Thursday 7 August 2014

Little project not so little.

When I ran for CSM there was a few things I really wanted to do and try and sort. One of these was trying to sort the income of lower class wormholes. The slight issue here being there is alot talk about what you can earn but no hard data. I've heard so much different stuff, for instance I've heard in a C1 wormhole you could make anything from 25 million a hour to 150 million a hour. That's a huge variance.

Some people I know did manage to give me alot of good information, Fits they use to run stuff rough idea of what they make a hour, what sites they run, how they run them. I got alot of great hints and tips. The down side is there is alot of people who talk out their arse. Just looking above you can see some of that 25 million to 150 million some one has to be terribly wrong. It probably doesn't help that this sort of thing is a pet hate of mine.

So with that I started to test what you could make, isk wise in wormholes. My first idea was to do a hour of farming in a couple different ways.

1 dps ship on its own then swapping to salvage after.
1 dps ship with a separate person salvaging.
2 dps ships and a 3rd person salvaging.

This gave me some rough ideas of what sort of isk I could make. I also got to work out correct percentages of salvage. 99% of all isk from salvage was from melted nanoribbons. I knew they made up most the income but didn't expect it to be that high. It also gave me a rough idea of what sort of percentage of the isk froma  site was from blue books and what was from salvage. Both C1 and C2 had a huge percentage from salvage, about 70% meaning they are incredibly reliant on the price of melted nano's.

The slight down side was due to melted nanos being random and my sample size being fairly small I wasn't sure how accurate they would be. I asked if I could get hold of the loot table so I could work out some exact numbers, which I was told was very unlikely. Its worth noting, to date this is the only thing I have been turned down on since being on the CSM. All other info I've asked for I've been told.

Part 2 of PvE testing.

I'll say now I don't do much PvE, nearly all my income comes from my T3 indy corp. I occasionally help out in NOHO with sites if there short, but that's not all that often. What I will say is when you live in a C6 magnatar stuff dies really fast to dreads, by comparison stuff seems to take ages when your just on your own in a Tengu.

I decided to do a much more accurate test. I'd run all combat sites (think small first then, relic and data sites after) 10 times, yep that's right 240 sites from C1 to C6 space. With another potential 240 from the relic and data, This isn't including Ladar and Grav sites, which would take it over 500. Holy shit what had I got myself in to.

I do all my testing on SiSi so I don't have to worry about being ganked. The down side is on SiSi its often harder to get faction mods which I wanted as they are often used in wormhole space. Combined with the fact finding wormholes is alot harder on SiSi. Luckily CCP devs are super helpful, a quick skype message and normally some one can come spawn me faction mods, more ammo (not joking even loading my Noctis and Tengu full on ammo I'd had to ask for a ammo pit stop) Find and move me to wormholes I need and in the case of testing C4's give me a couple million skill points to get marauders 5. Without there help I simply wouldn't be able  to test this stuff. So Shout out to CCP Leeloo, Affinity, Fozzie and Nullarbor, who have all helped.

When I do the sites I record how long they take, how long salvaging takes, and travel time. I record the isk from blue books and how many melted nano's I get. This allows me to work out a isk per hour for each separate site. I do this twice once including all 10 sites of melted nano's and once where I ignore the lowest and highest 2 sites of melted nano's, this allows me to get rid of any spikes I might of had where I got really lucky or unlucky. Thanks should go to our maths guru in NOHO, Faye for helping me out here with advice.

I can then use these numbers to give a average of all combat sites in that class of wormhole or use just the best site, as most of us like to min, max and only do the best sites.

The down side is this takes alot of time. I average about 3 to 4 hours on sisi 4 or 5 days a week I finished C1 last week and that probably took 20 hours. To make it worse, is as I get in to the higher class wormholes its going to take longer. Ideally I need to get this done before the summit which is in roughly 6 weeks time.

With this in mind I'm probably going to ask for some help off people to do C3 and C4 wormhles.I'll do each site a couple times, so I can record the time it takes and then I'm hoping to get a whole load of people in to help me blitz all the rest of the sites super fast. Hopefully I can get them done in a day and not a week. C5 are a bit of a issue. but I think I can sort them and C6 I can get most the stuff from NOHO accounting site.

That should then be the end of wormhole PvE, I should have a fairly accurate set of information on what can and can't be earn't.

Other stuff that's been happening, some stuff got added to Sisi (jumping through wormholes lands you at a distance depending on mass of your ship), and people spotted it. Needless to say it was quickly put on reddit here. Then it spread to the eve forums here. I managed to let some of the Devs know and CCP fozzie posted here. Keep in mind it was a Sunday and he replied within a couple of hours, on his day off.

There will be a Dev blog out soon (tm). Then I will try and organise a wormhole town hall for this weekend. I've been keeping a close eye on the thread and speaking to people about it in mails as well as on comms. I'm also happy to come chat to anyone else about it if they want to mail me there contact details.

CCP Falcon has also been helping me sort out getting some devs sorted for a couple podcasts as well as some other minor community stuff. It's surprising just what you get asked by players. So a big thanks to him and the devs coming on the podcasts.

5 comments:

  1. This is a great undertaking and thank you for doing it and devoting your time to it. Please remember that one of the biggest obstacles to PvE in EVE right now is the lack of scaling rewards. C1s and C2s are great because you can solo and keep all the profits for yourself but once you get to C3 and above, you have to divide your ISK/hr by the number of people you have to bring along with you to do it. This is true in wormhole space as well as k-space mission running or even incursions. 150M ISK/hr from higher level wormholes sound great until you have to consider you need 5 guys to do it and you'd be just as good running C1 sites solo...

    We need a serious look at PvE rewards that scale up with participation and not just the escelation type mechanisms currently in place.

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  2. I've been taking that in to account. for c1 to c4 i've done it on my own and then also 1 person dps 1 salvager and 2 people dps 1 salvager so I get a idea of what you can make in small numbers. And yes your correct on the seems good till you think hey i can make that on my own in a c3 and don't need 4 others to help me do these c5 or c6 sites

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  3. When we were living in a C2/C5, we only ran home sites either to clean them up or if there weren't more than 1 or 2 people on. We made our income off the C5 static. That made our situation a bit unique:

    1) no capitals, obviously;

    2) because we were either running sites or sucking gas in someone else's hole, our fleets tended toward cheap and PVP capable (T1/T2, vanilla fit);

    3) we got a little side income running null sec anoms.

    That held us for a good while, but I'm certain that our ISK/hour/player fell well short of what you'd expect from site running in a C5. I suspect, however, that what we were doing was not at all unusual for a corp in a C2.

    -Dersen Lowery

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  4. I'd recommend reading this thread:
    http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=1245158

    It's a little old, but I think it's relevant.

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