happy anniversary

So, about a year ago I won a few of Roc’s Ramblings Advent contests. I got some nice ammo, a cynabal, a few dramiels and other ships I could not fly, didn’t know how to fly and those that know me personally would never trust me with due to my abysmal kill/loss record.

SO, I instantly sold all of the ships, modules and other items that would make a pvper very happy for a week or two to the tune of about 600-800 mil, more than my little mining self had ever seen due to losing several hulks and never really mining anything harder to find than scordite.

Being a bit of a simpleton, I asked around “what would you do with 800 mil”. I recieved various responses like “faction mods”, “rattlesnake”, “awesome mission ship”, “go t3”, and more than a few “give it all to me lulz”

Then, I had a flash of insight: PASSIVE INCOME!

For those who just play Eve to spin ships in station, here’s a list of the various ways you can get isk in Eve, ordered from “most involved” to “least involved”:

Piracy/ransoming
WH pos ransoming
WH sleeper farming
WH mining
l5 missions
nullsec ratting
l4 missions
ninja salvaging l4 missions
nullsec mining
highsec mining
station trading
courier contracts
contract scamming
moon reactions
t2 component construction
spamming jita chat with scams.

This isn’t a complete nor completely accurate list, but I tried, darn it.

Anywho, after several pokes into the various passive incomes, I tried my hand at a pos farm. I was drawn in because it was the only passive income with a large income sum, and because it was something I wanted to do in Eve. So, I spent all that isk on two large towers and anchored them in a C1. Then, apologized profusely and moved to a different C1.

It has been exactly a year since then. Those two towers have grown to fourteen. Weekly maintenance has been about 10-15 hours and weekly cash flow has been about 300-400 mil.

As of this writing someone is blowing up those towers slowly, one by one. They will not be going back up. Whatever I can salvage from the wreckage (let’s be honest, it’s one guy and fourteen large towers, he’s gonna get bored soon) I will sell to fund future ventures.

Let me back up a bit. Typically, I refuel and rotate the towers on a weekly basis, anywhere from friday to sunday, depending on HW that week and upcoming tests, ect. So, this saturday I scan the highsec WH, check it annnnnnddd…..

Highsec island. And since I’m a moron and don’t keep a week of fuel in the towers, the towers will all offline soon. So, I take enough fuel to keep the main tower going for about a day and put alllllll the reaction profit in it.

Sunday night, the WH closes, I scan a new one. NOT a highsec island. I warp the freighter there, gets there at about midnight sunday night, before a 10 am psychology graduate-level class. And I’ve been doing boring stuff all day.

So I play a few rounds of Starcraft 2. Then bed. Wake up, am actually awake for psych class, am halfway to German when I realize that I forgot to refuel the main tower. Logon, everything’s swanky, I run a day’s worth of fuel in and online it. Go to German, leave, log back on….

Corp hangar gone. Carbide’s gone. Shield is up tho. So apparently in the 30 minute window of onlining they killed the corp hangar and hauled out about 360k m3 worth of carbides.

One sec… Nope, they’re not answering so I don’t know if they destroyed or hauled out the 2 bil worth of carbides. Meh.

Just to recap:
For the last year, these towers have been completely defenseless. They’ve all had two hardeners(offlined), have run out of fuel on multiple occasions, the actual main tower has assorted ECM and laser batteries(also offline) and I’m not even sure I actually put ammo in them or not.

And yet, these towers have stood proud against the multiple peoples coming in and out of a C1 highsec WH, devoters, eagles, falcons, ect, only to be laid low by a 2008 character in cane and hound with an impeccable sense of timing.

I’ve been thinking about it, and the only conceivable reason for this sudden bad luck in terms of total operational shutdown is that, for the last few days I’ve had 5 bil or so in wallet due to missing a few plexes and not spending the excess isk like water. This has been expressed to my various friends like so:

haav > hey, guess who has two thumbs and five bil?
haav > THIS GUY!

So, once again:

Murphy, you complete and utter asshole.

Spent 1.5 of that on fuel and reactants for this week, and assuming this hound and cane don’t destroy the 14 large towers, that’s another 2 bil.

So I’ll be using this to catapult myself back into an actual WH for sleeper killing, probably in tengus.

As a related note, I saved all the BMs for my static’s for the last year. If anyone wants all 113 of them for some charting purpose, here’s a teaser:

And here’s the last printscreen I’ll take of my WH. Fare the well, for you have paid a great deal of my account time for very little effort on my part.

Indiego Montoya > hey
Bacsalmas > hi
Indiego Montoya > just wondering how much carbide you got outta that hangar
Indiego Montoya > and wanted to ask you not to blow up my infrastructure.
Indiego Montoya > that was this week’s haul
Indiego Montoya > there’s nothing left in the silos
Bacsalmas > I think the danger of all pos 🙂
Indiego Montoya > but they’re a bitch to reanchor
Indiego Montoya > hmm?
Bacsalmas > you pay for, or shoot the POS ?
Indiego Montoya > go ahead and shoot
Indiego Montoya > i’m just saying there’s nothing there.
Bacsalmas > ok 🙂
Indiego Montoya > o/


Custom Wallet Manager

A few months ago, a corp mate and I started trading and we needed a centralized method of monitoring our activity. We tried a few programs such as eve commander, but we wanted more out of the system.  My corp mate James has helped me design and code up a custom wallet manager.

James picked the framework, introduced me to the coding methodology, and wrote a lot of the database queries given his strong programming background. I helped out by defining what we should report on, what stats were the most valuable, and a little theme design.

What we have now is a pretty solid beta of our wallet program. We do not currently have any plans to publicly release the code, but things might change as we finalize the project.

Overview

ISK Movement – Income, taxes, and broker fees
API – Timer update stats for API feed
Characters – summary of wallets
Movers – top 30 items sorted by profit for the past month

Transactions

Shows where, to who, and how much for each item.

 

Item Report

See how each item is performing.

Stock Report

Custom defined groups (fuel, Battleships, etc)
Lists if you have any orders for that item including remaining / total of the original order
Volume that has sold over the past 30 days
Profit for that item over the past 30 days

Profit Report

1 day, 5 day, and 20 day averages

Sale and Volume Report


Future Comings

Incursion is out, I forgot to save my old portraits so I’m remaking them as best I can. Not having much luck insofar.

As far as everything else goes:

I love how they added a “you should think about buying a plex” to the char sheet but I still have no easy way ingame to see how much time I have left.

Character creater was a hair bit buggy the first time I started it but seems to be fine now, Eve-Gate has a few more touches and then there’s THIS:

On Evegate, which, since it hasn’t been announced with the trumpeting of a hundred Icelandic angels, probably wasn’t supposed to be released just yet. Another clue is that the above screen is what you get, there’s no functionality whatsoever. BUT this looks like the precursor to chatting in channels while out of game, which is honestly the best new feature I could imagine besides PoSes overhaul, Black ops ships made a leeetle better and a few other things I was upset about but can’t remember right now.

For people looking for the link to the above window, it’s on the taskbar of Evegate. Probably won’t be in a day or two.

edit: apparently I’m an idiot and didn’t read the patch notes enough.


I can’t remember the word for this

Taramura Muggins > i need a favor
haav0c > can do!
Taramura Muggins > if you connect to RRWI-5
Taramura Muggins > let me know, my alt is trapped there in a pod and I wanna get her to empire without losing implants if possible
Taramura Muggins > or anywhere in that constellation
haav0c > holy shit, man
Taramura Muggins > i know….
haav0c > i’m amazed that that is LITERALLY the other side of eve.

So, I head to jita, buy a buzzard t1/t2 fit (Lucky Bastard XI) with some sister probes and fly on down.

I get to the first null jump, warp to planet, warp to 100km of next gate, caught in a bubble. I immediately fly straight up and look around.

One Taranis, one Dramiel, in a bubble field that covers every celestial. I make a save 150km above and from there warp to the gate. one of the bubbles drags me past it by 7km, but i manage to recloak and jump through before explodey death.

Six jumps later, having made 150km safes on every gate along the way, I jump through… into another camp.

In a bubble.

In scram range of a lachesis and web range of a huginn.

AND, for the first time since flying to covops, I misclick and cloak a second too late after dropping cloak.

http://www.darkshadowindustries.com/kb/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=2379

That doesn’t go well. So, Slight altercation of the route.

So, sick of making safespots, I warp full burn to the system in question, only bouncing off a planet when there’s something in local.

As an interesting fact, in those 35 odd systems I went through, I had to warp to a planet about ten times. And half of those were in stain. Anyway, I make it to the system, drop probes, scan.

Ten systems later, I find a WH that goes to lowsec, 7j from highsec. Dude gets the pod on, I scout it to the second to last gate with no incident. A few frigs, not much of a problem.

haav0c > clear otherwise
Taramura Muggins > kk
haav0c > sentinel warped off
Taramura Muggins > local emptied
haav0c > stabber/sentinel on gate
haav0c > stabber jumped
haav0c > other side…stabber, clear
haav0c > apart from the stabber
Takamura Muggins > omw
haav0c > warping to udianno gate
haav0c > local filling
haav0c > drake n vexor on duia
haav0c > both jumped
haav0c > gate clear
haav0c > where are you?
Takamura Muggins > onamam
haav0c > stabb, sentinel, omen on gate
haav0c > whoa
haav0c > fuck
Taramura Muggins > warping to udianoor
Takamura Muggins > what?
haav0c > gatecamp
Taramura Muggins > smartbombs?
haav0c > big
haav0c > no
haav0c > lachesis, cane, harby
haav0c > huginn
Taramura Muggins > well they cant bubble can they?
haav0c > nope
Taramura Muggins > this in udia
Taramura Muggins > ?
haav0c > ya
haav0c > no SEBOs
Taramura Muggins > on the out gate?
haav0c > no, UDI–>onamm gate
Taramura Muggins > oh fuck

13-14 man lowsec gatecamp. I cloak and MWD perfectly and get my ass out of dodge, friend warps through, warps STRAIGHT to the last gate, at zero.

Taramura Muggins > YAY I SAFE!

More proof of murphy’s law.

haav0c > annnd you’re ahead of me
Taramura Muggins > uyou good?
haav0c > ONE MOPRE SYSTEM
haav0c > CAREFUL
haav0c > ya
Taramura Muggins > smartbomb rokh
haav0c > …
Taramura Muggins > jumped througha dn started up
Taramura Muggins > i dead
Taramura Muggins > in jita
haav0c > FUCK
haav0c > wow.
Taramura Muggins > *sigh*
Taramura Muggins > lsot part of advanced spaceship 5
haav0c > well
haav0c > there’s a word for this situation
Takamura Muggins > errr
haav0c > i just have no idea what it is
Taramura Muggins > no
haav0c > no?
Taramura Muggins > fuckkkkk
haav0c > …
haav0c > T.T
Taramura Muggins > thatsd be the word


on PLEXes

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2006/07/13/

I really hate PLEXes.

I mean I love them.

I mean…. Well, let’s go with I hate RMTing.

No, because I’m enjoying paying with PLEXes.

OK, I hate the PEOPLE who are on the other side of all the PLEX transactions I go through each month.

Only… I don’t hate them, I just think they’re idiots to the point that…… OK, I hate them.

Let’s start over. I’m working at a seasonal job in the service industry, and between using “sir” every other sentence and constantly smiling, I pulled in about 100$ for eight hours of labor on Sunday. That’s about what, 2.5 bil in PLEXes?

I really hate that. I hate that I press buttons, over and over, to make what can readily be compared to pennies in IRL cash while I am in fact actively making money to cover both the regular subscriptions of my accounts and enough PLEXes to fund my carriers come Christmas day. I’ve got a stigma, you see.

I started out Eve, as most players did a few years ago, completely effing lost. After about three weeks of stubbornly refusing to use the tutorial out of principle I manned up, read the three paragraphs it consisted of at that time (with lots of clicking in between sentences accompanied by “ooh, I can do that?”) and started mining. In a Navitas.

I mined, for a stupidly long time, with a few lasers and a frigate’s cargohold, until I could afford an Exequeror. I mined in that until I could afford a brutix, then till I could afford a retriever, covetor, and finally a hulk. The entire time I had been staring at those damn pieces of veldspar I’d be tabbed out, reading halada’s guide to mining and drooling over the hulk’s yield/hour and all the shiny things I could do to improve it.

It’s been about two years since then. I’ve lost a heck of a lot of hulks. As well as other ships. But, in any case, I lost them and worked to get them back, blood, sweat, gore, etcetera.

Now I’m to understand that someone can throw down 70 US dollars and have a hulk and a hulk pilot instantly in the char bazaar.

Now, what I hated about WoW was that mainly, you’d spend a month or five on the dungeon of the month, running it, dying it, and getting slightly shinier gear to run slightly harder dungeons.

Then, about once every three months, blizzard would hand everyone on the server the shiniest possible gear while simultaneously unveiling the next hardest dungeon which was doable using the gear that you had either spent the last three months, five hours every night obtaining and/or picked up off the street. It’s easy to parallel this to Eve and someone dropping five thousand dollars and getting a supercarrier for their troubles. I think the main reason that I tolerate this is that the Eve person isn’t someone playing in a parallel world that I can never touch, accepting the free hand up while I pound on the glass with bloody fists.

In Eve, that person? He’s a target. He’s used his money to get a leg up, but I can reach up with a hand crafted through sleepless nights of losses and kills (mostly losses), wrap around his neck and drag him back down.

It’s a nice feeling.

So hey, keep buying those plexes. I’ll be here, slowly paying my subs with isk and gaining friends and equipment. And when you try to cyno out of my interdictor or jump a gate in your rorqual?

You won’t be going anywhere.