Feeling guilty

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , ,

I would be lying if I said that I have spent the past few weeks playing lots of EvE and making new online acquaintances in the game, because I haven’t.

What with the new way of training your skills I haven’t even had to log in to update my queue on any of my accounts, seeing that all of my characters currently have around 200 days worth of training going for them.

But all of this is due to the fact that I’ve been either super busy, or trying out a few new games. One of which being the new Assassin’s Creed. I have to admit that I wasn’t even planning on buying it at first but a friend showed it to me when I was at his place and it looked way more fun than Black Flag or that horrendous thing Ubisoft dared to call AC 3. So I spent the past week playing that, and the weeks before that preparing for a few exams I had to do that were work related. Seeing that I work as a consultant and customers always like it when the people they hire have a piece of paper stating that they know what they’re doing. It’s silly but that’s how the world works.

I wish I could have said that I spent the past weeks playing EvE though, that I had found myself a corporation I was truly happy with, one that I went on flights with, tried out new things with. But alas, I haven’t even tried searching for one yet.

I’m kind of hoping that I’ll just get one thrown at me I guess. Bad way of working but still. I promise that I’m going to try and change that, we’ll see what happens.

The EvE online youtube-channel did release a new trailer called “This is EVE”

If you haven’t watched it, check it out right now, just click on the play button there. It takes parts of real players talking on their comms, pasting it in a pretty nice video. I really enjoyed watching it, and I bet you will too.

Now it’s time to go log in again, I feel bad for leaving the factories cold for so long.

Stay tuned o7

Skill queue online?

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , 6 Comments
Starting tomorrow, you will no longer have to log in.
Or at least not on your alts that you’re training. As most know by now, tomorrow is the Phoebe release, and it’s bringing something in the game that nobody really saw coming. Or at least I didn’t. 
The 24 hour queue will disappear, you will no longer have to check up on your queue to check whether or not it’s still running or if you forgot. Starting tomorrow, you can put your whole skill plan from EvEmon in there. 
Which is a good thing, or at least it is if, like me, you have a few characters just skilling up for certain parts but you’re not doing anything else with them. With this new feature I won’t have to remember to check up on them, I’ll have hundreds of days on training already put up on them. Yay!
The one thing that might be bad about all this is the fact that not only people with alts will have no reason to log in. I myself have been there before, logging in just to update my skill queue, but when doing that I did start to talk to people and do things with them from time to time. If you don’t need to log in anymore because you have years of training ready, you won’t have any reason to start talking anymore and you might just not log on anymore. 
But I guess CCP saw more positive points on all this than the negative ones.
I have to admit that other than that I don’t know much more about the Phoebe release, I saw the invention changes but turns out they decided to wait with those for the next one. We’ll see.
As for what I’m doing in game right now, it’s pretty boring. I sold my POS parts, I moved to another system on one of my characters, I’m putting lots and lots of blueprints in my invention slots and I’m about to start FW on another character.
Pretty curious to see how that will turn out. It’s about time I tried it, who knows, I might just like it. 
Stay tuned o7

Taking it down

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , 2 Comments
I finally did it. After talking about it for weeks and thinking it all through, I finally took down my PoS.
When I first bought the POS from a friend it was mainly because of the way industry worked back then. In high sec there were almost no lines that were useable as an inventor/manufacturer other than those in backwater places too far from the market hubs.
At the time I had no idea what a POS was except for a way to do the things I wanted to learn how to do. 
Jump forward to the update that changed that. Suddenly you could use stations again, the whole industry bit changed, I no longer had to click hundreds of times in order to update my factory lines, and stations were a viable way to work once more. Having a POS still gave you slightly more options in the manufacturing/invention speed. But still, was upholding said POS and fueling it worth the slight speed upgrade? 
In my case, it wasn’t, or at least not anymore. Due to RL taking a lot of my time and EvE slightly being on the background I couldn’t continue the way I was. Spending 500m a month on fuel while I only used my lines once per day or less. I didn’t make as much as I used to due to my lack of time and I was basically barely making break even, all of this due to the cost of fuel. 
So I did the logical step, I took the POS offline and brought in all the modules, figuring that I wouldn’t be needing them anymore. If in the future I decide to set up a POS again it won’t be where I’m currently at anyhow. I would just move.
Taking down the POS took a lot longer than setting it up. Which was annoying, not only do you have to unanchor every single structure one at a time, you have to go scoop them to your cargo hold. And as you all know, you need to be rather close in order to start scooping.
This was done with a lot of warping out and in at the bookmarks I made for the modules. Seeing that when you’re flying an industrial to tear down your POS, speed is not part of your vocabulary. 
After I was done (or so I thought) I took the tower offline, which was one of my many mistakes, seeing that I still had two batteries hanging around the tower, and in order to unanchor them the tower needed to be online. It took me over an hour to have it come back online, unanchor the batteries and then take down the whole tower again. Shooting it all down would have been faster, a lot faster. But that’s hindsight for you.
So now I’m towerless and using the station to do my thing. I have no idea what the future will bring for my industrialist, but I know it won’t entail fueling that tower each month. Yay! 

Production efficiency and cost

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , ,
As an industrialist you have to check every part of the equation; is the material not too expensive, am I losing ISK on the time spent manufacturing, would it be more cost effective to just buy the invented BPC’s from someone and so on. 
I.. Don’t really do that. This is partly due to laziness and partly because I just enjoy doing what I do, not really caring if I make a profit out of it.
Which is one of the many things in my EvE time that I should work on, but as my readers (yes you two there) might already know, planning isn’t really my strong suit. 
A good example of this is the fact that the past week I haven’t done any manufacturing at all. I was missing one tiny part for my production but I didn’t feel like going out to Jita to get it, despite the fact that I have an alt parked there and I could have easily put up a courier contract to bring it to me. 
My time vs efficiency isn’t quite as it should be. At least I was still doing my invention, right? 
I have a few thousand BPC’s still waiting on their time to come, their moment to shine, to become an X or a V.. After that, or maybe even before that, I will be retiring my POS, something I decided on a few weeks ago but am finally coming to terms with. I’m not using it to its full power and therefor there’s no reason for me to keep using it.
Retiring my POS might even mean that my industrialist goes on his way to Null sec. The WH corp I joined on my combat alt has an industrialist branch who have a null sec HQ that I was offered to join. I might just take them up for that.
But that’s something for in a few months from now, because as we know. Planning and I, it doesn’t really work.

Another new playground

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

It’s been close to two weeks since my last post. This is partly to blame due to the fact that I’ve been busy and partly because I wasn’t doing much in game.

As per usual I forgot to stock up and been flying back and forth between Jita and my home base to stock up my POS once more.

It’s amazing how fast you go through your resources when you have two inventors/manufacturers running everything. When I think that I’ll last two weeks, I will actually last less than one. This is partly to blame because my math is pretty off and I tend to forget a lot of things.

As for my adventure in wormhole space, well I haven’t actually done too much yet, I’ve ran a few sites which was cool but other than moving ships inside the hole, there’s nothing else to say.

I’m not sure how this will change in the near future because I am currently juggling between EvE and another game.

Last weekend ArcheAge launched its Headstart. And despite all of the server issues and glaring queues, I had tons of fun playing the game. I never did any betas or even alpha despite buying the founder pack but this is because I tend to get sick of most fantasy MMO’s quite fast and I wanted my first experience to be in the live version of the game.

Yesterday was the official launch which meant that F2P players were able to join the servers too. Which in turn meant that I have not been able to play at all yesterday because there was a 2000 man queue on my server and after 2.5 hours of being in said queue there was still 1600 people waiting in front of me.

So I updated my market orders and went to bed. Only to find out this morning, when I wanted to start another few invention runs, that I was out of datacores.. AGAIN!

Cue another Jita run.

I keep telling myself that I should be writing these things down and just put 2-3b ISK in materials. But I don’t like seeing my wallet going lower than it already is.

I should stop thinking like that, you need to spend money to earn money, I just need to learn to spend it on time instead of last minute.

Stay tuned o7

Other pastures

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Last week, a friend I made in EvE told me that I should join the corporation he had joined. He’s been talking about it for a few weeks now ever since he moved into Wormhole space and he said that I should try it too. Seeing that it might give me an opportunity to come out with my combat character some more.

Fast forward to Monday and I am accepted into the corporation, all I had to do was get myself a few ships and move to the wormhole.
“Who needs a scout, I can handle this!”

Something that I did yesterday, I bought myself a few frigates, a destroyer and a battleship and spent about an hour and a half moving one ship after the other into the wormhole. It gave me something to do, it even had me thinking about fits. Although I have to admit that it didn’t help me in thinking too hard about them since once I figured I was settled I noticed I had forgotten dampeners and ammo (woops)
“I’m a pretty fly, with a nasty sting”
Joining a wormhole corporation is something that I talked about in the past, I even thought I had joined one before but turned out that they were actually high sec mission runners like myself who happened to have a POS in a hole that they went to from time to time. Which is cool, but not what I wanted. What I wanted was to live inside one, and not just alongside one.

Hopefully my move will allow me to experience this side of the game from close-by instead of just reading about it. It’s scary, because I can’t scan to save my life, but I guess that just means I’ll have to learn.
“Let’s get this show on the road!”

Other than the wormhole move and figuring out what’s next on my list in the new corporation, I will be using this weekend to run a few tests on my industrialist. I’ll be updating my way out of date spreadsheet, to check if I still make a profit (because who counts this stuff psh!) and whether or not it’s more profitable for me to stay in my POS, or if I should just tear it down and start working from a station.

If the prices aren’t too high for my manufacturing and invention I might just tear down my POS and just use the headquarters. Seeing that having a POS means spending 500m a month in fuel. So if the cost of working from station isn’t too high, I can just start doing that.

While creating T2 items I noticed a slight decrease in the market movement of some of the modules I make. Meaning that I’ve been scratching a few of the list in the past couple of days. I still have a few thousands blueprints that I’ll have to invent (holy crap why did I make so much copies of everything) but once those are all done, I’ll be checking which I liked creating the most and, of course, where most of my profits came from.

So plenty to do and figure out for me in the next couple of weeks!

Stay tuned o7

Flying solo, not something for me

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , 5 Comments
In the past few months (give or take 6-7) I’ve been making ISK and spending ISK. Mostly on industry related things and fuel. Due to a certain program called jEvEAssets I can track how much I earned, how much items I have in my hangars, how much all of it is worth according to Jita etc. etc.
This is great to make conclusions on how well or how bad you’re doing. Me, I’ve been doing badly according to this. Not because I’m making a loss, but more due to the fact that I’m not making a profit either.
This is entirely my own fault and I know it. I only log in a few times a week to buy stuff and then don’t use them. I have Battleships both faction and normal ones lying around in hangars that I never even flown except for getting them to a certain system. 
My manufacturing, the exact same thing. Where I make a slight profit due to what I make. I “lose” it because of me having to fuel my POS. In general, I have been stuck on 30b since March-April.
All of this, is mostly due to the fact that I don’t have an actual reason to log in more. Other than those 5 minutes I feel like doing it. And this in turn, can be traced back to the fact that I’m playing solo. 
In previous blogs I talked about searching for a corporation. But it’s not really working out too well. Also due to the fact that I don’t actually feel like logging in and searching for the right one. I’m just hoping that it will get thrown in my lap.
I dislike solo playing. I started up another well-known MMO again because a friend of mine asked me to play it with him to start again on a new server. The only reason I did this is because he asked me to. It’s a shame he never got into EvE the way I did.
I know for a fact that once I find a corporation, a bunch of people that aren’t too serious about themselves, I’ll have reasons to log into the game. And once that happens, I’ll see my capital go up again.
I just need to find them first.
Stay tuned o7

Safety is relative

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments
It’s been ages since I last got blown up. And never before did something like this happen to me. Today, I got blown up while moving a bunch of stuff to Jita in my manufacturing alt.

I usually fly with my Blockade Runner (Viator), this is because it’s faster than flying an Iteron and I have a cloak. A cloak that I normally turn on, but didn’t this time. It’s only 4 jumps though, so you think: what’s the worst that can happen.

Well today the worst that could happen is me flying around with about 500 T2’s in my cargo and having it shot out of the sky. According to the kill mail the total worth of this guy’s kill was about 700m, give or take a few.

No big deal in itself, but I just really, really liked my little Roadrunner. I made it myself. Now I need to go and make a second one. Although it still stings a bit, seeing as I had decided to use that bunch of items to be the last for a few weeks. Now I need to start on it again.

Lessons learnt, you’re never really safe when flying around. Most people know that, but when you haven’t had any kills or deaths for over 7 months, you get dulled into a sense of safety.

“Rest in pieces”

Overstocking

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , 6 Comments
I am a manufacturer, a producer of goods, goods that people need in order to do whatever it is they do.
Not just any kind of goods either, I manufacture T2 items. A special branch of items that you in order to create them you need to spend time inventing them first.

But what happens when you produce so many of them, that you have a stock so large that it is almost impossible to get rid of them quickly? What if you try and do this anyhow, knowing that it will flood the market.

That’s right, you crash it, and your sale price will go down quite a bit. I currently have too large a stock of the items I produce to put them for sale. This is bad, seeing as right now all of those items are currently sitting in a hangar, being trickled onto the market bit by bit.

And when things are just sitting there, they’re not making ISK, and when you’re not making ISK, you can’t put it back into your production cycle. Which means that right now, I’m producing nothing, other than a whole bunch of T2 BPC’s of the items I currently have an overstock of.

As you probably figured out, that’s not the way it should be going.

I have been creating these T2 items ever since I first started manufacturing, because I started doing this together with a friend who told me what to do when he still played. He has long since stopped playing EvE while I continued his little business.

The production of these things has made me a bit of ISK, enough to have a pile lying around, just looking at me, and screaming ‘Use me! You need to!’ but I don’t really like seeing that number go down, which, as a manufacturer is a stupid thing. Spend money to make money and all of that.

Maybe I should try something new, something that would need me to invest more ISK but get a bigger margin of it.
Right now I invest 500k-1m to get a profit of 1m-3m.. That’s nice, especially seeing I make a few hundred of those items per day. 

But maybe I should start seeing things a bit… Bigger?

But I might not be able to do that on my own..

Crius release, thoughts so far

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Crius was released a few days ago, and I’m loving it. The industry revamp, especially how they upgraded working with a POS is just great.

I’m sure there are people out there that might complain about the fact that their precious BPO’s now need to be inside of the POS. But I, as an inventor and T2 manufacturer, can’t be happier.

I can start my invention runs with a click of a button from my home base instead of having to go to my POS and be within 2500m of the lab. Not only that, but I can do it even when I’m 15 jumps away. 

Next to this, it’s just one click to turn on one invention run. For those who worked invention or manufacturing jobs, they know that this was a pain in the ass.

In the past you needed to decide which line you would put the job on, after which you pressed a button, using said line. Once you clicked, you had to click again to grab the blueprint, click ok once more another ok, and only then you could start the job.

That’s 5 clicks for one job. You can imagine how much of a pain it was if you had about 20 or 30 invention lines running, each day.

Luckily, that’s now in the past, I can start one job with two clicks, one to decide the blueprint, one to start. It’s a lot faster than before, and I can all do it from station, so easier at that. I will happily take the cost of the installation for that.

“You mean, I need less materials? Sweet!”

The fact that I can even install jobs remotely from a dozen or more jumps away, means that I can use my trading alt too. Of whom I found out that he has the necessary skills to do my invention and manufacturing runs too. Guess it’s a good thing I checked my skills on him.

The only thing that was missing was the ability to install them remotely so I did the most obvious thing to do… I bought a PLEX from the market (through a sell order, shame on me!) and activated second character training.

My trader now has a month of training activated for him, which I will use to train him a bit further into retail and allow him to activate remote jobs.

I’m still figuring out the bonuses that my POS can have, and what it does (as far as I’m aware they’ll just reduce the installation cost) but for now, I’m really happy what Crius has offered me as an industrialist.

 Stay tuned o7