EVE Information Portal

for instance, thats actually indirectly insulting my person

regards
HML

infact, I said "production" and not "collection"

regards
HML

I agree with Mynnna here, the likely sweet spot is 15:1. It provides a very hefty nerf, while keeping tech #1, and within the range of Neo, the new bottleneck.

We have been preparing for this exact nerf for over a year now. The only crappy part was Weaselior was right, CCP did half-ass it.
Good thing we prepared for both scenarios! So Fozzie, you are so very right, all the good smart dudes are well prepared for this. So basically half the CFC wasn't. lololol


Chiming in, I am da leader of da J-bal. I totally have credentials!

Ok smugging over. Back to real talk.

heavy misl launcher, you see

finally...coz I hate signing my Posts with my name


regards
HML

since it only affects this topic indirectly, i would recommend to move to the corresponding thread about barges, before I explain how that works

please back to topic, gents

regards
HML

I've taken the time to put together a price calculator.

It's available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqcVTxvQXiL3dHJXYXcwejAtemZ2MlVxQkhWSnVfRGc

Regrettably, you'll have to make a copy of it to work: if I let it be freely edited then it'll get vandalized.

When you make a copy, every green square gives you a drop-down menu. Select the proper value for fuel, input costs, and the profit people will demand. As a note, you'll find that due to alchemy not affecting the platinum you use, it has no effect on tech prices. Estimates that included it previously forgot to subtract the price of platinum from the final cost of the plat technite. I've included it for completeness's sake, and so it's easy to verify that it doesn't actually affect end prices.

Once you've put in your costs, you can select any arbitrary alchemy level, from 1 (1 cobalt = 1 tech) to 20 (20 cobalt = 1 tech). The sheet will then spit out what the technetium price will be, given those assumptions and alchemy level. This should allow Fozzie to fine-tune the tech price to exactly his desired range once he has accurate estimates - he simply plugs in the estimates, then adjusts alchemy until the end price is what he's looking for.

I'm posting this here both for CCP Fozzie to use, and for everyone else to check the math and verify it's all correct.

Be aware that other pubbies will push that estimate down by reacting cobalt for near-zero profit.

I have repeatedly pointed out that the price of cobalt, for the purposes of tech alchemy, should be treated as zero. I realized I should elaborate on why.

Bottlenecking

There is a cap on the number of moons that can be profitably alchemized. Tech is profitable because it is a bottleneck: all of it is used up before any other moon mineral is. If too much tech is alchemized tech ceases being a bottleneck, and the next rarest mineral (relative to use) becomes the bottleneck. In our case, that's neodymium (which is rising on the theory that tech will be over-nerfed making it either the sole bottleneck or tied with tech). Once neo is the bottleneck and not tech, the price of tech will crater well below the break-even point for alchemy. As a result, of the thousands of cobalt moons, only a fraction can be alchemized before the bottleneck loosens enough it's no longer profitable.

That means that there is a hard cap on cobalt moons that can be used for alchemy: if that number is exceeded, alchemy can only operate at a loss until people are driven out of the market.

Why People Will Always Mine Cobalt When Doing Alchemy

When making an alchemy pos, it is better in every single situation to mine the cobalt instead of buying and importing it. As you may know, the fitting requirements for a silo and a moon miner are exactly the same. This means that any reaction that uses base minerals fits on a pos and uses the same fuel regardless of if one, both, or none of its components are mined on that moon. In other words, you incur absolutely no extra costs to mine a mineral rather than import it (while saving the cost of purchasing it and importing it).

This means in every situation it is feasible to do so, you would rather mine your minerals than import them - even if someone will give them to you in jita for free. There are only two situations where you will not:

1)You can't get that moon. If I'm making nanotransistors, I'd like to mine the tech directly. But since I can't get a tech moon, i simply must buy the tech: it is not an option to mine tech myself.

2)You can get the moon, but it would be inconvenient. If I'm making nanotransistors, I can't mine the tech, but maybe I can mine the platinum. But if there's platinum moons available, but none in my system, I may want to buy the platinum rather than deal with towers outside my home system. Effort costs isk, after all.

But Things You Mine Aren’t Free

Oppurtunity cost is what you could have made, if you did something else. So if you’re mining ordinary ore, the cost of that ore (to you) is the isk you could have made otherwise (say, by ratting). And if you use those minerals yourself, the cost of those minerals (to you) is the money you could have made if you’d sold them on the market instead. Both of those mean if you’re in a hulk and mining ore, the ore isn’t free: it costs you what you gave up.
For Cobalt, that means you are comparing alchemizing cobalt, to mining it and selling it. To mine the cobalt, you need a small tower, and a small tower’s worth of fuel. Since there is virtually infinite amounts of cobalt in the game, the price of cobalt generally equals the exact cost of mining it: in other words you don’t make any money doing it. People who mine cobalt have a tower doing other things (ratting, labs) and use spare grid and cpu to get “free” cobalt (and other ‘worthless’ minerals).
When alchemizing cobalt on a moon instead of mining it, you are “giving up” the chance to put a small tower there and mine it for export. Since that makes no profit the opportunity cost of alchemizing cobalt is…zero. So mining it yourself is free.

Conclusion

There are thousands of Cobalt moons. Not only will we never run out, we will never run out of convenient ones: there is so much cobalt that there are plenty of systems with many cobalt moons and a station. There are more of these ‘convenient’ moons than can be profitably alchemized, probably by a factor of two or more.

As a result, no one will buy cobalt off the market. It will not make sense at any price: even if it’s free, you have to ship it and keep silos full. You’ll just mine it instead. As a result, the effective price of cobalt for the purposes of setting the price of technetium is zero.

Everyone is still reading his wall of text.