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Bad at EVE

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , , ,

I can freely admit that I’m not the best player when it comes to EvE as a whole. I am at best “ok” in PvP, and when I do my trading I am well aware that I’m making stupid decisions from time to time.

There are times when I feel like I am better than some of the people I come across in the game. And times when I feel like the biggest noob out there. I’m sure that a lot of people have that same issue when they’re trying out something new.

This game can make you laugh and make you want to strangle whoever fucked something up in your fleet as you throw your headset down in frustration because it was once more the same person doing that to you.

That’s what’s so great about this game. I used to play other MMO’s, I still play World of Warcraft occasionally, and I have never felt the same string of emotions in any of them like I do in EVE.

And that’s because what you do in this game matters. Whether you’re the first tackle on a titan, or the person stocking a market (or crashing it) whatever you do, will have an effect on tens, if not hundreds of other players.
This is not something that happens in many other games. In general when playing another MMO it doesn’t really matter whether you’re there or not. They might care personally, but the game itself doesn’t get better or worse without you there.

 

I need to get myself a Naglfar

I need to get myself a Naglfar

The past few weeks has been spent trying to help some fellow wormholers defend their home against HardKnocks, scanning for new places to hunt in, doing some PvP both market PvP and otherwise. And trying to make ISK.

We failed saving them, but I have a few nice screenshots

We failed saving them, but I have a few nice screenshots

A few days ago while scanning I was in a C2, there were a lot of signatures to scan down and I saw an Astero pop up on d-scan every few minutes. I didn’t really bother myself with him, figuring that he was going through all the wormholes, I was in an Astero myself so he was spending is time not much unlike I was spending mine.

I had one more sig to scan, a relic site, when it disappeared from my overview. This Astero was hacking relics. That was my cue to try and kill him at last, I already had everything bookmarked and it was time for some other kind of content. I warped to a relic at range, lo and behold, only half a minute after getting there the guy popped up on grid. Now, keep in mind, I had been scanning this wormhole for the past 10 minutes, he must have seen my probes. But I guess he thought he was safe, going to the cans slowly. I was on coms with two of my corpmates and asked them if they could bring in fast tackle. I had a scram on my astero but no point. So they brought sabres. I made them hold on the wormhole into the C2 while I figured out the best spot for them to warp to.

Turns out there was a small asteroid I could bookmark right next to one of the last three cans he’d go to. So I did. After having them jump the hole and hold cloak I told them to wait, right up until the guy started hacking the can. As soon as that happened I had them warp to the bookmark I had just made.

A minute and one dead Astero later I could go on my merry way into finding a highsec in our little chain.

Despite this being a fairly standard procedure, it still gave me the so called “PvP-shakes” not because I would die or anything, but because I didn’t want this guy to figure out I was stalking him. To suddenly warp off and leave us with no kill.

I have literally never had any of those feelings in another game. When you PvP in EVE, there’s a kind of adrenaline rush, whether you win or lose, there’s always the thrill of the hunt.

Stay tuned o7

It’s not always about the ISK, but sometimes it is

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

Going on roams means dying. Not all the time of course but you can be certain that the loss of a ship and pod are inevitable. Which means that you need to make ISK one way or the other.

I have plenty of ISK to lose a few bill in ships, but as has been said in previous blogs. I’m somewhat of a space-Jew. I used to want ISK in order to pay for a character with the skills I wanted. Now I just want ISK to see that little line on jEveAssets rise.

In the past it went along the lines of “I want to have 1b” once getting there it was 5, then 10, then 20, 25. My next goal is 30b, and this is where I’m starting to have a few problems with. I have had a few lucky breaks in the game, some of my ISK coming from winning Moros’ on Blink and selling them. Some coming from lucky trades. I think half of my ISK came from T2 production.

Came, because for reasons unknown to me, this is no longer profitable as a solo industry player.

What I used to do is buy the parts I needed in Jita, haul them to my production facilities, make the T2’s from my own researched BPC’s and haul them back to Jita. Making a solid 200-600k profit per. After being semi-afk from eve between January and June this no longer seems viable.

For some reason that would now give me a 400k loss per T2 product made. So now, I need to look into another way to make ISK, good ISK. Because I still want to get to that 50billion milestone, and more.

Right now I’m wondering what I should be doing with all the industry skillpoints on that alt. Should I extract it, sell the injectors? That’d give me a nice quick ISK injection. But what if I want to start production again? What if I’m just not looking at things correctly and I’m missing out on a good way to make ISK from production.

And what about my science SP? Do I ever want to bother making T2 BPC’s again? I’m honestly at a loss on what to do with that alt.

The only thing I can do right now, is getting her accounting up, because silly me still keeps forgetting about tax percentages when I buy “low” and sell “high”.

Where theoretically I’d get a profit of about 20m per item, due to taxes that can easily go down to only 5mill. Woops, lesson learned there.

If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them out. I need an ISK printer.

Ps: I already do PI, making coolant right now, might have to try something new there too.

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Past few days

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

It’s been about ten days since I last wrote. Which doesn’t mean that I haven’t been doing much, I just didn’t really find any inspiration to write.

Mostly because I haven’t been doing anything very interesting. Or at least not really.

Wormhole space needs patience if you look for targets, which is something I don’t have, I am not going to wait on a site or stare at a hole for hours on end. No way will I submit myself to doing that.

So I do relic sites or combat sites. Scan down holes in the chain, move from one point to the other.. Whatever I can do to keep me occupied.

I’ve been trading a bit though, and I made myself a bit of a profit in the past week. Nothing compared to what I see other bloggers get. Not even close, I wish I did, I’m actually jealous of them doing that but also glad that they know what they’re doing.

Because in general, I don’t really know what I’m doing, I just get lucky. Last Tuesday I didn’t really make use of the Skill Extractor/Injector trading. In hindsight I probably should have done so but I didn’t. I did however make about 600m profit in station trading by noticing a bit of a price change happening on one of the items I trade in. So that’s nice.

Speaking of the injectors and extractors. I have read the opinion on these of lots of people. Some hate them, others applaud them, and more are neutral towards it.

I am neutral leaning towards the positive side of them. This has mostly to do with the fact that I do use the character bazaar. I used to want ISK, so that I could use it to buy a character suiting my skill need, I wanted to fly everything out there (as long as I could afford it). I have since then gotten off this sentiment and even got quite attached to E’dyn. However, this does not mean that I would not pay ISK/Euros/Whatever currency you have. To get a bit of a boost in my skill points.

I have an industry alt with more than 3million in SP in mining. I haven’t mined in years, and I’m not going to either. So I got myself 10 extractors, extracted it all and gave it to my wormhole alt. I know that due to doing it like this I have lost about 1m in SP, but honestly? I don’t really care about the loss, because I didn’t use it anyhow, and now, I used that SP that was never going to be used again. To perfect my Tengu skills and to train up my Proteus skills. Meaning that now I can not only do more damage in a Tengu, I can actually fly a Proteus. With just a tiny injection of skills.

Running Sites Tengu“So pretty”

I shouldn’t look at them too much though. They’re a bit of an addiction. I get why, I do. And if I allowed myself, I would buy injectors. But luckily I don’t like losing ISK. So we’re safe from doing that. For now

Stay tuned o7

What’s this

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

I noticed something new when I logged in the other day. Some kind of achievement system.

I’m not yet sure what exactly the use of this is, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the Aura revamp that I’ve heard about.

Other than me noticing something that may or may not be new, I also spend a lot of ISK on my manufacturing again as wel as on PLEX.

Seeing that soon two of my accounts will be running out I’ll be using PLEX to start paying for my eve time. Seeing as this was always one of my goals when playing the game. A goal that I never went for because I also liked seeing ISK. Silly me. Have to admit, that my eyes went a little big bigger when I noticed the current price for PLEX. If I were to sell the ones I have now I’d have a LOT of profit, but I kind of need them too. A sword that cuts on both halves.

I’ve been thinking about the wormhole I was in for way too much too. Time to go search again, I really want to go wormholing again. Maybe I should just find a C2 to settle in if nobody will have me.

Stay tuned o7

Effort vs reward

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , ,
Despite not logging in to the game for more than an hour per week in the past couple of weeks, I’m still making a profit ISK wise. Which is always a nice thing to see. It’s not much but it’s enough to keep me happy. Especially if you consider how little time I spent setting up the orders for this.

Some people enjoy looking at the market and deciding what goods they need to buy and sell in order to make a pretty big profit. I on the other hand, am one of those guys that would like to see more isk, by doing as little as I possibly can.

Due to this I will never be super rich, but will more than likely have enough isk to do whatever I’d like to be doing at the time. 

Two months ago I put up about 10 different buy orders, some for PLEX, others for Datacores. At the time I bought about 15 PLEX, which I sold last week at a “profit” of 100million each. Which is not bad at all considering I’m not spending that much time in game.

Same for the datacores, buying them at around 15k and selling those for around 25k also made a nice little profit. All of this took me just a few clicks in game and a few weeks of waiting out of it.

This just goes to show that if you have the patience to wait, you can make a nice profit on the EvE market. Unfortunately not many people have that, most want a quick turnaround.

I guess the fact that I’m still looking for people to play the game with has its advantages: It takes me longer to put things on the market and most of the products I bought a few months ago are currently more expensive.

I do admit, that if you start out, the market can seem strange, and you do need a bit of ISK to get started. Years ago when I first started, I wanted ISK fast, and the fastest way to do this was buy a game time card and sell it. 
I’ve done it before, if I had to I’d probably do it again. 
The time it would take someone just starting out, to earn that amount of ISK, is too high. While it only takes me about an hour at work. 

At that time, and now I look at it as a win-win. Because not many people like grinding for hours on end just to get enough money for a ship. And I’m one of those people too.

Like I said earlier, I’m kind of lazy.

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

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..

Plans are made to go down the drain

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
You win some, you lose some. And the past week I lost a bit.
I had hoped to cash in on Prospects, to make a bunch and have a nice amount of profit. Unfortunately, this hope was linked to the fact that people would keep the price high for at least a few days. 
Back when the venture was released, I made a lot of money in that first week, creating these new mining ships for noobs. I thought I could do this again. But this time, I was ready.
I spent a few hours on the test realm writing down what would be needed for a Prospect. After the file was created I went on my way to Jita and started setting up buy order for the raw material. I already had all the BPO’s that were needed to create a few of these ships so I could save a bit more money on these.
When all was ready I waited for the patch to drop, over 200 venture BPC’s, ready to be invented. The invention of one such BPC takes 12 hours. The fact that I, like many other people, have a job, meant that I could only start an invention run at around 7, when I got home from work. Meaning that some people already had a head start. 
12 hours pass and it’s 7 o’clock, I should have already gone to work but I decided that I’ll just work from home (allowed to do this once a week). 
This was a good decision. Because as it turned out. I made a mistake. No surprise there.
Instead of having an Advanced Ship Assembly Array, I had a normal one. Which meant that once more, despite me thinking I was prepared and wouldn’t have to go to Jita. I had to do just that. 
I bought a few and brought them to my POS. Forward about half a day and I have my first Prospect ready and 10 more in the tubes. These would take a few days to complete, but I went to Jita with high hopes. 
The first 3 I ever made, were sold for a nice profit of around 100m before they went down, and down, and down. 
I was looking at the market and saw them going to around 25-30m and sticking there. With a heavy heart I have to admit once more, that planning is not my strong suite and that I definitely am not made for long term options. 
I’ll still make a profit on what I have, but it won’t be near the profit I had hoped.
Such is the life of an industrialist. You can plan all you want, but your competition will be doing the exact same thing and they’ll make sure that your profit won’t be as high as it should have been.
“At least you’re pretty”

Stay tuned o7

Prospecting and going out of my way to get killed

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , ,

Today marks the launch of a new release for EvE. New things happening, industry wise and others that I don’t really know much about.

Why’s that? Because I only cared about one thing, a new thing to invent. Namely the prospect. In a few hours when the patch goes live we will be able to invent a new T2 frigate from Ventures. I have prepared accordingly and have about 100 Venture BPC’s ready to put in my laboratories when I get home from work this evening. Hopefully I’ll be able to create a whole bunch of Prospects by the end of this week and sell them for a nice profit.

Because that’s what this is about, profit for me. I don’t use the Venture myself and am not planning on using it any time soon. Unless I suddenly feel like going out to get some gas in a wormhole.

Speaking of wormholes, let’s talk about my lack of doing anything that might destroy one of my ships.

Last night I was browsing Reddit like I usually do when I should be asleep and saw an image linked that was rather fitting to what I don’t do.

I would link it here but I forgot to give it an upvote and I can’t seem to find it again. It basically said something along the lines of “What use is having a ship if you don’t take it out for a spin”. Although I do take it for a spin, I never seem to leave station anymore.

So I need a reason to go out and get killed. I need to stop being a ‘pussy’ and go out to low sec in a frigate to get killed a few dozen times. Or do some killing myself but, let’s face it. I’m a noob, so I’ll more than likely lose ships instead of making others lose theirs.

Unfortunately that means actually taking the time to go out. And that might take a while before I can do this. Maybe I should try out a low sec corp, have people to talk to. People that give me a reason to log in on my combat alt, instead of me just logging in on my Indy alt to update a few queues and stuff on my POS.

Plus the fact that I was gifted a key to Wildstar in order to check it out isn’t helping either. I’m AFE (away from eve) too much for my characters good.

Let’s try and change it shall we?

Stay tuned o7

Another milestone with PLEX

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , 1 Comment
PLEX in EvE makes the virtual world go round. You can use it if you’re strapped for cash, by buying some with your Dollars, Euros, Yen, …Whatever it is you use, and then sell it on the market for ISK. 
The ISK worth of it right now is 710million, give or take a few.
If you have the ISK for it, you can use it to pay for your subscription, one PLEX being the equivalent of 30 days of game time. 
You can even buy them and just put them someplace until they’re worth more than they are currently. Which is something that a lot of people have been doing since they just keep going up. I myself am guilty of this too.
PLEX has other uses, there’s the Aura store that I know absolutely nothing about. There’s the dual training that’s rather new. 
And since a few days you can also buy the collector’s edition with PLEX…
I’m sure I left out a few things but there’s not many other games that allow you to use in game currency to buy things like this.
Which makes me come to my little milestone. For the first time in my EvE carrier I have used a PLEX to prolong my game time. 
I’m pretty proud of myself. Not only have I used my ISK, I have stepped away from me not wanting to use said ISK on something for myself.  
“PLEX going to a good cause… Me”