Incursion 1.6 fixes have so far included three client updates and two server side patches. One part of these fixes has related to extraction rate bugs introduced into PI.
http://www.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?patchlogID=227My
My first PI run after the original update had seen a drastic drop in available resources on my Empire planets. I had just wondered if they had changed the sensitivity of the scan slider, but my extraction rates seemed to have had halved or worse. Overnight the prospect of Empire PI went from amusing with a small profit, to being a pointless waste of time. So it was with some interest that I did my PI runs today. The resource levels still appear to have drop significantly on the survey scanner, but the extraction volumes were back to around where I was expecting.
I have been playing around with PI for around two and a half months now – just slowly building and adjusting the installations. I am not too pedantic about keeping on top of things, and the processes can sit idle for days at a time. Still – I’ve generated over 90M of PI materials at the moment. While initial setup costs halve the profits on that – in the long term I can see it being worthwhile. It is certainly a worthwhile endeavor for newer players.
I am scaling back the range of the items I am manufacturing and trading, cutting out those whose volumes are too low. In fact my manufacturing has almost ground to a halt, with most supplies now coming from buy orders far cheaper than you can make things. I can see I could turn over quite a profit in a trade centre, but I prefer the much slower .01 ISK games in this backwater. In the same sort of period as I have been working on PI, I have made probably around 150M in profits. Again – this is on relatively minimal effort.
These are miniscule profits compared to what I could achieve, if I wanted to invest a lot of time and energy into it. That is not my goal at the moment however – which is instead to increase the relatively passive income on my accounts and keep active in multiple areas within the game. I am not far off the point right now of having doubled my regular low effort income from 100M a to 200M a month – through Datacores, Empire PI and Empire backwater trading.
Evehermit 