Science & Industry

You're right and I've ran the numbers on raw material production and subsequently manufacture many of the T2 components to fill slot gaps (big tips so we'll see how that market changes) however the problem then is, the thing that is making you money is not T2 ship production, its the components....so just make components.

The only point that changes is where you need to produce the final object because the components don't sell such as with orcas/freighters to an extent, and for unknown reasons people are actually buying the T2 components to make T2 ships?

if you want to do that you need to also consider the ISK/hr on your components. because they use slots to be build.

for the final product:


add the cost for the stuff you bought from the market (average datacores needed per BPC, minerals, components, reaction stuff ...)

after that, divide it by:

the production times for ALL the stuff you actually build with your own lines, components, t1 hull, t2 hull, ...

do this for your T2 ships and you will find out that the ISK/hr you can expect is absolutely anemic compared to other stuff that is (much !) easier to make,

This. Kinda like the "I built it myself, therefore it's free" logic, unless you're making more ISK per hour (or as I prefer to rate it, ISK per minute**) on making the components, then it's not worth it, regardless of the profit margins.

Lets say you run 1 line of a T2 ship, and it's doing 1,000 ISK/min profit (i.e manufactures in 1 hour, sells for 60,000 isk profit).

You decide to manufacture the components of it yourself, which themselves turn a profit of 500 ISK/min. You need to run 5 lines of these.

Simplifying the maths somewhat, but this gives you a total ISK/min of 3,500.

If you just bought the components, and instead ran 5 lines of building the T2 ships, that's 5,000 ISK/min. Much more profitable.

That said, if the inverse is true (components make more ISK/min than the T2 ship), you're better off just manufacturing components and never actually manufacturing the ship.

"Wait, so there's no reason to make components then?". No, there's plenty of reason, most important one being market movements. When I used to manufacture T2 components, I didn't just make all of the most profitable item, mostly because I'd flood the market, which tanks the price, and results in a loss overall. Diversity is key.

This also brings in the reasoning of my other claims that T2 BPOs are useless, and as pointed out don't impact the market as much as people think. A typical BPO costs a certain amount of ISK, which can be remade in profit in a few months, maybe a year or two, depending on the BPO. A while back I did this calculation for some of the highest-valued T2 BPOs*, and you'd need to constantly manufacture for 20+ years to make this money back, making them from an industrial point of view, virtually worthless. If you reverse bottle imp it successfully, yes, you'll make a pretty good profit.

Raw T2 BPO ROI's are significantly better than normal BPOs, but unless you can resale the BPO for equal or more than what you paid for it, you stand to lose a lot of ISK.

* Pre-invention, the ROI for these things were much higher, as the lack of competition meant T2 item prices were *much higher* than their manufacturing cost. Back then, the high price of T2 BPOs was justified. What's happened between then and now is the ROI on T2 BPOs has dropped dramatically, but the price to buy them has gone up. More reason why, from an industrial perspective, they're a stupid investment.

** I used to manufacture T2 components several years ago,, they take 2 minutes/item to manufacture, so it was easier to use ISK/min than ISK/hour.

So taking this up as an example for the moment. I'm going to assume the BPO is used/research to "ideal maximums" i.e skills/researched values are all maxed/optimal.

Using this 2012 sale thread of the Eagle BPO as a reference, the Eagle BPO is worth 110 bil. I can only assume it's gone up in value since then.

Eagle sells for =~ 167 mil.
If you buy all your components off sell orders, cost to manufacture is 145 million.
If you buy all your components using buy orders at current average rates, you're looking at 122 million.

Lets favour the lower manufacture cost to give the Eagle the best profit margin possible.

Eagle, when fully researched, takes =~ 2132 minutes (1 day, 16 hours) to build. There's a big assumption here that this is manufactured in a normal NPC station, *not* a POS. This is not insignificant, but I cbf doing the numbers now, and most people are risk-averse when it comes to a 110b piece of paper.

At the lower manufacture cost, that's almost 20,000 ISK per minute profit from the Eagle BPO. That blows our pithy 500-1500 isk per minute out the water for sure. I won't deny this.

But even at this gloriously high ROI, you're looking at just under 11 years to make back your 110 billion ISK on the blueprint. At the lower profit margin, you're looking at over 20 years.

There's blueprints out there worth 5 million isk which turn a 1000-1500 isk/min profit, which return your initial investment in half a year.

Maybe it's just me, but this makes T2 BPOs absolutely not worth the money. I'd agree that the fact you've crammed 20 times the profit per minute into one job makes it "logistically easier" to deal with, but an efficient logistic chain, an alt account running 30 slots which self-funds through GTC is a far better option. The *only* way you make money off a T2 BPO is if you successfully resale it for equal or more than you paid for it.

This is why people get their knickers in a knot about CCP potentially destroying the value of T2 BPOs by removing/seeding them. Not because their industrial advantage will be lost, but because they'll lose all their investment on what I see as a poor choice for industrial types to go for, buying instead a hyped-up collectors item. Too bad, so sad.

I get what you're saying, and I completely disagree, but we could go down this path forever. I understand your taxi analogy, and it's grossly unrepresentative of the T2 BPO market, mostly due to the magnitude of figures involved, but your comparison would only work if you charged =~ 1 cent per taxi fare, plus numerous factors that simply aren't represented in a T2 BPO purchase.

Good analogy. The only major difference I'd point out is that taxi licences don't carry any effect analogous to T2 BPO's ability to hamstring CCP's capability to sensibly develop technology and industry in the EVE universe. That massively segues from this topic though. I'd also happily call a taxi licence a poor investment too, carrying the analogy through.

I happily turned a 4bil investment into 12b of pure profit over 6 months, twice the speed of the Eagle BPO's income, and didn't need to offload anything massive at the end, which kinda just reinforces my point.

But whatevs. If I haven't convinced you (or anyone reading) that they aren't worth it, I probably won't ever, and that's cool. Getting this slight derailment back to the original topic rails, T2 BPO's don't impact the market as much as people think. Just so happens that my reasoning behind that is that they're simply poor industrial investment choices. This leads to many other rants of mine, but they're all quite off topic :)

one of the clearest post about T2 BPO's I've read in 10 years...ccp should sticky that

Jesus, the US and Australia are quite different it seems. For context, you'd make that monthly fee back + profit with just 2-3 fares a day here in Aus, assuming $30-50 per fare. Adjusting my comment based on that example.