Jadal McPieksu
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Posted - 2010.01.17 11:02:00 -
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So, the 200mil a ship seems like a fair price.
The problem with the T2 ship market right now is this;
- The bill of materials for some T2 ships/components were announced to be changed by quite a bit in Dominion
- Some idiots did a bunch of math based on old material prices and proclaimed "yay, this is going to make ships cheaper" while happily ignoring the volumes of materials required.
- Participants in the material supply chain did some real math, figured out that some materials would spike in price and some (prom, dyspro) would tank due to changing demand in volume.
- Previously expensive materials tanked in preparation for the patch as prom/dyspro hoarders dumped their stock.
- Ships got (temporarily) cheaper as the material changes were not yet live but the previously expensive materials went down in price by a lot.
Clueless players rejoiced! Cheaper T2!
Then Dominion arrived and the changes went live.
Now you truly did need less of R64 materials to build T2, but at the same time the demands for many previously cheap materials shot up. So, the story continues...
- Price goes with the demand - there simply wasn't enough of the "cheap" stuff being mined/reacted to reflect the new demand.
- Technetium also spikes due to speculation as "Common wisdom" says it is the new bottleneck. The price spike temporarily slows down the production of components derived out of tech ("I'm not gonna pay *that* much for the raw materials" to make these bits).
- Prices for many materials required for T2 components shoot up as demand outstrips the supply. Builders have to update their complex spreadsheets daily to see what is worth building and what isn't.
That is now where we are today. T2 ship consumers scream "WTF ship prices are going up like nuts. I'm not buying" while at the same time T2 builders are going "WTF if I run the spreadsheet, it says I'll make a loss if I build this ship".
The days of "cheap" T2 ships is over. The final word on "right" price for T2 ships is yet to be seen, but I doubt we'll see sub-100mil HACs anytime soon (if ever). The key bit is that the raw volume of low end moongoo-derived "stuff" required to build one ship went up and each unit of moongoo-derived products has to be mined off a moon, reacted to simple reactions, reacted to complex reactions and built to T2 components in factories. So you need more towers mining and reacting previously "worthless" stuff. Even if the moongoo demands are spread out better so a couple of R64 materials are no longer the bottleneck, someone has to do all that reacting, hauling and building and as everyone wants their share of the ISK...
And so we get... more expensive T2 ships. Not terribly more expensive than before the changes were announced, but definitely more expensive than during the funny times when old bill of materials was required, yet the high end material prices were depressed as stocks were dumped.
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