Market Discussions

I think CCP might have increased the drop rate or escalation rate, but I haven't looked into it and every new patch there are reports of drop rate changes due to good/bad luck anyway.



They cost ~165m to build, if sub 100m pirate BS BPCs ever start showing up on contracts, I'll be buying a few hundred ;).



The CNR/SNI fill a niche that no other faction/pirate BS do so there's that. Also pirate ships tend to need different skills than the T1/faction ships people likely skill for first, the Nightmare needs Caldari ship, Amarr ship, Shield and Laser skills while the Rattlesnake needs Gallente ship, Caldari ship, Drone, Shield and Missile skills, both of which require two skill sets that the one of races required to fly it don't need as much.

Is exploration even worth doing at these prices?

Not everyone is a 100m SP null sec alliance min maxer :).

Consider it the same as trading in volume, even if you don't make as much per sale, the increased escalation chances means the quantity should make up for loss of sale price per individual item.

Given that and the effectiveness of both deadspace modules and pirate ships, I would think these will remain worthy of completing for some time now. Especially given that for those ratting consistently in null for example, these escalations are likely just icing on the cake for their already good ratting income.

The increase comes from anomolies leading to expeditions.

Anomolies aren't run for expeditions (now), they are run for the liquid ISK payout from rat bounties. However, purely doing anomolies is *boring*. Expeditions offer reasonably close ISK per hour from rat bounties, probably 80% of what you get from focused anomolies, plus they do so while being a break from the normal routine.

So they'll continue to be done.

As soon as the anom change was clear, I firesold the remainder of my pirate battleships - I actually dumped some onto buy orders - although I continue to watch the market and look for profitable opportunities to buy cheap BPCs in Jita and build them for resale in other hubs.


The ships outperform their price tags now, but I can't see any big alliance logisticians thinking 'we have enough security of supply to field a Rattlesnake doctrine'. Alliance logisiticians know that if they lose 500 Ishtars they can buy 500 more on the market within an hour if they are willing to overpay, or within a week if they are not. It may not be possible to replace a 500 Machariel fleet at a reasonable price.

I agree the Rattlesnake is an excellent fleet combat ship, I just think you are in for a nasty, nasty shock if you lose a fleet of them to a well laid trap and unexpected massive escalation.

Ask goons about faction hull supply limits and the time we let DBRB FC our shiny new TFI doctrine at the start of the Fountain war.

grr goons

No, our financial types have openly speculated that you could track the location of our home regions through time by plotting the prices depressions of the corresponding battleship hulls.

It might be old stock.

Large Beam Laser Batteries buy 11 mill, sell at 16.6 in Jita.
True Sansha Large Beam Laser Batteries sell in Jita for 6.5 buy is around 3 mill or something. You need a Large to make a True Sansha.

All faction modules are highly vulnerable to the mighty CCP nerf bat and useful will always overwrite rare. In the case of Faction Battleship, they were never PvE ships. Navy and T2 work better and PvP is cruiser down right now so a PvP battleship is going to be in far less demand. Much like the True Sansha Beam Laser Batteries, I bought a bunch because I knew they were under priced and the CCP nerf bat couldn't do much more damage to them.

If you think something with a green tag is horribly under priced and you can afford to have it sit in your assets for months or even years waiting for the the Nerf bat to swing the other way, buy them up. Machariel is a good ship. It's just useless right now.

We have more escalations because ccp fixed a lot of triggers for them.