Being picky about things

It has been roughly, 8 months since I last posted a blog post. Damn, and here I promised I would try and do more of them. But I have been busy so let’s just blame it on that shall we?

Today, december 14th started with the realization of me once more going “I should spend more time playing EvE Online”
Why did I come to this realization? Well, because at exactly midnight today, so when it went from 23:59 to 00:00 to ring in the new day. I got an email from paypal and eveonline, that all three of my subbed accounts have been resubbed for the next year. Which is a whopping 131 euros per account.

Yes, yes, I have been told that I could have done it a lot cheaper, but that’s not the point. I had forgotten about this recurring sub. I play eve on a bi-weekly basis, I undock and join a fleet with the wormhole corporation I am with.

I enjoy these fleets for the banter and the occassional kill we get. Although I don’t enjoy them when we go and act we are part of a low-sec blob, I decided a few months ago not to join fleets when I knew we’d be joining those.

But other than logging in to fleet up, I don’t actually do anything in the game. I wait with a lot of the others for the hunters to catch something and then go. I used to scan, be active in jita, do some hauling, made isk doing silly missions, etc etc…

And what do I do now, fuck all. Or at least very close to fuck all.

This needs to change! I have three accounts, 6 alts and only one I use.

So today after having spend almost 400 euros resubbing all of them I shall try and do more in EvE.

Starting, with figuring out how the market works these days. Do people still fuck around in Jita? Is it Perimiter now? Both? I have about 40bill in liquid ISK that should have been used in the past 12 months on other things, that ISK now is worth less than it was a year ago. The joys of economics and all that. Just as in real life when you just have your money sitting in a savings account you actually lose money due to inflation, that’s also the case in this game.

So, let’s work on this! But…How.. If only there were some people going “Ok dude, this is my stuff in amarr how I make money, do it in Jita and make bank”

But unfortunately it isn’t that easy. Time to make a few choices.

Hopefully I will actually be more active again, I guess you, dear reader. Will find out sooner or later.

Stay tuned o7

Goodbye 2020, you will not be missed.

There’s only one thing that I truly hope for 2021, and that’s that we can go outside more than we did last year.

I have been working from home since March, haven’t seen most of my friends since then either. One lockdown after the other here in Belgium, but we’ll get there eventually.
They finally started with the vaccinations, maybe by the summer I’ll be on the list. As a 32 year old I’ll be one of the last ones, which makes sense, those that are more vulnerable to this shit virus need priority.

Past few days I’ve been trying to figure out the way I used to make ISK again, only to come to the conclusion that I no longer have some of the required skills to even make T2 stuff anymore. Not that I really feel like doing manufacturing but I found a container with over 100 T2 bpc’s in it and figured that maybe I should just create them. That’s not happening.

I’ve put a few other things on contracts, found a bunch of cruiser BPO’s that I once bought and researched with the idea of selling them at some point, well, some point is there. I need the ISK to buy new ships to die in.

The market confused me for a bit, I was used to having an alt in jita and one in Amarr and then just sell stuff in Amarr from what I bought in Jita, but due to the whole gate dissapearing between the route, that’s no longer a viable option. I’m not willing to make those 50 ish jumps myself and definitely not paying for it. So I’m doing a bit of station trading in Jita itself.

In theory I should actually set the buy orders up in perimeter but.. I’m lazy

For now the trading is working well, I made about 2b in the past week, so that’s not too bad. I could probably make more but I’m not a big fan of keeping an eye on it. So I put up a few buy orders and then forget about them for a few days, only to then realise I should update them.

Most of the things I’m looking at right now is around a 10-15% margin, I could do more for slower moving items but they move too slow to my liking, don’t want to wait too long for buy orders to fill.

Other than that I’ve also started PI in the wormhole. It took a bit of messing and a lot of clicking but I think I got it going where it needs to be. Only thing I need to mess around with a bit more is the extractors, seeing that I’m not extracting enough in the cycle I put it on. But I can fix that one too by just doing it every few days instead of every week.

I literally have no idea how long this took me
T3 PI is fun

I’m enjoying EvE again, and that’s what matters. The things joining a corporation can do.

In the past few days I’ve lost on ship, a Nergal. I had no idea they existed until a week ago, luckily I had a bunch of SP saved up so I just injected myself in one. Just training the weapons to V now, gives me something to do other than training for a Nyx I will never fly. I avenged the nergal’s dead though by sacrificing a few TEST people to BOB

Speaking of Nyxes, look what I made!

I'm blue
I need to print more things, like this Nyx!

I’m trying to find excuses to use my 3D printer some more, finally printing a few EVE Online related things to put around the appartment.

o7 Stay tuned

post

I made a little deal

Wormhole space is a fickle mistress. And BoB a god that giveth and taketh.

The other day one of the guys on TeamSpeak was asking about someone docked up in one of our Citadels. A Russian, someone we had never seen before.

Seeing that we had bought this wormhole from someone, Astrahus included. I figured this was a previous occupant, logging onto EvE after being away for at least six months, only to log on and find him or herself in a citadel that they no longer owned.

So I decided to start a conversation with this person. And it turns out I was right. The guy (or girl I have no idea, for the sake of this story I’ll just go with him) was a member of a Russian corp that used to live here.

Now, the Russian part is pretty important in this. Since half the things that was said, was probably lost in translation somewhere. I basically offered him a way out to highsec and to buy his assets off of him. This was in my mind a pretty good deal. Since we could have easily just unanchored the citadel and taken all of the assets anyhow.

It took over 4 frustrating hours before he was finally able to show me his assets. Having never heard of EvePraisal, having never before used the fitting window to show his fits to people. It took a lot of screenshots on my end showing him which buttons to press etc etc.

I’m pretty sure he never even used a trade window before, since when the ISK I offered showed up as red for him he thought he was going to have to pay that.

But in the end I bought nearly 8bill in assets and ships off of him. Well, I paid him 8, it was worth quite a bit more but without a way for him to get it out, beggars can’t be choosers.

This has nothing to do with the post. I just like flying Panthers

After a while he logged on to another character on the account. I was ready to show him to highsec, so I warped to the first of three wormholes leading outside. He had undocked in a Kronos. Fine, he probably didn’t want to sell it to me and wanted it out. He warped to me. Only to warp away to one of the moons on which we put up a dead stick and then log off.

This confused me, I had no idea what he was doing.

After he logged on to his main again, this time undocking a Barghest and asking me to show him the way out.

Now, by this time, I decided that the way out for him, would be the pod express. The fact that he made me talk to him for hours on end to finally conclude our bargain had me frustrated. And I wanted some PvP action.

Knowing that he still had to move out the Kronos too, I decided that the Barghest could go. So I gave him a way out. Meanwhile, I asked a few of my guys to keep an eye on the tower. And I needed some tackle in order to catch him once he jumped the static.

After he was in highsec with the Barghest pilot, he logged off, and logged in the Kronos. Time for a proper goodbye.

He warped to the A3, thanked me again, and got bubbled as he jumped into our static C5.

It did not survive long. This was a marauder without a bastion module. I have no idea what it was used for, but it definitely was not made to survive too long.

I felt slightly bad about doing this afterwards. But, this is still EvE. And I did fulfil my end of the deal. He made it back to highsec.

Stay tuned

E’dyn

ISK makes New Eden go round

Making ISK is something everyone has to do. The way how you do it though, that’s different for every single one of the players out there. But it has to be done, how else are you going to afford the ships you lose? Or get into that Nyx you’ve been craving ever since you saw the ship model.

I used to make my ISK in three ways. Trading, industry and running missions. Half of the trading I did was to complement my industry and the other half was just me messing around on the market trying to find the stuff that could make me money.

Those that have read my blog in the previous years know that my industrial side existed of making T2 things. I used invention on BPC’s I had copied and turned those things into T2 products. All the goods needed to make those T2’s were bought off the market because I didn’t want to make everything in the whole process.

I made a LOT of ISK that way and I flooded the market countless times dropping the price of the things I made. Sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose. But unfortunately my industry character hasn’t been used at all in the past year. This due to the fact that the products I used to make are worth less than their materials combined. Supposedly this is due to the null-sec groups having their hand in it now. I wouldn’t know though, I have yet to start caring enough about null-sec to start looking into things.

As for trading, I haven’t done it either in the months since the citadel change. Partly because I’m lazy and don’t want to go do that one jump to put orders in a citadel, and partly because I no longer have a clue about what’s good on the market. Ok, mostly that second part ;).

Missioning, well I haven’t done that in years, I used to love running L4’s in my Machariel but ever since joining corporations and no longer being solo I just haven’t felt the need to do so anymore.

So how do I make my ISK now? PI and C5 sleeper loot. I absolutely love doing C5 sites with a small group of people. Doing it solo is boring, but I love having 7 rattlesnakes on the field, warping from one site to the next and just melting the targets.

Beautiful snakes, flying out to their next target

Beautiful snakes, flying out to their next target

A few weeks ago we had a little group of 4 snakes, two were mine, two were my corp-mate’s. In the three hours of farming we made a total of 2.4billion ISK. Which isn’t too bad. That’s about 200m/hour per character. And half of the time we weren’t even paying attention.

Due to my love of the Snakes, I made a third character, just to fly in one.
So last Saturday I had 3 on the field, along with two other corp-members we had a total of 7 rattlesnakes on the field.
We melted the sites and in one hour we made about 320m per person. Which could have been better but the sites weren’t the best out there.

Circling the MTU like there is no tomorrow.. For the rats

Circling the MTU like there is no tomorrow.. For the rats

That’s one way to make ISK in a wormhole though, my other one is PI and all of you probably know or have an inkling of a thought what it’s about.
If I pay attention to it I make about 1bn/month across two characters. Which isn’t bad but I tend to forget about it. Woops.

Got to get it out of the hole somehow

Got to get it out of the hole somehow

There’s a third one in the Yacht club that we introduced a while ago. Well it was already there but now more people know about it. Namely “Scout gets the loot”. Basically, when you’re in the chain and find targets, if we kill them, you get the loot. If you find an Astrahus to kill you get 50% of whatever drops out of it. Which is pretty damn good.

I have yet to find myself an offline POS with an SMA hanging around it (happened already) but it’s a nice incentive for people to find more targets. And more targets for us means more content. So it’s a win win.

Scanning can be a pain though. Spent a few hours doing it yesterday and I decided to keep it to a maximum of half an hour of non-stop scanning in the future.

Stay tuned o7

Meeting corporation IRL

My past couple of days were not spent on EvE for a change. Or not ingame at least. I was in Prague with members of my corporation. Which was super fun. And the week before that I went to Gamescom, which is something I’ve been doing in the past few years just because it’s a fun experience.

I don’t go to the con to play games though, because I don’t like standing in line for over three hours just to play a game in advance of its release date for about 30 minutes. It’s all about the atmosphere in the arena.

As for Prague, I never really did a real life meetup with people that I play games with, this was the first time that I decided “fuck it might as well” and went.
Prague is about a ten hour drive from my place so instead of taking a plane which would have taken one and a half, I decided that I’d do it by car. Make a little road trip out of it.

On the road I picked up two other guys from the corporation. The fun thing about doing that was not having a clue what those guys looked like. I showed them my car, told ‘em that’s what they need to look for at the designated pickup places and that’s it. That was step one of the adventure, step two was getting through Germany and the Czech Republic, into Prague.

I left on Thursday morning around 6.15 and we arrived in Prague at the hotel at around 17.45, this included a few needed stops on the way, and a detour in the city because instead of listening to my navigation system, I listened to one of the guys. As per usual on coms, that wasn’t one of the best ideas 😉

Prague riverside view

We spent a few days there, getting to know each other, putting a face behind the name and talking about EvE. It’s a nice change of pace from going out with my real life friends, since they know nothing about EvE and aren’t interested in it. I loved talking to others about it, making ingame plans, coming up with stuff to do etc etc.

All in all, a very good time. Although I did miss logging in. Since the place we stayed at did not have Wifi and my roaming charges are through the roof.

I came back yesterday, dead tired but with some great new memories. All in all, that was a good way to spend a few days off work.

The first thing I did logging in last night was turn on my PI again. Since my planets have been doing nothing since Thursday. After that, I put Jump Drive calibration V in my skill queue, because supposedly I should have that if I want to play around with a Blops. I still need to buy a Panther but I’m going to be doing that as soon as I come in Amarr or Jita.

I’m also thinking about maybe resubbing a third account. I still need to decide on it but I might want to do that again. I just need to decide on what I want to be doing. Since after training E’dyn into blops some more, I will probably start training for Dreads.

Trading wise I haven’t done much in the past few weeks. I’m buying and selling plexes every few days, same with skill injectors. It’s a small profit because I keep forgetting about the higher taxes on normal stations. But it’s something.

Stay tuned o7

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

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.

The joy of trading

I try to do some trading every once and a while to get my ISK flow going. But I don’t really calculate if I’m actually making a profit while doing so.

So I decided to start doing that and noticed something that I should have thought about a while back. due to the citadels and the new tax system, I was trading a few  items at a bit of a loss. Not large enough to notice but still, a loss.

I wasn’t paying attention to how much it cost me in taxes vs how much I paid for it in the first place. Seeing as I wasn’t doing that, I lost a few million ISK.

Not the end of the world, but once more a nice example of how I should be paying better attention to what’s in patch notes and start checking what that means for me.

Luckily I caught it on time.

Now the next step would be deciding if I want to stay trading in Jita/Amarr, or if I should move to a citadel one jump away. The main problem with doing that, would be my inherrent laziness. I don’t want to do one jump (I know) to put up buy orders in Jita or Amarr. It’s stupid but It feels like a waste of time.

Despite the fact that I can literally save a few hundred million ISK in taxes in the long run.

We’ll see what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll start a few production lines again but most of the T2 stuff I produced is getting made at a loss by other people. Which I still don’t get. The whole mindset of “I’m mining it so it’s not at a loss” is so wrong.

Stay tuned o7

PvP is starting to grow on me

I started updating orders again, because I’m in need of ISK, and I’ve been too busy losing ships in null sec to get some PvE going. Thus I went to Jita, put up a few buy orders and hope for the best.

Of course, outside the buy orders I’m also doing a bit of PI. As I’ve said in a previous post, PI is a great way for passive income, I currently have a setup of 10 planets across 2 characters in the wormhole which should get me about 700m a month, updating it once a day, and hauling it every other week or so. Which is a nice amount for minimal effort.

Outside the need of ISK, I am starting to feel a need for kills. It was a bit slow the previous 3 days, we didn’t get many targets, but there were a few good ones in the past week. Which is fun, I’m starting to not hate losing ships. And that’s the whole point of all of this.

Today was a bit funny, our nullsec was close to a miner system, so we went there, saw a bunch of procurers on scan and went out to look for them.

We found a few, killed a few, and went out to the next system.

Now, killing a procurer isn’t that hard in PvP ships, finding them when you already killed a few of them, makes things a bit harder. What made it a fun roam was the fact that when we jumped back in the system, just to see if they would come back. We jumped to ore sites, large, enormous, and as soon as I landed, I noticed two of them on my d-scan, coming closer to me.

Not only, did they just wait a few minutes, they warped right on top of me. And my corps mate who warped to another belt, had the same thing happen to him.

We had that happen twice in the same few systems. Unfortunately they didn’t give us a fight. It’s not like we want to kill miners, we want fights. Good fights.

We were hoping that if we caught one and held it for a few minutes they might come and play. But unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

We did harvest a few tears though.

 

tears

He obviously didn’t get that we wanted an actual fight. But some people don’t fight, and I get that. It had taken me years before I got into PvP.

I’m doing well, and enjoying my time in the wormhole and the corporation.

Stay tuned o7

So much to do, so little time

The wheels of my inner mind have been working overtime in the past few days on what I will be doing in EvE the coming weeks. Not because I’m bored and have nothing to do, no, it’s the exact opposite. I have no idea where to start this time.

Since joining the corporation I currently fly with I finally have things to do. I’m finally going out on roams, plan on new things etc etc.

I lost a ship the other day. The third one in a few weeks. And I don’t mind as much as I used to when losing something. Why? Because I’m having fun that’s why!

And that’s the whole point isn’t it, you’re supposed to have fun flying the ships you fly, instead of worrying about losing them. I’m starting to finally learn this lesson, it took me a while, and dozens of different corporations but I’m getting there.

Other than roams I’m having one of my alts train for jump freighters. The one thing I don’t like about the place I currently live in is the lack of a market. So I decided to finally put all of my liquid ISK to use and set up a market over there. Or at least try to.

I just need to figure out which items to stock. I think I’ll start with the corporation doctrines and work my way up from there. I already have a bunch of buy orders in place in Jita. Now I just need to figure out the logistics of the place.

I’ve also set up my PI in one of the systems and was lucky enough to recruit a few people into shooting down the Interbus POCO’s still left in the system. I honestly don’t get why these guys are not doing any PI over there, I found three Plasma planets within our little pipe. So I was confused when I saw the Interbus POCO’s still there. Oh well, I helped them set up new POCO’s, paid for them out of my own pocket and everything. In the long run it’ll be more interesting for me anyhow with a lower tax rate.

And last but not least, I took over a bunch of Moon mining POS’. I have no idea how it works and how much they’re going to make me, or cost me. But it’ll be an interesting little experiment. Although I’m 90% sure that I’ll be making a profit off them once the month is done. Unless someone decides to shoot them down that is.

All of this, happening because I finally decided to make friends instead of staying in my own little corporation. I’m glad I got out of my little bubble.

And I’m curious to what will come next.

Stay tuned o7

Happy New Year and all that!

First of all, I’d like to wish you all a happy new year and that hopefully it will be a good one.

Normally people do resolutions, I decided to skip those this year, I don’t hold myself to it anyhow. I might go back and see if I can find the ones I made last year though, see if I actually did anything that was on that list.

I’ve spent the last few days eating way too much food. Christmas party, Christmas leftovers, some more Christmas stuff at family, New Year’s dinner, after the fireworks some more food etc. etc.

Safe to say that I ate way too much, in too short a span.

But! This is a blog about gaming, and mostly about EvE since I’ve been playing more and more of it the past few weeks.

I joined a Null sec corporation two weeks ago and have been slowly learning my way around null, going on roam, getting to know them and trying to figure out things to do when not on a roam.

The one thing I hate about null is the fact that every time I think about buying something, I can’t. Because there’s no market here, at all. Most people have the stuff they need in their hangars so the newcomers are a bit fucked from time to time. Which means that I need to use the corporation’s hauling service to get stuff from Jita to the home base. But unfortunately that still means I need to wait until someone does the hauling.

This made me think about maybe making a market there myself. It’s not impossible but without no knowledge of what other people might need, it could be a bit hard. I might just grab a whole bunch of the doctrines and put them on contract with a slight profit. Should get me some ISK at the very least. But I can’t do that with my combat alt, meaning I should get one of my traders over here etc. etc. We’ll see.

For some reason nobody here does PI. It confused me, since PI is such a great way to make passive income, or even supply your own things when you make T2’s. So I’m looking into it too. There’s still Interbus POCO’s around, they’re easy to destroy and claim.

Other than that, roams! And plenty of them. I’m finally having things to do, and as you can see, plenty of things I still need to work out. The New Year is off to a good start.

 

Stay tuned o7