Science & Industry

Hello fellas, wonder if ya can give me some insight.

I'm a lazy station trader, and I'd like to try out the T1 BPC/BPO "market". I say "market" because stuff needs to happen via the contract system.

My goal is to not undock, and start it easy, but I don't understand anything about it...

From what I researched in contracts, T1 BPOs for basic items can be researched quite fast to full levels of ME and TE, and sold at 3-5 times the puchase price, within something like 10-15days. (example: Mining laser upgrades, ogres, salvagers etc)

On the other hand, BPCs for T1 basic stuff hardly seems worth copying because they tend be sold at some thousand isks. There if ofc the ocasional BPC contract for the price of an unresearched BPO, but these seems like guys trying out their luck on an unfair deal for the buyer.


My problem is that I'm unaware of contracts history.... I can easily research a market item with the tools provided by CCP (price change, volumes, spikes, crashes) but when it comes to contracts I'm blind, so here are my questions.

- Are basic items BPCs even worth making?

- Am I better resorting to buying BPOs, researching them, and selling them, ignoring the ability to make BPCs?

- Is there some tool that allows me to check public contracts (other than my own) that I'm unaware of, in order to see, for example, how many T1 ogre BPOs have been sold in contracts last month?

Many thanks for any help given.

\o

One of my hobbies is bashing offline research POSes and selling the loot that drops. As such, I have some experience with selling large quantities of researched blueprints on the market.

The problem with blueprints for smaller items is that they get exponentially cheaper and quicker to research as you go down. Cruisers are roughly the "break-even" point. Cruiser BPOs are pretty cheap to buy from NPCs and only take a few months to fully research. Destroyers and Frigates are nearly trivial, whereas Battlecruisers and Battleships can be quite a bit more expensive and take much longer to research. (The same generally applies to class-appropriate modules, but less so.) While you can sell Frigate and Destroyer BPOs for 3-5x their buy price, they don't typically sell quickly at those prices. For Cruiser and below, I typically aim for 2-2.5x. It does cut into my profit, but they typically get bought within a day even without advertising them in local. To me, disposing of inventory is more important than maximizing profit.

For larger items (capital components, capital ships, battleships, etc.) there is a good market (i.e. will sell quickly for good prices) for BPCs, especially fully-researched ones, because BPOs for those items are ridiculously expensive and take an obscene amount of time to research. Smaller manufacturers generally much prefer to just buy a BPC and be done with it. The obvious downside of getting into that market is that it requires a substantial investment of ISK and time on your part, which isn't exactly ideal for someone just starting out.

T2 BPCs are very hit or miss. Some are in high demand, others aren't, and I haven't sold enough yet to have a good feel for this. I feel like it may be more effective to just produce the item in question and sell that because you can skip contracts completely. If you're up against someone selling copies from a fully researched T2 BPO, forget it.

Where I tend to have the most luck is in selling packs of T2 component BPOs, fully researched, all related to the same end product. They tend to sell rather quickly for 3-4x their buy price and aren't too horrible in terms of time investment, but you may need multiple characters doing the research depending on how big a pack you want to sell. The same would likely apply to related packs of capital component BPCs, but I haven't tried that yet.


Again, I'm no market expert, I don't typically go for maximum profit (if anything, I think I may have inadvertently crashed a few BPC markets), and I'm certainly not an expert in research or production. But I do have some experience with moving bulk quantities of researched BPOs over contracts. I hope that experience is helpful.

Thks for the replies.

Yeah, I don't wanna go into capital stuff right now, nor spend 150+ day researching cruiser/BCs BPOs. I'm trying to consider this a side job, just because the "new" expansion allows permanently avaliable slots in research systems, so maximizing my profits is not gonna be my strategy.

If I can get 3x the price of an ogre BPO after 10 days of research, might not be bad, if I add in some diversity in items and some extra toons doing it.

Also thks on the contratct info. Gonna see if corps or toons can really sell bpos or bpcs properly.

Ok.. I think I'm gonna try researching low end BPOs to max TE and ME and then sell them on contracts for several time the BPO original cost.

Is there a list where I can find how long a BPO takes to research? I know it depends on several factors, but I'm pretty sure they'll have some "coeficient" (at the lack of a better term) inherent to the BPO. After all, all small ammo take same time to research, for example. I tried looking into Fuzzwork Industries site, but only saw a xls file with the Max Prod Limit... Not quite what I'm looking for.

That list would surely save me some time looking at market and trying manually sites like http://eve-cost.eu/research.

Many thks once again.

I started researching the low end bpo's and making copy's to sell a while back, I have only sold two packs so far, as with my skills they take a while to copy still, plus i still have things to research and I have limited slots

Both packs were mixed bpc's (max runs & fully researched, 50-60 bpc's in each pack) with random stuff, like frigs, rigs, shield extenders, turrets, ammo, cap boosters, etc, the 1st pack sold for 7 mil and the 2nd pack sold for 9 mil, both on auction with 1 mil starting bid

Neither packs got many bidders (like 3-4)

Try 10/14 or 10/20 Destroyer BPOs. They sell at pretty high prices (70-90m) assuming the destroyer is in demand. On the flip side, they do take 3 months (10/14) or 5 months (10/20) to research.