Market Discussions

At current stats, 10 cobalt moons are equivalent to 1 tech moon, PT-volume-wise.
If there's really 50 cobalt moons for every tech moon (so, about ~20k cobalt moons for ~400 tech moons), then yeah, sure, why not, theoretically possible.

But you'd probably hit the fuel cost issue faster than anything else, and alchemy is annoying to do compared to a normal reaction, so people would expect more profit from it, and so on and so forth.
It's much more likely tech alchemy will represent a rather small portion of PT production, but with tech price severely reduced from its previous highs.

Even if cobalt would be considered practically worthless and platinum would hover at around pre-speculation level, with fuel blocks getting slightly cheaper due to safer mining, you're still looking at tech selling at least at around ~50k ISK, most likely noticeably higher (75k or thereabouts).
Of course, that's before further changes, whenever they'd come, which might drive it down further.

I think there's like 300 Tech Moons, so at most, if all the Cobalt in all the world went to producing PT, it would double the production of PT.

I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you. I was just talking about the fact that it can't be a 5x increase. It could ~double the PT supply at most.

But, Cobalt has competing uses in Crystallite alloy, and POS fuel is a huge component of any Alchemied reaction, so I don't think anywhere near all the Cobalt will be used to make PT.

Tech can't quit being reacted into PT when PT prices drop. Alchemists will drop out when it drops.

Alchemy costs 40k Isk/unit of PT in fuel (assuming 2 Simple reactors/POS), 10(Cobalt), and 2(Platinum). At the moment, that works out to 48200 ISK/unit of PT. Platinum Techtite is selling for 65k unit.

That works out to a 340k Isk profit/hr, or 228m Isk profit/month. That's barely worth it (especially since the Plat+Tech reaction makes a much larger profit on the same POS).

If PT drops to say 50k ISK/unit (36k Isk/hr 24m Isk/month to alchemists), Tech would be capped at about 94k ISK/unit. Tech is currently at ...

drumroll please...

94,297 ISK/unit.


The demand for Tech is relatively inelastic, which is why a price fixing cartel worked so well. No need to reduce supply when people will pay twice the price.

Volume traded didn't significantly change when Tech prices increased.

It is also interesting to note that Tech in and of itself is worthless, it is only valuable to the game as a combined product with platinum. My speculation is that the very entrepreneurial people who buy tech do so to make Plat-Tech. These are the same people who will be more than happy to abandon buying the overpriced and manipulated Tech on the market and instead set up production of their end goal.

So yes, the Tech market WAS inelastic, however there is a whole new world out there for the former buyers of Tech to bypass the market all together, or at least enough to make Tech very elastic. That is going to be the largest impact on the market, the idea that they now have a choice.

Only if you also assume T2 item usage will remain basically unaffected by the reduction in price of T2 goods, which is an assumption I don't like the betting odds for.
Less elastic demand when prices go up, sure, but I doubt the assumption of reversibility (still not very elastic when prices go down) is feasible.
The rest of the assumption are also quite close to "worst case scenario for tech considering just the published changes".

But yes, you are technically correct, for a short while, tech could realistically hit and hover around the lowest 40k price point even without any additional changes.
I would also however have to point out that it's unlikely for tech to remain there absent any other additional changes to make it less needed.

You forgot "lovingly crafted."

My post here: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1709104#post1709104

explains why there's a hard cap on the number of moons that can be alchemized. Essentially, if you alchemize too much technetium it's no longer the bottleneck and it becomes worthless.

While generally correct early on, you didn't go "deep enough" with it a bit later on ;)
Neodymium also has an alchemy reaction, and that alchemy reaction has a better ratio (for now) compared to technetium (by a factor of two), but that replacement is Platinum, which has other uses too. If push comes to shove and alchemy becomes somewhat profitable for either/both Tech and Neod, I expect both to hover pretty close in price to eachother and Platinum to maybe go up a bit more again.
Also, you somewhat distort (but for the short run, you are sadly quite accurate) how the profitability (or lack thereof) of alchemy might evolve in time, but that's just nitpicking, so no need to get into it very much.

TL;DR - generally accurate enough, but think of Neodymium alchemy too.

Unless I am mistaken, he is not going to live in RL off the long worked things he posts.

I mean, I have it easy as I just apply and recycle the same concepts I use every day. On the contrary, I don't think he's a RL space alliance CFO doing the same job there and in EvE.

















.... or is he?