Big Succes .. Sort off?

Today was one of those days where I logged in and actually did something different than just sitting in station, looking at my orders and spinning my ships.

I logged in, and did what I’ve been telling myself to do for a while. Go out on a roam. 

Few corporation members were going to go on a BC roam so I decided to join them in a Hurricane I had lying about. Seeing that I am no PvPer at all I had to ask them for a fit for it, once that was done, and after adding a remote repairer I was ready.

It’s been ages since I had to use TeamSpeak so of course that had to update but once I was on it all went fine, my new headset works, everything’s great and I can follow the FC’s commands.
“No! I want to be on top!”

We jumped around a bit, failed to find anything and then came into a system where I saw a Venture on D-scan. As the veterans out there will point out, we did something extremely stupid next.

We split up, and went in search of the Venture, everyone going to a different belt. One of us the top one, other bottom, well you get the picture.

Some might have seen this coming from miles away, I certainly didn’t, and it seemed the rest of the fleet didn’t either. The venture was a trap. Not long after I had warped towards one of the belts I heard the venture was in the top belt and he got pointed. About 1 minute after I heard: “Oh, guys, I think this was a trap” and the fc telling us to quickly jump to top belt. There were about 11 of them waiting for us. Now, all in all we did pretty good, I repaired, I took a few shots, and then I jumped out back out at the command of the FC.

After which I kept thinking: “What do I do?! Am I supposed to go back in, what’s going on?”

Turns out the others got blown up and I was the only one still in my ship. Guess that was because I was late to the party and they didn’t point me as fast as they probably could have.

The roam was not what you would call a success except for the fact that I did go out in low sec in an “expensive” ship. That’s something isn’t it?

After that I went back to the so called market pvp and made a few 0.01 ISKers unhappy. But it’s making my own wallet grow bigger so that makes me happy.

Stay tuned o7

Trading and other things

I started a station trader a few weeks ago. I don’t think I’m very good at it. I think I’m just a bit too lazy to do the research which would be good to sell and what wouldn’t be.

I made him start out with 100m and am currently working with a 1b buy order and 400m in sell orders. He was working in Dodixie but I decided to go to Amarr since it’s a bit closer to where I usually am at with my other characters and I actually haul things between Jita and Amarr every once in a while if the goods I manufacture sell for more there.

While trading I kept thinking who on earth would sit in front of his or her computer all day updating the orders for 0.01 isk. That has got to be the most boring way to spend your game time. Some of the people who do it are probably botters but still.

I like undercutting them with bigger margins though. As long as I make a profit, even if it’s only 5%, I’m a happy camper.

Working as a station trader is helping me get to know the market a bit more, I can see why some goods sell well, others don’t. But I’ve only been working it for a few weeks and have yet to get that ‘Eureka’ moment where I know of a few goods that I can invest in and sell in order to get my billions a month.

But it’s fun, it’s new, it’s .. Well not very exciting but at least I’m doing something new.

Speaking of doing something new. I’ve had a few offers from Wormhole corporations, and one in particular was a bit interesting,  I’m going to try them out, be their so called “Guinea pig” 

Yay, Viator!

I do it my way

When reading other people’s blogs, especially the industrial ones, I always come across the same kind of things. People calculating everything. From the amount of ISK they will make with the sale of one product, to the cost of the invention, everything gets written down and put into their spreadsheet and used to calculate their total monthly profit.

I, don’t do that. I know that EVE is called spreadsheet online for a reason, and I use spreadsheets, I use them a lot. But I just can’t bother putting every single step of the process in a sheet to see if the things I make actually have a nice profit margin or not. Wether its 5% or 500%, as long as I see my total amount of ISK rise, I’m a happy camper.

Now, is this the wrong or the right way to do it? It’s neither, it’s my way. It’s definately not the best way out there but it keeps me from having to manage every single step of the process and keeping it all written down. I probably make a bit of a loss on some items, but I probably make a nice amount of profit on others.

Note the use of probably there. I have absolutely no idea which one of my items makes me the most money. And that’s where I’m doing it wrong. But I just can’t bother to try and manage everything. I still have over 600 blueprints in my hangar that I need to invent. 600! That’s 600 updates to my laboratories, and everyone working with POSes know that this is not a nice way to spend your time.
What do you mean: “You have to do us one at a time”

I keep hoping on a POS update, but I doubt that it’ll come anytime soon.

The reason why I’m starting about this is because today I will be putting the last of the T2 blueprints that I have in stock in manufacturing lines. I put a small hiatus on invention because I started to hate doing it, I hated logging in to update the lines, invent some more. 

But unfortunately, I’m at that time again where I have to.

This time however! I will try and use decryptors, something I haven’t done before, and I think I will start writing things down more, see how much of a difference that gives me.
Not using decryptors gave me about a 55% chance of getting a T2 BPC, the use of them will (hopefully) up that chance a bit. We’ll see what happens.

I still love my POS, but sometimes, I wish this was all a lot easier, but then everyone would be doing it!

Stay tuned o7

Glorified Chat Box

“EvE sometimes feels as if it’s just a glorified chat box”
That’s a sentence that’s been going through my mind for the past couple of days. It’s something one of my in game friends said, and it got me to think about this. In a sense he’s right about this, seeing that I spend more time talking with people than I do doing things.

Not that that is a bad thing, because I like it, I like talking to the people I know about random things and about life in general, it’s a fun way to pass the time.

I also spend a lot of time talking about the things I would like to do but I never actually do them. Some due to fear of the unknown, others because I have no idea how to start doing it.
I spent countless hours looking at this screen while talking

I did spend a few hours in Low Sec this weekend, but not much came out of that, either I just missed people or I was outgunned.

The one industrial that I came across was already in warp by the time I noticed him. Learning how to D-scan is one of those things on my to do list that I have yet to start with.

I spent a lot of time looking at my market tab the past weekend, I made a bit of a profit, and spend a few bill on materials to manufacture with. So I’m using my ISK for something. But I still have too much liquid ISK that’s not being used to gain more of it.

I think my problem in this lies with the fact that I use it as a counter, the more I have the closer I get to “winning”.

I don’t have much else to say, real life made me have a busier weekend than planned which means that my search for a WH corporation was on pause. I did join a few channels that I was told about in my previous blog, so there’s that. I have yet to speak to the people in it though.

If anyone has any other suggestions about chat channels I can go in to just talk, feel free to leave them here. As I said in the beginning of this post, a glorified chat box isn’t all that bad, I’m having my fun. 

In space, nobody hears you

When I log into the game I usually spend most of my time talking to the few friends I have on there. It’s usually the same 3 people.
When they’re not online, I tend to get bored easily. Which means that I should find an extra few channels to talk in. I sometimes spend time in the E-uni channel but there’s so many people on there that it’s a bit too unpersonal for me.

I like getting to know the people in the game with me. I’m social like that.

I flew my bomber for a few hours last night, didn’t find much to do, did come across a few gatecamps but I was smart enough to leave those alone, I’m not picking a fight when I am 100% sure I can’t win it. If I had a 1% chance of maybe hitting something, I might just get suicidal.

Industry wise everything’s going great, I stopped selling things to buy orders (yay me) and make a few million ISK more per produced good I sell, so I’m happy with that.

My RvB alt hasn’t seen much action the past few weeks. Another thing I should change soon. Unfortunately due to work I tend to come home quite late, so half the time I only log in the do something for half an hour before I crawl into my bed. Here’s hoping that I find more time in the weekends.

Stay tuned! O7

What button do I press to go boom?

Seeing that I have a bunch of extra ISK, without any effort or time spent on getting it, I decided to use it on ships and training myself in the use of bombing. Today will be a day for experimentation with that.

I currently have 10 fit Nemesis’ ready for action. Why the Nemesis? Well because I think it’s pretty, that’s the only reason behind my train of thought in picking a bomber.
Pretty, pretty Nemesis; Did I mention I like image search?

If I’m going to blow stuff up, or die trying, I might as well be doing it while looking at a pretty ship.
Besides figuring out how to bomb I also have to do the somewhat “boring” job of restocking my planets. It’s one of those things I tend to put off for quite a bit, most of the time my planets aren’t even working at full capacity because I don’t like stocking them again.

Which is one of the reasons why I might just go back to low sec with them soon. That would mean I could just log in, put the timers on, which would take about 5 minutes, and not bother for a while again.

Now, back to bombing. One of the reasons why I want to do this, is so that I will learn to not be afraid of low and null sec, specifically null, seeing that you can’t bomb in low. I’ve been going out of my way to not get into the lower security space, because I’m afraid of losing ships. And this has got to end.

In the larger picture I’m even considering of joining a WH corps, just because I need to learn new things and not get stuck in my ways.

Time to see if I can actually do what I tell myself to.

Stay tuned o7

Oh happy day

Today is a good day. Why? Well, that’s the story for today isn’t it?

As most, if not all, of you know, Somer Blink will no longer be able to use their affiliation program as an extra incentive for people to buy GTC’s through them. CCP gave them a few more days before this has to stop. So they’re offering a nice little bonus, instead of 250m you’ll get 1b per GTC bought. Which is a nice little incentive and it made me buy a GTC through them.

It’s been a year since I bought a GTC to add to my game time since I usually just have CCP credit my card directly. But I couldn’t let this go, not now.

After buying two GTC’s I had 2B credit on my blink account, I’m an avid gambler, so I wasn’t planning on doing what some other people do and just buy all the tickets in a blink in order to get a nice1.6b out of the 2b.
Not only did I receive 1 bill on blink credits, I also received 2000 tokens. Which can be used in promo blink, bonks etc. 

When I browsed to the blink site, I noticed a 30 day PLEX promo running, which you could buy into with a token, but in order to buy into it, you needed to have played a blink in the last 30 days.

So I just bought the first blink that allowed me to, because a lot of people were playing on the site and every time I clicked to buy a ticket on a random cheap one it was already finished. 

When I finally was able to buy a ticket, I saw my name flash in the yellow marker. Meaning that I won it.
My first thoughts were “Hey that’s nice, I just did a random one to join the promo and I won, now what did I win?”
Thank you Google Search
Turns out I bought a 200m ticket on 2 Moros dreadnaughts. Meaning that with this random ticket, I just made 6b (the ISK buyout for this certain blink)

Not only did I actually win something with the money I was thinking of spending on random tickets and hope that I might win something of 30m, I actually made a ton of ISK on this.

ISK that will be spent on furthering my goals of getting myself blown up a bit more.

I love Blink, I do, I probably already spent more than 6b in getting myself more credit, but I like the fact that I won something. If I had won the Promo too, I’d have an even bigger smile.

After reading my post I did notice that this sounds a lot like bragging. But that’s not what I mean to do. This is just me, being happy that for once, a gamble I took actually paid of. Despite it being an accidental one.

If only I had luck like this when I go out and gamble away real money instead of in game currency 🙂

EDIT: I spent another 1.4b on random blinks, including a Rorq, Daredevil, SNI,.. Not luck, but it’s not like I can complain today 

Stay tuned o7

The L-word

A while ago I decided to start up a trading character. Seeing that a lot of people seem to make most of their ISK from trading. I also decided to no longer sell my manufactured goods to buy orders (I know it’s horrible that I even did it!).

Now we’re a bit further in time and my trading character is doing, okay. He’s not doing great, but it’s definately not bad either. I gave him a few mill to start with, and he currently has a tenfold of the starting amount.
Which I don’t get, at all. Why? Well I still have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just winging it, the whole buy low sell high thing works, but I have yet to figure out the goods to trade and the why behind of it.

Well I think we all know the why behind of it, but it makes no sense. People are lazy. That is the only reason that some make a lot of money on them. It’s easy, people don’t want to spend their time jumping around to get their goods, they want one point where they can get them.

The perfect example for this is Jita, everyone knows that if you need something, Jita is more than likely the best place to find it. And it’s true, you will find it and chances are you won’t find it anywhere cheaper nearby. I’m guilty of doing this myself, I go to Jita when I need something, but I live 4 blocks away from the hub.

I’m still searching for the right combination of buying and selling though, right now I’ve just been lucky, scouring the markets for something to buy I suddenly find sell orders that go for way too little, I buy them, relist them and blamo, I’ve got a profit margin of 15-30%. It’s not that hard a job either.

But it does take time, especially when you haven’t got a focus point yet, as I told you earlier, I’m winging it. So I’m not doing one set of items, I’m looking at EVERYTHING. And that’s a lot of items, too many even.

Despite the fact that it works, I’m not doing that anymore, I currently have 100m on the trading alt, and I’m searching for the right investment to put it in. I hate browsing the market for hours 😉

Stay tuned o7

I like to move it, move it

Except, that I don’t, not really. I hate having to go after materials, ammo,.. Anything really, I hate flying from point A to point B with a cargo ship.
I trained my character to fly an Obelisk once, I forgot why, I think it had something to do with the fact that I thought it’d be a nice skill to have, and for some reason I liked the look of the Obelisk.

That was until I finally had one. I knew it was slow, but holy ****, calling it slow is an understatement. The align time, the warp speed,.. Everything about it is slow, and not only is it that, but if someone decides to gank your ass, well you’re royally screwed.

So all in all I flew the Obelisk about two times before selling it again. Same for the orca, but I still have that in my hangar, not only can I use it to safely move around ships if I needed to, seeing that it has a pretty good tank. I could also use it to boost a mining fleet, you know, if I ever felt like doing that. Or if I actually knew people who’d like me to do that.

I’m saying all of this, because I just want to let you, the reader, get into my mindset about transporting things. Which is why I absolutely love freighter services. I adore these people. Not only does their existance mean that I don’t have to move my own stuff around, it also means that I can spend the time I would have spent doing the freighting, on other, equally unimportant things.
Unimportant because I still haven’t figured out what to do, but I digress.

I’ve used Red Frog quite a bit the past couple of months, having them haul my fuel, my ores, other things I needed to get hauled. And I’m quite happy with the service they give, mostly because it seems that every time I put up a contract, it only takes 2 or 3 hours for it to be fulfilled, which is pretty good considering everything.

But next to Red Frog you also have PushX, so yesterday I decided to use them, they’re a bit cheaper than Red Frog, but also quite a great corporation that gets the job done. I even had a nice thank you mail from them. Something I never got from Red Frog, so that’s actually a nice extra.

Right now I do lean towards Red Frog a bit more seeing that they do it within hours and Push took about a day and a half, but still, that might be because of the amount of jumps they had to go through.

I’ll more than likely just use both of them, as long as I don’t have to do it myself, I’m a happy camper.
Hello, I’m Big Bertha

Stay tuned o7

A fine line

There’s a fine line between EvE being just a game, or it being close to a second job, and I think that I’m threading said line.

When trying to make ISK in the game, there are a multitude of ways to do so. You can mine rocks until you’re cross eyed and sell either the rocks or the processed goods. You can go out and do missions, earning bounties, salvage and loot. There’s null sec ratting (which is supposedly something that’ll make you earn quite a bit), exploration, industry, piracy, trading,…

There are so many ways of making ISK that it’s hard to pick one that you like, especially if you’re like me and haven’t even tried half of it yet.
But right now, my way of making isk is with industry, I create T2 items. Which means that I need bpc’s for them, which I get by copying T1 BPO’s and then put them in one of my invention slots at the POS.

There’s only a certain percentage chance that said bpc turns into a T2 bpc, without using decryptors and such I usually get around 55% chance of a T2. Which is pretty good, datacores aren’t too expensive and I have all the chips. I make a nice profit doing so.

However, I noticed that when I make things that only take a rough 10 hours to make, I start thinking of EvE as a job. I need to log in to do my invention once every hour, click and click and click because of the POS mechanics not allowing me to create batch jobs. And then I need to make sure that I have all the material to create said items.
It’s not that hard, but all the clicking can get to you.

A friend of mine told me that I should slow down a bit once the invention starts to feel as a second job, I would love to do that. But doing so would make it problematic for me. I really, really don’t like seeing my manufacturing/research job queues empty.
It’s something that makes me feel guilty, not using the full potential of a character. Already I put a few ME jobs up just because I didn’t want those empty slots just sitting there.

It’s time for me to start looking into other ways of making ISK though. Mission running is fun and all, but it gets boring too. You can only do so many level 4’s until you get cross eyed.

Maybe I should try my hand at trading. If only I knew what I was doing, that’d make things a lot easier for me.
If someone feels like mentoring me in the ways of trading, be my guest! Your help will be appreciated and you’ll get a virtual cookie out of it!

Stay tuned o7