How BoB makes its money

[Comstar]

Explanation here

Dungar Loghoth
Caldari
Black Omega Security
Pandemic Legion    Posted - 2007.06.10 02:53:00 -

Orange Species was in H-PA (Venal) a few minutes ago, complete with a cloaking titan and multiple freighters. After some detective work by my fellow alliance members, it turns out Venal sells plutonium for 11280 isk, and Curse will buy it for 13483 isk, netting a 2203 unit profit.

Curse will buy a million units a day, roughly. Someone has been filling these orders since May first. Everyday. All one million. At 2200 isk a unit, that's 2,200,000,000 a day. Every day. Since May first. 40 days at 2.2b a day is 88b, or almost the component build cost of two titans (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingamebo...74362&page=1#3)

To give you an idea, it would take about 40 minutes to complete the chain from H-PA to whatever station in Curse they are selling the plutonium at.

The thread is funny with some people saying "do it yourself". No wonder Delve never has BoB in it ratting like everyone else has to. I should start doing missons there.

I expect the other Titan's will start doing this too, if they aren't already. Now, is CCP is aware of this, and if not, shouldn't they have a machine set up to spot 2 bil a day coming into one person's pocket from the NPC ISK fountain? If they are aware of it, they haven't stopped it.

[Simond]

2 billion a day per titan, per trade route.
I think I've just got a goal for my newly-trained covops skills - BoB convoy hunting.

[eldaec]

Isn't this how people are supposed to make money in Elite-online?

I didn't really understand the outrage on the forum you linked to.

Or is teh real probnlem just that it's Bob?

[TheDreamr]

The problem is partly that an already mega-rich alliance has found a way of using their insanely expensive titan in an unintended way, allowing them to line their pockets with relatively little risk ... that and everyone else is kicking themselves for not actually thinking of it first before it gets nerfed like all the other easy-money trading tricks have.


Of course people could just be feeling all that hate because a) it's BoB and b) this makes the vocal minority of 0.0 asshats who complain that empire offers too much reward without any real risks, look like HUGE hypocrites.

[Comstar]

The outrage isn't really at BoB this time, it's CCP and Titans in general. Any Allience owning one can do the same thing. The rest of us plebs have to work for a living.  I'm sure if the other Titan Pilots aren't doing this already, they are doing this now. It DOES answer my question on where BoB gets their money, because few people seem them ratting or mining much. Granted they also get a lot of money from Pet fees too, and they made a lot of money before they used a Titan to do it.

They use the Titan to jump portal freighters from one region to another. In Complete safety and completely unable to interdict it. There is no convoy TO attack, it's all in the Titan which can just drop them into a POS or just outside the station on the other end and them take them to the station and back. The only way I can think of is the is to hit them for the ONE MINUTE it takes the Titan to engange the Jump portal, and the Titan can re-enginze the energy in about...22 seconds.

It IS a possible weak link in that you know he'll be doing it day in and day out, much like DB Preacher lost his MS. But losing a Titan is more likely to be because the pilot got hit by an asteroid. At his computer.


Now, the question is, did CCP know about this, and if not, why not? Surly they have tracking systems showing the to 10 money makers in the game, and right now, this seems as broken as a remote DD, which IS getting fixed, fiannly. I have a suspicion that CCP DOESN'T have the tracking tools to show who is making large amounts of ISK, which is why they keep getting FUBARs like this. Previous examples include broken complexes, that CCP apparently wasn't aware of until someone said something about on the public forum.

[Merusk]

Reading that thread is funny.  "Your share in a 10/10 complex is better. You wouldn't make much money doing this!"

Err, maybe, but could you do it in the same amount of time?  Seems like this would take 30 mins tops.  2.2bil in 30 mins, woo!

[Hellinar]

I expect the other Titan's will start doing this too, if they aren't already. Now, is CCP is aware of this, and if not, shouldn't they have a machine set up to spot 2 bil a day coming into one person's pocket from the NPC ISK fountain? If they are aware of it, they haven't stopped it.

Jeez. In a competitive game, exploit detection should be the first thing you build into the database. I've enjoyed playing EVE in a low level carebear sort of way. Putting effort into the 0.0 game with this sort of thing going on seems kind of pointless. CCP doesn't think that way I guess.

[Arthur_Parker]

Can't fault BoB for this, doubt there's any alliance that wouldn't do it if they were able.

[MahrinSkel]

This is just the way that the NPC goods market works, except that normally you have so much competition for them that the margins are a lot lower.  Before Titans, this particular route was effectively impossible to run, because both ends are in NPC 0.0 and it requires several freighters worth of volume.  If someone else starts making the same run, the margins will drop.

--Dave

[Comstar]

Not if they take the entire sell order AND the entire buy order in one trip, each day.

[Fordel]

Yea, that seems to be the real stink. If you leave 1 unit of the million unit large buy order, it resets every 24 hours... that seems to defeat the entire purpose of the market corrections if you can loophole right past the correction mechanics.


Seems like a text book example of a bug and/or exploit.

[MahrinSkel]

The market isn't quite that simple.  The NPC station has a demand number and a range, as long as the amount of the demand (the amount the order is for) isn't getting filled completely, the price goes up (until it hits the top of the range).  But the amount the NPC station will buy never goes down, someone can fill it for 1 short (to maintain the price), and that doesn't stop you from coming in 30 seconds later and filling the order (driving the price down).

It works like that all over Empire, and the handful of people willing to risk freighters in low-sec space clean up just as much.  There are three options to counter it:

1) Set up your own trade run and fight it out, Market PvP style.

2) Attack the freighters, either in Venal or in Curse.

3) Once Rev2 hits and Titans are no longer pwnmobiles, take out the 100B isk asset that makes the whole thing possible.  Knowing where and roughly when it will be is 2/3 of that battle.

And I say all of this knowing that AAA has their own (less profitable) version of this working with dread-hauling down to Stain, or at least they used to.  Dunno if Evil Thug is using his Titan for it now.

--Dave

[ajax34i]

I kinda expect CCP to nerf this, simply because they've nerfed NPC-trading in the past, however long ago it was, but more importantly because they keep talking about inflation and not introducing more ISK into the economy, and this does, a lot.

[Reg]

Any other time a trade route this rich has been publicized it's led to an inevitable nerf. But this is BoB of course...

[Simond]

The obvious fix is simple: Jump Array does not work with ships over a certain size...like, say, freighters & cap ships*. Battleship-sized ships and below only - good luck making that run using industrials.

Anyway, like Dave said - if it's not fixed before then, it'll stop with Rev2: Using your invulnerable solo pwnmobile to jump-bridge freighters around for free ISK is a whole different kettle of fish to using your vulnerable, interdictable, time-and-resource expensive supercap on a known route which will have enemy covops scattered all the way along it.

Wonder what the odds are on Orange Species making the same run anyway, then complaining about losing his titan to a log-on trap? ;)


*Yes, you can jump other caps/supercaps in with a titan's jump bridge. Yes, this does mean that they all appear with full cap. Yes, this is an advantage over any other cap ships that had to jump in the normal way).

[ajax34i]

Actually, in tune with what they did with NPC tradegoods sellers in Empire, the fix would be to make the supply go from 2 million units to 200 units.

[Hellinar]

How about slightly smarter NPCs? Wouldn’t a plutonium trader kind of notice someone buying multiple freighter loads a day, and respond by putting his prices up? If CCP was monitoring for “excessive” cash flows, they could feed that information back to the relevant trader, and stem the flow immediately.

Of course, that doesn’t fix the base problem that Titans can move massive amounts of freight around invulnerably. That needs to be fixed, or all the high profit routes would end up nerfed.

I think the base problem is that CCP tend to treat exploits as “clever play”, until BoB and an few other high end alliances have made a killing from them. I don’t see much sign of that basic problem ever being fixed.

[ajax34i]

Well they have something like this; the price of plutonium (and any other NPC goods) goes up as soon as anyone buys any amount, and otherwise goes down slowly daily (the NPC's keep reducing the price if nobody buys).  It usually starts with the supply priced at 6000, and the demand at 5000, and one goes down and the other up until the difference becomes positive (and profitable), at which point whoever has the cash to invest and the means to transport it, does.  The thing to remember, also, is that it's typically a 10% profit scenario, where they invest 20 bil to make 2, and if you take out their cargo ships in flight, they've lost 20 bil, not 2.

But the problem is that more complex behavior on the part of the NPC's requires more server CPU cycles to be assigned to manipulating the database, and the players will figure out a pattern after a while anyway.  So it's almost not worth coding.

The core problem, in my opinion, is that CCP has a few things where the "clever play" still doesn't have a hard-coded cap of some sort.  They started the game with a lot of these things, and they've been capping them one by one over the years (trade market nerf, module stacking penalties, ship changes to prevent stacking, gang size changes, etc.).  Which shows that they're learning, but also that they didn't have much XP to begin with.  Which is fine.

Thinking about all the bugs I've seen that are just annoying after a while, and all these issues that aren't caught, and everything that's been postponned for 3 years because there's always been something more important to fix, and then realizing that the devs are interested in PLAYING the game and treating it as a leisure activity, rather than a professional / business venture, that's what sucks.