Science & Industry

You would have to run the numbers to see.

Your answer is market based. I don't sell researched BPOs or copies so I can't really answer. But nobody really can. You have to look at the contract market and you have to have your own customers. What you make out of that is your answer.

First, under the new system, you need 1 small POS with 1 or 2 labs. So operating costs are down on the POS side. Not like before where you had to have numerous POSes filled to the brim with labs and all.

Copying is super cheap and I would be very surprised if there has been much upset in the copy market.

Research is a different answer. If you are researching BPOs with short research times, job install costs are pretty low. However, if you are researching big BPOs (caps, battleships, etc) then your job install costs will be high. I just dropped a billion ISK to research a capital BPO from 8 to 9 ME. The good news is there should be some normalizing of pricing. Before, people valued BPO research very individually. There was minimal production cost, but some BPOs took so long to research that some people were willing to pay an extremely large amount not to have to wait a few months for a usable BPO. Others not so much. Now, though, there's a set number - if a BPO cost me a billion ISK and 90 days to research, well, I am going to sell it for 2 billion (Edit: plus purchase cost of course). Nobody is going to buy it from me for 5 billion because they know it only took me a billion to make it, and they know I don't have to maintain a huge POS chain to run a research business. So there should be more 'normalcy' in the markets, and if you've got good skills and a good setup, your prices should be competitive with everybody else's. And yeah, I know skills affect time and not cash, but with research, job install costs factor in time, so BPOs that take less time to research are also cheaper to research.

If you're researching really expensive stuff, you've got to be quite the risk taker nowadays since the BPOs have to be in a POS to get the POS benefit. As for me, everything really expensive gets researched in a station. I know it costs a ton more and takes a ton longer, but I am not selling BPOs for profit, just my own personal use, so I look at it as a one-time expense rather than as a constant margin issue, and I am not willing to take the risk so I just suck it up. What decision you make as a researcher will be on you.

That's really all I have to offer as someone who is doing a ton of research but isn't trying to make a living selling BPOs and BPCs. I'd say it's doable, but as always, the whole blueprint business and its dependency on the contract market and individually acquired customer bases makes the area one of volatility. But that's like it always was. As for the rest, the mechanics have not wrecked the business. maybe resulted in some price changes, probably resulted in some normalizing, but overall still doable.

You can still do the max number of jobs your skills allow in any location with the proper facility. You will just not have the old slots limitation so doing it in station is viable as well (depending on what you do and in what volume it might make sense to use pos or not, probably not for most people).

The production times for almost everything were shuffled around pretty radically.