beaconBoy SavesTheDay
Galactic Hauling Solutions Inc.
7
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Posted - 2014.10.16 15:21:00 -
[1] - Quote
TL;DR: Bye bye flat rat shipping...hello, having all courier service priced by the light year (LY) and YOU paying double to triple what you use to pay to move one m3 of cargo.
First a little background....
Galactic Hauling Solutions Inc. (GHSOL) has provided the Eve community with a 70M flat rate, low/high sec courier service since the beginning of this year. This service has been wildly popular, and at our height we moved almost 800 loads of cargo per month. That's about half of what Black Frog does (remember they serve both low and null sec), and we used easily a quarter of the JF pilots that they have. If it wasn't for the competitive pressure, I doubt Black Frog would still be charging only 75M for low sec trips under 11.25 LY.
Despite what CCP and the fuel markets did this summer, the 50% increase in jump fuel consumption and another 50% increase in jump fuel prices caused us to increase our rates by only 40% from 50M up to 70M. We worked hard at insulating our customers from these increases and becoming more efficient. We even held off on these increases till August hoping the jump fuel markets might settle down requiring a smaller increase.
During this whole process we tried to educate our customer base that they should start using local trade hubs instead of Jita. This actually matched our how we organized our back end, but clearly. See we use a regional model where our JFs try to stay in a small set of regions for faster pickup and lower fuel cost. But today still over half our contracts are either to or from Jita, and usually all the way out to the boundary of low/null sec.
Today Jita bound cargo can be moved with 15 to 20 minutes of game time effort using re-using lit cynos, med clone suiciding and using small numbers of high sec jumps to do one less cyno hop. But with all these mechanisms going away or being severely hampered, next month it's going to take over an hour to complete a contract. And if a JF pilot was making between somewhere around 150M ISK per hour before CCP's proposed changes, shipping rates will have to increase substantially, or that player just looses interest in hauling.
This week we raised our prices to 10M ISK per LY of distance traveled from the starting point to the destination with an 80M minimum. It may seem like an enormous jump (unless you get wise and start using the regional trade hubs), but the other courier services are going to follow suit next month, especially since all the competitive pressure has been removed. And I would have liked to wait till after the patch to see how things shake out before raising our shipping rate, but this summer we took a huge hit in recruiting when waited. So we did this price hike to get ahead of the curve...maybe we'll be able to poach a few of the competitors' JF pilots who are dissatisfied with their leadership not seeing which direction shipping rates are going.
I wish this all turned out differently, but this is a direct consequence of CCP's 1 LY per game time minute for JFs. That's my name for "jump fatigue"...it's just a speed limit, and I do realize that the 90% reduction in effective range causes JF to be affected least. But if you want your shipping rates to be lower, JF's need more.
ps - I've pushed for 95% reduction in effective range for JFs in other posts, but that didn't seem to gain any traction within the Eve community. |