A month ago I was happily reporting 50B/month without hassle or even bothering to find anything new.
This time it wasn't so shiny. When Inferno expansion hit, CCP left in a serious bug/design error: capturing the faction warfare zone and upgrading it to T5 allows decreasing the ISK portion of the LP store prices, turning it into a money print (as opportunity cost). The exploiting ran rampart and the fix, despite announced, still not arrived. Now everyone and his mother are AFK-farming FW sites printing LP that they turn into LP store items during organized cashouts.
I wrongfully believed that the discounts only affect LP prices and also that CCP will be as fast with fixing and punishing the exploiters as they were with those who found a different loophole and used it to create millions of LP. The LP store exploit affects me directly since many of my item list are purchasable with FW-LP:
My business model needs a stable price: I purchase implants one by one from missioners and sell them to users on the same station or in another hub. The profit on an item is 10-15M and I sell a lot. The FW cashouts make the price hectic. When they push to T5 and cash out, the prices drop deep. Every subsequent cashout pushed deeper than the previous, as more and more people join the exploiters. The first T5 was practically invisible as most people remembered the initial exploit and that the perpetrators were negwalleted. The second T5 was visible but small as much more people were involved. The current one, a week ago pushed the prices below the highsec LP store costs. Despite I expected it, sold my items before it and set up buy orders for all-time low, I still lost serious profit, as I had to hold them for a week to sell them. While selling something for 110M that you got for 70M isn't bad profit, selling one every day for 10M profit is 2x more.
Thanks to this, since July 31 I made 40.7B, 1.2B/day, which is pretty bad. Losing 950M to a mistype didn't help either:
There goes my "50B/month laid back". I have to make significant changes to my item list if I was going to make 50B/month again. At first I have to find items that aren't affected by FW until CCP finally fixes it. It won't be easy as mostly I trade implants, but I'll manage. The bigger question is to dance once more with FW T5 cashout. I mean if I set up buy orders for 50-60M (for implants that cost 73M +73K LP in the highsec LP store), I might be able to sell them for 80-90M. After the last cash-out, it took a week for the price to regenerate. I'm not sure if it'll regenerate at all next time as the huge income of the previous T5 probably lured another bunch of players to FW and the original exploiters surely launched thousands of new accounts with AFK-orbiting frigates. The safe move would be completely liquidate the LP affected items and suck up the lower income (but lower time too). The risky way is to set up those 50-60M buy orders and hope. I'm not happy speculating, you might heard that. However it's a pretty safe one as the market will regenerate when they fix it. But keeping 30-40B locked down for 3 months, even for 100% profit is worse than character trading.
Anyway, while 1.2B/day is pretty bad for me, it would be still enough to stabilize the budget of the largest sov-holder alone, so maybe my disappointment is a bit Marie Antoinette-ish.
Tuesday morning report, which is still not really reliable: 159.6B (4.5 spent on main accounts, 3.1 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.7 on Ragnarok, 2.1 on Rorqual, 1.9 on Nyx, 2.3 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
This time it wasn't so shiny. When Inferno expansion hit, CCP left in a serious bug/design error: capturing the faction warfare zone and upgrading it to T5 allows decreasing the ISK portion of the LP store prices, turning it into a money print (as opportunity cost). The exploiting ran rampart and the fix, despite announced, still not arrived. Now everyone and his mother are AFK-farming FW sites printing LP that they turn into LP store items during organized cashouts.
I wrongfully believed that the discounts only affect LP prices and also that CCP will be as fast with fixing and punishing the exploiters as they were with those who found a different loophole and used it to create millions of LP. The LP store exploit affects me directly since many of my item list are purchasable with FW-LP:
My business model needs a stable price: I purchase implants one by one from missioners and sell them to users on the same station or in another hub. The profit on an item is 10-15M and I sell a lot. The FW cashouts make the price hectic. When they push to T5 and cash out, the prices drop deep. Every subsequent cashout pushed deeper than the previous, as more and more people join the exploiters. The first T5 was practically invisible as most people remembered the initial exploit and that the perpetrators were negwalleted. The second T5 was visible but small as much more people were involved. The current one, a week ago pushed the prices below the highsec LP store costs. Despite I expected it, sold my items before it and set up buy orders for all-time low, I still lost serious profit, as I had to hold them for a week to sell them. While selling something for 110M that you got for 70M isn't bad profit, selling one every day for 10M profit is 2x more.
Thanks to this, since July 31 I made 40.7B, 1.2B/day, which is pretty bad. Losing 950M to a mistype didn't help either:
There goes my "50B/month laid back". I have to make significant changes to my item list if I was going to make 50B/month again. At first I have to find items that aren't affected by FW until CCP finally fixes it. It won't be easy as mostly I trade implants, but I'll manage. The bigger question is to dance once more with FW T5 cashout. I mean if I set up buy orders for 50-60M (for implants that cost 73M +73K LP in the highsec LP store), I might be able to sell them for 80-90M. After the last cash-out, it took a week for the price to regenerate. I'm not sure if it'll regenerate at all next time as the huge income of the previous T5 probably lured another bunch of players to FW and the original exploiters surely launched thousands of new accounts with AFK-orbiting frigates. The safe move would be completely liquidate the LP affected items and suck up the lower income (but lower time too). The risky way is to set up those 50-60M buy orders and hope. I'm not happy speculating, you might heard that. However it's a pretty safe one as the market will regenerate when they fix it. But keeping 30-40B locked down for 3 months, even for 100% profit is worse than character trading.
Anyway, while 1.2B/day is pretty bad for me, it would be still enough to stabilize the budget of the largest sov-holder alone, so maybe my disappointment is a bit Marie Antoinette-ish.
Tuesday morning report, which is still not really reliable: 159.6B (4.5 spent on main accounts, 3.1 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.7 on Ragnarok, 2.1 on Rorqual, 1.9 on Nyx, 2.3 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
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