Bobby. eve-live for scc makes that pretty clear. Shame it wouldn't load for me last night.

A selection of connections (some of these are on 1000 lines rather than 50; apologies for that):

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2703079#post2703079


http://eve-live.com/talk/6052872


Wherein Blueprint Seller displays what seems like a good degree of familiarity with Pandemic Legion’s attitudes and general doctrine.

http://eve-live.com/talk/6051029

and states he is a ‘long time’ PL member, just like someone else we know.

http://eve-live.com/talk/150237838

And he has a knowledge of Hydra

http://eve-live.com/talk/173858333

And a knowledge of TLEAF and Bad Bobby’s FW/COSMOS farming

http://eve-live.com/talk/150239412

In fact, going back a few years, apart from a few references to Goons and Test these are the only corps/alliances Blueprint Seller holds forth on.

Also, a few minutes after BS mentioning Bobby, Bobby turns up here, picks up the conversation that BS was having and then BS logs off four minutes after Bobby arrives (without acknowledging Bobby, despite Bobby joining the conversation by saying hi to him)

http://eve-live.com/talk/150239916

Blueprint Seller mentions his experience building Titans, something Bobby has done a fair bit of

http://eve-live.com/talk/6052329

In which Bad Bobby distinguishes between the peasants and the nobility of eve

http://eve-search.com/thread/94755-1/author/Bad%20Bobby#15

Compare

http://eve-live.com/talk/6051672
and
http://eve-live.com/talk/7396612

In which Blueprint Seller explains that the way he got his financial start in eve is no longer viable

http://eve-live.com/talk/150238159

Which doesn’t match his story about always being a blueprint trader but does match Bobby’s story about getting his start exploiting COSMOS missions and harvesting datacores:

http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=1541215&page=2#54

There's a fair bit more but I think that is probably enough.

Now the thrill of the chase has worn off I feel a bit dirty and stalkerish.

The client has got cold feet after all this nonsense, so I am going to have to call off the loan.

That was impressive.