Once again into the blobtastic yonder

Posted: 2010-11-16 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: | 3 Comments

My string of BS losses to random disconnections, blackscreens and blackouts has shown no signs of abetting as has my corpmates’ request for me to join them in null, which according to them is full of happiness and liquid isk and shooting people who never ever come to our home systems, honest.

So, once again my corp is somewhere in nullsec and I’m following them in pursuit of fun and profit. For those of you new, let’s recap my null experiences:

#1
Alliance was used as renters before renters existed to inhabit systems in insmother CVA was trying to take from atlas. We were chased out by AAA.

#2
Alliance rented space from atlas in insmother from Atlas to serve as a buffer between them and the drone regions, which apparently didn’t like atlas in insmother.

#3 Corp is situated in Cloud Ring on NC side. Nuff said.

So, I leave my trusty orca in jita, pop in a viator and fly my three chars down to null.

Things got off to a flying start when I docked the viator, went five jumps to get a geddon for ratting, came 4j back and got bubbled and podded 67km from the station.

So, as of speaking I have four alts in null, drake pilot, drake/domi pilot, scanner/amarr everything, and Orca/domi pilot. Since I feel bad about not participating in CTAs I’ll be using the drakes because I’m sick of losing effing BSs.

Speaking of CTAs, my quest to get one actual pvp kill gets another good try with this boomtastic battle.

I’m the guy in the drake. Since I’m not an experienced nullsec spinmaster or news caster I’ll just say that having a gang of 450 individually “gf” a 15 man group we just steamrolled was one of the funniest moments I’ve had in Eve thus far.

I’m sure I’ll be told to redact that image because A. It’s a horrible drake fit, B. evil people might learn…..

That shooting SBUs in a subcap fleet is boring?

Eh.

Third time’s the charm?

Trading 102: Location, Location, Location

Posted: 2010-11-15 | Author: | Filed under: industry, market, ships | Tags: , , | 4 Comments

You want to be close to the ocean? That’s 11% more. Close to three subway stops? That’s 9% more on the asking price. With trading, just as with real estate, location matters.

People go to Jita because it is the place for items. But why do people flock to Jita?

  • Price: the volume is high and the margins small, so the price of the items will always be very competitive. Whenever reaction numbers are adjusted or new modules/ships released, this is the fastest market to adjust to the new price.
  • Volume: if I put a buy or sell order up, it should sell faster than any other location in Eve due to the sheer amount of trading volume that occurs in Jita. Now do keep in mind that high volume means that a lot of other traders are also working in the same market. Don’t be surprised to see your order get undercut by 0.01 ISK within a few minutes.

In this post I want to describe what happens at the “T2” and “T3” markets as I call them. What do the price and volume look like is other areas?

If you are a visual learner like me, the above infographic should explain it all. In the other markets, the volume decreases while the margins increase.

These volume and margin differences mean that you can make money. Take mission runners for example. These are people that run L4 missions one after the other. When they get a stockpile of salvaged loot, they will most often reprocess it and sell it right at the station.

Take advantage of this laziness. Put up buy orders for modules and minerals and when they stockpile, haul them to Jita to sell. What else do missioners need? Ships, modules, guns, and ammo! Load up Excel and take a look at the price differences between Jita and your test market.

As always, research your market before investing. Mission runners are just one example of a location differential that you can exploit.

Hello up there?

Posted: 2010-11-10 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , | 7 Comments

So, Incursion came out yesterday or so and I’ve been spending all the time since then just playing with the new character editor, which was a pure shining interface of beauty surpassing The Sims in anything it ever aspired to be.

Oh wait.

So, Incursion is not out on the day CCP chiseled in stone on the wall of the Vatican that it would come out.

Wait, no, I’m thinking of some other mandate.

So Incursion is not out on the day that CCP said that it would come out. In hindsight we probably should have expected this from the lack of an Eve trailer. I tried to make my own by staring at the show info screen of a nightmare and spinning it around a few times, but instead of the elation that usually comes with a new trailer all that I got was soft weeping.

So CCP has accidentally projected a deadline and not met it. I think this is a good thing.

Admitted, I want a sansha mothership NAO, but… every six months?

Really? Is that enough time? To maintain a grand scale MMO, shitloads of electronics and programs and mechanics, not knowing if any tiny change you make to a single line will fuck everything up or not, while all the while people your living depends on complains about almost literally everything you do and don’t do.

Good expansions take time and thought. I’m not saying that the expanions that a few some a couple most people didn’t like didn’t take time. They just didn’t work for some reason.

Fecked if I know why, I’m in the wrong major for that.

But anywho, CCP is spending more time on an expansion instead of releasing it on time early. And since they’re not actually CHARGING for this thing, there’s no marketing pressure to release before christmas.

So, CCP, I’m going to tag this post with as many Eve Tags as possible to try and get your attention probably just tweet fallout to say this:

“Take as much time as you have to, please don’t break anything.”

“P.S. more trailers”

Trading 101: An Introduction to the Basics

Posted: 2010-11-08 | Author: | Filed under: market | Tags: , , | 12 Comments

Time brings change; careers and interests change over time in Eve as they do within all our lives.

I started my Eve career off mining in highsec, then lowsec, then mining in WH space. Later on I moved to nullsec and recently trading has peaked my interests. Below are some general tips that hopefully will spark your interest in trading or, if you are an already established trader, will help you refine your skills.

Blake’s Advice for Trading:

  1. Review the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition (yes, I have seen every episode of ST:TNG).
  2. Buy low, sell high.
  3. Find a market. This can be T1, T2, meta, fuel, PI, ships, etc within highsec, lowsec, a mission hub, a nullsec market (they do exist!). Recently, Chribba took sov in Providence to make 9UY4-H a open trading station.
  4. Get your Accounting and Broker Relations skills to IV to reduce taxes.
  5. Have some start-up capital,  any amount will do. I started with 2 B.
  6. Watch the Market Forum on eveonline.com for anything written or commented by Akita T.
  7. Beware of advice on the Market forum due to people wishing to artificially inflate a product.
  8. It is not called Spreadsheets in Space for nothing, get Excel (or Open Office for you people) open and start your research.
  9. Use a program to track your profits. I use Eve Trader since it can aggregate multiple wallets and produce pretty graphs. The original project has been abandoned; however, due to the open source of the code, the project has been picked up and had been updated. Not all features work, but the core ones of aggregating multiple wallets and doing the math (sell – buy – taxes = profit) work. Updated project here.
  10. Minimize Jita local. It is terrible and will give you a headache.
  11. If you are wardc’d, use Red Frog Freight to move your goods around. It costs me around 5M to move up to 900,000 m3 13 jumps with a max of 1B collateral.
  12. Get at least two monitors. You will want to have your Jita/Amarr alt on one screen, your research, and your new market on the other screen.

So how am I doing?

I’ve been trading in a new market for the past 22 days and am averaging 62.4 M / day in profit.

Want to know more? Send me any amount of ISK and I will send you double back!

Some light reading during the downtime.

Posted: 2010-11-02 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, ships, wormhole | 8 Comments

So, due to a logical proofs test on tuesday, I held off on my usual fueling of the towers on sunday and studied instead like a good little college student. That plus dinner, a movie with a friend and a variety of coincidences leaves me at 3:00 Eve time ready to refuel and restock the towers. I pull up a SC2 commentated replay, my favorite fanfictions and start leisurely warping the freighter the 12 jumps from Jita to my static of the moment, slated to close in about three hours.

Plenty of time.

Of course, come 5:00 eve time, I’m 2j away from the target system when THIS comes up:

Attention players, we’re turning off the servers in about an hour for more patching stuff. It’s gonna be off for a while, so have a long skill trained!

I know that this was featured on the logon screen for a good day before, but in my defense it’s really hard to convert eve time to my local time. I have to add numbers together and everything!

So, I now have an hour to get the PoSes refueled and restocked. And so the fun begins.

4:01
Wspace colonists:
haav:FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

4:02
I warp to the WH BM labeled “2 am sun night” and THE WH ISN’T THERE. Fearing the worst, I stop the freighter 2j from the possibly-now-dead system and start aligning back towards jita. I drop probes, scan, find a WH
4:04
I warp to a WH, BM it as “mon night 12:07”, then, just to make sure it isn’t an old WH, i mouse over all my old BMs in turn to make sure I don’t already have this location saved. A momentary panic at an “approach location” appearing next to a BM called “mon night 12:07” is ended when I realize that it’s the BM that I just made. I find the correct BM and warp to it, jump through the WH. Horray! The route is still good. Tab back to the freighter.

Which is now 5km off gate.
4:05
Wspace colonists:
Haav: EYARGHH

I reapproach with the freighter, jump back through the WH, warp to pos, grab an itty and fill it with some of the reactants. Jump back to the WH, hit jump…
“a recent jump has made this WH unstable due to some science thing. Try again in 2 minutes and 10 seconds.”

Wspace Colonists:
Haav: GYAH

4:07
I jump through into the system, annnnddd….. No station in system.

Wspace Colonists:
Haav: Oh ffs

Warp one system over, dock, freighter docks, I split the fuel and stuff into fifths and haul in a fifth of it.

4:13
Warp to the WH and IT ISN’T THERE AND BOTH CHARS ARE OUTSIDE THE WH ARGH
Then both clients DC simultaniously. Oh, my connection crashed.

4:15
In a misguided attempt to stay efficient, I start moving the carbon polymers from tower 1 to towers 2, 4, and 14.

4:25
Screw the polymers, I’ll just divy up fuel.

4:28

I try to use the freighter alt to help haul fuel, but half of her “tower ##” bms are for the actual towers and the other half are for the silos, the crowning moment being the bookmark “tower 04 (silo)” which goes to the opposite side of the tower from the silos. Go figure.

4:30
If I have 14 towers and am spending about two minutes per to get all the little numbers up to at least two days, can I finish in half an hour?

4:58
Apparently so.

4:59
Freighter pod jumps back into normal space.
Wspace colonists:
haav wew-
annnd the downtime starts. See you all in 1-2 days!