A Scientist's Life in Eve

As Stabs pointed out in a recent comment, CCP have reacted to feedback from the community and have adjusted the planned ratios for the new Alchemy reactions.

Click here for the details.

So I’ve re-run my calculations, and unsurprisingly it is much more worth doing now.  I’ve also looked at market prices over the last year and OTEC will have to seriously scale back their income to stop Alchemy being a profitable activity.  Whether the volume produced will have an impact or not… only time will tell.

OTEC here will need to balance their profitability against how profitable Alchemy will be.  They certainly wouldn’t need to stop it being profitable, just reduce the profitability to a level that would make it less attractive to most people.

I need to run more numbers, but with a 10:1 ratio and the abundance of Cobalt moons across New Eden, I think that OTEC might find it difficult to achieve this.

I posted on the forum thread for this, and got quoted by a member of Goons a bit further down the thread, which raised that age old question of when and how to attribute cost to an activity.

His point is interesting, as previously before fuel blocks, if I put up a moon harvester and silo, which both use CPU and power, the cost in fuel to run the tower would increase.  However with fuel blocks, this now doesn’t change with CPU and power load on the POS.

So if I do reactions on a Cobalt moon, is the Cobalt free?  It has a small one-off cost to start harvesting it (the harvesting array – not even a silo if I plug it straight into the simple reactor).  The fuel use does not change, so where is my cost.  It’s free… right?

Well… I don’t look at it that way.  The Cobalt I mine, I could sell directly on the market.  When I look at something, I take an overall view on profitability, and contribution to profit of each item and each stage.  Rather than always assume that you have to take things through to the end product, I stop at each stage and evaluate.  An important factor is also my time, which I’m probably not as good at factoring in as I should be, as I seem to spend most of my in-game time doing things other than make ISK for myself

Risk vs Reward… yes.
Revenue vs Time… also yes.