EVE General Discussion

This is another mistake of cost analysis. Nobody runs from a single planet. You will need an array of POCOs to do business. That alone increases cots of operations nearly exponentially if they get blown up and need to be replaced. Hi sec actually looks like a better option, except your profits are eaten alive by taxes. These cash flow issues are virtually non-existent for the Sov space guys. Essentially, Hi/Lo sec PI farmers cannot compete any longer.

The costs vs. profit (that I purposely low balled by quite a bit) is per planet. The number of planets you are working is not a factor in your bottom line profit UNLESS your POCO's keep getting blown up before they are paid off. Yes, there is some degree of risk that you must make educated decisions about.

Thus it is wise to leave the current Custom Offices in place until you get a feel for how likely they are to be attacked in your area.

Also, while there are many area's of Null that will be very secure for a long amount of time, in many area's POCO's will be tempting targets for the much larger roaming gangs that frequent Null sec. Primarily because they ARE more profitable. Economic warfare is a veeeery common tactic in Null. Perhaps even more common that casual griefing is in Low Sec.

So that's 5 planets, 3 million in taxes. How many days production was that? I assume several.

5 planets is 5 POCO's. Say 500 million. Say there are 5 other guys just like on those planets you who pay 3 million in export taxes, and you do it every 3 days.

That's over 3 months to earn your initial investment back - which seems like an awfully long time to me.

I just don't know enough about most peoples PI habits to fill in the numbers properly. I have one alt who does PI in lowsec, a complete P0-P1-P2 chain, and I go and pick it up when the P2 launchpad is filled...which takes a REALLY long time.

I never see anyone else out there while I am doing it, which makes me believe low sec is not a continual hub of PI activity, at least not where I am.

What you need to know is; how many PI players are on a planet? How many m3 of goods are they exporting per week?

How are people to gain this information? It's all hidden currently. If you have a comand center on a planet you can view other players structures, but you have no idea if those structures are still active.

I think what they'd really need for this to be a worthwhile endeavor is a module you can install that tracks, across the whole system, PI import/export activity for all planets. That would be worth spending some money on for gathering intel.

As it is, how on earth do you decide which planet to throw a POCO down at, assuming you find one with no POCO or destroy one?

Wow so you have to compete?

I know your name is angst, but we are not comparing before/after patch. We are comparing the reality of post patch, with or without POCO. You can compare pre/post patch, just respond to someone else because that is not the conversation I am having :-p

Yes, compare before and after. I am comparing before and after putting up a POCO

Heh, I know INDIVIDUAL PLAYERS that have more than 10 characters doing PI.

PI bears never pvp'd to begin with. small gang PVP will center around people who WANT to protect their investments, not the bears that just look at the risk vs isk return.

Do all their characters do their PI on the same planets?

It is possible the convenience in picking up PI products and shuttling them around (particularly if they all use planets in the same solar system) far outweighs the loss in productivity by overcrowding the planets. I'm just not sure. Haven't done a detailed study myself. Most of the information necessary to precisely evaluate the effects of overcrowding a planet are not available to us.

DUST is irrelevant because it doesn't exist. It is probably fair to say that PI post-DUST will be a completely different animal, so not that much point in DUST speculation.

Also, I am not sure your assertion is true. Take a system with two relatively equivalent Lava planets on it. One has an Interbus CO, the other has a POCO with a 3% tax rate. People with access to that 3% rate will likely choose that planet. Of course neutrals may well be given a higher rate to encourage them to use the Interbus planet, but that really will depend on many factors.

I fully expect PI, and the way it works and plays will change over time. Certainly as DUST gets closer. But we deal with the realities of now.