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Question on getting Tags/Insignias from missions
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Equus
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#1 - 2012-06-19 18:22:37 UTC
Is there something I am missing when it comes to dropped insignias regarding quantity? Running level 4 missions I get every wreck I can when fighting Amarr or Caldari to get the insignias yet at the rate they seem to drop, I will have well over a million LP's by the time I have enough insignias to get an item from the store that costs 80k LP's or less.

Is this working as intended or am I missing something?

I know I can buy them from the market but for many things I have found the cost of the tags on the market cost more then I can sell the redeemed item for.
Spineker
#2 - 2012-06-19 18:31:32 UTC  |  Edited by: Spineker
The drop rates are horrific in comparasion to what CCP thinks the exchange should be. They have been this way for some time and the best way to get them is to farm the missions. You can do that up to like 7 days once every day.


Best to find a place where you have several L4 agents within a few jumps of each other that way you can run missions until you get a couple of factions and then farm them.
Zhilia Mann
Tide Way Out Productions
#3 - 2012-06-19 21:52:27 UTC
Equus wrote:
Is this working as intended or am I missing something?

I know I can buy them from the market but for many things I have found the cost of the tags on the market cost more then I can sell the redeemed item for.


A few things here. First regarding your latter point: always, always account for at least the buy price of tags when looking at what to cash out of the LP store. Way too many people miss this. It has detrimental effects on overall faction mod pricing (obviously) and is essentially the same as the MIMAF fallacy.

Related, you should double check and make sure you're getting your faction items through the lowest possible cost pathway. Many faction items are available either as straight items or as BPCs -- and the BPCs usually have much better payouts. CN BCUs are a classic example here, with the straight offer from the military store being barely profitable but the BPC being one of the better items available in all Caldari faction stores.

Third, yeah, there aren't enough tags and to cash out any serious quantity of LP you'll have to play the tag market. This can be frustrating if you've no idea where to start playing the market, but it can actually turn into a pretty lucrative side business once you have it figured out. Watch the tag price trends, buy enough at the low end to cash out and have a reserve, and sell the reserve at the high end. Hell, I've stopped running missions but I still have my fingers in the tag market, and it's still making me plenty of money.
Chainsaw Plankton
FaDoyToy
#4 - 2012-06-19 23:07:51 UTC
huge mismatch between what drops and what is needed, bottleneck tags go for quite a lot more than others. Federation Navy Fleet Colonel Insignia I is going for ~2.2mil a bit over 4x its npc value, where the Federation Navy Fleet Colonel Insignia II is going for 798k, or 48k over its npc value, a pretty small markup (and usually you can buy them for npc value). Add to this many mission runners are afraid of "screwing up" their standings, and not a whole lotta useful tags to go around.

haha just looked at volume of tag trade in the forge, for the Federation Navy Fleet Colonel Insignia I its 2-4k, and Federation Navy Fleet Colonel Insignia II its 20-40k, vendor them for the 750k cuz you can't use most of em for anything else

@ChainsawPlankto on twitter
Bumblefck
Kerensky Initiatives
#5 - 2012-06-20 09:28:30 UTC
This is a huge problem, and CCP are frankly overlooking it quite consistently.

Please add your support to this Assembly Hall thread, to try and get it fixed.

Perfection is a dish best served like wasabi .

Bumble's Space Log
Mazzy Star
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#6 - 2012-06-20 13:30:02 UTC
Equus wrote:
Is there something I am missing when it comes to dropped insignias regarding quantity? Running level 4 missions I get every wreck I can when fighting Amarr or Caldari to get the insignias yet at the rate they seem to drop, I will have well over a million LP's by the time I have enough insignias to get an item from the store that costs 80k LP's or less.

Is this working as intended or am I missing something?

I know I can buy them from the market but for many things I have found the cost of the tags on the market cost more then I can sell the redeemed item for.


If you can buy the item from the market for less than the cost to redeem it, you're either a) not finding the lowest price or b) dealing with an item that's typically produced via blueprints and you're buying it outright. Stop trying to find your own tags and use the market to get what you need. If a particular item is unprofitable due to tag prices, price out another item, and another item after that, until you find something with a good ISK/LP conversion ratio. Don't fall for the fallacy that if you find the tags yourself/mine it yourself/build it yourself it's somehow cheaper. It's not.

Quote:
This is a huge problem, and CCP are frankly overlooking it quite consistently.


Tags are expensive because of limited supply - so what? Why is this a huge problem? It's simple market forces in my mind, and when the price climbs high enough, faction missions may be worth it to more people due to the increased income from selling their tags. If they weren't profitable for building some items, there wouldn't be such a high demand for the tags and they wouldn't command such a high price.

TL;DR if a particular item is unprofitable or even a poor ISK/LP conversion, use your brains and buy it off the market. Find the best item for cashing out your LP and buy that instead.
Equus
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#7 - 2012-06-20 14:51:53 UTC  |  Edited by: Equus
Mazzy Star wrote:
Equus wrote:
Is there something I am missing when it comes to dropped insignias regarding quantity? Running level 4 missions I get every wreck I can when fighting Amarr or Caldari to get the insignias yet at the rate they seem to drop, I will have well over a million LP's by the time I have enough insignias to get an item from the store that costs 80k LP's or less.

Is this working as intended or am I missing something?

I know I can buy them from the market but for many things I have found the cost of the tags on the market cost more then I can sell the redeemed item for.


If you can buy the item from the market for less than the cost to redeem it, you're either a) not finding the lowest price or b) dealing with an item that's typically produced via blueprints and you're buying it outright. Stop trying to find your own tags and use the market to get what you need. If a particular item is unprofitable due to tag prices, price out another item, and another item after that, until you find something with a good ISK/LP conversion ratio. Don't fall for the fallacy that if you find the tags yourself/mine it yourself/build it yourself it's somehow cheaper. It's not.

Quote:
This is a huge problem, and CCP are frankly overlooking it quite consistently.


Tags are expensive because of limited supply - so what? Why is this a huge problem? It's simple market forces in my mind, and when the price climbs high enough, faction missions may be worth it to more people due to the increased income from selling their tags. If they weren't profitable for building some items, there wouldn't be such a high demand for the tags and they wouldn't command such a high price.

TL;DR if a particular item is unprofitable or even a poor ISK/LP conversion, use your brains and buy it off the market. Find the best item for cashing out your LP and buy that instead.


Really? I love the witty TL;DR response. Not everything is about pure profit, some things just need to be balanced.

This isn't about ISK/LP conversion and profits, this is just me wanting an item for myself. Can you honestly say that to get say a Republic Fleet Afterburner, warning here since I am not in game I may be off on numbers, anyway the item takes I believe ~200 tags of varying sorts to redeem. On an average missions I may get lets say on average 10-15 tags, and usually within those tags I there are 3-4 varieties, so I get 1-3 each of different tags.

No, loyalty points, if I remember right, an afterburner is somewhere around 80k LP and on average you get around 3000 LP per mission. Now you also have to remember not every mission is going to be amarr, maybe 1 in 6 or 7 missions are against the amarr, whom you need to get not just afterburners but many items from the LP store. So to get the base LP needed to buy my item will take roughly 25 missions, give or take. out of those 25 I will get say 4-5 that are against the amarr so I have a chance for tags.

Are you with me so far?

Now, the tags I need for my item are 92 of tag 1, 70 of tag 2, and 56 of tag 3.pretend I got 15 tags per run so that is 75 tags, that's great, I should be getting really close! It can't take that long to get my tags, well remember the varieties? So I will be generous here, out of those 70 I recieved 3 of tag 3, 7 of tag 2, and 10 of tag 1. Let's take the best number here and go with the tag 1 scenario, I was able to get 10 tags in 25 missions, I need 80 more, so 80/10*25, so with luck I will be able to afford my lowly afterburner in somewhere around 200 more missions, not counting the rarer tags of course. Also remember that I believe I am being generous with some of my tag numbers as it is sheer luck of the draw.

Of course I can buy tags on the market but last I checked I believe even factoring in my current stash of tags it would have cost me over 100 mil ISK to buy the tags, not to mention the time sink of getting everything everything. Again I may be off on my numbers but in Rens small RF Afterburners start at 80 mil. So yes I am much smarter to just buy one on the market, I wall save myself a lot of time, but I shouldn't have to buy off the market, if I run a three hundred missions I think I should be able to by a small (read 1mn) afterburner with my own LP's and drops, without resorting to paying some exorbitant fee on the market.
Mazzy Star
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#8 - 2012-06-20 17:07:48 UTC
Quote:
but I shouldn't have to buy off the market

You don't have to. You can collect the tags yourself - it will just take a while. But why is that a problem? Who says every item in the LP store should be easy to collect the items for?

Just like if you want to build a T2 ship, you can try to metagame a way to get your hands on a tech moon, setup a POS for inventing the T2 BPC, and mine the ore yourself. Then you can build yourself a T2 ship. Is it easy to collect every single component yourself? No. Is that unfair? Is it outrageous that it's easier to just buy the T2 ship off the market or at least buy some of the components off the market in order to build it yourself?

[/quote]if I run a three hundred missions I think I should be able to by a small (read 1mn) afterburner with my own LP's and drops, without resorting to paying some exorbitant fee on the market.[/quote]

The market price isn't exorbitant. It's the price the market sets for that item. There's nothing unfair here. You just have some preconceived notion that you should be able to gather everything involved in producing an item yourself. The problem is that notion is unrealistic for every item in a game as complex as EVE.
Zhilia Mann
Tide Way Out Productions
#9 - 2012-06-20 17:17:08 UTC
Equus wrote:
if I run a three hundred missions I think I should be able to by a small (read 1mn) afterburner with my own LP's and drops, without resorting to paying some exorbitant fee on the market.


Sorry for snipping the rest, but your problem is right here: smalls are way out of whack. Because they do require tags, some of which are required for mediums as well, their prices are pretty much always higher than the deadspace C- and B-types. And the deadspace versions are better.

So yeah. I'll agree that the LP store is broken if we're talking about small modules. Not so much other sizes though.
Equus
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#10 - 2012-06-20 17:51:12 UTC
Mazzy Star wrote:
Quote:
but I shouldn't have to buy off the market

You don't have to. You can collect the tags yourself - it will just take a while. But why is that a problem? Who says every item in the LP store should be easy to collect the items for?

Just like if you want to build a T2 ship, you can try to metagame a way to get your hands on a tech moon, setup a POS for inventing the T2 BPC, and mine the ore yourself. Then you can build yourself a T2 ship. Is it easy to collect every single component yourself? No. Is that unfair? Is it outrageous that it's easier to just buy the T2 ship off the market or at least buy some of the components off the market in order to build it yourself?

if I run a three hundred missions I think I should be able to by a small (read 1mn) afterburner with my own LP's and drops, without resorting to paying some exorbitant fee on the market.[/quote]

The market price isn't exorbitant. It's the price the market sets for that item. There's nothing unfair here. You just have some preconceived notion that you should be able to gather everything involved in producing an item yourself. The problem is that notion is unrealistic for every item in a game as complex as EVE. [/quote]

I understand where you are coming from, and I definitely know there are options, I just feel that the LP store is off if you can potentially buy a fleet stabber or if your luck is really bad a fleet pest before you can buy a small afterburner, it just doesn't seem right to me. Yes there are plenty of options out there and many different ways to accomplish and acquire things in the sandbox of Eve, but just because there are alternatives doesn't mean something that is off/broken/wonky should not be looked at.

Anyway, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.