Don’t forget about the thriving market for loot parts - I knew a few people in empire who traded in loot from noob systems - they never even touched a blueprint but moved loads of product consistently with cheap buy orders and sell orders on the stuff that undercut the manufacturing industrialists. Drove me nuts when I first started to try and manufacture stuff. Do you actually see prices below build price on tech II stuff? An inventor I know recently told me that the tech II ammo was ridiculous - he could barely get the cost of the invented BPC back, let alone the costs of materials - but he didn’t mention anything about ships and modules.
Tell me about insurance.
How does insurance work? Can you insure against theft from within the corporation? How does the in game insurance work? What holes in coverage are there? Are there player run insurance companies?
Insurance only works when you get blown up.
The best insurance (Platinum) is 1/3 the average value of your ship for a 100% payout.
On T1 ships it it worthwhile. On T2 ships it is nearly worthless and I know no one who bothers (only covers mineral cost and T2 ship cost is hugely in the T2 materials not accounted for).
Your modules are NOT covered.
Your rigs are NOT covered.
Your cargo is NOT covered.
Only the ship. If you give the ship to someone else to use insurance is canceled (there is a way to corp insure but I forget how…been ages since I insured a ship since most of mine are T2 ships with rigs).
On a semi-regular basis I post on the forums asking that loot drops be nerfed into oblivion (named drops remain the same). It is idiocy to make T1 mods…everyone has 20 of everything just lying about not to mention the effect they have on the mineral markets when melted.
I see prices below build on T2 a lot.
Everyone and their brother sees manufacturing as the road to riches. Just stuff the crap in the oven and go mission. Come back in a few day = Money!
Most people really really do not seem to consider the total build cost. I have a crazy spreadsheet and tweaked for ideal builds and invention and even with perfect luck it is hard to turn a profit. But people keep doing it for some reason…I guess because it feels like making money…even when you are actually losing it (or at the least not maximizing profits).
Next Rant: Dysprosium Moons :smack:
Insurance is pretty simple. Open the insurance window, choose the ship, decide the payout level (imho, always buy platinum; you can be pretty sure you will lose your ship and you get the highest net payout from the platinum, including the cost of buying insurance) and buy the insurance. The insurance is good for about 3 months. If your ship blows up in that time, you get the payout - depending on what level insurance you buy the payout varies. You only get payout for destruction of your ship; theft will not give you insurance (imagine the scams that could be run if you could insure against theft!!) the holes in coverage are:
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if you spend good money on mods, you’re SOL in insurance. It’s a flat rate for the ship. If you have a pimped out BS that cost you 125 million and slap 250 million in mods on it (very easy to do once you get into faction stuff) you get the same payout as if you flew the same ship with no mods into an enemy gatecamp. The upside is that sometimes you can make money on insurance - I lost a rokh a few months back that was all decked out in tech I stuff - since I got the rokh at material rate from an industrialist in my corp, I actually came out ahead, even though there were snide comments about my weak ass fit on the killboard.
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You lend the ship out, and your buddy trashes it, you will get a nice mail about how the insurance was invalidated as someone else was flying it. No money at all. Interestingly enough, that same ‘feature’ once worked to my buddy’s advantage as a ship that disappeared from a POS (hrm… didnt I say earlier that corp theft was never a big problem? well it wasn’t a BIG problem, but I did know someone who got a ship stolen now that I think about it) got blown up about a week later and the message he got told him who stole his ship.
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If you repackage the ship to transport it, insurance is voided.
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insuring tech II ships is pretty much useless, as their ‘value’ on paper and what they actually cost is miles apart - example, a tech II frigate’s ‘base price’ is somewhere around 1- 2 million (?, just a guess), but if you buy one on the market, it will run you well over 10 million.
I’m sure there are probably other holes, I can’t think of em just now.
ETA - jeebus, I might as well not try to answer any questions and just say ‘what Whack-a-Mole said’ cause I’m so fecking long winded that he gets in two posts before I finish composing one answer. 
Well what I am really curious about are the opportunities in the private insurance industry. I already have Platinum insurance on my ship. Which was in the end pointless. It’s an Imicus, and like two noob tutorials later I was given a free Imicus. It’s ok though, now I have three ships my noob ship and two Imicii.
Yeah, that probably has a lot to do with it - I never mine, but have probably enough raw materials to build a couple of battleships sitting in my hangar, just from melting down loot. I consider all those raw materials bonuses rather than part of my earnings. Also, I personally knew people who put stuff on markets at below mineral costs specifically to ‘help noobs’ or fill out a market in a dead end system - they got the materials from missioning or mining. They tended to get pissed when industrialists would come by and buy out the entire stock to go home and melt. Part of the ‘problem’ is the different goals people have in the game - some people really don’t care what their wallet looks like, they set some goal not related to money and work toward it (that ‘filling out the market’ plan was a total loss as anything they built and put up at better than average prices were generally snatched up and melted or hauled somewhere more busy to make a profit - I don’t know why they didn’t just put slightly worse than average prices up, the market would have stayed ‘filled’ that way).
Insure the free Imicus and blow it up!
(or not)
If they wanted to ‘fill the market’, they could setup proxy corporations that will only deal with noobs. A corporation that only deals with lower than market value goods in order to help noobs, and who markets to noobs specifically, giving a criteria requirement in order to sell. Should be easy enough to set something like that up. Keep the market filled, at a lower cost to noobs, and keep industrialists from buying it up.
Let’s talk about Empyrean Age.
Do you think they are ramping up the system so that players will have even more control over the game world? Will people be able to start making incursions into and taking over systems, or can that already be done?
I have never heard of private insurance companies - it sounds HIGHLY intriguing as a neat niche, but I am seeing one problem with it - it would be very hard to confirm insurance payouts are warranted, and a fledgling insurance company could very well be scammed to death. I wonder if the Eve API would allow you to get a look at deathmails of clients? That might make it feasible. (this last part is specualtion more for the other Eve vets around, I doubt you know much about the API, but that is a cool feature of Eve as well).
How much can in game corporations deal with THE corporation?
I’m assuming this code would be the code that would be necessary.
One thing that may be possible is insuring things to only 80% of their value, in order to cut down on fraud.
I think that is kind of the idea - day to day players can have an impact on the politics of the game. That was kind of the case before, but it was mostly run as specific event type things with hard core roleplayers being the ones involved in that. I also think that this is an attempt to move some of the empire PVP away from the basic ‘sit in Jita and blow war targets away’ strategy used by many empire PVP groups (if you haven’t heard of Jita yet, the place is so packed it makes lag a killer - many pilots avoid it like the plague).
Prior to today’s patch, the faction lines were static; there was kind of a cold war going on to fuel missions/plotlines, but people couldn’t actually take space in empire. You could dominate empire space, as some corps in the lowsec areas do, but you couldn’t change the owner of it. Now it appears you can. This is kind of exciting, and should also make it easier for newer players to get into PVP; you dont have to go through the trouble of getting into a decent PVP corp to take a whack at fleet battles, you can just join the faction militia. That is very cool imho.
0.0 space is a different matter; people take space all the time, and even build outposts (which are like slightly gimped versions of stations you find in empire) where they can control docking rights, access to manufacturing and clones, etc. In fact, my crew was just forcibly ejected from a swath of 0.0 space, so people do make incursions into space and take it, its just that the empire pilots aren’t really affected by that kind of activity.
I am pretty excited about the possibilities of faction warfare, but am not sure it will be as cool as it seems. I get the feeling that some people will find way to exploit it for either gain or griefage, and CCP will be forced to make changes, which will of course be applauded by some and denounced by others. That go anwhere near answering your questions?
I kind of wish there were a way to employ NPCs. Having store clerks would be quite useful. Your conversation with whack-a-mole gave me the idea that setting up a brokerage so that billionaire industrialists could redistribute wealth to noobs. But sitting there in the station so you can man your store would get hella boring after a while.
I am very interested in the macroeconomics of the place, and how that’s managed. How they keep the market from getting glutted, and how they keep people from cornering the market on certain items.
Even though it is the Empyrean Age that brought me to actually playing Eve, I am sad that a day of my free trial will be used up patching the software. At least I am getting up to Gunnery Level 4 in the meantime.
I definitely want to setup a corporation, but I am trying to get an eye for what niche to fill. I think there is definitely some market in working with an all noob corporation. I already have the requisite skills to setup a corp with like 20 people in it, so I could get in with a lot of noobs. A noob swarm might be fun. 
That is one aspect of the API, yes, specifically a way to export info on member activity (directors can also use an ingame function to check same info too, but that is useful for creating websites, spreadsheets, etc). I think there is a function of the API that allows killboards to pull info directly from the API too, but I am an idiot when it comes to coding and haven’t dabbled in it much. I could ask a few corp members about it, some of them would know.
80% is a good idea - could still be competitive with in game insurance if you insured mods - maybe another idea would be to only insure tech II or faction mods to prevent uber-industrialists to build stuff at 75% market value and blow up massive quantities of it.
I’m not sure what that question is asking - do you mean by THE corporation the insurance corporation, CCP, or what?
I’d recommend that folks read some of the EVE Tribune’s stuff. There’s also an archive of older guides/articles on the public forums that should be a good jumping off point.
IIRC we also have had a rather extensive series of “corporate cookbook” articles that would be helpful for someone who was trying to set up a corp for the first time.
Oh, and along with EVEMon, you really need to download EFT (Eve Fitting Tool).
There have been plans in the works for a while now to set up an API based killmail feed.
But the idea of insurance is, I’d wager, fatally flawed. The premiums required to support the service would be prohibitive. Especially for pilots who fly with faction/deadspace/officer gear. Heck, how would you (pl) go about insuring a dual polycarbon II rigged, republic autocannon fitted, repubublic MWD (or even better, Domination MWD) fitted Vaga flown by a pilot with a head full of high grade Snakes?
Insurance companies in the real world turn a profit because tragedy is comparatively rare. In EVE, it’s a good rule that if you fly a ship long enough, you will lose it. If I knew that I could secure all my hulls, mods and implants for a cost that wasn’t prohibitive, I’d happily invest in it and have no worry at all about tossing ships into meat grinders.
Not true.
There is a reason that the Caldari Achura bloodline was viewed as nearly game-breaking when it first came out. If pilots have any ambition towards combat, Achura provides an amazingly strong SP/hour base for that, a very decent base for int/mem based skills and enough charisma to learn basic mission running skills. And let’s face it, you really don’t need most Social skills above Lvl 4 even if you’re a hardcore mission runner.
My datacore harvesting alt doesn’t have any of the LP boosting Social skills and only has Negotiation, Social and Connections to 4, but flying a PvE fitted Ishtar she’d been able to grind standings remarkably quickly in any R&D corp I’ve put her in.
Much more importantly, it’ll be an incentive to get players to actually undock more and get into complexes in lowsec that can be probed down and raided without having to tank the sentry guns. I’m already seeing what sort of a gank squad I can put together, especially since the lower level 'plexes will only allow smaller ships, making SP differentials and combat experience huge factors.
A 1 mil SP player will probably be in for quite a surprise when faced with, say, a Rifter that can do upwards of 159 dps with faction ammo.
Nah, this really was The Great War, the single conflict in EVE that polarized pretty much every single sovereign 0.0 alliance on the map. It’s begun to break down of course, and BoB has been pushing back and retaking territory that they lost. Querious, Fountain, etc… and with MC and TRI evaporating, RA fracturing, Goon participation rates at an all time low, I think we’re poised to see the evolution of TGW into something new.
Yes, lowsec will now be conquerable.
Yes, RP’ing will be boosted tremendously.
Players already had pretty much total control over the economy and 0.0 realms of the game, they’re about to get a huge amount of control of Empire.
Hnm. I wish there was something like Evemon for the Mac. I saw one thing, Skill Minder Cocoa or something like that, but the website for it was down.
As for the insurance thing, obviously there are ways to reduce your risk. You can insure only particular things so that it doesn’t give the person an incentive to wreck themselves, but gives them an incentive to buy insurance. Like say, insure their cargo, but nothing about their ships. Or, insure their ship mods, but not their cargo. Also, a way to keep uber-industrialists out of the way would be to set the payout at 80% but the buy-in at 20%. That way there is no way to make a profit by slightly undercutting market rate. You can also choose not to do business with the kind of corporation that can make that kind of investment. Obviously you pick and choose who you work with.
I might give the insurance thing a try.
Yeah to be qfh that does suck somewhat.
yeah it is kinda neat to be in a n00b corporation in some ways - every time you do something new, like get your first BS, win your first battle against some punks who thought you were easy pickings, etc, everyone is pretty excited. Theres a sense of discovering the game as a group rather than having some guy thats been around since 2004 telling you the way to play, what to do in all the different situations, the way to fit x ship, etc. You also feel more important to each other, a lot of times a noob in an established corp is ignored or ‘humored’, where in a noob corp you all depend on each other and everything you achieve you have pulled together and earned… - My first corp was a noob corp and we had a ‘special bond’, we all cut our teeth together. The downside, which I said I wouldn’t go into earlier, is that a lot of times, more experienced ‘PVP’* corps will decalre war on noob corps just to increase their e-peen, my first group almost folded under 3 separate wars brought to us by much more experienced players, and they came at us like bullies kicking dogs. There was very little we could do to prevent their predations - we were a bunch of frigate pilots with 2 or 3 cruisers mixed in going up against well fitted BSes, cruisers and and tech II frigates. Nowadays, I lose a 120 million isk ship, give a little facepalm, and check the market for a new one. Back then losing my caracal pretty much put me out of the battle as it represented half of my net worth. That sounds harsh, and some people quit over it, but those of us that stayed learned a little bit. With a little advice, you probably could fare a lot better than we did.
*I use quotes cause these 'PVP’ers are kind of weak compared to ‘real’ PVPers that fight against other PVP corps- they’re more gankers looking for easy kills to grow their e-peen than people looking for a challenge in fighting a human opponent. Hrnmm… maybe that sounds a little bitter, but I’ll stick by it.
Player based insurance simply isn’t doable. NPC based insurance is only doable because it creates ISK out of thin air.
Imagine, if you will, a business model based on insuring 80% of a hull for 20% of its value. Okay, let’s take the Titan the Goons recently lost. There is no firm ‘market value’, as the only price points you have to go on are auction sales and/or individual component prices. But even individual component prices vary greatly depending on how/where/when they were acquired and which BPO’s they have. Etc…
So let’s set a conservative figure and say that the Goon titan cost 70 bil to produce. That’d cost 14 bil to insure, and the payoff would be 56 bil. Do you anticipate having that much in liquid assets, especially as a noob? What if five people insure their titans with you? A dozen? Two dozen?
Even limiting it to mods doesn’t help. Can you really afford to replace Estamel’s Invulnerability Fields? What about a half dozen of them? Dread Guristas Invulnerability Fields? If a Nyx pops with a set of four officer smarties, you’d be out billions for those mods alone. And how do you even set the prices for mods that simply aren’t traded on the market but are, instead, only on contracts? Look at the price someone paid, the price someone can get if they contract it in the Forge? The price someone can get if they contract it in 0.0 space? The price someone can get if they contract it in NPC sovereign 0.0?
A cargo-hauling insurance policy might be slightly less impossible for you, but a freighter gank or three would almost certainly break your bank if you had billions in liquid assets. And you won’t for some time. That doesn’t even begin to look at the worst-case scenario of someone hauling, say, an egg and having it popped before it hatches into an outpost.
Add to that the fact that you’re a noob with no known history in the game, and 99% of players will simply yell “scam!” when you try to hit them up for money. Especially since you’re selling a service which conventional EVE wisdom says is impossible and which has never been done by many far older, wiser and wealthier players.
That, I think, is the core of the matter. If the idea was economically viable, someone would have done it by now. Trust is pretty much non-existent in EVE, and for very good reasons.
All that doesn’t even begin to get into how you’d actually set up a pricing structures. A one-time fee of 20% will leave you blasted by debt in absolutely no time, as you should figure that each and every single ship that someone insures will die, sooner or later. A recurring monthly fee of 20% will make your insurance service a waste of ISK after the third month and so most long term players wouldn’t see a need for it on such terms.
It’s just not a good idea.