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Jester’s Trek: Meet the new Boss
So, there’s a new dev-blog out today, by a new EVE game designer, CCP Fozzie. First, let me express my amusement that poor Fozzie got — as his very first dev-blog! — the third rail of EVE economics, technetium. One imagines CCP Greyscale hiding inside an empty cardboard box on the loading dock somewhere when he heard that a dev-blog would have to be written about this topic. Or maybe CCP Soundwave or CCP Unifex put all the devs in a line, asked the volunteer for this dev-blog to step forward, and Fozzie was the only person who didn’t step back. Twice. 
Anyway, I’ve of course written about “OTEC” before. This troll-become-reality has entered the EVE lexicon with surprising speed. I was also amused that OTEC has essentially been making fun of CCP right on EVE TV during the Alliance Tournament! The “commercial” for “OTEC brand technetium” even uses my stat about what percentage of a Hulk is made from tech (70%). gg OTEC; plus one internet from me.
So we — and I include OTEC in that “we” — have been waiting months for the other shoe to drop. And now that it has dropped, it proves to be a ballet slipper: alchemy. A strong response, this is not. As a matter of fact, this is a remarkably weak response, so weak that I’m kind of surprised that CCP bothered. When I read a statement like “So we are going to kick Technetium in the balls,” I expect something much more sweeping.
This ain’t it.
Now before I go on, let me say that I fully recognize that this is a first step. There’s a whole paragraph devoted to the fact that there will be “multiple releases” devoted to this problem. Eventually, the entire T2 production chain will have to be reworked, and eventually the gathering of the raw materials for this production will be done through “group game play and risk taking.” That’s all to the good. But I assume “multiple releases” means we’ll see expanded alchemy in winter 2012, the first steps toward resource gathering next summer, and a new production chain in winter 2013.
At the earliest.
Which means this dev-blog and the “pressure valve” that it describes is what we’re stuck with for about the next :18 months:.(1)
For those not familiar with alchemy in EVE, there’s a pretty decent guide to it that was published by Ten Ton Hammer a few years ago. It covers the basics. The short version: you need a low-sec, null-sec, or wormhole POS connecting silos containing the input products to an alchemy reactor that produces the “unrefined” product that you want. You then haul the unrefined product to a station and use a blueprint to complete a manufacturing process, minus the appropriate taxes for use of station services.
Now CCP’s idea here is that when the cost of this or that intermediate material — such as platinum technite — rises too high, people will set up these POSs and therefore put an upper limit on the costs of these materials. In theory, there is nothing wrong with that idea. In actual practice, there are two problems with it.
First, the profits from such an enterprise are obviously going to be extremely variable at best. At worst, you’ll lose money — and a lot of it! — attempting alchemy. The risks involved for the casual player are pretty significant. The average player does not set up a lot of low-sec POSs, for instance, because of the risk of losing them to a much bigger corp or alliance. In the middle, you’ll lose only a small amount of ISK as fluctuations in the market make this or that alchemy reaction less profitable. This one is why the alchemy reactions that exist today aren’t used that often, by the way: there are more consistent ways of making ISK with the same risk. One of them is simply buying platinum and technetium and making platinum technite yourself using reactions. If you have the means to buy the initial raw materials, the potential exists to make a large amount of ISK this way.
In short, only if things stay consistent on the market for a couple of months at a time are you going to make any ISK doing this, and only if you don’t have any bad luck along the way.
Second, you’re opening yourself up to tremendous market griefing opportunities. Running a POS can be expensive and if you don’t have all the raw materials you need for your reactions right when you need them, you could be stuck pouring fuel into a POS that isn’t producing anything. One of the two materials needed for the platinum technite alchemy is cobalt, what was until yesterday an extremely cheap material. Needless to say, the price for every scrap of cobalt in the game has now inflated hugely, going from an average price of 600 ISK per unit to 6500 ISK per unit or so.(2)
Think the richest organizations in the game are going to casually let you cut in on their livelihoods? Or do you think they’ll simply have you paying for your tech in a new way? Let’s go to the forums:
We’ll be backstroking through our 9 trillion isk that we’ve made off our moons while you all try to figure out whats the next best thing to do (that we’ll already be well on our way to controlling).
Well. That answers that question, then. Seriously, to buy every scrap of cobalt currently on the market in Jita would cost about 40 billion ISK… about the cost of one well-fit super-carrier. On the scale of the ISK being made on tech, this is a rounding error. The CFC can grief every alchemist in the game comfortably every few weeks or so, completely disrupting the alchemy supply. That will leave anyone who tries to get into this market with either no raw materials to put into their alchemy or hugely expensive raw materials.
Perhaps you have an idea to stake a claim on your own cobalt moon. That’s fair. It’s only a Rarity 8 material, so moons should be pretty common. And sure, there’s cobalt moons scattered hither and yon around the galaxy. But guess where the highest concentration of known cobalt moons is. Go ahead. Guess. No, guess again. Yeah, now you got it. The southwest corner of the galaxy. Places like Aridia, Khanid, Provi, Catch, Querious, and Period Basis are lousy with known cobalt moons. Delve probably has lots of them too, but there’s never been an attempt to publicly document what’s available in Delve. But I know the Goons maintain a monthly budget for moon scanning.
Oh, and the other platinum technite alchemy material, platinum? Someone bought about 20 million units of that today and then relisted it on the market for twice the price it was yesterday. Hope those of you doing platinum technite reactions today have a reserve stocked up.
In the “Bottleneck” post I wrote a couple of months ago, I listed the exact materials needed to build one Hulk in terms of raw materials. That’s where that 70% number that OTEC used in their commercial came from. But I didn’t explicitly list the materials for the complex reactions. In point of fact, it takes 1174 units of platinum technite to make one Hulk. Moon goo from tech moons go into reactions. The current platinum technite reaction is a simple reaction generating 200 units per one hour cycle. Therefore, 1174 units is six hours from one platinum technite reactor, meaning that one such reactor can produce the materials for four Hulks per day.
Unless I’m missing something, to generate the raw materials for the same amount of platinum technite from alchemy will require that single reactor to run for nearly five days straight at ten units per hour. That’s for one Hulk. During the same amount of time, the traditional means of production will be producing the materials for twenty Hulks. I dearly hope I’m missing something. I must be missing something.
Because otherwise, OTEC is shaking in their boots, I’m sure.
As I said, this first response from CCP to the tech problem is pretty freakin’ weak and I hope we’ll see something stronger before the winter expansion.
(1) See what I did there? I’ll have more to say about this eventually.
(2) “If you dump all your isk into speculation around this blog and lose it all because we changed something again, you have only yourself to blame,” says the dev-blog about this. One hopes they’ll change the magic mineral to chromium or something before release.
"I will also repeat that this change is only the first step in our plan to revamp the methods by which the materials for tech two ships and modules are collected and used. We will be taking the time we need to do it right, but that process starts very soon in Inferno 1.2 with these alchemy changes."
Nice reading there, Jester. On a side note, what's Rote doing with the 100+ billion isk PL paid them not to kill their Malices?
Allow me to quote Jester: "Now before I go on, let me say that I fully recognize that this is a first step. "
I would suggest that it is you who lacks the reading skills, jackass.
Is a well fit super carrier really up to 40 billion now? Damn!!!!
Its still around 15-20b for the hull, I'd say 40b is 2 carriers since only PL officer fits them.
Manufacture cost has almost doubled in the last year and change. Mine was 9b, but it would cost more than 16b to manufacture it now (without a markup) at current Jita mineral prices. Mine is one of the cheap ones.
It's about 30, a well fitted (not Officer) SC.
Example:
Nyx
- about 20b hull (to build not buy on the forums …)
- 1b rigs
- about 1b for FB
- 3.5b ( /-) for the low slots (tank) – core x-type hardeners, corpum a-type x 2 …
- add in about 1-1.5b for rest of the fit (faction: remote ecm, cloak, cap rech, web, scramble, remote cap transfer / energy, some backup mods here and there, nothing fancy)
- add in 3.5b if you wanna go slave and there you have it … 30b (more or less)
Ripard is missing the point of economic pressure valves. The point of them is not to maintain a low pressure, but to prevent catastrophic pressure. He also seems to think that alchemy should be a risk-free way to get around the natural sources of materials, which also isn't the point.
This change will not cripple OTECs ability to control the market, but it *will* place an upward limit–albeit a high one–on the price they can charge before driving the rest of New Eden into alchemy.
It's similar to why we so rarely use synthetic oil nowadays: OPEC keeps the price of oil lower than the cost of setting up synthetic oil factories. Just as with EVE alchemy, synthetic oil would take a massive capital investment and be subject to the variances in oil prices,and at current oil prices is too risky. If oil were $1000 USD a barrel, though, it could make economic sense to go synthetic.
I think you missed the point of his article. OTEC controls to technitium supply. With their "fortuitous" invasion of Delve (and surrounding regions), TEST (and by nature, Goons) now controls a very large slice of the one and only moon mineral that can be used to circumvent OTEC's domination…
Alchemy will be an emergency release valve…heh… too bad Mittani has it welded shut. ./tinfoil
Alchemy is a joke. Like anything in a game, the more hassle involved the higher the profit potential needs to be for anyone to bother with it. Given the cost of fuels and capital required to set up a god awful number of POS's to matter, alchemy is just not going to result in even a pressure valve. It may help some low yield producers to get their hands on some reduced priced tech, but it will be at the cost of annoying hassle and game time. In the end it is unlikely to have any impact at all on pricing. And further, whatever profitability there will be from it will continue to be dependent on OTEC keeping the primary supply tight.
I still fail to see how is this gonna fix the Tech 'problem'….
Tech will still be located only on the North, right? Oh yea … price may go down … but for like what? 10%? 20%? 30%? Still same alliances will control it, NOTHING will change there. It's not like all of a sudden there is an alternative (a good one not this joke) to it. You will need a ton of POS's to replace a few of Tech … not going into logistics / man hours / etc to actually make it a profitable business. Personally I don't see and improvement on this front by adding new alchemy reactions but I do believe CCP is wasting time on this concept and looking in all the wrong places …
I hate to admit it, but I agree with Jester this time. This is a weak response. However…it is a response. It's not going to hurt OTEC at all, and they'll still make stupid amounts of money. But it will effectively put a cap on the price, and make it so it won't be easily manipulated.
Id also like to state that jesters understanding of how alchemy actually works is laughable, but evne though he fails to understand how to do alchemy, he is kinda right.
the response for 2 years of waiting is pitiful, PITFUL, but this has more to do with the alchemy itself 10:95?!?!? wtf SERIOUSLY.
If anyone thinks CFC/Otech/Anyone can control the cobalt market there kidding themselves.
There are something like 2500 cobalt moons in the game spread over a dozen regions, most of which CFC do not control. R8's are all over the place, especially cobalt becuase of how large amarrian influence is on nullsec/ls
Indeed. Jester is a decent blogger, but with posts like these he proudly displays his limited understanding of a subject in a strongly opinionated way…
Today i sat in the sun underneath an apple tree with two long legged bikini girls, one got me drinks, the other decide to exercise yoga on the lawn. I dozed away anyway. Awake again, while they change for clubbing to the max, to kill time i read this on the internets. Seriously.. its summer, you cavemen.
LEAVE THE BASEMENT……GO OUT… HAVE FUN…
MOW MY LAWN YOU LAZY CUNT!!
Mow your cunt, you hairy cunt.
Dear CCP…
To fix the whole OTEC issue, where OTEC members are laughing at entire CCP Devs and EVE players at the moment, all you need to do is realize that the original moon setup is not enough any more to respond to current player's demand (number of players has increased and there are more ships destroyed on a daily basis now than 3 years ago).
Easiest ever 5 minutes long solution: add a few technetium moons in all regions at those existing moons currently holding no moon resources on them. All it takes is change a few numbers into the moon data base.
Make no mistake about it: Three or four new tech moons per region won't break the game any further than it is now with a few players making tons of isk to the point they can afford to welp entire super fleets without consequences, effectively making it literally absurd to field any supers any more to fight them back. The longer a strong response (yes, a literal kick in the balls) from CCP fails to take place, the longer and larger the problem becomes and the more regular players that will stop playing. It's happening already, with more and more people moving on to other games.
Certain things in the game DO need the nerf bat or buff bat swung hard on them, and in other areas it only needed to be a gentle tap. CCPGoons apparently doesn't know the difference between the two and are like a crazy kid swinging a baseball bat in a china shop.
This…..whatever you want to call it, was very goon influenced obviously for it was more of a old mans fart then a bang to tech. Quite simply the easiest of changes for CCPGoons to do is, on the next update, that certain tech moons in the north, just aren't tech anymore. Along with those cobalt or whatever moons in the south/east of Eve suddenly are now tech moons. You just do a swap of moons and balance out the number of tech moons amongst ALL nullsec regions.
I have no idea how many tech moons are in the game, but putting an equal number of moons around each region would fix said problem immediately. Would also create a LOT of conflict in the game in terms of Sov, because if the goons wanted to keep there monopoly they would have to fight everyone to do it or risk feeding massive isk to there enemy's. Much like how the NC did with there titans and supers, selling them to the highest bidder, and then getting attacked by the very ships they built.
If all the space is equally good nobody will have a reason to fight for better space, and there will be no terrible space for new, weak, or newly weak alliances to get (re)started in.
CFC fought (and schemed) for the space they have, against the coalition that had it before. And that coalition got it from the one who was there before that.
Do you really want ALL the space to be blue, and filled with the big powers?
"This…..whatever you want to call it, was very goon influenced obviously"
Just in, new model tinfoil released. Now with extra paranoia amplifying properties.
So the CFC already had a plan to capture the southwest regions before the invasion of Delve so they can control the cobalt supply and put a price increase to alchemy in order to maintain their tech monopoly.
Am I getting it right ?
the conservative approach?
ccp making a change thats so directly influencing the power balance between players is a pretty new one and a pretty stupid one.
the otec got their advantage by means of the game, it is up to those of us who are pissed about it to take it back.
Giving an alternative route to that resource means they invalidate the achievements of the otec AND they take the possibility of wars arround it.
OTEC did indeed get their advantage by means of the game. But it was an artificial creation by CCP when the change to T2 blueprints caused an R32 material to be the dominant moon resource in the game and to have it predominately clustered in one relatively small area. This is not to take away from the masterful gameplay the OTEC overlords have accomplished given the current game setup. But the fact is that the current advantage is becoming overwhelming due to the few groups who hold the majority of those moons banding together. The long term impact on "the game" is not healthy. It may be realistic, but for a game it is not healthy.