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

Radio silence, done, hopefully

I’ve had a busy week behind me. Haven’t been able to do much on EvE. My employer sent me on a Microsoft training (Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager) and I’ve spent most of my free time playing around in my own server environment.

Next to that I decided to drastically change my complete home experience by going from Windows 7 to Windows 8. And I did that by formatting my computer, I made back-ups of my important files but everything else went *poof*.

Most of my Friday night was spent trying to figure out how Windows 8 works and downloading the EvE Client again. I also needed to reinstall EvEmon and after doing that I smacked myself in the head for not saving my plans. Good thing I wasn’t following them anyhow.

I’m sure this is something more people do, you create a whole plan in EvEmon for you to follow, you think along the lines of: “This is the path I’m going to go on” and then once it’s time to finally update your queue.. You don’t do it, you just put something else in there, making sure that all the time you spent figuring out the best way to train, was futile.

Or I could be the only one. My training is nowhere near as efficient as it could be, I don’t have my attributes set right, and I definitely don’t have a 1 year plan to use said attributes with. I should do it but the main problem I have is that I have absolutely no idea what I want my characters to train. I just swing it and do something I might enjoy.

For example; because I have no idea what to train on my industry alt, I am currently training her to be able to fly an Ishtar, which would take about 38 days before she can even get in one. She has absolutely no combat skills whatsoever and I just decided to start her on that path. Is it smart? Probably not. Do I know what I could do with her instead? Nope.

Today I’m going to be updating my manufacturing queues and buying some things I need to do that. I’ve already spent the last hour putting up sell orders, turns out I forgot to do that too *woops*.
Next to that, it’s a very sunny day, so I’m going to be taking my motorcycle out for a spin, and spend an hour or so afterwards to clean that beast.

The evening will be spent on a roam, I can finally fly interceptors so it’ll be fun to be finally able to keep up with the guys and not be caught in a bubble.

Fun times will be had. Or at least I hope so.

Stay tuned o7

As if you know what you’re doing

I have spent most of my evening jumping around different systems on my ex-RvB alt, trying to get all of its assets in the same spot. Let’s just say that it’s taken me quite some time and I’m even close to being finished.
I don’t like a mess in my assets window, on most of my accounts they are spread in about 4 or 5 systems. On that one alt, the assets are spread in 16 systems. Hence the clean up.

I’ve been able to just trash some things, Noob ships that were docked somewhere because I once went into the station without a pod.. Ores that were so low in number that using my time to bother with them would actually make me lose ISK.

Most of the spread right now is between Jita and one of its previous bases of operations near Amarr, seeing that this character used to run L4’s, in a time that I can no longer remember.

While “playing” I was checking EvEMon a bit and I couldn’t help but notice that I don’t have any skill plans, for any of my characters. I create one, and then I just ignore it and just wing it, deciding on the fly what to update the queue with.

I really should stop doing this, not only is it inefficient, it’s also not really helping me into knowing what my characters can and can’t do.

As the readers of my blog know, I flew a Dominix a while back. Which is a great example of me not knowing what I can do. Because when I was first asked if I could, I said no, until I was linked the fit and I noticed that I can actually use sentries, and that I can get into a Dominix. Now, that second part is just plain stupidity on my end because I fly a Machariel and have Gallente Battleship on V so I should have actually known better, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that I have absolutely no idea what to do with my two combat characters and my industrial character. I don’t know what to train and I just pick skills at random that look good. 
Or I start working on the mastery and then just stop doing it altogether because I noticed another one that I liked better.

I didn’t actually resolve to do anything special this year. But if I’m going to, maybe I should just start with making a skill queue and decide on a path to take.

Stay tuned o7

Time vs Reward

Everything in EvE is time related, you need time to earn ISK, time to get your skills higher, it takes time to do missions, scanning, whatever floats your boat.

And what do we get in return? A reward, wether it’s the ISK or finally being able to fly that sweet sweet battleship you’ve been pining for.

I started thinking about this when figuring out what to write, I had a nice little post ready for you all, stating the reasons why I haven’t actually written much the past week. And all of that, is due to time, or the lack of it.

Some people are on EvE for hours on end, but in the end they only spinned their ship while talking to their friends. Is that rewarding? Well I hope that they find it rewarding.
I hate not being able to log in as long as I want, since I started working again my free time has been dwindling down to only a few hours a week. Which is normal, you have to earn money.

But I feel guilty when I don’t spend enough time on EvE, seeing that it’s an MMO and I’m still not smart enough to have my accounts pay for themselves. Plural, I have four accounts, two of which are combat oriented, of which one is in RvB. And two that are industry oriented. One of those wasn’t even supposed to be subbed anymore since I was only training a character for 50 days on it but I forgot to get in npc corp on time so I just subbed him another month.

Back to the topic at hand though, the time I spend in EvE these days is far less rewarding for me than it should be. Which is due to the fact that my measurement of it being rewarding is way off.
When I see my wallet rise, I think of my time as being spent in a good way. And I’m sure that a lot of people think like that.

But I should stop thinking like that, I should go out and destroy other ships, let my wallet drop because I needed to buy more ships to destroy. Unfortunately, that’s something I can’t do. So I log in, update my lab queues, planets, etc. And I log back out because it’s time for me to get some sleep for the next day of work.
I can’t wait until I get to the point where I finally have to do as less as 1 hour a week to earn the big amounts of ISK. But unfortunately I don’t see that happening any time soon, partly because I suck at trading, and partly because of my lack of time to research things. And when I do get to research, I seem to suck at that too!

I did make 600m this month, so I guess that’s better than nothing at all.

Here’s to hoping.

Now here’s something for you to think about;
What does reward mean for you in the game vs the time you spent on it. And, as a bonus.
When you only have half an hour or an hour to spend, what do you do? What does it do to you that you can’t get the most out of the game?

Pew Pew


Stay tuned o7

Taking it down a notch

A few days ago I decided to take my invention running down a few notches. The past few weeks I’ve been inventing non-stop. Every time the 10 jobs I could run were completed, I started another batch. Which means that right now I’m sitting on a whole bunch of T2 bpc’s.

I decided that it was time to finish manufacturing all of them and calculated that this will take me two or three weeks. In that time I will not be inventing as much as I’m used to, but still try and make sure to upgrade my research jobs.

Instead of putting multiple manufacturing jobs a day, I went to a few two day jobs. This is because of the fact that due to my new work I have a lot less online time than I had the past few months, couple that with the missus and you get the picture.

What does this all mean in general? Well, easy, that I haven’t been able to play as much as I would like to, but, I have been planning. But a plan only goes as far as first contact.

As most of us know, once we try to put the plan in action, other things come around the corner to screw with you.

I use EvEMon, I bet a lot of us do, and I have a plan on there for my industrial character. The only problem right now is, I have forgotten why all of those skills are in the plan. I know what they do, and why they would be good to have, but I just haven’t got a clue why I put them on that character. What was I going for you ask? Well it seems like I was skilling up on exploration skills.

But I can’t for the life of me know why… This character has zero, absolutely zero combat skills, so in order to do sites and not get her ass kicked too hard, I’d need to train in at least a few offensive ones…Right? Or am I wrong? I know absolutely nothing about exploration, the only exploring I’ve done is once with a friend of mine (who did most of the work I just came in to clean it up) and during the tutorials.

I guess that’s why I wanted to train it.. Juicy, juicy loot
My own little space bubble
Stay tuned o7