Logistics be damned

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , ,

My manufacturing is going pretty well. So well in fact that while I stock up for a few weeks, I usually only last a week at most. This due to the fact that I can actually update my jobs at work, which means that my lines are currently spewing out T2 products two times a day.

This is positive for my wallet too. Especially when things like last weekend happen and one of the modules I tend to sell a lot suddenly went up in price and I was able to sell a few hundred of them for a million more than I usually sell them.

The station trading I was experimenting with however, has slown down once more. I made about 100million trading datacores but I tend to use a lot of them for my invention runs too, so I decided to stop trading them for a profit and just brought all the ones I had left to my home system so I can use them when the time comes and I ran out of the T2 BPC’s I have now.

I’m just glad that public courier contracts are a thing. Without these I would have given up on my manufacturing and invention ages ago. All I need to do is buy all the products I need in jita, then set up a contract for little under a million per jump et voila.. A few hours later I usually have the products where I need them to be on my manufacturing station, ready to be put in the corporation’s containers.

I still need to learn to just buy enough to last me a month or so. I still need to learn that that wallet is not doing anything with all the ISK in it. I should use it for things instead of just letting it sit there.

It’s the same as with putting your real money in a bank, it’s just sitting there, interest is almost non-existant, you might as well use it to buy stuff.

Stay tuned o7

On the move

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

I did a lot of jumps last night before heading to bed.

I’ve been looking for a corporation for a while now with a friend of mine, either to go back to wormholes, or have a look at Sov Space.
Yesterday our search came to an end when we(well my friend first) decided to join a null sec corporation. So I spent the last of my evening before I headed out to bed last night, jumping down to their staging system in order to start figuring out what’s different in sov space null today;

From what I’ve seen so far the corporation seems an easy going and fun one. Here’s hoping that the CTA’s don’t mess with me too much. But it’s easy to move out anyhow, we’ll see how it goes.

My trading has come to somewhat of a standstill due to the fact that prices of the implants I was buying and selling on one of my alts has dropped quite a bit. If I were to sell them at the price they’re currently at I would be selling them with too much of a loss. So I decided to put a pause on it for now and wait for the prices to go up again.

My manufacturer however is still happily chugging along with her industry jobs. They currently make up for most of my income, with all my manufacturing and trading of the past month I made about 2.2 billion.

Along with the fact that I sold the Tengu pilot again (for 2b more than I bought it last month) I made about 14b in total. So I currently have way too much liquid ISK.

But I started training for capital production, once I get my skills up a bit I’ll be looking into that some more.

Stay tuned
o7

Why do you even try?

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Someone’s been trying to manipulate the sentry drone market in Jita the past week. Prices have been fluctuating between 1.2-1.9m for a Bouncer II in the past few days and the same happened with Curators earlier in the week.

I can’t help but wonder why this person did what he did. More than likely to make a quick profit but in order to do so he/she had to buy every single Sentry drone below his wanted price and then put them up again for way above their normal sell price. That would mean that one person in Jita is currently sitting on a few thousand sentry drones.

The problem with this is, that he/she is not the only one in this certain market. On any given day you can see the prices change fast and stock go (if you camp it) relatively quickly. Which is because drones is something that everybody need and they tend to die quite a lot. If you want to take over a market, don’t do it with something that is relatively easy to make, certainly not something that fluctuates on a daily basis.

I wonder if the person doing it made a profit. I know I did, I still had some drones lying about and decided to sell them as soon as I saw the price change for the better.

Now I can’t help but wonder if Gardes and Wardens are going to be next. Maybe I should stock up on them too…

As for my industry, I’m making a nice profit again by manufacturing. Although I’m not seeing the profit in jEveAssets, this is because I am putting more and more ships and ISK into the wormhole I occupy with a friend. I think I spent about 700-800m on helping with the fuel, a new poco and ships. Which is quite a bit seeing that for now I’ve only done sites ones. Which made me about 60m in half an hour so maybe I should do more of these.

Courier contracts are saving me precious time and ISK (because I’m bound to be blown up) but sometimes they don’t get filled, despite me giving 1m per jump (it’s only 4 jumps people, comon!).

I did try taking Red-Frog or Pushx but they take even longer than public contracts and I do not have the patience or time to wait for them to fill. This is mostly because I still don’t plan enough ahead and usually notice that I’m out of raw material once I want to click “Start” and it doesn’t do anything.

I keep saying that I should change my ways, but we all know that if by now I still haven’t learned to plan ahead enough, I probably never will.

Stay tuned o7

Space Janitor, vacuum service

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , 2 Comments

A while ago “This is EvE” launched, bringing about an influx of new players to Tranquility. One of these new players was my sister’s boyfriend. He knew I played EvE, saw the trailer, asked me for a referral and made his account.

I told him to do the tutorials and ask me if he had any problems, despite me not knowing much, I still know enough to help out a “newbro”.
After the tutorials he told me that he was enjoying the fact that he could mine and play other games at the same time. I had created.. A miner.

But a miner with a backstory. While talking to him he told me that it was quite fun, he was going out in space, looking for rocks to clean, like a janitor, cleaning up space for others to enjoy.

As many new players he had no idea what the difference was between null/low and high security space, so he just set out there, finding rocks and noticing that some people would pay more for the rocks he cleaned in 0.3 than those in 0.7.

So fitting up a venture he went out there and of course, got blown up, but that did not stop him no, he went out there again, and again. Wanting, needing those precious rocks, for his job was to make sure that other pilots could fly about, not having to worry about these things.

I applaud him for doing something I haven’t done in ages. That’s the way of the newbie. You just don’t know any better and go out there.

I gave him a few dozen ventures and a tanked retriever that he could work up to. If he enjoyed mining, why would I stop him from doing that, I had all those things in my hangar and wouldn’t miss them anyway.

We need miners and most people who play the game try out different things too, so I gave him a few exploring vessels as well in case he felt like making more ISK.

Although I did warn him that I myself know absolutely nothing about relic/data sites, he’ll figure it out eventually.

But right now, he’s a miner and enjoys it, I actually enjoy hearing him tell his own space adventures, despite them being about mining “The adventures of a space janitor” are entertaining. Especially when talking about all the millions of ISK he made. I can’t recall the last time I was happy with a “mere” ten million.

I wish I could go back to those days though.. They were a lot of fun too.

This gives me more ideas

Industry and Bombers

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

I’m getting better at scanning down the wormholes that connect our little hole to the rest of space. Which is nice, seeing as I used to hate scanning mainly because of how bad I was at it during the tutorial missions.

Which is really the one and only reason why I never decided to try again, despite knowing that back then my skills were not even close to being good enough for me to scan something “quickly”.. I’m relatively better at it, it only takes me about an hour and a half to get 13 sigs down, so that’s good… Right? Right?!

I’m slowly going through the BPC’s I have left from doing so much copying runs, I think I only have about 400-500 of them that I’ll try and turn into T2 ones. Or at least try to, I have an average succes rate of 75% inventions per 21 runs (I have 2 characters running inventions every day or so). After the invention process is done, I usually manufacture the T2’s, again, two characters so that means that every other day I have around 200-400 T2 items sitting in my headquarters ready to ship over to Jita. Which I do through courier contracts because I’m too lazy to go out there myself and it’s super cheap.

Once I have gone through my surplus of BPC’s I’ll have to check the market to try and figure out what’s needed, because right now I’m still working with a supply that started two years ago. As you can imagine, a lot changes in two years but I want that supply to be relatively gone before moving on to something else.
I do have a plan of what that something else might be, I just have to figure out if it’s a good one first before disclosing anything.

As for the other “adventures” I’m having, I’m enjoying W-space but am still checking for some other options, I currently own 3 combat characters, which gives me quite a few options.

What all three of my characters have in common though, is the fact that they can all fly covert ops ships, specifically bombers. I love bombers, the fact that you can sneak up on someone and drop a bomb or deliver a load of torpedoes on them is pretty awesome.

Which is why I finally did something yesterday that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time. I joined a bombers bar run. Which I enjoyed, although I have to admit that it was rather boring at first.

I logged into the one character not in w-space only to be told that I needed to go to Thera, luckily I was only 12 jumps out from one of the high sec entrances so I burned towards it and someone in fleet was nice enough to give me a warp in to the wormhole.
After getting into Thera we were told to meet up somewhere and…Wait.

“Thera is pretty though”

Waiting is not something I enjoy, time spent waiting is time lost, while it is a precious commodity. But luckily the voice comms and the books I started reading a few weeks ago made sure that it wasn’t lost entirely, I was laughing along with the others and enjoying a good book until we were giving the go.

Which meant jumping through another wormhole where a black ops vessel was waiting for us to bridge us to our targets. Last night was a good night, I spend an hour or more “waiting” but those few kills that did happen were quite fun.
We first got a bridged right on top of a Legion, I was too late in getting there because the amount of bombers we had along with us meant that dmg was extremely high and it was down before most even knew it.

The second kill was a Legion too, another pilot that had no idea what was happening to him, a better kill too, he was worth a few more ISK and I did get to be on that killmail. After that we were told to ‘burn” back to our staging system. Once again we waited a bit before being dropped onto a Raven and Legion. We got the Raven but the Legion got away, and once more we burned back to the staging system.

During the burn a Paladin was spotted on one of the gates.

We were told to try and catch it, and catch it we did. I had nothing to do with the catch, but it was fun to watch. Burning to a Marauder that’s 100km away equiped with a microwarp drive is not something many people can do but it happened. After the point he was able to jump away again but our tackler had anticipated that move and was already 50km closer to the spot he was going to and was able to snare him immediately after.

The paladin did take a little while longer to kill (aprox 20-30 seconds) but he went down, and my pilot’s killboard went up by 2.8billion isk. Which means that right now, I’m sitting on a killboard of a few billion destroyed against nothing lost.

A good and fun night all in all. Missing those few hours of sleep was worth it, and I’ll definately do more of this.

“Another one today, Thanatos!”

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