I’m Danny Centauri a player with many years EVE experience, but until October last year a capsuleer with minimal industry and trade hubs experience. Over the past 10 months I’ve grown from 1 industry character to 13 spread across multiple accounts, 8 of these being t2 producers. I wish to share my experience with Eve News24 readers to allow others to reap the benefits of proper market whoring. ^^
Danny Centauri: Makin isk from New Gear
The days of ‘Jesus features’ may be over but still we get a slow trickle of new ships, modules and rigs appearing on the EVE market. Whether that be the Tier 3 battlecruisers, the drone damage modules, t2 warfare links, CPU rigs or the latest thing to hit the market the mining bonus rigs for ice and mercoxit.
It seems that that patience is a virtue that EVE players simply do not exhibit (because OMG we want the shineys!!!) I took a look at the history of a few items and the insane prices that players are willing to pay for new gear:
Tornado – First sold – 29th November 2011
Day 1 – High 194mil, Low 130mil, Average 165mil, Quantity 281
Day 2 – High 85mil, Low 64mil, Average 72mil, Quantity 1496
Day 3 – High 66mil, Low 60mil, Average 63mil, Quantity 916
Day 7 – High 55mil,Low 54mil, Average 55mil, Quantity 487
The price drops extremely fast within the first 24 hours, this just goes to show the importance of getting to market fast. For the first week there is still an opportunity to make really good margins well above that of anything else on market, but the most juicy profit comes early on especially with T1 ship production where the barrier to entry is low. Lets take a look at another more complex example:
Skirmish Warfare Link – Interdiction Maneuvers II – First sold – 29th November 2011
Day 1 – High 79mil, Low 59mil, Average 65mil, Quantity 6
Day 2 – High 48mil, Low 35mil, Average 46mil, Quantity 99
Day 3 – High 43mil, Low 25mil, Average 32mil, Quantity 137
Day 7 – High 4mil, Low 4mil, Average 4mil, Quantity 150
The production cost of the warfare links was around the 2mil per unit mark making the percentage profit ridiculously high close to the 4000% mark. The higher margin is because there is a higher barrier to entry with T2 production with both skills and time, the people who got to market early were those using a highsec POS for both their invention and production. Ultimately it was these people will to incur the expense of running a POS who make the most profit from the release of new t2 modules.
There are two, obvious yet, important lessons here for patch day production:
1 – Be the first to get your shit to market, if you’re slow your profits are low. If you plan to build a lot then make sure at least your first batch is a single run per industry slot.
2 – The more complex or expensive the product the longer the prices will remain high. This means things like t1 ships, modules and rigs will drop in price massively in the first 24 hours.
With these two lessons in mind and previous experience making excellent margins with small scale new equipment production in previous releases I wanted to test just how far it was possible to push new equipment production without flooding the market.
This gave me two choices with Inferno 1.2 either the new ice or mercoxit rig, common sense said that the ice rig would be the most frequently used with all of the former Mackinaw pilots compensating for the loss of the ice mining bonus by fitting the new rigs.
To the test server! With my product in mind it was time to start my prep, after checking the build times and material requirements it was time to spreadsheet everything up. I write down everything, indy players simply have to have a certain level of spreadsheet OCD to survive EVEs rapidly changing market. With the build cost being just under 2mil, I purchased the materials for 1600 of them and spread the materials between 14 equipment assembly arrays . With 8 characters skilled to build them and a 30min build time in a equipment assembly array it would take me 10 hours to build all 1600. Everything was ready to go, I just needed to purchase the BPOs once the release was live.
Costs incurred:
14 equipment assembly arrays – 33mil per unit – 462mil
Materials for 1600 medium ice harvester accelerator I rigs – 3625mil
POS fuel – 24 hours – 18mil
Total costs: 4105mil
This is much more than I would usually spend producing a new item. It’s pretty much the EVE market equivalent of wrapping yourself in bacon and jumping into shark infested waters, extremely high risk but a risk I was willing to take to see just how far patch day production could be pushed!
Onto the sales:
Batch 1 – Patch day – 80 units – 1164mil turnover – Sold by 14:10 EVE time – Average 14.6mil per unit, with highest sell price at 30mil per unit!
Batch 2 – Patch day – 240 units – 2845mil turnover – Sold by 17:40 EVE time – Average 11.9mil per unit
Batch 3 – Patch day – 800 units + Batch 4 – 220 units – 5638mil turnover – Sold by 23:49 EVE time – Average 5.5mil per unit
Batch 5 – Day after patch – 260 units – 837mil turnover – Sold by 07:32 EVE time – Average 3.2mil per unit
Total revenue: 10,484, average 6.55mil per unit.
So in the space of less than a day I had turned over the best part of 10.5bil of Medium Ice Harvester Accelerator rigs, for a profit of 6379mil ISK. I also have the equipment arrays for future projects, by this point there wasn’t much that could wipe the smug grin off my face.
If anything I could have pushed this further and sold primarily on market instead of contracts, even then on day 3 profit was 200%. This could have meant at least another 4bil profit over 2 further days potentially more but I was happy with my sales and went back to my regular staple diet of T2 ship production. These rigs with a lone indy character could have easily netted anyone 1bil in profit over the space of three days, with low skill requirements, investment and risk. It continuously surprises me how few players capitalise on the profit surrounding the introduction of new equipment.
Experiment complete and rather successful if I don’t say so myself; an experiment that will hopefully have indy players large and small whoring away on the test server looking for the next big score. Think big and act fast and a single patch day can pay for your subs for the rest of the year!
- Danny Centauri