Science & Industry

These are just some thoughts that I had about how these three elements on industry interact with each other to affect prices and something that has been bothering me about the upcoming Crius update.

As many of you know the production for items for profit is a hit or miss kind of ordeal. Some items make a tidy profit, while others lose you money. Most people attribute this to the fact that some producers mine their own materials, are idiots, and consider their minerals free.

Lately I have been thinking about how much station trading has an effect on the pricing of items. A trader does not have to necessarily consider the mineral cost of an item, just the cost at which he can purchase it at. Buy orders can get very low. The capacity for the trader to influence the price of an item really depends on how capable he is able to acquire the item for cheap. I am not sure how much volume this is, but I wonder if it is significant enough to affect the sell price.

What would be nice, is if industrialists could catch when items are selling below material cost, scoop them up and reprocess them for profit. This ensures that the items stay at just material cost, or above. A dream come true for me! Unfortunately though, the reprocessing values for all items are drastically reduced in the upcoming Crius patch.

What is the reasoning for not allowing 100% refine (or some other number higher than 55%, that seems far too low to me)? Is it because we do not want overnight for people to snap up all of the below material cost ships and make money overnight? Why is this a problem, if it will mean a more predictable market? What do you guys think about this? Are any of you guys concerned that the prices of items will not increase once the patch hits and that the thin margins of profit on items will diminish? I do.

*Please correct me if any of my assumptions are incorrect.

No, that is not really true.

Ore will be boosted so that they will refine to the same minerals that they do today, but not finished goods.

Finished goods are only being boosted by 11% while scrap metal processing is being nerfed to 55% maximum. So after Crius if you reprocess something you built before the patch, you will only get back 61% of your input minerals. There are very few T1 items that have extra materials. (Mainly ships that went through teiricide.) That was the main problem with extra materials. People did not understand why these blueprints with extra materials used different formulas than all the other blueprints in the game.



Actually, there are quite a few people who do that. Buying underpriced items, reprocessing them, and then selling the minerals is how I made my first 100M isk in this game.

Today scrapmetal processing is a big safety net which prevents anyone from losing their shirt on manufacturing, as long as they stick to T1 blueprints without extra materials.

Imagine a manufacturer who chooses poorly and makes something that nobody wants to buy. He only discovers that there is no demand for his widgets after getting them to market. The installation costs to manufacture the items were trivial. Either he can reprocess the items himself to get 100% of the minerals back, or he can sell his items to a reprocessor at a slight loss. Since reprocessing takes about three clicks, reprocessors are very happy to get just a couple percent profit on each item. So the stupid manufacturer only loses a couple percent of his investment when he makes a bad bet.

After Crius, manufacturers will need to be much more careful.
* Nerfing reprocessing means the safety net is going away. I will still be happy to buy and reprocess underpriced goods, but my new price will be about 50% of input cost instead of 95%.
* Installation costs will be significant now.
* Installation costs incentivize long runs. So people will be building things in large batches.
* Work teams reduce costs of specific items. But if many manufacturers flock to the system with the good work team, then there will soon be a glut of that item on the market.

The takeaway from all of this is that overproduction will be a trap which will catch many manufacturers. If you make a bad bet and produce the wrong item, your items will either sit on the market a very long time, or you will take a 50% loss to get your minerals back.