Wormholes

There's been some talk around the office of a simple wormhole service we're looking at administrating. I thought I'd posit this to the WH forums and see if it garnered enough interest to be worth the setup.

Your problem:
You scan holes, you roll them, you find interesting things but sometimes there just aren't enough alts. With only three characters per account it can become increasingly difficult to keep track of an allied or enemy network of wspace systems due to simple mathematics. With the number of alts required to function in your systems you just can't keep up!

Our solution:
Locator alts for hire.
Payment plans are simple!

• Initial fee: a one time setup fee, this hires our scanner, who will move to, safe up, and park in the system.
• Ongoing fee: A low weekly payment to keep the alt on standby, payable in either ISK or free passage/tax for our PI if you own the system.
• Lookup Fee: Each time we are queried to locate your space, we will scan down all avaliable Kspace holes and provide a report detailing the signature names, destination systems, and relevant metadata. These reports are timestamped and payment is processed when the report is delivered.

Staffing and logistics
Initially we would do this in a limited run with only our corporate pilots, but as we grow, we'd like to present opportunities for third parties to join the system. Owners of alts would receive 80% of all pay, and our 20% cut would be collected for administrative and information security. Contractors would not be privy to the identity of their clients, and we would keep this information confidential. Contractors would, for logistical reasons, only be avaliable for hire on the ISK payment plan, while corporate members would be eligable for the PI model.

Desired Feedback:
I'd love it if people could answer the following questions so we can gauge interest/profit to see if this is worth setting up.

Would you use such a service?

How much would you pay for such a service?

If used, how many locators would you consider keeping on contract?

Would you be willing to become a contractor?

heh, hence the post. It's hard to get a line on just how much people value the ability to "phone in" an alt they don't have to PLEX or train.

25 as in 25 ISK a day?

Hardly profitable, but let's see if anyone else sees value in it.

That's bigger than what I was thinking TBH, and more in the "worth the freakin' time" neighborhood.

Honestly that's why I was thinking of the other setup.

Keeping the weekly lower, say 5m a day, but attaching a 10m install and a 10m report ensures that people are getting a much more fair price when you factor in timezones, etc. The idea is to make it an attractive long term low-level expense for customers with no more alts who don't want/can't afford more accounts.

In best case scenarios you'd be able to instantly call up a scan 24/7 but that's unrealistic, and thus handing over 225m a week just for the parking seems a bit high.

Install fee was, basically, because running the service requires actual player input for two things, scans and installs. My thinking is that installing can potentially be a real pain as there's no guarantee that the next hole isn't 30+ jumps away from the last one, so it's only fair to compensate the pilot for the trip. Similar logic is used for the 10m scan fee. Depending on the system in question you might end up filtering through 20 sigs to find all the holes, then you've got to poke head through all the kspace ones, write all that crap down, and format it. That's easily between 15 mins and an hour of work depending on the hole.

5m a day is trivial to most people income wise, but it does make it worth the time of the guy running the locator to keep it there in stead of bouncing all over the universe, and it makes it more fair to the customer if scans are delayed up to 24h/downtime etc. This means the guy is compensated for parking an alt that he may have otherwise wanted to actually use for something, but the cost isn't so high as to create an unrealistic expectation of effort on the part of the guy who's just basically getting paid to babysit a hole. On the flip side, if you're only paying 5m a day for the locator, you're not getting reamed if it takes a little time to process.

Hmm... maybe a sliding scale for reports based on time from request to delivery? Schedule scans for when the client is online so he can make best use of the report? There are several ways to make this carry the highest value for the client's ISK, but in general I think systems where people pay NOW for a thing they get NOW just work better, and the ongoing fee is just to keep the locators in enough cash to replace the occasional probe/clone or whatever.

So, basically, I want to keep it cheap to keep the locator on contract, and set up a system that incentivizes using these guys for logical things, like processing a scan once a day, or rolling the daily cost in to finances for a long term deals where you might want an ace back door to someone's hole you may or may not trust down the line.

I don't expect anyone to make some other toon the scanner for their important holes.

Sounds good!

XD double post, I do that :P

Would you use such a service?
Not likely, especially with 3rd parties involved (blows opsec out the window). Would be too easy to add a couple scan alts to the service for contracting in the event that a hostile group tries to find your home.

How much would you pay for such a service?
Depends on the duration of the contract. Would you be willing to log off alts in systems for a month or two?

If used, how many locators would you consider keeping on contract?
1-5

Would you be willing to become a contractor?
Nope

I'd think your target audience would be in the lower end wormhole system with smaller corps or alliances. I'm pretty sure its standard practice for a lot of the larger, more well known entities to keep scan alts in any/all potential wormholes where they might find fights or juicy targets.

I see where you're coming from, but no decision I make in EVE revolves around buying PLEX with ISK. Mostly because I don't do it. I can afford my subs, and I like using all that ISK to buy fun stuff like spaceships. So, my numbers look at costs pretty much from a "how often am I gonna lose a probe" scenario. If I really needed to plex an account to make the whole thing work then I'm looking at a customer base far larger than what I'm guessing is realistic., and, obviously, supply/demand mechanics would dictate a price hike to support it.

Starting out though, I think charging literally half that is going to be the business model. Makes it a lot more attractive to customers.

With the new ease of use on scanning, all you need to be a scanning alt is astro 1 and a few core probes.

The idea sounds great for people who aren't quite smart enough to be living in wormholes.