Sunday, May 20, 2012

Because fuck phoenixes

Oh, phoenixes. Phoenixes, phoenixes, phoenixes.

They're toxic assets right now. There are 8 of them on the forge market for less than they cost to build, and still nobody's buying. I have four phoenix hulls gathering dust right now, and the time has come for me to give up on waiting for the market to recover and put that money back to work. Fortunately I'm not a complete moron, so I won't be selling them for less than mineral price. Instead, I will be reprocessing them. It works like this:

  1. Phoenixes are reprocessed into capital ship components. This entails a 5% loss (EDIT: Assuming no standings), or 1950*4*0.05 = 390 million.
  2. Launcher hardpoint components are further reprocessed into minerals, since I don't expect to have any use for them in the immediate future. This entails a negligible loss.
  3. The components (and the minerals from launcher hardpoints) are used to build ships on which actual profits can be made. Since everything except the phoenix has margins much larger than 5%, I make a profit from this.

This, of course, begs the question: If reprocessing phoenixes to build other things is a good idea, should I buy phoenixes off the market to reprocess? To which the answer is "yes, but I'm not going to." tl;dr is as follows:

1950*0.95=1850, so reprocessing a phoenix which is selling for less than 1850 million is cheaper than buying minerals. The cheapest phoenix on market is 1725 million, which is a savings of 125 million. Taking advantage of this would entail spending liquidity on ships, moving the ships to my building system, reprocessing them, and playing spreadsheet-fu. I currently have enough liquidity to buy 4 phoenixes, which would save me 500 million isk and involve hours of work. In short, I would be expending actual effort in order to make the sort of money I usually get from the sale of 1 to 2 hulls. This is unacceptable.

Somebody else might consider making a go of it, though.


Anyway, the personal effects of this will be as follows:

  1. Three runs (59, 62, and 64) will show phoenixes sold for 0 isk, because tracking their value would involve effort.
  2. The runs which receive the components and minerals will show silly margins and profits, because tracking the value would involve effort.
  3. 7 billion isk will disappear from my net worth, and only reappear when the ships built from the recovered components and minerals are sold, because tracking the value would involve effort.

11 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. I haven't. Checking eve-central shows that the lowest sell orders are in forge, though.

      If you're referring to moving ships to different regions to sell, that is something that I've considered in the past but elected not to pursue. The way the market is behaving lately it might be something worth putting back on the table; though it would help if lonetrek didn't tend to track forge prices so closely, since that's probably as far as I'd be willing to move them. Also, if I had a character who could fly amarr dreads.

      Delete
  2. You said:
    > reprocessed into capital ship components. This entails a 5% loss

    I've never had to reprocess a capital. Is this a fixed 5% loss on the modules or is it skill/station based like normal reprocessing?
    Normally I get a 99.5% yield, but if it is only 95% for caps then the economics changes.

    Also, nice blog. Thanks for the tips too. I made 500 mil when you highlighted the Naglfar price variations :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Just standings. None of my characters have standings to anything, so I always assume defaults in that regard.

      Well done with the naglfar. I waited something like 12 or 24 hours after making that post before resolving to buy up the cheap ones, during which time I know one sold. Later, I kicked myself for missing it

      Wonder if that was you~

      Delete
    2. Are you selling the ships on the market (rather than direct trade or contracts)? Because broker fees are also standing based. Getting some standing with the station you operate with isn't hard and worth a lot. You can hire mercenaries to grind missions for you, you just follow them around in a pod.

      Delete
    3. 7.0 would probably save me a hundred million or so per month. If I were big on maximizing efficiency, it's something I would look into.

      My goals are more focused on minimizing effort, though, so instead it falls into the category of 'things I might get around to someday if I'm really bored.'

      Delete
    4. Possibly, but IIRC I didn't manage to sell it until 3 or 4 days later. I still have a second nag I'm holding on to in the hope prices will rebound or mins will spike again. There are some who think that the recent dips were pretty much solely due to big speculators profit taking and it will be another month or 2 before we see the real new value after the drone alloy and loot drop changes.

      My indy/trade alt has decent standings to minimise trade fees and refine taxes. She had to get them for datacore farming so a bit more with cal navy for jita IV-4 was not that much more suffering.

      "more focused on minimizing effort" - amen to that. Every now and again I go nuts with some new indy scheme before drasticly scaling it back just due to the amount of effort involved. T2 manufacture can be very lucrative but the short timescale of 10 run BPCs and invention jobs is just too much :pain: to keep doing for long.

      Delete
  3. Getting to 6.7something using a service on the forums will cost you around 700M or so from 0. Maybe something you want to look into as it accounts for refining as well as Fees& Taxes. Based on the numbers from this post alone you'll break even in 7 months max. All you need to do is be in fleet, so it's pretty low from a effort point of view.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. About tracking your wealth - do you know that there is a program named Jeve assets ?. Hehe , made me feel good :) . Like in "if i sell everything i have i can buy myself a t2 fitted supercap and a cyno frig for the other account " :)

      Delete
    2. I've heard that asset trackers exist, but haven't felt the urge to try one. Can any of them track the total value of assets for multiple characters, including the mineral value of jobs installed on behalf of a corporation?

      Delete
    3. Multiple chars and accounts yes .A corp tab exists in jEveassets but the mineral value of current jobs installed isn't counted (even for chars). Also BPC's are valued at 0. But at least is free.

      Delete