Science & Industry

This. It is great fun.

A year(ish) ago I came across a guy who funded his PLEX semi-afk by manufacturing from mineral buy orders with an alt. I started listing product at .5% over min+manu+transaction cost on the 5 items he dealt in.

He tried to buy and re-list for a while, but everytime he bought my gear I would dump another days worth on the market. He sent me about a half dozen mails full of RAEG. In one email he even begged me to stop since he was not going to be able to make his PLEX for the month.

He tried moving regions but strangly everywhere he went he ran into the same problem. Eventually he sold the character and went back to missions for his PLEX money.

Good Times.

It took you so long to response so many of use did assumptions. I'm sorry for that.



I'll try to give more insight to this part.
- You sold the ship and made (10+20) 30 mill of profit.
- Because you mined some minerals yourself you now feel that you have more room to play with prices.
- How low are you willing to sell the ship now? Lets say 100 mill.
- You now get a profit of 20 mill

All you would do in this example is to put in some (manufacturing + mining) work and get a profit of 20 mill. In this case the manufacturing part was a waste of time. Just mining gets the same profit. Now this is only if you sell the ship as low as 100 mill. Going lower would be just wrong. It's the illusion that makes you fell like you can get more profit on the Manufacturing part if you mine yourself. Breaking down profits to its basic parts makes it easier to decide what to build.




Funny Note: Manufacturing at a loss is a waste of time. In fact doing any activity that makes you lose money is a waste of time. It's actually better to do nothing. I can actually claim that PvP in EVE is the most wasteful way of wasting time, because you lose ISK which is time. Some claim that the amount of time you waste is only influenced by the "fun" factor. Some go as far as to state that if you have enough fun at something that then it doesn't matter if you are wasting time doing it. But the fact will always remain the same no matter what I do. My family when they see me playing games: "Why are you wasting time again with playing those stupid video games, why don't you go do something more useful."

This is by far the most compelling reason that Time is not money inside a videogame...unless you do RMT.

If you follow this through you find that minerals you mine are free, even though they are not worthless.


You know, a really interesting question to ask is what "mineral price" people use. For example, I might produce and sell an item 5% above mineral price relative to the station I am in. However, min price at that station may be 10% under mineral value relative to the region I am in. Which may be 10% under mineral value relative to Jita.

If the item price stays constant relative to mineral price, then manufacturing profit% is the same at all places. Any %increase in profit can only come via trading profit.

If you do that, though, people make whine threads about MIMAF

This applies to mining the wrong minerals too. Given manufacturing uses a basket, and trit is good for highsec but rarely the most profitable/hr, there is still something clearly rotten in the plan here. When you make a series of these mistakes in one action, you can easily add up to 25% less per hour pretty quick compared to someone else -also- mining in highsec.



Nope. This is you not bothering to calculate the value of hauling logistics to yourself, and not working out how/when you can dual purpose a flight. Hubs don't move, and non hubs rarely contain the entire manufacturing basket of mins, and that cannot be fixed by local mining yourself, because thats exactly what causes the skewed distribution of mins at the non-hub in the first place.

Mining the wrong mins is an opportunity cost. Mining the right mins in the wrong place is an opportunity cost.

Building stuff that is unprofitable ties up capital which is an opportunity cost. Building stuff in the wrong place so that it ties up capital and can't be profitable ls an opportunity cost. Owning an unprofitable BPO is an opportunity cost. Buying bpcs to make unprofitable things is moving from opportunity costs to outright loss. Copying a BPO that can't make a profit manufacturing is more profitable than manufacturing. etc.

If you mine for 3 hours for one min, you'll have a fair sized basket requirement to consume your gathered portion. ie you'll need 100mil+ to consume 30mil.

If you take the other approach - ie you sell to a buy order most of your gathered portion, and then buy from a sell order a basket the size of your gather, then you've just gone and created negative trade profit in order to manufacture. Given non hubs have slow sales movement, you'll just be tying up that mined capital along with extra working capital for days to wait for it to exchange if you try to access the proper sides of the spreads when converting to a basket for manufacture.



Finding the local maxima and having several reliable belts BM'd with various balances of roids that you can recheck quickly is a once off investment that lasts pretty much forever. My alt created in 2009 has BMs created in 2009. I'm always vaguely amused to see them showing in context menus as I fly past.

You might want to log in once after a DT respawn to see what is supposed to be where, and then vague mental empirical records will do for the rest of your playing career.



The scenario you put forward didn't have "cans" or "mays", it had obvious problems.

Some people aren't interested in making big piles of ISK. They just like mining/manufacturing/selling. They're just enjoying the process. They're just enjoying the game.

There are always new players joining the game, so I don't see this dynamic changing any time soon.

No matter how much you complain, there will always be players who undercut the market at a personal loss. When they run out of ISK, they just go back and mine some of those free minerals everyone gets so upset about.

Argument looks around.

Realizes it was birthed 10 freaking years ago.

Biomasses itself out of boredom.....................

The problem is that the vast majority of people here don't have a clue what that actually means. They insist on using the lame "pay 2 million to sell for 1 million" fail argument to make an invalid point that they don't understand in the first place.

If you put it that way your saying minerals are free.

But everyhings has value accordance the price some one wants to pay for it. If i put op a sale order of an item way overpriced none valueble , if some one is paying the ammount I ask it has value. the other way around is also true, when nobody is willing to spent isk on a valueble itemi can't sell it.
The same go's with minerals. The belt don't charge money for you mining activitys and as long your minerals are sitting in your hanger they are worthless. The moment you sell them, as pure minerals or manufactored into somthing, they get a value. A value you are charging or the other will pay for it.

Let me just say this.

Not everything has to be related to ISK when talking about cost.

Cost could be hauling ore to another system, did it cost you isk to do that? no. Did it cost you time? yes.

The reason is mine, research, build and haul is so i dont have to worry about ISK. If i want something, i mine the ore, I research the BPO, I reprocess the minerals, i haul the minerals and then I produce the item, I then choose whether or not to sell the item, i could just keep it, you dont always have to be in it for the profit. The only isk that cost me is very little ( production cost ect ). It cost me time.

So yes minerals are free in that it did not cost you isk.

They are not free as it cost you time. Time could = money for one person but not for another.

The value of time is determined by the person themselves, I for one dont need a ton of isk, when i can obtain the things i want without it.

time doesnt have to equal isk.