Eve Market Doldrums

If your a new player or new to market trading you might be asking yourself why is my market volume slowing down? Is Eve Online dying? What exactly is going on? I offer a few opinions as to why you might be seeing low market volume.

Summer Doldrums

Historically in-game populations trend down in the summer. If we take a look at Eve Offline Stats the player count will decline from June until September then it picks back up once school starts again and winter sets in, in the northern hemisphere. Lower player counts correlate often times with slow market volume. Think of it as a double edge sword less players means less items being destroyed as well as less players purchasing your goods.

SOV Revamp

The SOV revamp has players holding their cards close. It feels like everyone is holding their breath waiting for shit to hit the fan. Player numbers and market volumes will pick up some once this patch hits mid July. Although July is typically still a down trend for player counts as the summer doldrums continues, lots of people are on vacation. Did CCP plan the SOV roll out when player counts are typically low on purpose? The tinfoil hat sure doesn't breath well during the summer. 

Burn Amarr

Burn Amarr is icing on the cake. Again several factors to slow market volume. Less players logging in. People tend to just avoid logging in altogether during that weekend. So less movement on the markets. Goods and services aren't being moved around as rapidly it slows the whole market. Expect business to be back to usual next week, still the impact is felt.

Cheap Materials

Another outlier I was thinking about is cheap materials. Producers(that aren't on vacation) are easily over producing as tech 2 materials and to a lesser extent minerals prices slump. Though I am not sure this has as much effect as the previous points. You run some calculations and see how much you could be making on a few items and you have some run away over production on your hands during the summer months.

Keep a watch on the news, devblogs, and Eve Propser's Market Show to anticipate your market volume.

Even after three years Eve markets are still a harsh mistress

Eve is still a harsh environment at least when it comes to the market. The tl;dr I was setting up a sell order when I dropped 100 million worth of goods for 8 million. On account of a zero. Even after playing for three years you can always make mistakes. Don’t reset or set up market orders right after you get up in the morning and aren’t quite awake yet. The takeaway always remain diligent in all your financial transactions.

The unforgiving system of Eve Online is what I am still playing for. Hardcore mode is turned on for everyone all the time. June marks three years since I first started playing Eve Online all be it off and on at times. I remember thinking back then how much more people must know than me. Sitting here now after three years there is still so many things I haven’t explored.

The big difference I have found as the years go by is my attitude toward the isk value of different ships and things. When I first started playing I would have gone crazy if I had missed typed a market order and sold a 100 million in goods for a tenth of the price. Today I just shrugged it off and went back to my spreadsheets to calculating next week's gains. Spending billions a week on manufacturing materials pales in comparison to my first month in game saving every last isk for that Retriever(which I destroyed in less than a week in low sec that is another story). Now I buy and sell ships worth hundreds of millions just to play with for the afternoon and soon forget their loss or sell them.

Here's to an afternoons past time for a hour every day.

Tech 1 Manufacturing Guide

The Goal:
Tech 1(T1) manufacturing is the basic level of industry in Eve Online. Typically you only need the industry skill at level one, a blueprint original(BPO) or copy(BPC) and the most basic of minerals sourced from the market.

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The Plan:
What to build? Time to pull out your spreadsheets, you need to see how much it will cost you to build based on material costs vs what you can sell it for. First figure out how much it will cost you to build the item check out this blueprint calculator or Fuzzysteve's blueprint calculator. Then check item prices at your point of sell either in-game or on Eve Central.

Your next consideration is what BPO will you use? How to buy a Blueprint Originals(BPO)? Will you buy an already researched BPO from contracts or buy un-researched BPO from the NPC market and do research yourself? See my Blueprint Research Guide for more info. Don't forget to take into consideration BPO costs into your overall investment.

Where to build? Two things to take into consideration here.
1). Consider availability of materials make sure you can get enough materials it will do you no good if you buy up all the resources in your system and have to fly or ship in your resources using shipping services and lose your margins.
2). Consider the building index of the system or how many people are doing that activity in system. The build costs will scale up as more players build things in this system.  Areas like large trade hubs will have higher building indexes as compared to less used systems further out from major hubs. Go to your star map go to the industry folder and you can see the various levels of industry activities in various systems there.
You need to balance the two availability of materials and system building index.

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The Skills:

Industry - 4% reduction in manufacturing time per skill level.
Advanced Industry - 3% reduction in all manufacturing & research time per skill level.
Mass Production - Ability to run 1 additional job per skill level. 
Advanced Mass Production - Ability to run 1 additional job per skill level.
Supply Chain Management - Skill at running manufacturing operations remotely. 

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The Equipment:
Industrial ship to haul your minerals or goods.
Blueprint of the item you want to build.
Minerals (See cost layout below to find out how much you need.)
Station with open manufacturing slots. Note: Even if slots aren't open you may choose to "Get in Line" if for some reason you can't move your minerals to a new station.

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Total Costs:


I use simple excel functions to create these spread sheets. After I enter in the mineral amount from the BP in cell B4 for Isogen, I type =(B4*D1) in D4 cell. This function allows me to change my batch number and buy exact amounts of minerals. You can use =sum() to add up the amounts to get a quick grasp of how much things are going to cost. Like I mentioned before you can use some of the various online tools. When I started out I wanted a little bit more control than some of these web applications give you.

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Time Required:
Five minutes to buy the materials five minutes to ship the minerals to your station. 10 seconds to start the manufacturing and five minutes to finish and haul back to market. So in total 15 minutes every time your manufacturing job finishes. Again watch the videos below to better understand how to really invest in manufacturing.

Note: As you build more items per batch you will have to wait for those items to manufacturer. For example I currently run 10 slots, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I renew my BPO cycles one day a week and I am building enough units per batch for a 7 day cycle time. This practice is similar to Planetary Interaction cycle times.

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Other Resources:
UniWiki Manufacturing
Eve Industry.org's Blueprint Calculator < The manufacturing calculator I use most.
Fuzzwork's Industry Tools
Eve Platoon.de's Industry Calculator
Eve Cost's Industry Calculators
Eve Market Guide.com's Manufacturing Calculator
Jitonomic's Manufacturing Calculator
Eve Isk per Hour Download
D.R.K. Industry Tracker
Danny Centauri's Tech 1 Manufacturing Guide

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Video:

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Back in the Pod

Enter obligatory getting back into Eve blog post here. Also lots of empty promises that I will post more content and consistent updates.

Yep I am back in game more posts to come specifically guides and other random ramblings.

Thanks for your time.