Planning towards efficiency

Due to the fact that I’m going to a Steel Panther concert tongiht, I decided to spend last night making sure that I have enough materials ready for manufacturing on Thursday. I made sure that I wouldn’t have to worry about the queues until then.

Or at least I hope I did. As most of you that have been reading my blog may know, I’m not that good at planning.

I tend to forget one thing or the other every single time I go about my production runs. You’d think that after failing at bringing everything with you that I’d have learned. But you would be wrong.

Next to my production planning I installed EvEMon again and made a queue for both my industrial character and combat character. Due to me not knowing what to do with the industrialist for now, I’m training her to become an Ishtar pilot. It’s one of the many ships that I’ve always enjoyed watching and that I still can’t fly. Thus she’s learning right now.

According to the plan it would take about 50 days before she can fly it and use the correct drones. I’m hoping on shorting that a bit.

Giving her the ability to fly a combat ship is not without reason though. There’s a deeper meaning than just wanting to fly an Ishtar. 

Due to the fact that I tend to mostly create T2’s I decided that it was high time for my industry alt to start using research agents herself. I know, I know, you’re thinking: “Why haven’t you done that already?!” 

Pure laziness really, but I’m on my way to changing that. This is part of my ‘Get a bit more efficient’ plan.
It’s a small step, but I’ll get there… Eventually.
“This will help too.”

Stay tuned o7

Efficiency is not part of my vocabulary

I am nowhere near as efficient in my manufacturing as I should and can be. I tend to restock my products at the last moment. I click ok on my assembly line, and suddenly notice that I’m missing R.A.M. tech, or Tritanium, or any of the other things I need, to complete my process.

I really should just have a large stock of everything, but I’m lazy. Although one could argue that if I really was lazy, I’d actually have a big stock, because that would mean that I would not have to go to Jita as often as I am doing now. But the lazyness is translated more to the fact that I don’t feel like calculating/checking what everything is that I need, buying it, and afterwards getting it all to my home base.

But I should put up more buy orders, I have zero of those, and that’s a bad thing.

Trading in general is something I am not doing right now, my little experiment did give me a bit of playroom, I made about 1b from the 100m I invested in it. But I wasn’t too good at it, it took me too much time to figure out what I should buy and sell, that I just decided to not do it for now.

I do have a few buy orders on my trading alt, mostly for implants, because they keep on selling anyhow. But shh, I never said this, we’re not supposed to give away our secrets.

The past week I was able to have my net worth go up by 300m, and I have absolutely no idea how that happened, because I just did some manufacturing, then again, this week I actually did manage to make sure that every line was occupied so maybe I did good on that part.

“I’m sorry, it’s complicated”

Now to find a way to use this ISK, to make more ISK.

As a little sidenote; I’ve been thinking about trying something new, corporation wise.
My industry alt is in a corporation of her own, but it’s pretty lonely. I want to join some other corp, in which I can still do my manufacturing etc, but I don’t like the idea of giving up my POS. Anyone have an idea of what I could try?

Stay tuned o7

Saying Goodbye

Goodbye my old friend, I have neglected you for too long. I should have done more with you, I should have used your special skill set of talents instead of just letting you wither away in darkness, watching as you trained harder, waiting for the day that I’d finally take you out to help you fulfill your destiny.

But alas, it was not meant to be, I didn’t have time for you, I told you things like; “Later, we’ll hang out later.” All one big lie, a lie I told myself too, because I thought that I would make time for you. But I never did.

I bet you’re wondering what this means, why am I writing this. Well it’s easy. I had to make a very hard decision earlier. I decided to let go of one of my accounts, sell one of my characters and transfer another one. So that I am now working with only two accounts instead of three.

The third account had two characters on it, my trader and another combat alt. One I was training as Caldari, I wanted him to be able to fly in a SNI and a Tengu. But after long consideration, I sold him.
“Isn’t she a thing of beauty”

He was supposed to be my go to PvP character. An alt I could log on to in order to have some fun. An extra when I went out missioning. But I never actually used him. The only times I logged on him was to update his queue. No more, he is in someone else’s hands now. And hopefully that person will use him for his intended purpose.
“Who wouldn’t want to fly you”

My trade character will join my Indy’s account. And I might train my industry alt so she can do some boosting. Seeing that when I’m out doing L4’s she’s not far behind, salvaging the wrecks.

After selling the alt, I started thinking about the Character Bazaar, and how much I like it, and I bet others do too. In no other MMO are you able to purchase characters with you ingame money, characters that are stronger, better than what you play with. If you’re not happy with your character, or you want another one in a certain field but don’t feel like training him/her since it will take too long, you just browse the bazaar for what you want and deposit some ISK for it.

One of my long term goals when I first started playing was that I wanted the ability to buy a character I wanted with the ISK I made.

But seeing that I trained him myself, I don’t need to do that anymore. And yet, I still have the option. If I want another high skilled industry character, I can buy him or her. If I want a trader with a few months of training, I can buy him or her too.

You just need the money for it. I love the “freedom” this gives you; don’t like your character? Just sell him.
Or if you had the problem like me, if you know that you won’t be playing him anymore, you can turn him over to someone else and make a nice amount of ISK from it too.

I probably sold him too cheap, I wanted a quick sales and I’m not known for my patience. But I just hope that the person who bought him, will use him. Unlike me

Goodbye old friend. We had a nice run.

Stay tuned o7

ISK, APPS and FFA

I haven’t been able to spend too much time in game the past few days. I’m feeling a bit ill, which is making me dead tired, which in turn makes sure that after work, I want to do nothing but lie in my bed until the weekend arrives.

And it’s almost there! So that’s good. 

The hour or so each day I do spend in game, I spend updating my orders, my factory jobs and my skill queue’s. Although the last one is something I won’t have to watch for a while now seeing that all three of my active characters are currently training a 7 day skill.

The month hasn’t fully started yet or Aura tells me the bad news, I’m in the red. What does this mean? Well, easy, Aura (the android app) has this handy feature that checks your ISK flow each month, by counting how much you earn and spend. It’s pretty simplistic seeing that it watches your wallet, but I like watching my wallet and it helps me because then I won’t have to do it.

Since the start of the month I have spent 3.7billion ISK and made about 3Billion.. As you can imagine, those numbers should be reversed. They are a bit skewed though because they don’t count sell orders, and the negative ISK flow seems to mostly be coming from buy orders I put up. So I guess I’ll have to use jEvEAssets at the end of the month like always.

I like how all of these little apps are making my life easier, I have my spreadsheets, but at least I don’t have to put everything on there. I think I might go crazy if I had to do that.

Speaking of ISK flow.. I decided to do a good deed this month.

I’m just assuming here that most of you read EvEoGanda, if you don’t, then go have a look, it has some pretty good content.

Now after making said assumption, you should all know about the upcoming FFA. Seeing that a year or so ago (might be more, I am bad with dates) I had tons and tons of fun in an FFA made by The Tuskers, I decided to donate for this FFA.

It’s a great way for newbies to have fun in PvP without actually sacrificing ships of their own, and it’s fun for old carebear newbies like me because I can actually try my hand at PvP too and I know where to find it for once! So it’s a win win situation.

If you’re a newbie, or a vet, I urge you to join the fun and blow up some frigates. The more people the merrier.
She wants you to join too! – Rixx Javix sure makes pretty posters

And I’m sure Stay Frosty will be grateful if you help in donating a prize or two yourself.
As for now, I’m going to prepare myself for the weekend, where I’ll probably venture in a WH again in search of a kill..

Anyone taking bets on whether I’ll get killed or kill someone?

Stay tuned o7

Sleepers don’t actually sleep.. Who knew

Last Thursday was the first time in my entire EvE career that I did two new things. The first one was flying a Dominix with sentry drones, and the second one was using said Dominix in order to do sleeper sites in a C4 along with a few corporation mates.

I had fun doing it, although it did require some of that patience you need as a wormhole dweller. Not only did I have to make 24jumps out of high to our wormhole entry point, all of this in a Dominix. When I got there I had to wait a bit longer because we needed to collapse the high sec entrance, and then find a good, unoccupied C4 to play in.

After three or four collapses we found one with 3 offline towers and decided this would be a good time to go do a few sites. It was about 00:00 here so I was starting to get a bit tired, but I really wanted to see how they worked.
Ok, let’s do this

My job was pretty easy, seeing as I was in a sentry drone boat, and the rookie of the bunch, all I had to do was launch my drones, put on my hardeners, and have my drones assist one of the others. Which gave me plenty of time to look around. Or at least it would have given me plenty of time if we didn’t go through them so fast. I was amazed at the speed we were doing them. 

What do you mean my friends are gone

The veteran among us was too, this was the first time he had taken anything different than ravens along and our 8 sentries + 1 raven were shooting down the resident sleepers quite fast. I think we clocked down on about 10 minutes per site. So that was pretty good.

I stayed for about an hour longer, providing over watch for the Noctis as he went about salvaging our loot and after that I jumped back to our own little wormhole, jumped into the POS and logged out, because I was dead tired and I had to go to work in the morning.

When I logged back in yesterday, I decided to set up a few extraction planets. Seeing that I have the skills trained up to level 3, but never actually used them on this character. I checked the planets and decided to just put up 3 lava extraction ones, making it easier to just extract and make 1 kind of material instead of multiple, seeing that I tend to be bad at logistics.

I had forgotten how easy it is to put up extraction jobs and let them run. This is a nice way to make some passive ISK, and it will make sure that I have to visit the wormhole from time to time.

Let’s just hope that I don’t get blown up when visiting a custom office in an Epithal

Stay tuned o7

Christmas and EvE

As most of you may know, today is Christmas. A time for sharing, caring, family and gifts.
The last part being the most important one for a big amount of the population. All because we as humans love receiving new things and are pretty egocentric when push comes to shove.

CCP did something nice within their Icelandic folklore and the celebration of Christmas for the players. They introduced us to the Yule lads. Born from a troll mother these little creatures are used to scare kids and steal things instead of giving. And thus it came to no surprise that a lot of the gifts we received from the advent calendar, was seen as something worthless. Until yesterday, the 24th, the last day before Christmas. Everyone rejoiced as we got ourselves snowballs and the Leopard. A nimble shuttle with an amazing warp speed of 20 A/U. The trolls delivered.

And how!
I spent half of my day yesterday driving through the country with my little sister, she needed a place to store her 700+ Pokémon cards and I was a bit bored so I shrugged and said why not. At the one store we found that had what she wanted I bought her a Christmas present, to her great joy. Unfortunately for her she’s not allowed to open it until this evening when we’re having our family dinner, yes, I’m evil like that.

As for Christmas EvE, it was spent at my girlfriend’s place, along with her parents and brother and sister, food, Wii and ice cream. It could have been fun, but it wasn’t, mostly because I’m not a big fan of a family get together, and I kept on thinking: “I could have spent my time better on EvE”

Which, would have been a lie, mostly because I barely undock, and when I do, I seem to find myself a bug.
Today’s plan is easy, this evening I’m spending my time at home, with my parents, my girlfriend, my two sisters and my youngest sister’s boyfriend, eating soup, roast, homemade tiramisu and who knows what else.

But during the day, I will be spending my time in front of my computer. Trying out Exploration once more, while my girlfriend is sitting behind me, getting frustrated with her exam material. Seeing that she’s in her last year of college and her exams are coming up she spends most of her waking hours studying. 
Which is good for me, more EvE time and less girlfriend agro.

I decided on trying out wormhole exploration once more today, I’m going to try and get to null sec. I’ll have a relic and data analyzer equipped in my little Cheetah, seeing that I also want to see what happens when I find one in null or any low system I get to.

What do you mean, I’m already there? I didn’t even get time to blink

Wish me luck, because I’ll be needing it.

Stay tuned o7

Not that good at writing things down

Trading has been put on a definite hold for now. Mostly due to the fact that prices seem to be dropping everywhere.
So I’m just going to build a small stockpile and then when prices rise again I’ll have a nice amount of profit.

At least, if they rise, but I’m sure they will, it’s the holidays, people just have more time to play right now.

I’m ashamed to say, that after playing EvE for so long I have finally found a use for the transactions tab in the wallet. I have never, in my whole life on EvE clicked it, until a few days ago. This little thing would have made everything so much easier if I had known it existed sooner.
As one of the people I talk with stated: “You’re a trader, you make a nice amount of ISK by trading, and you never used that tab? WHAT?!”

I know, shocker, it came as quite a shock to me too when I found out how much that can help when you’re trying to figure out how much you paid for something because you never write it down.

Speaking of never writing things down. I have made about 10 trips to Jita yesterday. That doesn’t seem like much, but I did it in 2 hours time, in an Iteron that could have done everything in one trip if I cared to remember everything I needed.
I didn’t take the bpcs along and I hadn’t written it down so everytime I came to Jita I remembered a maximum of 2 things I needed.. But not the amount I needed.

I’m not that good at this spreadsheet online game this week, can you tell?

As for the combat alt, he has finally gone out of the station! After a few weeks, it was about time! But I didn’t do any combat, I did scan a bit, even went through a few wormholes, enjoying the view. I did forget to make screen caps, but I’m going to point fingers at the fact that while I was playing yesterday, I was also watching a few online training videos for work related things.

Multitasking, yay!

I’m going to try and do more tonight, we’ll see this weekend if I actually succeed in this or if I fall asleep because I’ve been working my butt off.

Stay tuned o7

Thinking things through is not my forté

I have a hole in my hand, and it’s quite big. Every time I want something, I tend to buy it. This can be anything, from a game, to a new cellphone, to a ship in EvE that I just have there to look at.

This time, it was “EvE Online: The Second Decade”. I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to decide whether or not I felt like paying 158 Euros on this. 
Trying to make this decision I kept weighing the pros and cons of the collection. I’m a big fan of Collector Edition’s, I have the one from SWTOR, The Witcher 2, Heroes of Might and Magic VI,… 
And all of them have one thing in common, other than the collectible in it, I’m no longer playing the game or using anything in it. My Darth Malgus statue is sitting next to me and my Geralt head too, the coins are in my wallet and I sometimes wear the Might and Magic shirt. But all the rest, is not being used.

So the biggest part of making the EvE decision, was whether it would be used or not. The collectibles in it are pretty cool, golden pod and gnosis BPC would most definately be something I’d use. 
But I’m interested most of all in the Rifter USB hub and the “Danger Game”. The Rifter being my favorite ship and the game being something that could be a lot of fun with my friends.
Pew Pew Pew

So after hours upon hours of weighing, I decided to finally buy the game the other day.
Cue 10 minutes later, I have just spent 158 Euros on a pretty USB hub and a board game I may or may not play.

My girlfriend rolled her eyes at me when I told her that I was having second thoughts. Knowing full well that this was going to happen. Good thing there’s the fact that you can ask for a cancellation within 14 days of purchase. So that’s what I did.

Moral of this story: ‘I really need to think harder on whatever it is I do and buy’

Which is something that I need to do in game too. Despite me really wanting the CE, I can’t for the life of me think of a good reason to spend 150+ Euros on me. I thought I did have a good reason, until I actually bought it.

It’s a shame that the Americans had that Black Friday sale but us Europeans were left in the dark. I really, really want the Danger Game and USB hub.. But the whole package would only be worth about 50euros less than the current asking price.

So if the price does drop, I will probably buy it. Unless I can find someone willing to part with their board game.
I’d love to play this with my friends on New Year’s eve.
Stay tuned! o7

Industry and Guilt

The problem with manufacturing T2 is invention. You need to have invented blueprints in order to do something with your lines. And that’s where I’m slacking on. I got bored of all the invention, every few hours checking in on EVE to put new copies into the mobile laboratories. It’s something that quickly becomes a drag.
But now that I stopped doing that for the mo
ment, I feel guilty for not using the POS. Sure the others in the corporation are allowed to use it, but we’re pretty small (there’s three of us) and the other two don’t actually use the POS. They are quite clueless about how industry works.

Which I get, it’s not easy to get into and it definitely is not something you can do without the correct amount of SP.

So what am I doing now with all those open slots? ME research on several BPO’s I had lying about. They’re not actually worth anything but at least that way I’m actually using the slots and I don’t have to feel too guilty about it.

As for my other characters. Well I have had almost no time to past couple of weeks, other than updating market orders and taking my Cheetah out that one time I have done close to nothing worth of note. Which is a pity, because I joined that new corporation to have more stories but Real Life seems to be getting in the way of me actually creating them.

Why are we all just hanging here?


Market wise the game is doing good for me, although I have yet to make a lot of money out of it, my station trader is making a small profit, but a profit nonetheless.

Every time I read the people with market blogs and their billions of profit I want to know what their secret is. I even want to talk to them about it and give me hints. But the problem is, that the secret is more than likely spending a lot of time checking out the market and fluctuations of it. Look at items and how they move. 

Unfortunately, that’s time I do not have, and time I would probably spend by getting bored of it and closing the market altogether.

It’s a shame that people can’t give away their secrets on ISK making, but I get why. Without those secrets, there wouldn’t be any more ISK to make.
Stay tuned o7