The L-word

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

Time vs Reward

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , 2 Comments
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

I like to move it, move it

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , 4 Comments
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

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

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

Please restock..

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , ,
I forgot how annoying it is when you don’t have the correct amount of materials in stock when manufacturing. A month ago I made sure that I had enough materials for my manufacturing runs for the next two months. That was before I decided to start doing it with an extra character.

So yesterday when I logged in on my alt account and wanted to create a few hundred T1 modules that I will later turn into T2, I was confused at the fact that I didn’t have enough materials.
This is why you should plan, and why you should have enough in stock. I have flown to Jita for different things, so many times, instead of just going there, buy everything I need, and then fly it back home.

I’m starting to learn though, yesterday I made sure that I have enough raw material to last.. Well I have no idea how long it will last. Despite me knowing that I shouldn’t, I still use my liquid ISK as a marker on how “space rich” I am. Which means that I don’t want to spend too much ISK on materials.

I did spend about 1b on fuel and 1b on materials. So I’m back down to 2b liquid ISK.

I’m kind of hoping that fuel will skyrocket with Rubicon and then I will sell a bit seeing that I’m going to start making my own. But we’ll see if that’s going to happen or not.

Boom!

I found a few screenshots with explosions in it… I think I will go run some missions, if my girlfriend doesn’t come over at least. 

Fleet up!

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , ,
I went on an RvB ganked roam the other day. There were about 121 people in the fleet. I had tons of fun, despite me not having done much.

When I logged onto my RvB alt the first thing I did was ask in the corp channel if something fun was going on, and I got linked to the fleet. After joining it, joining the channel and setting up my mumble I was ready. Ready to do 22 jumps to the staging system. I wasn’t quite in the right fit, seeing that I was just flying one of my Kestrels, like I always do, and it was an Assault Frigate fleet but, I’m a tackle, I was good enough.

After arriving 10 minutes before we’d go out to Null-sec I had my first “woah” thought going. It’s been ages since I was in a big fleet so when you warp to the commander and see about 100 people fly around, you’ll look at it for a few minutes and just take in the view.
Pretty lights!

The mumble channel was quite fun too, the fleet was made up of Reds and Blues and there was some friendly banter and shots given to each other. Which made me laugh so hard that my sister came to ask me what was so funny. I couldn’t quite explain it to her.

A few jumps into null one of the scouts told us that there was a Talos and some other ships on the gate, so we all jumped in at the same time. Causing a spike in local and probably making them scared. I wasn’t on any of the kills due to TDI. By the time I had the Talos targeted he blew up.
But no worries, it was fun.
About 20 minutes later we flew into a bomber, who had just dropped a bomb. I tried my best to burn away from it, but that didn’t quite work out. My kestrel blew up, and seeing that we were in Curse, I had nothing close by to get into. But it was getting late and I had to go to work so I called it then and there.

Despite not seeing much action myself, I had a lot of fun in that roam, mostly due to fleet chat, mumble, and the local chat spikes.

When the FC tells everyone to say hi in local, and everyone does, it’s good enough to bring a smile to your face.

Stay tuned! o7

Thinking of PI

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , 4 Comments
I own a few high sec factory planets. The reason why I have them is because I had gotten too lazy to update my low sec ones.

So one day I decided to pack up every planet in low sec and just put factory planets in my main system. It’s turning out pretty well, I make a slight profit by making the products, it’s not as big as the one I had in Low Sec but still, I don’t mind. It’s all about being lazy anyhow.

I now just buy the T1 mats in jita, or wherever it’s cheapest at the moment (I do this in bulk) and then I ship them over to my planets, converting them in T3, T4 stuff. Depending on what I feel like doing. It works pretty well and the times I make Robotics it spices up my little Robotics stock.

Having these planets made me think long and hard about Rubicon’s custom office change. And I still don’t know what I should do with it. My corporation isn’t that big, most of the time it’s just me and one other person that’s online. We do own a few accounts with the two of us and we both have a whole bunch of firepower at our command, but I doubt that we’ll be able to set up a few of our own POCOS.

I think I want to have a look and see what will turn out after Rubicon, will every office in our HQ’s space suddenly turn into POCOS, or will some of the interbus ones stay up. And if that happens, why?

Another thing that might stop me is the cost of a POCO, it’ll go up, that’s for sure, and despite the fact that theoretical taxes will pay it back within the month. There’s the off chance that you’ll be out of luck and get wardecced, meaning a termination of your POCO, among other things.

I guess we’ll just have to play the wait and see game.

Hmm, that reminds me, I have to fill up my planets for the week!
My little ‘Epithal’ I love you so much


o7

I’m probably doing it wrong

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , 3 Comments
A post at http://notmo.blogspot.be/ made me think about the way I fit my ships. As a noob, I have no idea why some fits are good and others are bad. Most of my fits I either get from friends who can use EFT or out of BattleClinic.

This is probably a wrong way to approach this subject. While flying my Machariel I used T1 scout artillery, until someone told me that if I used T2 I’d have more DPS and will be ‘better’ at flying with it. Why? Well I have no clue but I just shrugged and started training for T2 artillery, I already had a bunch of it anyhow due to the fact that at the time I was manufacturing them.

After having it trained I did notice a change in my dps, but I didn’t quite get why. I’m exactly the same with fitting tank or rigs. I know that what I have is good (because I tend to not die) but I have no idea why it’s good for my fit.

Maybe it’s time to play around with EFT, time to look at other people’s fit and figure out why something is good or bad.

And time to train artillery specialization.

My RvB character is training into missile skills, I’m having a lot of fun with the Kestrel I fly, although I tend to lose more than I kill. 

Taking it down a notch

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , ,
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