Broken Manufacturing or Broken Expectations?

Over at the blog Eric Shang - The New Pirate of Eve Online, he writes a post titled "Why I Left EVE Online - Manufacturing is Broken" which I read with curiosity as I participated in manufacturing and thought it was pretty solid.

I tried to do manufacturing and created a new alt. I did not want to mess up Eric’s Pure PVP SP so started fresh.
I wanted to find a manufacturing corp and found that most corporations will say they do it but if you speak to them in their public channels they do more missions and PVP. There will be the odd person that does it and I have found they are very secretive about it.
I stopped looking for corporations after about a week of searching and chatting and started hitting the manufacturing channel. I got more response there from the odd individual. They are 1 man bands again.
So my conclusion is that there are no EVE Online Pure 100% manufacturing corporations. If you belong to one. Please leave you corporation name in the comments because I was looking long and hard.

There are no major manufacturing corps because securing assets from theft is near impossible and there is low incentives other than sharing assets for cooperation. More people do not make manufacturing jobs go faster per project, and multi-tiered manufacturing (i.e. one person mining, another refining, someone else manufacturing, and someone else selling) do not offer much in the way of savings compared to unrelated individuals doing that work and selling each stage on the market to a wider pool of buyers for the best profits at each level. If there were more transaction taxes outside of corporations you might see some economy in vertical integration but as EVE's economy works now, there is none (or not enough to overcome security concerns).

This is the outcome of how manufacturing works in t context of the economy and corporation security, but I wouldn't say it makes it broken. It breaks Eric's expectations of a manufacturing corp with many people running many functions and departments, though. In the post, Eric explains:

I struck gold when 1 person took pity on me and started a private chat. He explained that most corporations will have the odd person doing it but no real corporation out there that only focus on industry actually exists.
It’s all to do with ganking. If you make stuff and haul it to jita or where ever you want to sell it and your corporation description is all about manufacturing and industry. Your corporation is a target for merc corporations with war decs.
We only do industry means you have isk and no fight. They war dec you and ask a ransom to end the war dec. You pay and soon after you have more merc corporations and more outgoing than profits and your corporation folds.
So if you looking for a 100% industry corporation that only mines, manufactures T1 and T2 then you not going to find them.
Even if they out there. They not advertising it.

 I don't know if I buy the ganking/war dec reasons for not having industrial corporations, but its the same idea: its EVE's environment and manufacturers have adopted to it. Sorry it does not meet your expectations.

So no corporations then… how about solo manufacturing as a new player?
He said that unless you have isk behind you that you can buy BPO that has some ME and PE done to it, then it is a waste of my time and money. I would also need a POS because if I tried to make stuff in high sec with the manufacturing costs and taxes I would never ever make profits.
Players that have been playing the game for some time have Ammo and T1 frigate BPO’s with perfect ME/PE levels and have a POS.
When you buy a BPC from a BPC seller it will have some ME/PE but never the full researched one. You see they keep that one for themselves to undercut you.
You can’t use a BPO from the market. Your profits are none or a loss on almost every frigate and ammo out there in a new player’s price range.
This means you will have to buy a BPO and do ME/PE until it is perfect and hope that the BPO you bought is actually going to make you ISk by the time you start making things.
You can get an excel document with profits and by the time you have fully researched a BPO the mineral prices have shifted a bit or even the market has shifted a bit and you end up with a BPO that can do no profit.
Time, effort and isk wasted.

 To be clear, this is Eric relating what someone explained to him in a private chat. So its not factual information that Eric investigated, its a second hand story. That being said, there are some truths in this and there are some exaggerations.

First off, yes, its very hard for a new player with no ISK reserves or skill points to dive into manufacturing in EVE and be profitable. Of course, that is true with almost ANY career a new player in EVE tries out, whether its PvP, wormholes, Faction Warfare, etc. Being a new player sucks because EVE's open universe means you are side by side with players who have been playing years and have immense knowledge, ISK, assets reserves you lack. But that's the double edge of EVE's biggest selling point of combined uni-sharded universe.

Furthermore, yes, its hard to get a BPO/BPC and just start manufacturing because there are numerous perfectly researched BPOs producing things with no waste already on the market that you can't compete with. That's a result of a fully player driven dynamic mature economy, you can't have a fully integrated universe AND a shallow end pool for new players to wade in.

But that does not mean new players are completely shut out from manufacturing. EVE's economy is not a smooth surface; there are major markets where competition is fierce, and isolated markets where service is sporadic at best and thus prices are higher to reflect the difficulties in getting supplies to them and the lack of competition to drive prices down.

One of the ways a new manufacturer could get started is buying researched ammo BPCs and building in an out of the way station to avoid higher taxes, and then selling in mission running hubs where mission runners always need more ammo. Or transporting it to a low sec hub. Or even NPC null sec. Higher risk, but higher profits. Hell, in low sec I used to bring in frigate hulls and sell at a nice profit so a new manufacturer could try that in the right low sec or null sec hub. It takes effort and research but the profits could easily cover the BPC costs.

In his post, Eric complains about Industrial Missions which I cannot speak to for I haven't done any missions at all in years and then sums up:

- So you can’t join a corp because there is no corporations out there that do it. If they about they in constant wardec so you PVP more than actually do industrial.
- You can’t go solo because your knowledge is way too limited to actually understand the tricks of what to make and how to make it as cheaply as possible and you don’t have 200 mil + for a POS.
- You can’t do Industrial missions because you only really get data cores that FW get as well.

Point 1, agreed, but that's just how EVE works and your expectations of something different does not mean anything is broken.

Point 2, I call BS and think you need to actually do some research and effort to find a niche rather than taking the word of someone else and letting your broken expectations equal broken manufacturing. And needing a POS to do manufacturing is BS as well if you are smart and look for opportunities for your products outside of the major hubs.

Point 3, I cannot say.

Overall, I think this is a case of reality not matching expectations and then calling it broken.

(Also, Planetary Interaction is a form of industry and should be new player friendly and a way to get started, right? Look into that if you are a new player starting out.)