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..

Crius release, thoughts so far

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Crius was released a few days ago, and I’m loving it. The industry revamp, especially how they upgraded working with a POS is just great.

I’m sure there are people out there that might complain about the fact that their precious BPO’s now need to be inside of the POS. But I, as an inventor and T2 manufacturer, can’t be happier.

I can start my invention runs with a click of a button from my home base instead of having to go to my POS and be within 2500m of the lab. Not only that, but I can do it even when I’m 15 jumps away. 

Next to this, it’s just one click to turn on one invention run. For those who worked invention or manufacturing jobs, they know that this was a pain in the ass.

In the past you needed to decide which line you would put the job on, after which you pressed a button, using said line. Once you clicked, you had to click again to grab the blueprint, click ok once more another ok, and only then you could start the job.

That’s 5 clicks for one job. You can imagine how much of a pain it was if you had about 20 or 30 invention lines running, each day.

Luckily, that’s now in the past, I can start one job with two clicks, one to decide the blueprint, one to start. It’s a lot faster than before, and I can all do it from station, so easier at that. I will happily take the cost of the installation for that.

“You mean, I need less materials? Sweet!”

The fact that I can even install jobs remotely from a dozen or more jumps away, means that I can use my trading alt too. Of whom I found out that he has the necessary skills to do my invention and manufacturing runs too. Guess it’s a good thing I checked my skills on him.

The only thing that was missing was the ability to install them remotely so I did the most obvious thing to do… I bought a PLEX from the market (through a sell order, shame on me!) and activated second character training.

My trader now has a month of training activated for him, which I will use to train him a bit further into retail and allow him to activate remote jobs.

I’m still figuring out the bonuses that my POS can have, and what it does (as far as I’m aware they’ll just reduce the installation cost) but for now, I’m really happy what Crius has offered me as an industrialist.

 Stay tuned o7

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

Plans and Decisions

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
Last Saturday I spent a few hours making a spread sheet about my invention. Not even all kinds of invention but the invention of 1 kind of item. I’m hoping that said item will bring me a nice profit in a few weeks once I’m done creating copies of my Blueprint Original.

Seeing that you need Blueprint copies to invent them into T2 copies.

The reason why this took me a few hours is because of the fact that I had to make a list containing all the products I need for the invention and creation of this. Then I had to breakdown said list into all the raw material I would need for this.

After doing that I remembered that I already had a bunch of material around somewhere so I had to put those into my calculations too. And let’s just say that it’s been awhile since I had to test my math skills. For some reason I came to amounts of 5m ISK more than I should have, but I accidentally multiplied somewhere instead of making a sum and well, it took me a bit to find said error.

Along with all of this I also made a few additions to my POS. I added a few extra labs for more copies and I asked a friend if he wanted to join me in my little venture. I bet that if it were in any way possible, he would have had ISK signs in his eyes. But that’s a good thing, it’s more fun if you work with multiple people on a project.

And speaking of projects, I have decided to say farewell to null sec. I had tons of fun there but it just wasn’t my cup of tea. Logging in, hoping for a fight and having to wait because fleet command was going to take dreads out first while I was sitting there in my little cruiser was not something I liked. Despite getting a bunch of fun fights, they were too spread out for me to stay there.

So I went back to High Sec and am currently sitting in my Machariel wondering what to do.
I’ve been thinking about maybe going to Low Sec. I just need to find someone willing to take me in. A Noob with little experience in PvP. Because, let’s face it. The only reason why I survived so many fights is because I followed people around and was pretty lucky most of the times.

A few days I went on a Talwar roam, my last roam with the alliance I was in and after a few hours I decided to head home. I have no idea how, but I was able to get past a gate camp in my Talwar with about 80% hull left. That’s what happens if you go home alone, instead of breaking up gate camps, you are their victim. 
“Breaking up a party”

Lucky for me everyone had engaged me so nobody could jump after me to finish the deal. So I made it home safely, only to put the destroyer back on contract, grab myself a Claw and head 22 jumps back to my High Sec home.

I guess I’ll be running missions while I wait for something to drop in my lap.
Or maybe I should go out searching actively, if only I knew what it is I want.

Guess time will tell

Stay tuned o7

Making it work

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , ,

Well, that’s it for me, I not longer have any T2 BPC’s to manufacture.

One of my biggest problems due to lack of time in EvE is that my T2 manufacturing is taking hits from it too. I’m making a profit, but my profit isn’t big enough, I made about 500m after expenses in April. That’s not nearly enough to make me happy.

And unfortunately I don’t see it changing in the near future.

I need to find some new way to make ISK. Something that’s easy and doesn’t take too much time…

The answer to that is Trading. But I don’t feel like trying it again. Despite the fact that if you’re good at it, you don’t have to spend too much time a day doing it (ten minutes or so). But that’s if you’re good at it, and I wasn’t. I made a profit, but I made it slowly, it took me about 2 months to make 1b out of 100m and another month to turn that 1b into 2b.

Those numbers aren’t bad, to the contrary even. But I spent way too much time to get there. Instead of spending a few minutes, I spent a few hours a day updating orders, checking what to buy, what to sell. And I relocated four or five times in that timeframe. It wasn’t the fun I envisioned it should have been.

But maybe I’ll try again, I have 600m on my trader that I’m not using and 14b on my industrialist. Guess I should make the ISK work.

Stay tuned o7

I smell something burning

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , ,
Turns out Jita is burning this weekend. I had read something about it happening but I had forgotten about it. Good thing I fly a Blockade Runner. I turned back right on time, otherwise I might have lost my runner and about 600m in cargo. It’s not much but it’s something.

“What do you mean, I’m going to die there?”

The one thing that’s problematic due to Jita burn is the fact that I don’t have any materials right now for my manufacturing. As most of you know that read my blog (those two or three people) I still don’t plan too much ahead and thus tend to restock about once or twice a week. 

But at least I can still do my invention, so that’s something. I was running out of T2 bpc’s anyhow…

“Or at least, the ones I want to make” 

I was going to add that it was the price of a PLEX but we’re past that already. They just keep on going up. Not that I mind, I have a bunch of PLEX locked away just for that, a few to sell, a few to use myself.

I haven’t been able to log in as much as I would have liked, but this time I didn’t mind that much. A few days ago when I had a few hours to spare I logged in on my industrial alt and I noticed that she finally finished the queue I put up a few weeks ago. She’s finally able to fly an Ishtar.

Flying an Ishtar has been on my to-do list for ages but I never got there because of other skills. What with me not knowing what industrial skills to put in the queue, I figured that trying out L4’s with an Ishtar could be fun and a bit more of a challenge than taking out the Machariel on E’dyn. (Although the Machariel has been parked for a few months now)

As you can imagine, the skills of my industrial alt are not that great, put I made a fit that might just work. Although I have yet to test it. I’ll have to breeze through a few L2’s and L3’s with it but I’m sure I’ll get there in a few weeks, and who knows, by then I’ll have a full T2 fit.

One of the things I did do, with the idea of flying an Ishtar, is making most of it myself. I’m an inventor, so I made a few copies of my Vexor BPO and started a few invention runs on them. I made about 5 Isthar BPC’s and one of those has now been made into one. 

I’m proud of myself for doing this. I’m actually going to be flying something I made myself. I haven’t done that since I made a newbie ship back in the tutorial!

Now all I need, is a bit of time so I can actually do what I’m saying here.

Patience is a virtue

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , 3 Comments
Patience is a virtue. But it’s not one of mine.

“Patience, young padawan”
Unfortunately, from time to time, this game is all about having patience. Your skill queue, your invention queues, manufacturing, waiting for fights… Everything you do in EvE needs some amount of patience in order for you to actually start enjoying the fruits of it.

Most of the time I can do other things while waiting. There’s enough to do in the game that you shouldn’t actually be bored any time at all. Shouldn’t being the key word here. Because as most, if not all, of you know, station spinning is something we do quite a lot.

These days I spend the time I can spare to play EvE looking at my queue, skill plan and deciding whether or not I want to do a trip to Jita in order to get myself some more materials. All of this because I manufacture and invent T2. My combat alt gets shoved aside for this, priorities and all that.

The other night I had some free time, something I usually do not have on a Saturday evening. So I decided to help out my alliance by joining a fleet that was going to go out in defense of a small tower. I asked in alliance chat if someone could loan me a Typhoon because I haven’t gotten one myself yet, and joined TeamSpeak. It was supposed to take about 10 minutes of forming up and then going out there. 

“Fear my rustyness!”

How wrong I was. Bear in mind that I know absolutely nothing about how Null Sec is supposed to work. I have done a few roams with my new alliance but I’ve been quite busy so haven’t actually done anything else yet (working on that).

While I was on TeamSpeak, people started talking about Carriers and Dreads. I was just listening with half my mind occupied on whether or not I’d be dying in someone else’s ship. Not knowing what was going on or what everyone was talking about I just sat and listened, suddenly hearing the faithful words: “Everyone that can fly a dread or carrier X up. We’re going out with them, the rest of you can wait in the station but stay in fleet.”

This was bad news for me, I didn’t feel like waiting a certain amount of minutes/hours while other people were going out in Dreads/Carriers. I had logged on hoping for a fight, not to spin my ship some more. I do that enough on my industry alt.

After waiting 30 minutes I gave back the borrowed Typhoon and logged out. Cursing that I spent about 50-60 minutes doing nothing at all, because I thought I’d be getting in a fight.

In the back of my mind, I know that this is something that happens, you need to wait, need to be patient. But not everyone has the patience to do so for too long. I decided to log out because I knew for a fact that I could be doing better things than waiting while I had no idea why I was waiting.

It’s a shame really, because experiences like this is what makes people decide not to join in other operations, not to try out other things. Because they don’t like wasting their precious time.

Stay Tuned o7

Planning towards efficiency

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , ,
Due to the fact that I’m going to a Steel Panther concert tongiht, I decided to spend last night making sure that I have enough materials ready for manufacturing on Thursday. I made sure that I wouldn’t have to worry about the queues until then.

Or at least I hope I did. As most of you that have been reading my blog may know, I’m not that good at planning.

I tend to forget one thing or the other every single time I go about my production runs. You’d think that after failing at bringing everything with you that I’d have learned. But you would be wrong.

Next to my production planning I installed EvEMon again and made a queue for both my industrial character and combat character. Due to me not knowing what to do with the industrialist for now, I’m training her to become an Ishtar pilot. It’s one of the many ships that I’ve always enjoyed watching and that I still can’t fly. Thus she’s learning right now.

According to the plan it would take about 50 days before she can fly it and use the correct drones. I’m hoping on shorting that a bit.

Giving her the ability to fly a combat ship is not without reason though. There’s a deeper meaning than just wanting to fly an Ishtar. 

Due to the fact that I tend to mostly create T2’s I decided that it was high time for my industry alt to start using research agents herself. I know, I know, you’re thinking: “Why haven’t you done that already?!” 

Pure laziness really, but I’m on my way to changing that. This is part of my ‘Get a bit more efficient’ plan.
It’s a small step, but I’ll get there… Eventually.
“This will help too.”

Stay tuned o7

Let’s go flying!

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , ,
A few days ago I came online at the right moment. The alliance was going to go out in Stealth Bombers, looking for targets.

I’m a big fan of bombers despite the fact that I only have a little experience with them. But still, this would be a great time to get some more of it.

On top of that, we’d be using a Sin along with the bombers to make use of the short range jumping technologies so that we wouldn’t have to do it ourselves. When I heard that I couldn’t help but get even more eager about this, I had never bridged before so that’d be another first for me.
The night was on to a good start.

“What now? We wait? Oh..Well okay.”

Cue the waiting. Because of the fact that we weren’t going to be roaming ourselves, we had scouts out that were checking for targets for us, I didn’t mind, that gave me some more time to check my fit and make sure that I put the bomb away. We were only going to be using torpedoes anyway.
After jumping into a Purifier instead of my Nemesis I joined the rest of the 15 or so bombers and waited until a target was found. 

“Pretty colours”

At around this time I learned that I really should pay more attention to what is being said to me in Teamspeak or even Fleet chat. As I never used a bridge before, I had no idea what I had to do. I figured that if it was lit, I’d jump automatically. I was wrong.

“Wait, what’s going on, why am I not jumping too?!”

I saw everyone around me jump, and I just hung there in space, looking around me trying to figure out what just happened. Turns out I need to right click the Black Ops ship and press jump. Oh well, lesson learned, time to wait again.

After a while we heard our scout go “Oh shit, oh shit, fuck fuck, get over here!” So I bet you guys can figure out what happened, there was a target, and the scout only noticed when he was right on top of them, or shall we say the other way around.

We jumped, got bubbled and started calling targets and shooting. They knew we were around and had prepared accordingly. I followed the Fleet Commander’s calls as I burned out of the bubble, right as I got out a, few more ships got called in and we were told to warp away if we could.

I just sat there with a smile on my face as I warped towards one of the moons and cloaked up. It was the third time in a few days that I went out for some PvP and got myself a few kills extra on my killboard. According to what was said on TS we did lose the ISK battle, but it’s not like I cared about that, I was PvP’ing, and I was enjoying myself a lot.
“Time to go”

As far as my ISK making goes, I’m still manufacturing, and for some reason making more ISK than a few weeks ago. Which makes no sense because I’m doing less work than I did before. If I had more time I would be trying to figure out how this is happening. But right now I’ll just shrug and be happy with it.

And on a final note. I’ve been accepted on the Fansite list on the EvE Online site. Yay! I doubt I’ll get more people coming over to read my stuff, but it’s nice to know that the people at CCP think I’m worthy enough to be on there.

Stay tuned o7 

Efficiency is not part of my vocabulary

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment
I am nowhere near as efficient in my manufacturing as I should and can be. I tend to restock my products at the last moment. I click ok on my assembly line, and suddenly notice that I’m missing R.A.M. tech, or Tritanium, or any of the other things I need, to complete my process.

I really should just have a large stock of everything, but I’m lazy. Although one could argue that if I really was lazy, I’d actually have a big stock, because that would mean that I would not have to go to Jita as often as I am doing now. But the lazyness is translated more to the fact that I don’t feel like calculating/checking what everything is that I need, buying it, and afterwards getting it all to my home base.

But I should put up more buy orders, I have zero of those, and that’s a bad thing.

Trading in general is something I am not doing right now, my little experiment did give me a bit of playroom, I made about 1b from the 100m I invested in it. But I wasn’t too good at it, it took me too much time to figure out what I should buy and sell, that I just decided to not do it for now.

I do have a few buy orders on my trading alt, mostly for implants, because they keep on selling anyhow. But shh, I never said this, we’re not supposed to give away our secrets.

The past week I was able to have my net worth go up by 300m, and I have absolutely no idea how that happened, because I just did some manufacturing, then again, this week I actually did manage to make sure that every line was occupied so maybe I did good on that part.

“I’m sorry, it’s complicated”

Now to find a way to use this ISK, to make more ISK.

As a little sidenote; I’ve been thinking about trying something new, corporation wise.
My industry alt is in a corporation of her own, but it’s pretty lonely. I want to join some other corp, in which I can still do my manufacturing etc, but I don’t like the idea of giving up my POS. Anyone have an idea of what I could try?

Stay tuned o7