Missions & Complexes

I don't know where other people, but there is a mission chain called Enemies Abound that drops them like crazy. I'm not sure if you can pull it off Caldari Agents, but I'm Amarr and get it with relatively frequency. I'm currently KOS to the gallente though.

Each to their own, but this is essentially the "minerals I mind are free" fallacy everyone in science and industry hammers on so hard. Which is to say, you could go out and get them, but you could also buy them and the effective cost is the same except you've sunk a bunch of time if you get them on your own. Remember to always account for the sale price of your tags in the cost of your LP items.



Then don't do faction warfare. If you're worried about being KoS in Gallente space, it's the last thing you want to do.



That's your best bet. It's competitive, but if you buy in sufficient quantity during market dips you will have enough to both cash in LP and resell tags during market peaks.

Thanks for the replies.

Its less a 'free minerals' issue and more of a 'I'm damned if I'm paying somebody 2 million ISK per tag' issue :)

Personally, I'm buying LP Store items to use them on my fits rather than as a source of income, I don't feel there's enough profit in it for the work as I don't blitz enough L4's to have LP items dripping from every surface.

Just trying to be self sufficient and have nice shinies. It's no problem to drop a few PLEX and go mad shopping and buy shinies all day, but that kinda defeats the point of playing the game (IMO)

I don't mind venturing into lowsec, so I'll keep an eye out for Enemies Abound and stick up some buy orders away from the main hubs and see what happens.

I'd rather not be KOS to any of the Empire factions, so I'll see how bad a hit Enemeies Abound gets me.

Its Gallente tags I need for the Caldari LP store.

I'll put some levels in Diplomacy too.


:)

I think it definitely needs looking at - the Tag requirements are too high I feel.

Once I've got my standings to 8.0 for the corps I'm running missions for (Caldari Navy and Spacelane Patrol) so I can get tax free refining/reprocessing and jump clones (yeah, I know I could buy them or use a 0.0 station, but self sufficiency here :) ) then I think I'm gonna change to running missions for Mordu or Thukker or ORE even as they have their own implant based LP stores that are pretty useful and don't have silly tag requirements.

Yeah, I do agree that it is a very difficult situation to improve. Pretty much any action taken would negatively impact market values of LP items and Tags and a lot of people would be pretty upset.

Personally, I think the Tag requirements for LP store items should be about 50% of what they are. Reasoning for this is that this would keep them at a not trivial to acquire amount without them being (as I feel they are now) prohibitive in time/reward, risk/reward and associated issues.

Granted, this makes me seem like a big fat carebear having a whinge, but that's not my intention. I'd just like to see the LP store be a viable source of personal use equipment.

Doesn't :



And :



Cover this already?


I'm all for pirating a bunch of wishy washy, libertarion, hippy surrender monkeys any day, but I'm not sure how that helps .

Unless you're offering reasonable rates for finders fees?

To be fair, there is a major problem with LP stores, but it isn't the high end items (like the CN invuln you mentioned). Those are actually somewhat balanced and can provide a decent ancillary income source for mission runners willing to do a little work to get the tags (and the whole situation makes the drawback of toasting your standings with two of the four major factions very much worthwhile for those willing to do so).

On the other hand, the low end items that require tags that don't drop in large quantities from L4s would have trouble competing with -i deadspace B and C types even without tag costs, but as things are those tags can actually be more expensive than the ones that drop from BS wrecks. That is the major breakdown in the LP store.

Having said all that, I wouldn't be adamantly opposed to imposing a much higher ISK cost for the same items, to the tune of making it more cost effective to buy the tags but giving an opportunity to sink large amounts of cash from the economy instead. Keeping that balanced sounds like a major headache though, and I haven't been all that happy with any of the dynamic market balancing solutions CCP has tried in the past (does anyone actually know what mineral costs insurance is actually tied to these days?).

Yup. Often times, the cash value of the tags alone is considerably more than it would be to simply buy the module outright.

Which goes right back to the MIMAF problem I mentioned earlier, but that's kind of a separate issue.