The Flame Wars Have Begun, They Have

So as we all know, Crucible came out yesterday. And I'm sitting here running numbers on these Interbus Customs Offices, and I'm pretty appalled. According to the screen, it's a 17% tax, and from what I'm reading on the forums, that's on market value of what you're moving. So as someone who normally has extraction and separate production planets, we're going to be taxed 34% of the item's market value before it even can become the final item....or, god help you, if you need to move it to yet another planet for P3-P4 production......yeah, that was me you heard screaming in anguish.

So PI is about to skyrocket in price. This is both a good and bad thing. Good for those of us who can replace these terrible Customs Offices with our own and get rid of this ridiculous tax, bad for those stuck in high sec who I hear are paying a 10% tax, which is still fairly heinous. So the prices raise to compensate. But wait? What's this? The tax is raising based on market prices? So you can never keep up. And high sec, and probably low sec, PI producers are going to be run out of business either by inflating prices on the tax end, or the competition who doesn't have to pay these taxes in null areas who can undercut them by leaps and bounds.

I thought CCP employed an economics expert?

So after only a single day of watching it cost me 4 mil just to move my robotics offplanet, I decided I needed to get moving on these damn offices. I bought 10 BPCs from a gentleman who was taking pre-orders, so they're already sitting in Jita waiting for me. And after doing a bit of math, it's going to cost near 100 mil per office I need to put up. So I have an extra PI character I haven't gotten around to putting anything down on, so I'm going to tool him up some planets to produce all the P3 and P4 products I can't either already produce or can't buy for decent prices. I also put some buy orders up for P4s, but the .001 isk pirates are having at them, and I don't have the patience to play that game anymore.

Short term plan: buy P2 products my wormhole does not produce. Set up chain for production of these P2-P3s, then all eight of the P4s. I want a production line ready in case someone does manage to kill one of our customs offices.

I also just contracted a freighter run worth near 1 bil to Jita, but I think I'm going to sit on it for now and see where prices go while we're not hurting for isk.


EDIT: While looking at Dotlan and seeing no jumps, but finding an extra wormhole, I assumed either jumps hadn't shown up yet, or the extra WH was an outbound. Then, while screwing around with PI on Eve-eye, I found this underneath where it counts jumps.

Jumps have been removed from API and are unavailable
for wormhole space after CRUCIBLE expansion

How did I miss that in the patch notes?

NO62

Not too much of note has been going on, of late. Mostly we've been plugging away at PI, we've cleared through probably 6 bil in POS fuels in the last month or so. Hopefully the prices will stay where they are at, and I forsee them doing so til the new POS pellets blow over, and then maybe they'll return down to near before inflation prices.

We've finally moved out of our second Class 2 wormhole. We've had some nice grav spawns in our main C2, but they've been de-spawning mysteriously. We saw a russian Anathema in-system a week or so ago, but today I found out three ladars have gone missing, meaning someone de-spawned them no less than three days ago. And our last grav de-spawned a day early. So it appears we have someone screwing with our sites. I understand a scorched earth policy, but this is kind of ridiculous.

Today also marked a strange occurance, we spawned a NO62 wormhole exit. This is a Class 5 connection, with a 3 bil mass limit. This is the first time I've ever seen this hole in our Class 2, and we've lived here for over a year now. So I popped through, found two Revelations, a Chimera, and a Thanatos on scan, but no one moving about, so I called in the Orca crew. 8 minutes later and the hole went critical. I decided not to screw with it further, as the C5 had a C4 static. The critical hole will keep for now.

POS Fuel and Why Is The POS Red Boxing Me?

So not a heck of alot going on of note here lately. Well, except that our own POS has shot down four of our ships. No, it's not set on aggression, and I even doubt if the haulers it shot were armed.

First up was one of the new Tengus we replaced, the pilot warped into one of our bubbles, and the POS decided to blow him to smithereens. Like a fly caught in a web. Petitioned, reimbursed.

Last night, I was flying an Abaddon back to the POS when I warped to a spot 220km off the POS in preparation for warping up to it. I started aligning there for too long, distracted, when I noticed it had decided it didn't like me. I was neuted, and it slowly took down the well plated BS. I was going to remote rep it with one of our Logi ships, but decided the POS would take that badly and blow it away as well.

So I ejected to see if it would still kill the battleship, which it did immediately without my skills. Why do POSes shoot un-piloted ships? So I warped up and grabbed a Noctis, thinking I could salvage and get out before it targetted me. Almost immediately the small arty batteries locked and began firing, and the Noctis went poof.

Alright, so no more of that. A bit later, a corpmate was running PI, and got his Mammoth stuck in a bubble as well. Normally we don't ever do this but once in a great while, but we don't have the same setup in our other C2, so we forget when we come back from an extended stay there. The POS blew him apart, and only a warp stab remained from the wreck.

More petitions, we'll see how these go. I checked and re-checked the settings, they're only on "Attack if standing lower than 10.0". Oh well.

But POS Fuels! I hope everyone else is making a killing on these like we are. We've ramped up robotics production and kept all the other fuels flowing. We've probably made 2 bil in the last week alone. The coffers are well replenished. What Eve taketh away, it can give back.

Course, we could lose it all tomorrow, but that's Eve for you.

Got a bunch of stuff to do today, so we'll keep this one short. Fly safe! o/