Market Discussions

A common wrong assumption crafters/manufacturers make. Even if you acquire all the materials yourself, they are not free! If you manufacture at a loss, you could just sell those materials and make more money.
You will only cut out broker fees, if you buy materials through buy orders, or nothing if from sell orders.

Actually, the "mineral buyers" just purchase what you're selling, and re-list it then.

This is because, at some point, your cost per unit becomes cheaper than their manufacturing costs.

The other thing you're forgetting is how much time it takes to get all those minerals...

If for example, something takes 3 hours to make (for me, buying all the mins), I can build 8 of them every day, assuming I always have a mineral stockpile (and who doesn't).

Now, it takes you an hour to mine enough trit for one run, so you can go to market every other day or so.

Now, after two days, you have eight (8) units of the thing, and I have 16.

Two days later, you have 8, and I have 16 ...

Now, the market can absorb all the ships we make per day (and more on weekends). For every other day's sales, I can build a little more than 1/2 of a new ship (so four more ships every 2 week cycle). Since I want to take 16 to market every time, I don't do anything with the money yet.

Eventually I buy a second BPO, so now I'm pumping out 16 ships every day that get sold.

You are STILL only capable of producing 8 per day, because there are not enough hours in the day such that you can mine enough Trit to build more ...

That certainly makes sense if you can make the ships for "less" than the market price. With a lot of ships it isn't the case.

I did a LOT of bimbling around in enyo's for a while. Because I'm also an FC I could do enyo fleets and "sell" fully fitted enyo's to my fleet mates at prices under what they would have paid in Jita.

Everyone happy, happy, happy... including me. I made a bit of money, which was not the objective... just enough to cover expenses and pay for fuel and my implants if I lost a pod. Fleets were hysterical amounts of fun (like the water fights we used to have as children with the fireman who lived next door.... we always lost but ended up giggling about it) and even if we all got blown up it wasn't making people cry... and I could FC a fleet for round about the reimbursement price of the hulls (corp only reimbursed hulls).

....

But that's not the scale you're talking about. What you're talking about is making 20 battleships because you fly a battleship a lot. I've done this too, but only for hulls that I could make cheaper than I could buy them at Jita..... and amazingly if you crunch the numbers, there are VERY few (sub-capital) sized hulls you can make yourself at such a discount that it's worth your time.

What makes more sense, in fact, is to look into building the fittings. For example, I had a period where I flew nothing but logistics ships. Scimitars. It was really busy in real-life (I run big-ass projects for a living.... sometimes in billion dollar projects with public visibility. (If you hate being in the spotlight like me, try having a job that puts everything you do wrong in the newspaper!.....sheesh!)..

A la.... Sometimes I have all the time in the world. Other times, there are months (or more) where I hardly have time to eat).

Short story: It was easier for me to make 100 scimitars and just fly that than to try keeping up with the ever-changing configuration demands of the alliance I was in.

So I made a fuckton of scimitars (WAY more than the 100 I expected to lose) AND the fittings. I didn't actually make the hulls or even most of the fittings. The hulls weren't "profitable" to make at the time so I just bought them by the 100's from Jita. As for fittings, I made the one that gave me the biggest margin.

What I did in my nullsec area was to put them on the market, fully fitted for about a 20% margin above what cost me, including logistics. Everyone seemed to think this was a fair price.

People with proper logistics skills could literally buy one from contracts, jump in and fly off... It was not a new idea... all null sec alliances have this but everything I shifted sold and paid 10 times over for every scimitar I lost. So I PVP'd for a year when real life had me busy up to the eyebrows with minimal grinding and ended the year with more ISK than I started with. All on the backs of a few characters I had in a backwater system that did nothing but mine occasionally and grind a single module.

And that's the point. A friend of mine goes out PVPing in a Drake. When he loses his drake he "mines" a new one. (This is what you're talking about). People who know how this works don't do that. They make 500 drakes and sell 400 of them to pay for the 10 and make a profit along the way.

T-

I have made billions and billions from manufacturing, and I haven't sat in a mining barge in years.

In fact, it would have been impossible for me to manufacture as much as I did if I needed to mine my own minerals. That would have required an army of alts and a great deal of time in game which I felt was better spent with my family.

You mined ore. Great. That made you X million isk per hour. Then you manufactured and made additional profit. Great.

I put up buy orders for minerals. Then I put up courier contracts. Then I pushed "go" on manufacturing. Then I hauled my stuff to market and sold it.

Sure, my per unit profit was smaller than yours because I had to pay more broker fees and couriers. But I more than made up for it in throughput, and also didn't sit in belts for hours. So my profit per hour and profit per effort was greater.

I'm pretty sure I can compete just fine.

there are a few situations in which doing the whole production line can have a benefit over specializing ship building would only be one of them if it reduces logistics.

This is not the case in hi sec.


one that comes to mine is fuel production for wh. by mining and refining ice product but creating the pi product in system you are able to build the same levels of fuel with less hauling as an example.

Capitalist market theory postulates that every entity is rational and will always strive to maximize it's profit/benefit. People get mad when you don't follow that pattern.

If you switch to a generally logged-out model of production, that number, at least for me, is about 1.6bil per logged-in hour (if that's what you mean by real-life hour).

There's always been serious passive isk opportunity in this game, even more so with Crius.

Perhaps those upset about others not following the pattern are not considering the same factors.

As pointed out, "profit/benefit" ... perhaps someone likes making a particular thing, and has fun doing it. So long as it sells they are happy. If that feeling of happy is more important than a few extra ticks of fictional space money to someone, then so be it.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, no one can starve in Eve, no one needs fuel for basic transportation and no one can be unemployed.

Let's break down what you are really doing here.


Bob mines minerals that have a market value of 30 million ISK, then uses them all to build a ship he sells for 25 million ISK.

Bob has made a 30 million ISK income from mining, and a 5 million ISK loss from shipbuilding, for his investment of three hours of playtime (mining) and three production line hours. That's a bad return on effort for the mining, and a net loss from the production. You can do better than being Bob.



Alice buys minerals and moongoo from the market that are valued at 530 million, but pays only 502 million because she is a shrewd trader. She then builds three Ishtar hulls (taking 5 days) and sells them for 555 million.

In this case Alice has risked 502 million to make a 28 million trading profit, and a 25 million production profit. Once the Ishtars sell, her 502 million is no longer at risk.

Alice has invested the following:

- 120 production line hours
- Tying up half a billion in capital for five days
- Ten minutes of effort setting up the trades required to do this build.


You want to be Alice, not Bob. (Note - don't build Ishtars right now, the market conditions do not suit it; they did last week).