Create the Content You Want to See (and some ideas for creating conflict in Lifeblood)

In the first half of 2017--the last time, for the foreseeable future, I would be working from home--I did more solo roaming than I ever have in my 6 years of playing EVE. I took advantage of my flexible hours and lost about 20 ships in solo PVP per month (you know you are a solo PVPer in EVE when you measure your success by your monthly losses). That's, comparably, not very much for many active solo PVPers, but a lot for me given time constraints. I primarily roamed the north, from Verge Vendor LS to Pandemic Horde NS space and surrounding areas via the rarely camped RQH entrance. Later, I returned to Thera and roamed null if there were decent connections. 


I would say 50% of the time I roamed to northwestern null I got good fights before getting blobbed into oblivion (thanks, of course, to all the people and groups who've PVPed me!). Many of my best fights were against players or groups roaming Horde space, not from Horde themselves (I often compare fighting Horde to fighting Concord. You can snag a few kills but it is hard-programmed into the game that you will die). I have dozens of fights recorded on OBS and I'd like to someday edit them for youtube, but this post is about something different, it's about what I constantly encountered on my way there.

While solo roaming as much as I could before taking on a more normal working schedule, I was "staging" from my market hub in Jufvitte, High Sec. I saw many of the same people in space in HS, from EVE UNI to war deccers preying on (or dying to) EVE UNI, to afk miners, to mission runners. I saw dozens citadels and ECs go up each week, and dozens go inactive. There was some local conflict--such as EVE UNI's wars against HS "war deccers" and their POCOs--but not many.

I love the concept of "local conflict" in all areas of EVE--the idea that a group of players (sometimes new players, sometimes vets) can live in a location in some area of space and consider it their own, and run into conflict with another group of players who live there (or want to live there) and compete for the limited resources. "World wars" in EVE are cool--such as the currently dubbed "blue donut war"--but often the small conflicts have the more interesting stories, and content that does not escalate to massive super/capital brawls. "Local conflict," though, almost always requires competition over limited resources, and as a result I am a huge proponent of CCP always looking to add limitations to resources. Single systems that can sustain hundreds of players, for instance, stifles content. POCOs are limited resources, moon mining refineries are/will be limited resources, market hubs are relatively limited resources, and so on. Are there stories of a small (10-30) player corporation waging war against another small local group in competitive for some resource? It happens occasionally in null--although small, unaffiliated groups are almost nonexistent--but not often. It is also rare in LS and HS. Perhaps it is most common in wormholes, where two small groups might compete for a specific hole. I wish I knew more stories of local conflict, in any case.


I am a strong advocate of creating the content you want to see, rather than passively sitting by waiting for a war to develop. In the spirit of "creating the content you want to see," I've tried to do as much as possible as a mere solo player, and often with the goal of creating conflict or interesting content. I took my own POCOs, I destroyed starbases, I put up my own market and industry hub (more on this in the next post). Solo PVP itself is a way of creating content--sometimes for myself, usually for others.

One day in mid summer, I was using an alt to ship scan citadels and ECs to record which were active, which had services and modules fit, as part of my citadel/EC research project (more on this next). I noticed a Proteus slow-boating off the undock of my Azbel. 30 minutes later the Proteus was still there, off-tether, so I ship scanned him. 6b in modules fit according to EVE Prasial at the time; a paper-thin mission running active tank that could be killed by three tornados or, maybe, 5 thrashers. I had neither. But I started paying attention, combat scanning and ship scanning all over, and AFK players in expensive ships were everywhere. And I thought: someone should take advantage of this.

Well, I did. The kill itself isn't really important--though it is always nice to make isk off PVP--but it got me thinking about how much content is out in space, waiting, drifting around, and how much could be created.


Lifeblood brings new content, new structures, new mechanics, and (maybe) new opportunities for conflict. Will Lifeblood's change to moon mining bring more "local" conflict? Will it bring conflict at all? This remains to be seen, for one based on how unevenly distributed the moon minerals are, and two, based on the overall supply refineries provide. Here, then, are my current ideas for creating content and conflict:
 
1. What if someone created a public freeport refinery in low sec on a moderately valuable open moon and made the moon extraction timer public? Assuming the price of the M refinery drops to sub-600m then dropping a bunch of refineries all over LS and making them public wouldn't be too costly, and might make interesting conflict when/if people try to mine the field. Or, at least, it would give groups something to blow up, which would give other groups an opportunity to counterdrop. So, the first idea I have for creating content is to put up a bunch of freeport refineries in active LS and make the extraction dates public. At the very least--if no one comes to mine or even destroy--I guess I will have to train some mining alts and grab the valuable goo. Win/win?

2. Are there ways of exploiting the new mining sites? Some players were at first unhappy that ganking miners in the sites would be near impossible with the sites having a small cap on who can enter--almost "instanced" PVE areas. I am not going to let that stop me, and in the spirit of EVE even if it is not profitable or sensible in any way, I will find a way to gank miners in these sites--just on principle. However, are there ways of exploiting mechanics in the sites? For instance, can the Orca be killed? Can the friendly NPCs that help players be killed? I need to test this. For science.

3. Pirate Forward Operating Bases. One of the more unknown parts of Lifeblood. Will FOBs, if left unchecked, disrupt high sec life in any meaningful way? You can see they are already being run in HS because they generate loss mails, collected here. You can also keep track of players these NPCs have killed by looking at the HS losses for blood raiders and guristas here. There is a fantastic write-up on reddit about how Spectre fleet destroyed the first of each type. Ganking groups that attempt to run the sites might be a possibility--if, that is, anyone ever regularly runs them. There's a possibility a very bling marauder can solo them, which is something I may consider testing out.

Other ideas?

Oh, and way back in 2014 I was up to a 2.6b isk bounty. After years of hard work (dying), I have finally reduced that number to zero. Kinda bummed about it actually.

Market Milestones: A 40b isk Month, Progress Past 600b, and a more interesting Economy

Market Trade in 2017

I was feeling nostalgic this week, reading some of my original posts about market trading back in 2014 when I was just playing with a few billion isk and a t1 hauler. I'd haul things like 4 stealth bombers and some damage controls to a faction war hub or system that bordered null sec, and was amazed when I was able to PLEX my accounts via isk in just the first month. Almost four years later, and I still find the markets in EVE an incredibly fascinating experiment, and still tune into Delonewolf's weekly EVE Talk when I update my orders, or Roedyn's Station Trading twitch stream (and still really miss EVE Prosper's weekly show, RIP). Nowadays, I'm more interested in the market and economy-qua-experiment than I am in making isk. But, the isk basically makes itself, often in spite of my terrible trading habits. When I first wrote a guide to regional trading, I wrote:

        That's the catch with regional trading: it is very long term and heavily dependent on how much   

        you invest into it, particularly if you do not want to micromanage your markets.

We hit 600b in total profits this month (that's like one good weekend for Rita Jita). I'm probably the worst trader in EVE, like an economist who is personally terrible at investing or making good economic decisions. Nah, I like the theories, the meta-, the meta-meta- questions, the social psychology and virtual world that is the game's economy, and I have Ramen Noodles and boxed wine for dinner (a wild weekend for me in EVE is losing a few ships in solo PVP).

 

A 40b Isk Month in May - How it Happened

My prior record for profits in one month was 33b back in February 2016, the month skill injectors were released. Last May I hit 42b due, this time, to PLEX (with a bit of help from working from home that month and having more time to play):

May's breakdown was: 20b from PLEX, 22b from normal regional trade. Of that regional trade, around 8b was from the Jufvitte market hub project, and the other 16b from the rest of the regional market hubs I stock here and there. With no traditional summer expansion and a rather deep "summer slump" in activity, I am honestly surprised I made so much casual trade profit in the quiet summer economy. From August to August, this puts me at around 200b for the year.

The top two splits in the pie chart breakdown are plex and injectors, at around 32b each (aka 32,000 million), while the rest of the profits are distributed fairly even across various items sold at regional hubs. If you can buy plex or injectors when "low" and sell when "high," it is free isk--but how do we predict when the are low and when they will be high? In 2017 it was easier than usual.

The PLEX split was announced in March, and released shortly after, putting upward pressure on PLEX prices for a few reasons. Sheer speculation was probably the main driving factor, but the split and removal of AUR increased the uses of PLEX itself. The lack of a traditional summer expansion being released may have also contributed to the PLEX rise, as there was not a large influx of players trying out or returning to EVE and buying and selling PLEX to jump start their play.

Ghost training was increasingly discussed on the forums and r/eve and used as a main example of CCP's slow reaction to game-breaking bugs, mechanics, and exploits. Most people assumed CCP would imminently remove it, but it wasn't until June that it will formally declared an exploit. Yet this caused massive speculation on both injectors as well as PLEX, as some SP farmers tried to liquidate their stocks while many others invested in injectors for the inevitable spike.

What will the RMT markets do now that "winter is coming," with the large (and only) expansion of the year coming around November? Adam4EVE's graphs on market trends suggests why I think both plex and, following, injectors will rise. PLEX volumes spiked in mid-late summer with a massive PLEX sale, reigning in the spiking price that seemed to be fast heading to 4m per unit.

Now that the volumes of PLEX are dropping back down, the price is slowly climbing back up. Barring another huge PLEX sale from CCP in winter, I'd expect PLEX to slowly resume its climb to 4m per, or 2b for a month of game time. The only game change I could see stopping this would be a change to 0% tax market hubs or another nerf to anom income. The former change would lesson the ability to manipulate RMT prices without real cost, while the latter would reduce money supply. In the past few months, isk from bounties has dropped by 10%, while money supply has only plateaued. I would pay close attention to both graphs in the August and following economic reports (and sales from CCP), but from the looks of it, I'd say PLEX will be near 4m and L injectors close to 1b in early 2018.

In August I was mostly unable to play EVE. Traveling and moving left me without a computer that could run the game. Yet I still made 15b or so. A large reason for this was rapid price changes across the economy--too many interesting changes to discuss. For instance, T3Ds doubled and for a few days tripled in price, and were reliably selling at those percentages. They sat at 30m almost all summer and each month I stocked up on more. Investing in them was a no-brainer: they are used tons in large fleets (e.g., jackdaws), as well as solo and small gang, as well as in PVE (exploration, wormholes), and some of their mats are used in other ships that were getting re-balanced. So, if you are wondering what to invest it for the upcoming winter expansion (or the next summer or winter expansions for 2018 if you are feeling really speculative), think about the following formula: What are materials or items that are already good to trade, which will be more in demand with higher player activity, which may also see a period of low supply as producers or gatherers work to catch up to demand?

How Much Trade can LS/HS Player Hubs Capture? My Test at Owning a Market Hub (pt.2 in my Citadel/EC Series)

In my first post in this series about Citadels/ECs, I covered broad statistics about their usage, ownership, and proliferation. The findings of that post were simple: 1) There's a ton of them piling up in HS/LS, 2) even more in NS/WHs, 3) many of them are inactive, and 4) the current 3-timer system stifles most conflict and needs change.

In this post I am going to get more specific (and interesting?) and talk about player market hubs. I'm also going to cover an experiment I've done over the past few months that attempts to test just how much of a market player hubs can capture, and how profitable they (theoretically) could be for both trade and tax. The experiment is not about making isk but capturing trade away from NPC hubs and seeing if a market hub obviously  owned by 1 player will create any conflict. (More on the latter in pt.3 of this series.)

Market Hubs

This is the important part about the new structures, right? Except for low tax industry, market hubs are where all the money is made in the new structures--not just in market taxes, but in having a market hub where you and your alts get low/no tax. Before we can talk about the market hubs included in the sample we have to set out some basic metrics for comparing player hubs them to NPC systems/stations. Here's how I think about the hub tier list in EVE:

Jita is in a class of its own, to be fair, and can't really be compared to another other hub NPC or player. The next most active market hubs are "S"-tier. They mostly do not allow player hubs to be built in system and are in roughly the top-five or top-ten on the station trading rank. Many players do their primary trading at S tier hubs like Dodixie and Amarr, for instance. Just in terms of number of orders, the biggest player hubs just barely reach S-tier, if at all. By amount of isk traded the hubs in Perimeter do, but that's just in virtue of the amount of PLEX and Injectors traded there, not total ships and equipment. A few null sec player hubs reach S tier but none of them are currently public. Trading in null hubs is, of course, super profitable, but requires a character in the respective alliance.

The A-tier set of hubs represents the top 5-30 or so trading hubs in game by volume, isk totals, and number of orders. These are hubs where regional traders often thrive and see good movement on orders with decent margins. Probably only a half-dozen player hubs currently (May-July 2017) reach A to low-S tier trade levels: The hubs in Perimeter, Maurasi and other hubs 1-2 jumps from Jita, a few hubs one jump from Amarr, and a few null hubs. Most of these systems can house player markets, though, and represent a significant space in which player hubs could, if stocked, take a large portion of the isk traded. Player hubs in such systems stand to potentially capture much more by players if dedicated traders moved in.

What I would call B-tier hubs represent roughly the top 20-150 NPC hubs. They are active areas of regional trade like mission hubs, FW and LS hubs, and regional bottlenecks, and often have high margins but, depending on the goods, lower velocity. There are about 30-50 player hubs that could be included in this category based on number of orders and volume. What I would call C-tier hubs are basically everywhere else, and profit depends on a highly case by case basis.


How Much Trade can Player Hubs Capture?

What is valuable about player market hubs, of course, is that they have significantly less taxes than NPC hubs, and theoretically no taxes such as if you own the structure. Before player hubs, serious traders would grind (or pay for someone else to grind) their NPC standings up to above 8-9.0 in order to get 1-2% lower taxes. Even just 1% lower taxes adds up in the long run. If you list 100b of items in an NPC hub in a month, dropping a few percent of the taxes can save you a few billion. Moving to a player hub with, say, zero or 0.1% tax likewise ends up saving a few extra billion a month if your volumes and margins stay the same. Considering that some top traders list trillions of isk of items a month, a few percent savings ends up meaning a great deal.

I'm not really a serious trader--more of a lazy one--but I do like efficiency. Switching to player hubs with 1% tax or less saves me roughly 1-2b isk a month in taxes currently, and theoretically could save me upwards of 5b in taxes or more if I only traded out of low tax hubs during max trade months. The difficulty, though, is attracting as many buyers as the nearby NPC hubs.
 
Market Hub Experiment

Goal: Own a HS market hub as a solo player and capture, with other player hubs, as much of the
           system and regional trade as possible with the amount of orders I can field
Secondary Goals: Create conflict?
Time Investment: Restocking and updating orders only once a week (specifically: on Saturday or Sunday I watch DeLoneWolf's EVE talk episode on youtube, and during this hour or so I am able to update most of the orders.)
Start Date: Mid-April
End Date: Whenever it gets destroyed or whenever I get sick of updating orders

If you can capture the majority of trade in a system or region, more traders will sell at your hub, and more buyers will buy, more builders will build, and so on. There's a "snowball" effect, in that there seems to be a critical mass of orders that prompt a lot of people to switch to buying from a player hub. Because of the ability to get little to no tax, most player hubs are focused on "offshore" markets for RMT goods--PLEX, injectors, etc. However, hubs are slowly capturing more non-RMT goods trade. In June, for yet another month in a row, player hubs managed to capture around 1.0% more brokers fees compared to the previous month: 

If the trend continues, player hubs will capture 20% of brokers fees by early 2018.

I chose an odd region to set up a hub--Verge Vendor, and the system of Jufvitte. I've only ever traded a few select items in this region, but I thought it would be an interesting place for a hub because 1) there is no central market hub, 2) there's already some player hubs which capture a lot of trade, 3) EVE UNI and some other active groups live nearby, 4) I roam the LS part of VV and often roam north to Horde space from this area. However, VV is not a great place to trade if your goal is to make isk. Market activity in the region is overall very low, but my goal in setting up a hub is to capture trade and see if it creates conflict, not really to make great isk. The other important factor is that I cannot update orders more than once per week, so a slower trade region works better for my goal.  


In regional hubs, the ability for players to hit "buy all" and shop at one location matters sometimes more than the prices. More players will buy a 10-20% higher isk Rail/Blaster Comet fit in FW LS if they can hit "buy all" at a station, as opposed to saving a few million isk at most by having to fly all over for the items. The same can be said for mining ships, haulers, and so on.

As a result, I use one character's 300 total orders to sell essential ships and equipment at basically Jita prices in my player hub, along with another set of 100 orders or so that actually make me isk. The idea is that in order for players to buy my one item 20% over Jita prices, I need to incentivize shopping at a player hub by selling all the other modules they need in the same place and at low prices.

For the market hub, I used an Azbel and also set up manufacturing and research at basically no tax--and partly to have a more vulnerable hub to, again, try to create conflict. EVE UNI has a campus one jump away and the region has rookie/career agent system, so I partly wanted the industry available to them or people building for them in mind. I set up the market hub at .2% tax consistent with other hubs in the region, then later lowered it just .1%. Other market hub owners were not supportive of the tax rate getting lowered even more. I don't make much isk off the taxes (maybe 50m a month?) and the fuel comes out to something like 1b a month--but, again, I am saving around 1b in taxes that I would be paying if I traded out of an NPC hub.

You can see the exact day I put up the hub. I do research BPOs there, but I usually forget about them for days or weeks, so it is interesting to see the industry side actually getting used.

There's another reason I chose this system/region to set up a solo market hub--there was already a market hub in system which has had a stable 1500 sell orders for most of 2017. While I could afford to inject a bunch of SP into alts to get to that many orders myself, my bottleneck is time to play EVE.

In total, then, the other player hub has 1500 orders and my hub ("Market and Industry" below) has around 500 out of the total (sell) 3000 orders in system. That puts player hubs at around 2/3rds of the sell order numbers in system. So I am kind of cheating in my experiment, given that another player hub is capturing far more of the trade in the system/region than I am can.

Profits / Times orders were updated:
April: 7.3b / 4 updates
May: 6.42b / 4 updates
June: 5.53b / 3 updates

So with around 500 orders updating only once a week (and missing a week in June) the hub made on average 6.4b a month. Profit has been declining largely due to the drop in activity in game. In terms of time spent, that's around 700m per hour, but I was also multitasking (hauling goods on a second account and listening to EVE Talk). The other player hub in system updated orders much more frequently than I did, so I would estimate that they made at least (if not decently more) 3x the amount of isk given they had around 3x the orders. If that player hub was just one person trading on many accounts, that's a good 15-18b isk a month at least (granted with considerably more time invested each month). How much more profitable would player hubs be in regions that are not terrible for trade?

My market hub was just a small solo experiment in a region bad for trade but convenient for me at the time in game. Ratting in a super, multiboxing 50 rorquals in Delve, or aggressively station trading in Jita are more profitable--insanely more. But those activities just don't fit my super casual playstyle.

Last up in this series--and really the entire point of it--covers Citadels/ECs as conflict generators. Market hubs owned by solo or small groups are all over. They generate isk, but what about any conflict? And if not, why?

Statistics on Citadel, EC, and Market Hub Use and Ownership (and a small study)

tl;dr : over the past few months I've been collecting info on Citadel/EC use and their impact on the economy and conflicts in EVE. In short:

• Players are using market hubs in almost all regions and collecting around 12% of trade, but largely in RMT (PLEX, Injectors, and Extractors) buying and selling, with market hubs capturing an added 1% more trade each month
• However, when well-stocked, some regional market hubs have been able to capture over 50% of system trade volume in LS/HS systems
• A significant number of market hub owners in HS (outside markets near Jita/Amarr) are small groups or solo players, and probably highly vulnerable to destruction by small groups and up
• Based on a small random study I did, probably at least 10-20% of structures in HS are abandoned/inactive during the past month (of April), as a conservative estimate
• There's very little incentive to destroy Citadels/ECs (except for strategic purposes especially in NS/WHs) and as a result very, very few die in LS and HS and, as a result, abandoned/inactive ones are piling up extremely quickly
• As a result, CCP should probably reduce the number of timers on Astras and Raitarus (except those in HS?) to only 2, like wormholes--or they should remove/nerf asset safety. Or both.

~ Don't read further unless you like words or are super interested in Citadel/EC usage statistics  ~

_____________________________

Citadels have now been in EVE for one year (the Citadel expansion having been released on April 27th, 2016). Engineering Complexes are newer, at only 6 months, but nearly already even more prolific. These new structure have completely shaken up the meta of living in space and generating content--and in some ways not for the good. I am interested in the stats for these structures: How much are they being used? How often are they being destroyed? Who owns them? Are they generating conflict, or stifling it? Do they make much money--and if so, who is making that isk?

Some of this info is fairly public--such as the number of new structured destroyed on zkill. First, then, we are going to look at stats CCP released at fanfest on new structure use. Second, we are going to look at the fantastic data compiled on Adam4EVE's structure statistics page. However, some of it is hard, if not impossible for mere players to acquire. For instance, ownership of structure and data on non-public Citadels and ECs.To try and get an overall picture that might answer some of these more interesting questions, I did a semi-random study on Citadel/EC use specifically in high security space.

Before I talk about the methodology and results, it is worth looking over the stats CCP shared about structure use during fanfest:

In terms of total structures online, a few things stand out to me. Raitarus are quickly becoming more popular than Astrahuses and should probably overtake them in total numbers in 4-6 months, and likewise for Azbels compared to Fortizars. Yet there is a surprising number of Fortizars online. At roughly 15b a piece, you are looking at a base value of over 18 trillion isk in just Fortizars in space as of March. Keep in mind that one of CCP's original goals was to make these new structures worth having, for almost every player or play style. Given the sheer number online thus far I would say they have succeeded (more on this later).

Networks of Citadels are increasingly common, especially as a way of safely moving capitals and jump freighters across the map. CCP has in the past voiced displeasure at how safely cynos work on Citadels, as well as with how overpowered tethering is (more on this later).

These numbers are probably to be expected. Citadels are super popular everywhere except LS, but even there they are fairly common. These numbers do not reflect where Citadels/ECs are destroyed, though. On any given day the majority of Citadels and ECs are destroyed in null, followed by wormhole space and LS, followed by HS last. The average in wormholes is roughly 1.2 per system, though obviously not evenly distributed (however, I've been hard pressed to find many wormholes without an Astrahaus in them lately).

So when we compare the number of structures online to the number destroyed thus far, do we get a balanced split? The cost and commitment of destroying these structures is in almost every case (barring trade hubs in systems like Perimeter) not at all worth it outside of WH space. An enemy Astrahus in null is a headache for attackers but a powerful staging platform for attackers or harassers. In many cases, all a staging Astrahus needs is a clone bay to perfectly function as a staging or move OP Citadel, making them even less worth being destroyed and less costly to deploy.

The final graph from fanfest is the most interesting. POSes apparently sat at 30% of all player industry in late 2016, but within just 2 months after release ECs had already surpassed that percentage. Since then, ECs have captured roughly 80% of player industry, and Citadels about 2% from the looks of it. "Legacy" industry POSes remain at 10% of player industry (this 10% from POSes probably represents a few LS capital shipyards with Thukker Arrays, which have not been replaced for ECs yet, and some industry POSes in HS that are running final months of jobs). The remaining industry in stations? A large majority of it is in Jita, and in career agent systems. (Career agent systems always have a high number of jobs per hour due to the industry career agents and tutorial.)

Let's look at one more graph, this one from March 2017's economic report:

And here's the April chart for comparison:

With the May chart slowing but still seeing an increase in player hub trade captured:

Though we still see some 90% of the brokers fee going to NPC stations, we also see 10-12%, or 1.3t-1.5t isk, occurring in player hubs. April saw a transfer of another 1% of broker tax to player hubs, and May 0.5%, and it will be interesting to see if that trend continues. We (think we) know (assuming the info is accurate) that market hubs in Perimeter can make around 300b per month in taxes, which is consistent with the economic reports. I would assume player market hubs all around Jita make at least 500b total per month, and hubs around Amarr another 100-200b. There are a few other player hubs in or near other systems, including LS and NS, that probably make another decent chunk of that 1.3t in March and, comparably, other months. This is one of the main questions I set out to get some evidence about: Where are the other player hubs, who owns them, who fights over them (if anyone), and what is the likely trade volume there? The other sources of service fees to players do not even approach the brokers fee even when all combined. Industry tax, clones, reprocessing, etc., together barely reach half of the market hub profit, even with nearly two-thirds of industry fees now going to players, industry is more of an incentive to get other players to use your market hub.

Let's first look at Adam4EVE's statistics on market hubs. Across all of EVE, there are around 450 public or semi-public Market Hubs in game, as of early May, 2017. The earliest ones date back to November, 2016, and the most recent were put up on the day this information was collected. The vast majority of these hubs are in High Security space. As of April, player markets are selling around 20t isk in sell orders and have up around 8t in buys. Interestingly though, a good half of all market hubs have no sell or buy orders at all, and just 10 or so have over 1k sell orders. Large isk buy orders are most popular--of course, meaning buy orders for PLEX and injectors. With few hubs having a large amount of sell orders, it is apparent that not many players have chosen to sell materials, ships, and equipment in player hubs on a large scale, but the overall trends suggest that sell order volume and isk amount are both increasing.

Adam4EVE's data is extremely useful and worth spending hours looking over if you're into that sort of thing (i.e. graphs), but it doesn't tell us some key factors about Citadel/EC market hubs: Who owns them? Are the majors hubs owned by a single cartel or is there evidence smaller groups own them? Do they get destroyed, or attacked, and what kind of isk do hubs outside of the Jita/Amarr areas make? Also, and not just for market hubs, how many structures are likely inactive? A significant amount of market hubs have zero orders--does that mean they are used for other purposes, or have their owners left EVE or taken a long leave?

A Small Study on Citadel/EC Use -
Methodology:

To get some evidence about these questions, I took a semi-random* sample of 50 systems in high security space and searched for all “Upwell” structures in each system (Citadels and Engineering Complexes). I recorded the name of the corp/alliance holding the structure, the number of players in the corp/alliance, and I also recorded whether the structure had any fueled services active (in cases where the structure had such info public, i.e., if the structure itself was public). (I also recorded upcoming vulnerability timers for ~non-scientific purposes~) I researched public databases (zkill and evewho) to see whether the corp/alliances are (plausibly) active or (possibly) inactive. I recorded every market hub and used Adam4EVE's data to record the number of market orders and share of the market volume in the system. Then, I came back to the structures one month later to see if their activity had changed (e.g., to see if structures that had active services still had them).

*About the sample: In order to get interesting results I excluded systems at both ends of the extreme range of high sec systems. I excluded from the sample systems one jump from Amarr and one jump from Jita, like Perimeter—a very special system—because the massive amount of upwell structures would highly skew the final results. I also excluded high sec systems that are in “high sec islands,” i.e. high sec systems that are cut off from the main body of Empire high sec by low security systems, and including Solitude. These systems are less popular but also attract a special type of nomadic player and I did not want this end of the range skewing the sample either. The final sample is basically “your average high sec system," The sample includes everything from systems with less than 5 jumps in the last hour I visited, to a few “mid/high-tier” trade hubs, to systems that border low/null security systems, to mission running hubs, and so on.

The Interesting Results: 

Total Activity/Inactivity, Public/Private:

• In total, the 50 HS systems contained 198 Citadels/ECs, 
• 87 of the Citadels/ECs were private, i.e. around 40% give or take some that were temporarily private 
• Of those that were public, 42 of the 111 public structures had no active services. Of those 42, 25 still did not have active services after one month when I re-checked their status. 
• Based on the above, a reasonable conservative estimate is that roughly 10-15% of structures in HS are inactive during any given month, and probably a lot higher (by 10-20%).
• In all the systems sampled, there were only 14 active POSes.
• In all of the 50 systems sampled, only 2 system lacked any Citadels or Engineering Complexes whatsoever. 
• The most densely packed system had 18 total Citadels/ECs 
• One month later, I re-checked all systems, and 52 Citadels/ECs were added and only 2 removed
• In all 50 of the systems sampled, only 2 Citadels/ECs were destroyed since the Citadel expansion in 2016 to May 2017 (13 months). Both kills seemed to be a purge of inactive structures (no modules fitted).  
• (A net total of 50 Citadels/ECs added per month would mean these 50 systems would have around 750 Citadels/ECs by 2018, but there's no way to tell how many will be added on average each month.)

Market Hub Activity:

• In the 50 systems sampled, there were 11 active market hub (6 Forts, 5 Azbels)
• In all of the systems sampled, only 1 had a market hub (Fortizar or Azbel) owned by a primarily PVP-focused entity (in this case, a null sec group that lived many regions away).
• 1 group owned 3 market hubs; 1 group owned 2
• The highest total market share for player hubs in one system (in terms of total number of buy+sell orders) was 45% at the highest point during the study

Future Improvements:

Alright, so what stands out to me is that only a tiny fraction of Citadels/ECs are getting destroyed relatively to the number put up. They are piling up fast and not generating much content at all. Just from the number of decently upvoted and commented R/EVE posts in the past month (May/June) there's a huge amount of dissatisfaction with Citadel/EC timer mechanics at the moment (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). There's lots of proposed solutions but the general consensus is that the mechanics that stifle conflict are either 1) the 3-timer + off-timezone + damage cap system of destruction, or 2) asset safety, or both.

For 1), I think the solution is fairly uncontroversial. Citadels/ECs should use wormhole timer mechanics. 2 timers, back to back. Maybe Citadels/ECs in HS should retain the 3-timer system, and maybe Keepstars as well? Those are fringe cases, though. It shouldn't take 3-timers, in Aussie timezones with damage caps, across an entire week to destroy a single, undefended, 550m isk (R) / 950m isk (A) structure. Period.

For 2), In my opinion based on destroying Citadels/ECs solo and in groups (more on this in future posts), removing asset safety entirely would be justifiable, but perhaps too extreme. It would push too many players away from using Citadels/ECs (a bad thing) and toward NPC stations, driving players back to the safety of NPC space. However, even if asset safety stays outside of wormholes, more can be done to increase the incentive for players to destroy Citadels/ECs, and primarily: increase the salvage amounts, espeically relative to rigs, and/or make blueprints in build part of the drop/destroyed loot table. Base salvage should be increased, and if rigs are fit, salvaging should drop substantially more based on the material requirements for rigs added in. If something like 40-50% of base material costs dropped in salvage, destroying inactive structures would at least have a small isk incentive. Blueprints in use in the structure would make destroying industrial structures much like destroying labs/arrays in POSes, adding in the same risk/reward as the legacy system.

Phew, that was a lot of words. Upcoming (shorter!) posts in this series include my experiment in setting up a market hub as a solo player, and my experience destroying Citadels/ECs for potential profit (obviously, there isn't any) or fights (not much either!).

That feel when you think CCP is making necessary (but lazy) changes yet the community is going insane

So, I've been in the process of doing a super long study into Citadel/EC usage statistics for a post here. It has taken we way too long. That post is almost done, but I wanted to chime on the current, can-only-be-described-as shit-storm on R/EVE (and the forums, not that people really visit them nowadays).

CCP has made a number of necessary changes to EVE in the past week. Certainly not ideal changes to the underlying problems, but necessary, given how deep some of the problems go; and expedient, given that they did not require much dev time. Lazy is how I would describe the "fixes."

First, CCP once again nerfed Rorqual mining, and this time nerfed the spawn rate of mining anoms. Let's be fair, anyone who objectively looks at the mineral markets and the amount being mined in certain regions would agree that a fix was needed to keep the economy healthy. In my opinion (similar to EVE Prosper's) the problem with Rorqual mining was not cheap minerals (that's fairly win-win except for newbros), but the scaling. Any activity in EVE that can be done semi-AFK is going to be open for abuse and should probably be made more active.


CCP Soundwave (rip) once called for a war on passive isk. Sadly he left and the current tenure of EVE devs decided to release a capital mining ship that mines just as passively as mining barges. Anything that can be done passively to make isk will be exploited to the maximum extent by players running as many accounts as their computer can handle. A better fix to the Rorqual would have been to keep the mining levels at their original released level, but to make Excavators like Fighters, requiring actively clicking at least a few times every minute to mine (and shouldn't all mining require or at least involve active gameplay to get maximum isk? One would think). Multiboxing more than 1 Rorqual should have been humanly impossible from the start. Instead, we got players naturally running 10+ Rorqs while still watching Netflicks, and as a result CCP implemented a necessary but self-induced nerf to their mining amount and mining anom spawn rate. Lazy is the best word I can use to describe this change.

Second, CCP nerfed Fighter damage, and made it more likely NPCs will shoot fighters. As a solo PVPer I think Fighers apply far too well to BS and lower targets, but their DPS when applying is probably OK. There's virtually no sig tanking their DPS (even in an AB Succubus), and that destroys the line between capitals and sub-caps. Nerfing Fighter DPS in my view is once again a lazy fix to a problem that requires changing. The problem of course is that EVE's primary isk sink (NPC bounties) is absolutely out of control.

The isk facuet graph is the main one people are pointing to to indicate the problem of null sec anoms. Bounty prizes have completely outpaced every other isk facuet and isk sink in game. However, there's a more important graph.

Money supply is more important than pure isk sinks. After all, if 100% of the isk from sinks was being destroyed, there would be no issue how much isk was entering the game. Instead, money supply is the issue. And money supply has absolutely skyrocketed and is only speeding up.


What does high liquid isk do to the game? First off, it raises PLEX and injector prices. Why? People who have a lot of liquid isk need a place to park that isk. Having 100b+ in your wallet is both dangerous and stupid. Dangerous because of the possibilities you misclick an order or contract and lose billions to a scam. Stupid because isk sitting in your wallet makes zero profit. Historically, players "park" isk in PLEX and, now, injectors. They are one of the few goods on the market that sees real inflation. T1, T2, T3 ships and modules have not seen virtually any inflation in the 6 years I've played. Neither has almost any other good expect PLEX and, now, injectors. So the smart thing to do--and indeed the only non-super-speculative thing to do--with hundreds of billions of isk, is to park it in PLEX.

I parked 200b isk in PLEX when it was sub-1b about a year ago, and another 100b in injectors when they dropped below 575m (lol) in November 2016. As expected, both rose, and I sold off stocks of both to make a mindlessly easy 100b in profit or so. When PLEX and injectors are at a 1 year low, give or take, I'll probably start to park 400-500b in them, repeating the cycle once again.

High PLEX and injector prices are not necessarily bad for the game. Look at it from this perspective: the higher PLEX goes, the more a measly 15 bucks will get you in game. Most people don't feel that way. High prices are bad for the players who view PLEXing their account via in-game earnings as essential to their playstyle--and, if R/EVE is any sign of how the playerbase views high PLEX prices, players freak the hell out when PLEX goes higher. It also creates a bad perception for new players. Making 1m isk an hour mining in a venture seems much less significant when PLEX is at 2b compared to when it is sub-1b, even if, realistically, new players would be better off not trying to PLEX their account with isk for a long time.

Second, though, the higher liquid isk gets, the more EVE suffers from what I would call the "Planetside problem." The Planetside problem is that equipment, ships, and guns are trivially cheap, but there's no reason to log in to fight.Some back of the napkin math I did suggested that Goons could lose around 75 fleet fit Machs (and pre-spawn-nerf prices) a day and still be turning a profit from Rorqual mining and carrier ratting. 

Instead of putting a respawn timer on mineral sites--which do not directly add isk to the economy--why didn't CCP add respawn timers to ratting anoms, which add the majority of isk to the game? Running out of Sanctums and Havens in your system would mean having to move (gasp) to another system that you haven't depleted. It would mean players would have to (gasp) spread out and maybe move systems once and a while in order to keep ratting the best sites. CCP is once again, in my opinion, using a lazy fix to a deep problem. It won't hold. Players will switch to multiboxing rattlesnakes or super-boxed VNIs. I don't expect the isk faucet graph to go down relatively to average players logged in during the summer. Yes, it will slow down, because less people will be playing, but the Fighter nerf is only going to push some players to farming anoms with other ships.

Overall, I feel I'm in an awkward position. I think CCP is trying to fix some real problems in the game and economy, but doing so in completely lazy and lacking ways that ultimately won't fix the problems. On the other hand, the shit-storm players are raising on reddit is focused almost entirely on the fact that CCP is making any changes whatsoever to null mining and anom isk. Both sides are being intellectually lazy and going by knee-jerks reactions.

If you've been around EVE and R/EVE long enough, you'll know some of the posters there haven't played EVE in years, and others play R/EVE a lot more than the spaceship pewpew game the rest of us play on a weekly basis. If I were CCP I'd ignore them and pay attention to the feedback offered by the CSM and the quantitative data available, and I'd sure as hell try to create more long-term and sustainable solutions to the economic problems EVE is facing. 

Finding and Destroying POSes for ISK in Low and Null while doing Exploration (and a review of the POS-Phase out plan)

Way back in 2014 I stumbled upon an offline POS in high sec, owned by a corporation that, by the looks of it, had long since gone inactive. Being new to POSes, wardecs, and structures altogether, I decided to see what would happen if I declared war and attempted to blow up the structures. I learned a ton, and actually made a bit of isk, and in the process I started one of many side-hobbies I have in EVE involving combining traditional exploration with hunting for offline POSes.

I also had this silly completionist goal of visiting every system in EVE at least once, a goal that combined well with doing exploration sites and looking everywhere for POSes. Fast forward a year or so, and I had visited every system in High Sec at least once, and made many tens of billions on loot found from destroying starbase modules like Ship Maintence Arrays, Laboratories, Assembly Arrays, and even Reprocessing and Compression Arrays packed for of ore/minerals. I learned a ton about the game in the process, listened to probably 20+ audiobooks doing this casual exploration, and amassed over 1k kills on my Stratios I used for the activity. This activity also caught on, and I learned of many players who had even better success than I did at destroying POSes. (For example, check this group out: Mischief Managed. They were finding and destroying so many offline POS mods for a few months that I basically couldn't find any. I have no idea how they found so many, so quickly, and over such a large area.)

When I ran out of systems in High Sec to visit, naturally enough I've moved to searching and exploring Low Sec and now Null in 2016 and on. This actually works well, because that's where I PVP most anyway. I created a POS Mods dscan tab and started using it in every system as I roamed different regions. I was surprised to find quite a few offline POSes to pop just from checking dscan. One day passing through Heydieles, for instance, I noticed the moon mining POSes had gone offline--all 13 of them.

  

 This is likely going to be even more common over the next 6 months, partly because POSes tend to go offline during the "summer slumps" in EVE, but more so because CCP has announced some of the penultimate plans for phasing out old POSes. I'll talk about that more at the end. In this case, I fortunately had a 1k DPS Hecate nearby to quickly pop all of these moon mining structures. My hauler only collected around 500m in moon goo, so it wasn't really worth it. I expect in many cases owners of large-scale moon mining operations will simply let their farms go inactive, rather than undertaking the massive hassle of collective all of the remaining goo and modules. 

In other cases in LS/NS I've made a bit more isk in my finds, putting me closer to 100b isk made from the activity (not that it is great isk per hour, keep in mind!). This SMA dropped a few hundred million close to an NPC null station, and my "jackpot" so far was around a billion isk in capital blueprints and materials from this offline cap production POS:

 Here is my super-sophisticated map and checklist of regions I have now fully visited: 

HS and LS are fully covered, but I still have many small patches in many NS regions left to go. I think I will tackle that during the "summer slump" when action dies down elsewhere. Maybe I will find a few more final offline POSes to give this playstyle a final sendoff for me before POSes are removed. But this side-hobby I've had in EVE is largely at an end.

So what of the future? CCP has announced plans for phasing out structures: In May, starbase production module BPOs will no longer be seeded, and in August POSes will no longer give such bonuses to industry. Moon mining, reactors, and refineries will be disabled when the new Refinery Upwell structures are released sometime in winter of 2017, probably November. According to graphs released by CCP at fanfest, we've already seen a massive decline in the number of POSes used for industry (more on this in a future post).

The first few weeks when the new Refineries are added and the old are disabled is going to make for a very interesting scramble across LS/NS to re-establish moon mining operations, and potentially for new and smaller parties to get involved. (Some solo/small group players like Delonewolf have plans to try out a Refinery. I may give one a go as well.) I think it could mark a shake-up in LS. Potentially, it could allow for many smaller and some more industry-focused groups to carve out a piece of LS moons. Potentially, too, it could mark a transition of the Big Blue groups in LS to adopt a renter-style model of moon mining. I don't see Shadow Cartel doing much mining, but I do see them considering outsourcing the mining operations to a new style of LS renters.

Based on what CCP has said, I think we can expect POSes to be fully removed sometime in 2018--maybe summer or maybe winter. However, I think the main conflict drivers/content creating changes will be:


1. The completely new way in which groups will have to run moon mining, and

2. The conversion of outposts to faction Citadels. I think this could lead to a bunch of local wars across null in the weeks before the winter expansion, and could make for some super interesting content if large groups decide they want ownership of some or many of the faction Citadels.

The switch to Upwell structures means the burden is on them now--and not POSes--to provide a lot of content, and due to the long and off-timezone timers they are unfortunately not creating a lot of content. Many questions were asked about this at fanfest and CCP voiced some disfavor with how punishing the 3-timer, off-timezone system for structures is at the moment. A huge amount of conflict could be created if structures had slightly better self-defenses but, say, one less timer.

I am currently doing a small study on Citadel ownership and activity using data I am gathering myself. In upcoming posts I am going to talk about their current vulnerabilities, destroying them solo, and stuff like that, and later in the winter I will post more about the potential for solo or small groups to make use of the new refineries.  

Market Trading in EVE Ascension (or: grinding past 500b, setting new goals, maximizing efficiency, and some ideas for Alpha trading)

The last time I posted about market trading, the Citadel expansion had recently been released and offshore Citadel markets were already helping drive down the prices of PLEX and injectors. PLEX in early June, 2016, had fallen to an incredible 850m isk:

Daily SP rewards were implemented (remember when EVE had dailies?), offering around 300k SP a month if the played logged in every day to collect the reward, which put some downward pressure on the injector market while also lowering demand due to being an additional way to gain SP. Since then (over the last 8 months) PLEX prices slowly climbed back up to over 1.2b in November, and have since plateaued at 1.05b.

In spite of the massive economic changes that EVE has seen over the past few years--skill trading, Citadel markets, free-to-play, and so on--PLEX still follows a predictable path. However, PLEX is not where I've made most of my isk over the past few years, and I've only bought when it has dropped below 900m or so. Instead, injectors have made up around 40% of my trading profit over the past year.

Buy them low--ideally sub-600m--and sell them high--ideally over 650m. Since I do regional trading, incorporating injectors into my casual market took little added effort. The last time I posted specifically about my market trading gameplay was March 2016, the first month seeing skill injectors in game. I hit a record 33b isk in profit that month--on one character and just 300 market orders. Where do I stand now? Here's a really vague chart of the profit. This only includes my main trading alt--it doesn't include trade on second or third alts that I occasionally add, nor does it include special projects I've done, such as Thera trade, or more recently Alpha clone trading.

March 2016 was a proof-of-concept: How much isk could I make with just 300 orders? Turns out, I made about 105m isk for every 1 order. However, my goal in EVE isn't to make as much isk as possible. My goal is simply to have as much fun playing EVE when I log in as possible. Isk value is relative: Is 100m isk a lot per month? 1b? 10b? 100b? It depends entirely on your playstyle. However, time is (largely) not relative: Every player only has, at most, 23.5 hours a day to play EVE. We might all have different playstyles and we might all value isk differently, but an hour for me is just as long as an hour for you, and we all have an upper-limit on how much time we can play (and for many of us, obviously, it is far lower than 23.5 hours a day! Or even 23.5 hours a month!).

That all said, my goal since I started trading has not been to make as much isk as possible. Instead, my goal over the past 3 years has been: Make as much isk in as little as is time possible. So, while my average isk per month has not substantially changed over the past few years, the time I spend to make that isk has drastically plummeted. In 2014, I estimate I made around 300m isk per hour spent maintaining my regional markets, or around 10 hours per 3b isk, or around 30+ hours a month to maintain my 10b monthly average during this year. That's actually quite a lot of time spent, even if it is better than many other activities in EVE--especially if you compare it to what good station traders make. It took me time to find items to trade; it took me time to find where to sell the items; it took me time to haul the items in low amounts since I did not yet have the best ways of hauling available; it took me time to list the items--and so on.

Fast forward to the past 5 months (since July-August, when I was unable to log in much). I have continued to average over 10b isk a month trading (on my one main character). However, I've also kept track of how much time I've spent to make this isk maintaining my market and occasionally station trading in Jita: Around 4-5 hours per week (usually split into 2 2-hour play sessions per week). So, I make around 700m isk per hour spent trading (maintaining markets) now. My profits have largely not increased, but my efficiency has. And since I largely value my time more than I value my isk, that's the improvement I like to see.

In total now, this means I've passed the 500-600b isk mark. About 450b of that is from trade on my main trader, but around 100b or more of that is from destroying offline POSes (another update about this coming soon!), and then around 50b isk or so from exploration.

Finally, I've started a side-project since the release of Alpha clones. Can you make decent isk doing trade on Alphas only? They are very limited in total market orders, making regional and station trade fairly painful, and you can only have one Alpha logged in at once. However, there are two ways I've made over 2b isk in a month with Alpha trade.

The first involves using 3+ Alpha traders and taking advantage of limited edition items. Remember back when CCP released the Sunesis? I set up low regional buy orders on 3 Alpha clones in distant regions (Solitude, Syndicate, Placid, Stain, Curse, etc.). I managed to get a few dozen Sunesi(?) for less than 20m isk, and resell them for around 40m in the following week. The most time consuming part of this, though, was hauling the Sunesi. Instead, I decided to simply relist them a month later in the same regions for 3x the price, and have sold a few this way. So, my first tip for Alpha clone trading is to use your small order amount to trade in limited edition items. This is relatively time consuming and I much more so recommend a second method.

The second way I've done Alpha clone trading is buy selling high value, slow-moving items in null sec markets. 
1. Join a large null sec group that trains new players, such as Karmafleet, Horde, Brave, or Test. This is a great idea for Alpha players anyway, since joining such groups is often the best way to learn EVE.
2. Once you have your first billion or so isk (I know this step isn't very practical, but you can easily make 1-2b isk in such groups doing anoms in a VNI or running data/relic sites in your null region). Start buying high value items in Jita that are not listed in your local null sec market. Don't price gouge, because your alliance will hate you, and also because you will either get undercut or not see sales.
3. Repeat step 2 until you hit your order limit, then consider going Omega and getting better trading skills, or adding another Alpha into the alliance for more market orders.

I know steps 1-3 are not very enlightening by themselves, so let me give you some examples. Finding good items is 90% of the work. The other 10% of the work is hauling the items, but the best way to do this is to search for high sec wormhole connections to your space (such as while searching for data/relic sites). Injectors are a no-brainer, everyone loves injectors.

Here my alt is selling injectors in two NPC stations--one in Aridia, a common route to Delve and Fountain--and the other in Venal. Selling in your respective alliance's own market hub is an even better option usually. The margins won't be as great but they will move faster, and you will be nearby to update or restock as needed. You can do this with many other items as well: expensive skill books, expensive T2 ships not in supply locally, and so on. Look at your alliance's killboard and pay attention to the expensive stuff that dies. Does it have faction mods, tech 2 rigs, or rare modules fitted? If so, are they in stock in your local hubs? If not, stock them. This works with NPC stations in null and low sec as well. Overall, though, I would recommend exploration for Alphas looking to make isk over any other activity, and trading as just a side-gig.