14 March 2006

Damn HACs

Bloody HAC prices and availability – stop the whining about it already.

A classic example (one of many) of the subject of my ire is this thread
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=307834%5B/ . That’s probably about the twentieth thread in the “General Retards Whinefest” section of the Eve-Online forums on this subject in the last six months. Just fuck off already with your “omg HACs are so expensive whaaaaaaaaaagh”.

I really don’t understand what the bloody problem is, why do so many people just expect that everything in the game be available to them at low cost? I would love to fly around in nothing but Caldari Navy Ravens or Rattlesnakes with fully pimped out faction setups. Can I? No can I fuck, even my deep pocket doesn’t stretch to that. Why can’t I fly about in the ships I want to fly with the kit I want fitted all of the time? Simple, supply and demand. The supply is relatively low because the source of the supply is fairly limited. The demand is relatively high (amongst my peer group in Eve at least, i.e. 3 year vets with deep pockets and plenty skill points).

Why on god’s green earth, or in CCP’s beautifully rendered space can the whining carebear masses not accept the fact that some gear in Eve is not easily accessible and that HACs are one of those things?

All the economics and market forces “experts” that reply in those threads get right up my nose as well to be honest, some of them obviously haven’t got a Scooby what they are banging on about.

The laws of supply and demand are not exactly complicated and debating whether it’s the build time, number of bpos, RAM supply or whatever causing the problem doesn’t really matter. The fact is the ships are rare and expensive. Good. Get over it and fly something else if you can’t afford them.

What’s the point in introducing high end content if everyone gets access to it immediately? There should be something to aspire to, something to aim towards, a new shiny toy to save your pennies for and if that happens to be a HAC then so be it.

I love the fact that members of the intellectually challenged General Forum mob think that there’s some kind of price fixing going on or that if ‘they really wanted to’ HAC manufacturers could drive the price down. You are being exceedingly niave. Prices are high due to supply and demand, drop the prices and someone will buy the ships and resell …. and why? Simple because there are people out there who can’t be arsed waiting and have the isk to buy that new HAC for 150m+ right now… and they do.

The other dirty secret of the HAC world is that the number of bpos driving open market availability is a LOT less than the total number of bpos released (twenty of each I think?). For example, before we traded one of them a short while ago, BNC owned 3 (yes three, 3, the number after two and before four, THREE) out of the 20 Zealot bpos in Eve. They were pretty much all used to supply the corp. So just us, little old BNC had 15% of the total supply of one type of HAC and we weren’t sharing. We currently have 6 HAC bpos out of 160 in game, that’s 3.75% of the total market supply. Count the rest of BoB’s HAC bpos in and we control probably closer to 5, 6 or 7% of total supply.

Assuming that every other alliance in Eve has at least one HAC bpo driving internal supply and it doesn’t take long before the open market only has access to about maybe 60% of total blueprint availability.

Great!! High end content for players at the high end of gameplay, an isk sink for the rich and a rewarding edge in combat for those who put in the effort and teamwork to deserve it.

Of course, you’ll say, you would have this attitude you have 6 HAC bpos in your corp. Fair enough comment but I assure you I have exactly this attitude about Recon ships, Command ships, Capital ships and all sorts of other stuff where I don’t have direct access to a large market share.


You see the thing is, I’m not an unrealistic, grasping carebear ;)

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