Saturday, March 31, 2012

March monthly financial report


Notable things:
  • Net worth is now over 200 billion.
  • That thing where somebody paid me 20 billion for a rorqual.
  • New field -- 'research items' under net worth. This is for blueprints I'm researching to sell.
  • The low number of ships sold this month is because I'm holding several off the market -- three phoenixes, each of which is part of a different run. Phoenix prices dropped to mineral price, and with mineral prices rising it became a sure thing that I could make more money by waiting to sell them. Market price has risen by 140 million since then, and I'm holding out for another hundred.

Also, I finally got around to making a condensed version of the financial report. Decided not to use it this month, though,  because it's been an interesting month.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Lottery round 5 winner


Kelleris won 66 mil on a bet of 46 mil. I was starting to think everybody had stopped playing and I'd get to shut it down, but nooo~

To everybody's complete shock, announcing winners on other forums has driven precisely zero new players, but I'll keep it up so long as people are playing. The lottery page continues to be found here.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Easiest 20 billion I ever made


What happened here is that this guy (name redacted) was trying to set up a buy order for 2.0125 billion and added an extra zero. What he got instead was the cheapest hull on the market for the price he set the order for.

There's a warning box when you try to do that, so he must have either disabled or clicked past it. Whoopsie.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Lottery round 4 winner


Procrastination edition~

Kelleris won 46.5 million on a bet of 17.5 million. Grats! You should try that again.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Lottery update: Going public

I said I'd advertise the lottery outside the blag on Friday. THAT WAS A LIE.  I did it today instead.

In the runup, I also did a little work on the lottery. Stopped branding it as RANI, for one thing, because the ticker doesn't actually do anything other than sound cool . Also, changed the lottery to finish on Mondays.

Announcements have occurred in the following places:

Sell orders forum -- I anticipate cross-posting winners in this topic to generate long term interest.
Twitter @parasoja -- I anticipate cross-posting winners here to generate long term interest as well.
Reddit -- Mostly because I'm active in the r/eve community.

If anybody feels like giving a shoutout in one of those places, and in particular upvoting the reddit topic, that would be pretty chill.  If not? Also chill.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Manufacturing status update: Research edition

When I started my manufacturing project, most of my blueprints were poorly researched because I was anxious to get started. Today, most of my blueprints are still poorly researched. I decided to fix that.

I decided to start with component blueprints, because they're quick to research -- 3-4 months instead of 15+ for ship blueprints.

So I had to decide what level to research the prints to. For this, I used spreadsheets.

This shows how much it cost to build a rorqual (me3 I think) at various component ME levels before crucible hit. These days the mineral cost is about 1700, and the savings will be 50% more as well.

Anyhow, we can see that actual savings from ME research fall off pretty quickly. The 2.5 (now 3.7) million per tier 2 hull you save between my current ME30 prints and and ME90 ones adds up, in my case, to about 50 million per month for my entire production line. Still, having decent prints is a matter of professionalism.

 
And now, PE. Saving one minute of ME means that a 60 component run will finish 1 hour sooner, or roughtly 1%. The difference between my PE10 prints and PE20 is fairly trivial, but considering that pretty much all I do is wait for runs to finish I'm going to call it worth it. Though, having PE on a capital print will save a lot more time.

I decided to go for 100/20. These are nice round numbers, plus in terms of resale, if you check contracts, it puts you at a nice balance point between poorly researched prints (e.g. 50/10) and excessively researched ones (200/50).

Key:
I didn't actually have the cash to buy a complete set of replacement prints, so I did it peacemeal. This is the status (as of a few days ago) of my components. It's probably pretty difficult to read if you didn't make it, but one cell equals one blueprint.

'Keep' means I'll be keeping both blueprints in order to increase production, rather than selling the one currently in production once it has been switched with a researched copy, and then itself researched to 100/20. This is because in the medium term I'm looking at increasing production to maybe 5 characters, which means I need moar blueprints.

I'd also like properly researched ship blueprints, eventually. This is a much longer term project project, and except for a few dread blueprints I haven't really gotten started on it yet. I expect I'll have all the replacement ship blueprints I need inside of 5 months, by which time sale of spare component blueprints will have freed up plenty of liquidity.

Also of note, I've decided to tear up freigher production permanently. Even when one of them (charon, of course) is pulling much larger profits than normal, the margins are still pathetic compared to jump capable ships. Plus, this is a good time to sell freighter prints -- my charon BPO went for 72% over NPC price.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Oh my god look at the sell orders forum

43 titans up for sale in the first 5 pages.

EDIT: Not counting the 50 by PL because I think they might be pulling a scam during the rush.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Lottery update: Good news bad news edition

The bad news is, crontab is a startlingly unpredictable piece of software. I tried to disable the winner-picking script during the patch, but it ran it anyway.

The good news is, it picked a winner properly. Horay!

The bad news is, it reported the wrong isk value for the winnings. This was caused by a debug variable being set, and has been fixed. The lottery page was also fixed, but I used a calculator and a text editor for that.

The good news is, this isn't a substantial bug so we don't need to go another semi-test round. I anticipate going public this Friday, and probably switching to picking winners on Mondays, which means this will be a 6 day round.

As always, I am obliged to spam a link to the lottery page

Lottery round 3 winner


Aleph Gideon won 35.4 million on a bet of 10 million. You should give that a try!

I'll bet I'm not the only person who's sick of me posting these every week. At some point in the future (probably the end of March) I anticipate switching to doing a month's end report.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Lottery status update

So, funny story. Last round I said that if we could get more people and/or isk that round, I would announce it more widely this round. We did, but I'm not going to do that (yet). Here's why.

The short version is that I just rewrote the lottery tool from the ground up, and need to make sure it still works. The old version worked perfectly, but it was a massive kludge. The new version does some things substantially less wrong, and is much easier to work with; but it's also a bit more complicated. I deployed the new version last night, and (~shockingly~) it was a little bumpy, so I need to make sure it works right before putting actual strangers' money into it.

The major changes are that it now uses stored refids instead of my hilarious breakcode system, which means that I can stick the winner-picking script on a cronjob instead of running it manually (yes Ryan, this is all your fault), and the addition of a configuration file so I can drag and drop new versions to the server without having to go in and change variables.

Now everybody donate generously, FOR SCIENCE


Industry has low margins and is a bad career


We have a brand new first place entry for largest profit on a single ship. The carrier from a few weeks back still holds first for widest margin, but the 900 million I made on this hull beats out both that and the phoenix I made 700 million on after the patch in terms of net profit.

RANI lottery round 2 winner

Hyptron

Hyptron tripled his investment in less than seven days! Use the same strategy and you are sure to get rich quick.

Provided nothing else goes horribly wrong, round 3 starts now. Only slightly depressing news in a few hours~

Thursday, March 1, 2012

RANI lottery round 2

The first round worked, so we're running another. Want in? Check out the lottery page.

My hope is that people will be more interested in a lottery which has actually paid out winnings.  For a refresher on how it works you can visit this post.

This round will end on Tuesday.

February monthly financial report: Richest person I know edition

This month is significant because passing the 170 billion mark means I am now the most space-rich person I personally know. The first place spot was previously held by an old corpie who somehow ended up with 170. These days he's living in lowsec, leading a corp of newbies who came from his WoT clan.

Anyway, nothing really interesting happened this month. I was wrong about it turning into my best manufacturing month ever. It was very, very close, but a glut of phoenixes on the market slowed things down right at the end. As usual, a bit of exploration and trade income explains the gap between manufacturing income and change in net worth.

...exploration, man. Here I am running this multi-multi-billion isk manufacturing process, I go out to kill a few hours scanning and it ends up being half my income.

Mind you, I spent more hours doing exploration than the pittance it takes to keep manufacturing going.