EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, Part 4

So, if you've been reading the chronicles of my EVE corp's endeavors with a Covetor BPO, this is the third installment. Here are links to the other three.

Well, it's paid off. It looks like after costs (not including the original BPO purchase), with selling 6 Hulks, 5 Covetors, and 20 Covetor BPCs, we'll have made about 95 million ISK. Here's a pic of the corp wallet with some of our first Hulk sales. Those big, fat, green numbers with 8 digits make it all worth while.


It's taken around two months for all of this, so at this rate, it will take about 2 years to pay off the Covetor BPO. This fits in with EVE's reported economic velocity of roughly 10x real life where house mortgages take from 20 to 30 years to pay off. I'm sure I can make more time-efficient use of the BPO in the future; I was going slowly to make sure I didn't go too fast and make a mistake somewhere.

I can see that the invention system is designed to be complex enough to put some players off doing it. In a game where skills train with real time, all players will eventually have all skills. In the case of combat, you still need experience and practice to play well. But with manufacturing, you just follow the recipes. So in an effort to keep the markets from being flooded with products on the high end, they've made the process so complex that fewer players are willing to navigate its twistiness.

Given the profit margin I appear to be making with the Hulk invention process compared to standard Tech I battleship manufacturing, it appears to have worked. Part of that is that more skills are necessary for the Hulk process, but I can't help thinking the convoluted nature of the whole thing and the random element in the BPC invention have made a difference.

EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, Part 3

So, if you've been reading the chronicles of my EVE corp's endeavors with a Covetor BPO, this is the third installment. Here are links to the other two.

We've now invested 2.8 billion in the Covetor BPO. The main goal is to manufacture Hulk mining ships. A convoluted process called Invention is how EVE makes production of such Tech II items difficult. You can skip the next paragraph if you don't need to know just how complicated it is.

First, you take a BPC (blueprint copy) of the base ship you're inventing with. Hulks come from Covetors, so you start with a Covetor BPC. Copying the BPO costs money and time. Then you use a ship data interface (costs on the order of 50 million ISK), a number of appropriate datacores, and the BPC into the Invention process to make Hulk BPCs. However, there's only a chance you will get one. If you're curious, here's a site with a calculator that helps you figure out what your chances are. If your BPC is a max-run BPC (Covetor max-run BPCs allow 10 Covetors to be made), you can put in a decryptor to help the process (these run between 5 and 20 million ISK). These variously affect the chance of invention, the material efficiency level of the resulting BPC, and how many runs the result is good for.

Once you have your Tech II BPC, you then put in one of the base ships (in our case a Covetor) plus some construction components, and you finally get your finished product!

It's extremely difficult to completely vertically integrate the whole process. The various components of the invention process come from R+D agents and various types of hidden combat instances that must be probed for. Some of the construction components are made from materials that must be synthesized in PoSs (Player Owned Stations) from moon materials.

It's clear to me this whole system was designed to generate two things: highly fluctuating costs to make a large barrier to entry, and to require very large numbers of people to work together (either as a team or through the market) to make Tech II items. My chance of getting Hulk BPCs with the process was 24%. The first seven attempts gave me nothing, and cost on the order of 120 million ISK. Two of the last three gave a result, so I'm now manufacturing 6 Hulks. When they sell, it will pull in around half a billion ISK gross. I'm keeping a careful spreadsheet of this whole Covetor BPO business; it's too complicated for me to be sure it's earning money without keeping careful tabs on costs. Here's a pic of the spreadsheet, and a picture of the corp wallet after I bought all the parts needed to make the Hulks.