Team Un-Building

My reaction when the dev blog about industrial rentable teams in the Cruis industry revamp was released was tepid at best:

Overall, I'm disappointed. When I saw teams were coming into things from the second dev blog I had more of an image from World of Tanks where you get inexperienced tank teams and train them up over time to become proficient experts in various abilities. Instead we get temporary random components to fight over in auctions.
And again, I feel this feature will aid the large scale rich heavy industrialists over the small scale and casual industrialists. Those with the wherewithal to hire the best teams to their hubs can amortize the hiring cost over their jobs and produce more cheaply even in busier systems than those who work with generic default teams or the poorer quality teams. I'm also willing to bet that capital ship production teams will be in highest demand even if poor quality because the large capital jobs makes savings more significant.
On the other hand, the devil is in the details. What's the spread of randomization of the teams? How many teams will be created? Will null sec powerhouses achieve any benefit from outbidding everyone to bring teams to null sec? How much will freeloading affect benefits (which ties back to my question of whether or not teams are tied up in jobs once they are working)?
Together with all the other changes coming this summer means I don't even know how this is going to shake out. Time will tell.

Well, time has told and CCP decided to pull the plug as the feature was seeing very little use and low impact on the game:

While we definitely think that the core idea behind teams is a good one and brings value to the game and you, in its current state it is adding the wrong type of complexity and not impacting the universe in the way we hoped. We have done some initial investigation and it is clear that bringing it up to the quality standards you should expect of us is a large project. A project which at this time is not the highest priority for us against some of the other things we are looking at. Given this, we believe the right thing for EVE and its players is to methodically remove industry Teams from the game over the next few months until such a time as we can properly revisit it.
Our rollout plan is to disable the seeding of new teams by the end of 2014 and to disable the UI features in one of the first releases of 2015. While we would stop seeding new teams, any existing teams in use would continue to provide bonuses until they retire, including those being actively used in jobs. We will also be closely monitoring the impact this potentially has on the Industry landscape and react as appropriate if the change is not as expected.

To those wondering why CCP didn't just leave this little used feature in, having extra code to work around for future releases increases complexity and risk for little gain if the feature is mostly ignored. I applaud their willingness to address the issue by admitting its not working out and removing the feature instead of letting it fester.

I admit the impact the teams had was less than I anticipated, probably because the effort of getting a useful team for your operations was complicated due to horrible auction mechanics and poor interface design and usability.  Ultimately, though, I feel the major failure of teams was in trying to force players to work together to achieve a common goal without providing sufficient tooling to accomplish that. Creating a secondary inflexible market for teams that are randomly generated and of mixed use seems to run counter to the main economy that is flexible and supplied via player actions.

I think the next iteration of teams, if they are ever given a second chance should:
- make use of the main market
- be player "built" (i.e. designed and created)
- can still have a limited lifetime and can still be used by everyone in the system
- have fewer but more focused bonuses

However... I have my doubts they will be coming back, which is a shame because I thought it might lead to crews for ships.

Project Vulcan - Crius Aftermath

So I've completed my initial analysis of how the new industry changes in Crius will impact my Archon building enterprise and come to the conclusion that everything for now will be fine.

The blueprint changes caused my mineral requirements for a single ship to grow:

Old Requirements:

Tritanium	51,869,850
Pyerite	12,696,300
Mexallon	4,716,339
Isogen	740,691
Nocxium	209,801
Megacyte	16,177
Zydrine	37,674

New Requirements:

Tritanium	55,781,078
Pyerite	13,667,030
Mexallon	5,067,414
Isogen	797,995
Nocxium	226,258
Megacyte	17,578
Zydrine	40,593

The actual requirements on the component BPOs went down slightly, but the Archon blueprint required a few extra components. Fortunately, mineral prices have been falling so the impact has only been around 15 million ISK. The factory costs in my quiet low sec system have had an impact, adding an additional 13 million ISK for the component and ship factory costs. So overall my costs have grown 28 million ISK per unit. 

On the other hand, ship prices in my region have been steadily climbing with the last Archon I sold going for 1,395,000,000 ISK which I was quite pleased with, and gave me my highest profit margin yet since it was built with the old costs. 

So right now I plan to continue operation as normal and keep my eye on the mineral prices, factory costs, and Archon prices.

Crius Industry - Setting Up Jobs So Nice

So this morning I got my new load of minerals to the station and set out to install my component jobs.

It was so easy to set up the jobs in a fraction of the time and clicks it used to take me. I was so pleased. You can tell they spent a lot of time thinking about the industry interface and its a stark contrast to the fucked up piece of shit that the Team interface is. (Excuse my french... as a GUI developer it pisses me off)

For my station in low sec it looks to cost about 5-6 million ISK for the factory rental costs for the components, and another 8 million ISK for the Archon factory rental cost. Nothing too disturbing. So far my margins are looking just fine which also please me and means I can continue my operation.

Although I'm losing a large number of cyno ships lately. Sigh.

Crius Changes - First Hiccup

I was travelling all weekend so when I got back Sunday I loaded up EVE and checked on my industry jobs, delivered my Capital Drone Bays and an Archon, put the ship up for sale and tried to build a new one.

Uh oh.

Apparently I need one more component of everything except Capital Computers, Sensors, and Shields.

Plugging all the new numbers in the spreadsheet of doom and I see my base mineral cost has increased by about 10%, and that has not taken into account the factory costs, which for the archon itself is 8.7 million once I get my missing components.

Honestly? So far, not feeling the big pinch despite not making use of any POS or teams. Once I get my new mineral load, I'll evaluate the component manufacturing costs and add it all together.

Speaking of teams, looks like all the decent capital manufacturing teams are getting hired in null sec for 20-75 million a pop right now. Its going to be next to impossible to get on to Iges, but I'll keep trying.

More updates to come.

Development 101

One of the most important things in any complex application is enabling the user to find things that are relevant and important to them. Its development 101.

I was playing with the industrial changes and explored the teams interface. I figured out the difference between teams already at work and teams up for auction, saw how to bid on them (not a fan that you *have* to hit enter after typing a solar system name, but not a big deal), and decided to throw a bid on a team as an experiment.

Note: not pleased the bid had to come out of my alt's personal wallet instead of a corporate wallet, but again not a big deal.

I log off and logged back on the next day and decided to check out that bid I made.

And I would if I can find it. 

I don't know if the auction finished and I was outbid or if its still running. I simply cannot find it as I did not explicitly write down the team name as I made the bid. That's crap, CCP, that is unacceptable. It should be simple as a check box to see the teams I've made a bid on, or at least that have a bid from my system / a specified system. This is a big deal.

Seriously, can you tell which one I've bid on?

The interface knows my bids because if I hover over the right one in the auction column it tells me my bid amount! It should be obvious at a glance which one it is, and ideally if my system I bid for is the current winning bid or not.

(And no, I do not think this is a good spot for the API and a third party developer to step in. This is a good spot for CCP to develop a new feature properly. Their QA department should have caught this.)

On a positive note, I'm pleased with how many active teams there are and how easy it is to browse for the ones that impact a certain blueprint. Still need time to tell how feasible it is to get a team I want though.

* * * * *

In other news, the first of two pre-Crius Archon builds comes out in two days, so after I get back from a long weekend family trip I'll evaluate what changes to my Archon build there will be. Look for that post Monday.

Fear and Loathing in Los Crius

Over at The Nosy Gamer blog the author was talking about how he was going to stick it out in Low Sec with his industrial adventures despite the upcoming changes in Crius expansion tomorrow:

I seriously considered moving back to high sec. Quite frankly, with the changes coming tomorrow, staying in low sec is pretty stupid. But a low sec base is more convenient for my faction ammunition business. Most of the cost of that is the time I take acquiring loyalty points, not manufacturing.

With all of the tears flowing from high sec, I figure I'll do something really stupid. That's right, I'm going to double-down on low. Can a casual industrialist not only survive, but thrive, in low sec operating against the high sec industrialists and all of the advantages they'll enjoy once Crius goes live. The only way to really know is to try, right?

I admit I have not delved seriously into the Crius changes on Sisi prefering to simply evaluate them once they hit Tranquility and how they will impact my casual capital building enterprise. So I commented:

I'm with you Noisy! I'm going to continue to operate my small cap building venture in low sec and we'll see how much things change for me.

Casual Low Sec Producers Unite!

To which a commenter self-identifying as the infamous Dinsdale responded:

Umm...you might want to get onto Singularity and have a good hard look at your "small cap building venture".
I am on Sisi, right now, with my Archon BPO, looking at all the combinations and permutations, and calculating the disastrous changes to the "casual low sec producer".

I used to build Archons, Thannies, and Moros in Carrou, one jump from high sec. It will be utterly impossible to compete with the big boys starting tomorrow. The wastage on a 1 run job is insurmountable compared to a 3 run job, and that is BEFORE the use of the teams, which will be used by null sec, not low sec.
And BTW, high sec is even more screwed than anyone else, regardless of what Noisy thinks.
regards,
Dinsdale

Am I worried? Yeah, I have concerns and I will be documenting here how much hit my margins take after tomorrow. So on Crius Eve, let's record the numbers of the old way of doing things.

The main cost for me right now is raw materials. Here is my chart of mineral requirements:

Click for full size.

Crius is going to change those numbers, probably upwards. The second change of Crius is that the charge for using factories will probably no longer be insignificant digits compared to the materials.

Stay tuned.

PLEX Prices

Recently PLEX prices on the market have climbed through the roof and have gone over 800 million ISK per unit. The lowest sell prices in Jita today are at the 810 million point with the highest buy order at 803 million ISK. When faced with the decreased amount of player activity observed recently it seems rather counter-intuitive as one would expect there to be a correlating reduction in demand which should lead to lower prices, right?

Click for full size. Provided by @Sidrat2011, thanks!

Well, let's do an Economics 101 class and see if we can't make heads of tails of this a bit more.

Supply and Demand...

We are all probably well familiarized with the concept of supply and demand. In a perfectly competitive market with all other factors being ignored and the assumption that the sellers want the best price for their goods and the buyers want to pay as little as possible but neither side wants to wait very long (i.e. they do what it takes to sell / buy as quickly as possible), then supply and demand impact the price point at which a product will sell. As supply increases, the price will decrease and vice versa; as demand increases, price will increase and vice versa.

Example of demand increasing from D1 to D2 and therefore price increasing from P1 to P2 and quantity changing from Q1 to Q2.

The less well known part of that concept is that changes in supply and demand affect the quantity moved as well, so keep that in mind as I think it may come up later.

So as stated in the intro, since there are fewer people logged in there must be lower demand for PLEX and therefore shouldn't the price decrease? Well, there may be fewer logged in players but there is no current knowledge that the number of subscriptions funded through PLEX has decreased the same amount; the volume of PLEX sold has decreased over the past few months but not as much as the PCU has fell, I'm guessing only about 10% from a glance.

Nevertheless, prices are rising and not decreasing! Something is a play here. Is it possible that demand has increased against our initial assumptions? Could the changed New Eden Store and ship paint jobs that require PLEX converted into Aurum to purchase be increasing demand? If this was true, we'd expect to see that quantity sold increasing or at least holding steady but that is not the case.

Perhaps the pressure is coming from the other side of the equation. As discussed above, when supply increases prices will decrease and quantity sold will increase, and when supply decreases then prices will increase and quantity sold will decrease. Interesting. 

Let's do a scenario so see if my adhoc hypothesis holds up. Let's say both demand and supply have fallen. The lower demand means prices will fall but the lower supply could counteract that fall, and even reverse it if the supply drops off enough. Note that we don't have an easy graph to see how much the supply is at any given point, only the volume of goods sold and the price they sold at. On the other axis, if demand and supply both decrease then the quantity sold will decrease as well, which fits (albeit not as easily) with what we see.

TLDR: its possible based on my simplistic understanding of economics and the current state of the PLEX market that both demand and supply have fallen, leading to an increase in prices and decrease in overall volume.

If correct, and that's a big if, we can postulate that if the concurrent users logged in numbers correlate positively with supply and demand, then PLEX prices could decrease if the PCU count recovers and climbs to higher levels again.

* * * * *

I was going to talk about Price Elasticity of Demand / Supply but I'm already feeling way out on a limb here. Basically from what I remember the idea is that the elasticity is a measure of how much a buyer will tolerate a changing price before they decide to not buy the product. A lot of factors plays into the elasticity like how much the item is needed, how much it costs compared to the buying power of the purchaser, etc. I'm going to wildly guess that the price elasticity of PLEX is pretty high, i.e. the price can increase quite a bit before a buyer will opt out of the market, hence why the volume sold has decreased so little in comparison to the price increases.

But that is even more of a wild guess than the rest of the post so take it with a grain of salt.

UPDATE: EVE Altoholic has better analysis with lots of graphs and expertise behind it. Go check it out!