Monday 20 April 2015

You profit from fixing my 'broken' PI spreadsheet

I occasionally get reports that my PI spreadsheet is broken.

Sometimes it is not working at all as I am fighting with Google itself, which is why it now is cached via http://foo-eve.blogspot.com.au/p/pi-spreadsheet-snapshots.html

But generally it is because the prices are 'wrong'.  I get my prices daily from Eve Central, and take the average prices from Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, and Hek.  I primarily do my PI in a wormhole, and one trade hub is as good as the next, with a mild preference for Amarr (due to ~40% wormholes ending up close to there).

So, there are 2 ways the prices can be wrong.  Firstly my cache of prices can be 24 hours old.  Shrug, you can copy my spreadsheet and change the CacheBuster parameter on the main sheet at A2 to force a price refresh.






Secondly, my price is an average over 4 trade hubs (ignoring no price at all).  If one of those hubs has a price that is wildly wrong, then all pricing running from that will also be (less) wildly wrong.

As of writing this post, my spreadsheet is getting the 'wrong price' for livestock, with an average sell of 145,000 ISK/unit.  The Jita price sell price is 9,500 ISK/unit, and my average buy price is 7,000 ISK/unit.

Both Eve Central and my spreadsheet see the only sell order for Livestock in Hek as 550,000 ISK/unit which by anyone's account is overpriced, especially for a trade hub.  I have no intention of fixing my spreadsheet, as it is working as intended.



However, there is a good trade opportunity for those wanting to fix the data I retrieve, buying some livestock anywhere, getting red frog/push x to haul it, and selling livestock in Hek.  If you are so inclined, I also note that some of the other trade hubs are also missing sell orders for PI. 

  • Hek is missing Polyaramids, Silicate Glass, Ukomi Super Conductors
  • Dodixie is missing Synthetic Synapses
  • Rens is also missing a few items.

Yes, I could fill these gaps myself.  That would involve me spending more time in highsec.  If no one else does this inside of another week or so, I will get some stock sent to Hek, if only to fix my spreadsheet.

Two of the complaints I read about market trading are that there is no way to find things to trade, and how everything always is immediately undercut.  In the third biggest market in Eve ( Dodixie - http://eve-marketdata.com/station.php?step=Rank ), for Synthetic Synapses at least, neither of these complaints are true.

Monday 13 April 2015

Eve Pos planner update

The Eve Pos planner at http://eve.1019.net/pos/index.php has an update.

0.58 (2015.04.13)

  • Updated module inventory to match recent updates (removal of Medium Refinery Array and addition of Personal Hangar Array, Compression Array and Thukker Component Assembly Array)
  • More updates coming...


Re: eve pos planner
From: Qalten
Sent: 2015.04.13 05:26
To: DoToo Foo, 

Thanks for your e-mail regarding the IGB POS Planner. I've recently returned to EVE (apologies if you're receiving this reply long after you sent your mail) and will be updating the planner immediately to reflect the changes, and will be planning on adding interface improvements shortly.

Please feel free to make any suggestions or comments on what I can do to further improve the tool. I hope it's been helpful to EVE players over the years, and hopefully more to come!

Regards,

Qalten

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=418404

Tuesday 7 April 2015

FozzieSov - my perspective and confusion

Firstly, I think it is time for a sovereignty revamp.  There are some goals coming with the Fozzie Sov model that I am very much in favour of.
  • Harder for large renter organisations to hold vast territories of unused space.
  • Similarly easier for smaller organisations to take unoccupied systems in nullsec.
  • Simplifying structure setup.  No one that has ever set up a POS thinks it should be this hard and counter-intuitive.  I think this even when I personally have benefited that someone else failed to set their POS up correctly.
I understand that this is going to mean some changes.  Some may benefit, and I fully expect some to be harmed.  Before you pay too much attention to anyone's whining (including mine), please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking .

Some things I like:  back into the structure
Instead, we want the user to make a conscious choice after it has been deployed, and decide if they want personal, corporation, alliance or public use. That’s right, we want those structures to be used for the wider audience, so if you wish to establish your own Market Hub somewhere, make it open to everyone and set your taxes to be shamelessly expensive go right ahead.

We will lose our forcefield, and to be honest I don't care. Before the WH groups all evict me (and we really should get that defector first), I care about what the POS forcefield allows.  We can see the overview and dscan while 'safe', and that there are no docking games because I can enter and leave safe space unless there are (clearly visible and destroyable with station guns) bubbles.  Allow me to check for safety, clear moorings and enter warp (unless there is a bubble) and I will be content.  This probably includes me wanting to swap from docked to moored and back again.

CCP is thinking about playing with fuel (Back into structure).  One point we are considering is to remove fuel requirements to online structures and move it as a requirement to operate service modules.  I want overall requirement for fuel to either stay static or even increase. Reducing total overall fuel requirements will have shockwaves through the market and even worse, will nerf my PI wormholes.

I don't understand when structure will be activated, deactivated, reinforced or captured, and when will it be destroyed?  Entosis links are used to wrest control. Politics By Other Means refers to capturing stations. But then Back into Structure refers to destruction of structures with special containers.  Maybe I am slow today, but I can't work out when something will be destroyed and when it will be captured.


I want there to be places that a small group can hold.  I am an industrialist and believe that in Eve, destruction is good for business.  However it is only good for me if it is someone else's stuff that gets destroyed.  If I am going to store billions of ISK of ship and loot, I really do want it to take more than 2 people for 1 hour to steal it from me.  It is common to have 2 to 3 pilots on sporadically over a couple of hours (eating meals, looking after kids etc).  It looks like a single pilot with 40 minutes up their sleeve could make everything vulnerable.  If so, that would cause me to consolidate and reach for more numbers than I have.  If it takes 4-5 well trained pilots to defend a class 1 or 2 wormhole for 4 hours/day, but it only support 2-3 medium skilled pilots running sites for that same time, then there is a problem.  There are always PI alts but ... PI alts are usually just that, possibly with POS gunning or the ability to fly a scanning ship.


Docking up in stations to hide is being strongly discouraged. Trolls can shut down services to cause fights, or simply to punish the AFK. (Politics by other Means)  Although reinforcing of Sovereignty structures may only occur during the owning alliance’s prime time window, station services can be disabled at any time through use of the Entosis Link for between 5 and 20 minutes (depending on occupancy levels).

Today, to bash out a large properly configured POS in a c1-c4 system requires either at least 2 weeks of building a capital, or a couple of squads of kitchen sink battleships (give or take, less required for well fit ships), over 2 days.  What I am trying to work out is what will it take to either disable my wormhole services, and possibly take my POS replacement away from me.  I think it is entirely proper that a well put together couple of squads, over 40 or so hours can evict us.  Similarly, 4 or 5 pilots consistently on over a couple of weeks with enough strength to cause us cower in stations would similarly be acceptable.  So I repeat myself : CCP Please do not let a single bored pilot with an hour to spare wait for us to go offline and reinforce our small corp wormhole stations by stealth.

I am currently spreading my time between wormholes and tending a nullsec market, and probably doing both badly. I spend large amounts of my in game time tending these, 


Market hubs are interesting and powerful places. I would love these to be scaleable, and available in wormholes.  Something small that that could take a set of PI buy/sell orders for my PI farming wormholes, up to something that can support the fleets of the largest alliances.   I do see that, with effort, station contents including market hubs, should be at least partially lootable.

Wormholes space is currently best space for a small group to set up shop.  When I first moved into wormholes, we had 3 or 4 of us set up a tower, bash out customs offices, and live out of our space.  This was exciting and stressful times.  I really was worried about that lone Drake taking out our just anchored tower.  Now I know what is required to knock one over, and it is more than that lone Drake.

I am worried that with Fozzie Sov, small corps setting up their first structures be able to be trolled out of existence by every passing 2 man gang.  Will the small corp wake up with all of their services offline because someone had 15 minutes of spare time while they were asleep?

There is a transition plan where existing structures will co-exist but without bonuses while new structures take over.  For me this works.

Anyone thinking that there will not be losers out of the structures and sovereignty changes is foolish.  If the big boys are not screaming blue murder, then it will be the little player, but hearing discontent from some quarters to make me think that it might be OK. 

References :
* Back into structure : http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/back-into-the-structure
* Politics by other means https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/politics-by-other-means/

Someone else I am watching for his take on the new mechanics for WH space is Trinkets Friend from http://localectomy.blogspot.com.au/2015_03_01_archive.html  (NSFW) - especially his March 2015 posts.

Edit : Turamarth's post : http://turamarths-evelife.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/is-ccp-gonna-bust-da-bubble.html 

If you have a blog post on this topic, add it as a comment.  I will turn it into a clicky link at the bottom of this post.

Wednesday 1 April 2015

Cache of PI spreadsheet

I have created a Google Docs folder containing most recent PI price snapshots.  I will name the files with a "<YYYY-MM-DD> PI snapshot.pdf" format.  The first one is 2015-03-31 PI snapshot.pdf


I am fighting a losing battle with google and the Foo Eve PI spreadsheet.  It works fine for me, but  can't keep it working for everyone all the time, despite different caching strategies.  ( http://foo-eve.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/pi-spreadsheet-working-again.html )

So ... I will really cache it, this time as a PDF, manually.  As it is manual, it will be updated when I remember to do so, hopefully weekly.

I have plans on fixing this permanently, possibly as a google app.  But for now, this will do.  Please magnify or download for your favourite PDF reader.