Bubbly Bubbles

Finally, it's here... my Phobos heavy interdictor :)



Now all I have to do is find an excuse to use it. Took it by my lonesome self into a couple of wormholes the other night, but the owners seemed to be offline :(

Rigged For Her Pleasure

There's been an announcement that the upcoming mini-expansion is to include changes to Ship Modifications, the so-called "rigs".

So in the near future we can expect 3 classes of rigs, for the 3 (sub-capital) ship sizes: small for frigs and destroyers, medium for cruiser and battle cruiser hulls and large for battleship hulls.

The main change will be price, by what I feel is an enormous factor of 5. This means that using current prices for salvage, a medium rig would cost 1/5 of the price for a large rig, and in turn a small rig - 1/5 of the medium rig price. For example, a Trimark Armor Pump I costs around 15 million 20 million, so the medium and small variants should be at 4 million and 800K respectively.

What this means is that some ship classes will be getting a boost - especially T1 battle cruisers: one typically costs 20 - 40 million, and for PVP they are often used unrigged. Being able to equip them with 3 rigs for under or around 10 million (usually 20-40% of the hull value) is simply fabulous compared to the 45-50 million it would cost in the current system (over 100% of the hull price).

Another class of ships that would greatly benefit from the rig changes would be assault ships. Imagine for example a Trimark rigged Ishkur, with Warrior II drones hunting interceptors. The additional cost would be pretty small, a few million at most, but survivability would be greatly improved.

One possible disadvantage however is the fact that the increase in rig usage, combined with the alleged ability to transform T1 salvage into T2 salvage, might cause a significant increase in the salvage materials' prices - and as such a significant increase in the prices for battleship-sized rigs, compared to what we are used to currently.

There is an ongoing discussion on this topic on the Features and Ideas Forum

Meta 3 and 4 item prices soar as the farmer CNR armada remains grounded

Again with the macro farmers!

The past week has seen a strong increase in the prices of "best named" (a.k.a. Meta 4) and Meta 3 items. The reason? Oh, let's just say the armada of stereotypical CNR's and Golems running missions non stop has been nerfed a notch by CCP.

But how much of this price increase is natural market reaction and how much is artificially induced by market manipulators? This is indeed a great opportunity for anyone with a fat wallet and some patience to obtain an even fatter wallet.

Take for instance the best named 10MN Microwarp Drive, the "y-t8": it is generally used on cruiser and battlecruiser (and their T2 versions) sized ships for the following reasons:

• Less fitting requirements which may just be enough to "fit"
  
• Less cap usage than T2
  
• Comparable to T2 performance-wise

Six months ago, one of these babies cost around 3-3.5mil; yesterday in Jita the going price for one was 14mil. In other systems of The Forge and the surrounding regions you could still find some for 8-10mil, which means a certain degree of market manipulation is underway.

How much exactly is difficult to pinpoint, given the "lag" with wich prices elsewhere allign to Jita prices; but given the previous trend, I'd say anywhere up to about 30%.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, as usually this kind of manipulation implies a price spike for a few days, but afterwards, depending on the daily demand, supply and quantity left on the market, the price stabilizes, sometimes lower than before the spike.

I'm anxious to see how the price increases are going to affect PVP... watch the killboards :)

Important Market Shifts in Response to CCP Actions

As of late, due to several actions/changes performed by CCP, a few sectors of the in-game market have suffered some significant changes:

- In response to CCP announcing different sized rigs, the prices on salvage have taken a hike (20-25% in some cases)

- As a result of rumors that CCP started taking action against isk farmers by banning accounts (and also because China recently outlawed virtual currency to real money trades), prices on isotopes and other ice-related fuels for starbases has also increased by some 20-25% at the time of this writing (The Forge regional market). So far mineral prices remain largely unaffected.

- PLEX prices are coming down again from an all-time high caused by market speculation (and CCP offering the option to pay for Fanfest tickets with PLEXes)

Also, the number of Isk spammers in public chat channels has decreased drastically, which can only be a good thing, hehe.

In other news, I've been playing the T2 market a little (well, a little more actually). It's nice to put your cash to use - granted, the 0.01 undercut wars are killing me, but the return is awesome; when I'm bored I simply go do something else.

That's it for now,
See you in space.