Approaching Speculation

We love to comment on how different Eve is. Most of the talk is about the bright, shiny stuff that people can brag about. The fights. The kills. The various antisocial moves that are made. It is all true. However, the Eve player that does not dive beyond the space past the log in screen will find themselves behind and they may not even realize it.

To a small degree I have dipped my toes into the waters of speculation. I'm not speculating with the hope of making millions or billions. I don't have that type of ability. I am speculating on a basic fact.

On June 4th, 2013 mineral prices for battleships will increase.

How much will they increase? I don't know. CCP has not yet decided upon it. They will not officially tell us. People who log into the test server will have the first glimpse at the new mineral costs. They will be able to use this information to make strategic decisions on building, mineral acquisition and activate an entire level of market PvP.

The side effect of this speculation and active, aggressive market manipulation is that those not connected to the industrial side of their spaceships will not even know that the cost to make their ship has increased. The cost will increase in a slow roll due to the massive stocks that will be built before the patch goes into place. Over the course of months the ships will gradually increase in price until they plateau.

However, I am not sure that the initial plateau is real.

I was pricing making battle cruiser  With a BPC researched to a Material Efficiency of 100 the build cost for a battle cruiser was still more expensive then the bulk of the battle cruisers on the market. It has been several months since the battle cruisers were changed and the pre-patch stock has not yet been depleted. Ship hulls are already a tight market with a large amount of competition.

Comparatively, a battleship can be built for under its current market price with a decently researched blueprint. For now.

This had led me to venture into a bit of mineral acquisition  At first, the draw to buy from Jita was great. However, I looked at my local market and decided that I could make high sec work for me. There is a thriving mining population and they can also mission in the same stations that they can build and refine from. I put up some buy orders and decided to see what would happen.

Some filled, some sat. I found myself engaged in an .01 isk war with other buy orders. I went to one of my successful market friends for help. He told me to increase my buy orders to under Jita prices and not spend my time fighting with people trying to get dirt cheap minerals. I did so and suddenly my orders started to fill. The end result was that I now had minerals at a bit below Jita buy orders but higher then local which led to them building quickly.

The other thing I did was stop being scared of low sec. There are, for whatever reason, many sell orders for minerals on the low sec market for significantly less then high sec. I avoided them because I am stupid. Also, because it is a habit to not connect low sec and market acquisition together. I was avoiding the very space that I lived in. I stopped being silly, sat down and picked off all of the buy orders. They were sometimes large and sometimes small. But due to the shape of the area and the fact that I run all around it, scooping it all up was a simple and easy task with enormous savings.

The entire project is an interesting and productive entry into buy orders. It will only last for another month. Every battleship I plan to build needs to be built by then. I am building battleships for myself. I am giving myself a future stockpile with some savings to it. Not because I really need to but because the entire project is interesting. I'd like to see if I come out ahead with it.