Exploration and Bomber changes

There were a couple of announcements over the last few days. The first, a devblog from CCP RedDawn about upcoming changes in Pheobe. I've heard varying opinions about this but the general consensus seems to be "meh"

Personally I think the changes seem to be fairly positive and anything that brings data site's loot more in line with relic sites is good from a selling point of view although maybe not be from a lore perspective. Surely ancient sites with technology from the golden age of man would be worth more than data from pirates. Well, I guess it depends who's buying but that's how it is for another 2 weeks anyway. The loot volume of common high volume drops like Positron Cords is also also being lowered meaning you'll be able to carry twice as much crap as before but I think most experienced explorers will still leave or trash these items, especially in high sec sites as they're still pretty worthless and will probably be more so now that it's easier to cart more around.

Higher faction POS BPC drop rates and "Optimised" BPC drop rates are another change which I guess is a good thing although obviously more supply = lower prices but I doubt there'll be a massive influx of these items into the contract market. We won't know more until the patch hits though so maybe they'll tweak the rate too much and we'll be flooded with BPCs.

Lastly on the subject of just data sites; the addition of new faction materials is interesting. I expect the price to be astronomical (excuse the pun) to begin with until the market flattens and people realise they can't sell the finished products in which these materials will be used for more than the materials. Then again this hasn't exactly stopped drone or ammo production so why should it stop this.

All those wormhole changes from Hyperion are starting to make sense a bit more now with the addition of null sec data and relic sites appearing in class 1-3 wormholes. It seems CCP wanted to clear people out of low class wormholes or something so they can add in fun stuff for the average player to do and I expect the level of ganking will be through the roof for the first week or so. The fact that local is no indication of a wormhole's residents will probably make covert ops players godly as they gank all the intrepid explorers in search of their fortunes. Either that or people will realise they're easy targets and not bother in the first place. My money is on the former though... too many people just aren't that careful. 

There was more to that announcement but escalations and career agent changes are a story for another day. However there was another announcement, this time on the forums (I'll update with a link once I find it again.) Stealth Bomber changes are coming and the community is pissed. Now I've only just gotten myself into an SB so can't comment much but it's relevant to what I'm doing at the moment so I'll throw in my 2 cents (although neither the country in which I live, nor my country of origin use cents as currency so that could be an indication of the worth of my comments) 

So bombs will now take 12 seconds rather than 10 seconds to hit. This change seems to benefit people who are semi afk and will give them 2 seconds longer to tab back into the game and watch as their shields disappear. Is there actually any point to this change? It's not major but 10 seconds seems to me to be plenty of time for someone who's actually paying attention to get out of the way or shoot it. It's probably tied in with the second change of bombs having less hp meaning one smart bomb can take them out so the extra 2 seconds gives smartbomb users time to release their own bomb before yours is too close...maybe. 

The change people are whining about most is stealthed ships will now decloak each other when within 2000m (including people warping through you)which makes organising bomber wings a pain in the ass. Or at least a pain in the ass for anyone that is a real person. It's been pointed out in the replies that this change is because of multiboxers using programs to run stealth wings, but the program can actually warp all of the accounts in at different ranges with no mistakes. Real players on the other hand make mistakes. And one mistake from just one player can mess up the entire warp and get everyone killed. Now of course it's not impossible to organise but it seems like a lot of effort especially when you can't see your fleetmates while they're stealthed. Personally I'm not convinced this change is a truly needed one. If stealth bombers are so prevalent why do I only rarely see them? Oh right... they're stealthed. 

Well, that's it for now. Time to go fly a bomber while it's still viable (yes that last part is sarcasm) 

Another Month in the Bag

Account renewed and ready to pew pew.

I spent the weekend trying to make enough through trading to PLEX the account again but I ended up spending more time drinking and socialising than flying internet space ships... crazy I know. I got into the habit of only updating trade orders a couple of times a day though. There's very little point in playing the 0.01 ISK game and I'd definitely try and turn people off it. 

The reasoning behind it is that buy and sell orders are 90 days if you set them to max, therefore as long as you don't enter a ridiculously high (for sell) or low (for buy) price there's a really good chance your stuff will sell regardless. It just requires patience and focusing on the long game rather than trying for the immediate sale. Which, lets be fair, if you need the money that fast, sell to a buy order. There are some people who advocate station trading as "passive income." While it's certainly something you can set up and leave to run I think there are very few items that have steady pricing making it something that you do need to pay attention to on a regular basis and not exactly passive.

However you can limit yourself to updating a couple of times a day and still keep up with the market which is just what I've been doing. I've also been buying stuff in starter stations and hauling it in bulk to the hubs which is surprisingly easy. All it takes is the relevant industrial ship skill trained to 1, a cheap t1 indyship, a decent fit and a bunch of buy orders. Once you've bought enough just fly a couple of jumps to pick up the goods, load up and fly back. Generally I'm only carrying between 2 and 5 million in value but I still use safe undocks just in case. And although it's fairly low value stuff, I'm selling at usually 2-300% mark up which is awesome when first getting into trading. It works out at at least 2 million ISK per 8 Jumps, more if I've built up a good stock of ship modules.

The hardest part of trading is knowing what to buy and you'll find very few guides that actually give you any examples. Mostly because the market changes so quickly with people dipping in and out of certain items as margins change. An example of this is Data Analyzers. I spent the last couple of weeks buying them at 30k in Amarr and selling them at 90k. Eventually more people cottoned on to this great margin and they're back down at 40/60. It's still profitable but I personally let my orders fill slowly and didn't update when they ran out. Generally all the data you need is in front of you in the market window in the price history tab. Using the table as well as graph can help you decide what items are good to trade based on price trends and volume sold. No point in trading high margin items if they don't sell after all.

Speculation is also something to take into consideration. Just yesterday there was a devblog article on the EVE launcher about sleeper components being used as hand-ins (well, the blog is from over a week ago but it was only just put on the launcher). I saw it pretty much as soon as it went up because I happened to be around during downtime so I immediately bought all the cheap ones in Amarr and listed them at 3 times the price. 4 hours later and they'd all sold and now the price is even higher. Maybe I should have held on to them for a few hours but with speculation it's hard to know if something is actually going to increase in price or not so I didn't want to push my luck. Get out while you're ahead as the saying goes. 

Throughout all of this trading I have ended up stuck with a few non-sellers. The worst of which is a couple of Helios's. Right after buying them the price crashed for some inexplicable reason but I'll just hold on to them until the price comes back up a couple of mil. I can just consider them non-liquid assets for the time being.

Well anyway, that's my thought process with trading at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to grow my wealth more in the next month and with all my skills at a high enough level to comfortably fly covert ops ships I should be doing some exploration and probably learning to stealth bomb at some point too. Fly safe and see you in game!

What's up with the markets?

Long time no update

First off, it's been a while since I completed the challenge (nearly 4 weeks at time of writing) and a while since my last blog post. A combination of real life kicking my ass and sapping my will to write as well as not spending a great deal of time in game and therefore not having much to write about.

In the last couple of days I have managed to play a little and I've been noticing the market, especially in Amarr being very quiet with a lot of weird prices. I guess you could easily put it down to the end of Summer phenomenon but it seems to me that, in the last week or so at least, there have been a few major players absent from the market. A lot of data site items like decrypters have dropped dramatically in price in all of the major hubs for example and there are some pretty big margins opening up on high volume tech 1 ship modules while tech 2 module margins are ever decreasing. 

Are there indy players dropping out of t1 manufacturing and more going for t2? That would seem likely but for the drop in decrypter prices which would suggest more supply than demand, but if there are more players focusing on t2 then shouldn't that force the price of decrypters up? Either way it's hard to know what to get into from a trading point of view at the moment. There seem to be very few steady sellers and those I do find I can't actually buy enough volume keep up with the amount I'm selling. I might therefore start buying up BPOs of certain t1 modules and do 100 or so runs a day to supplement what I'm buying from station trading. There's still profit to be made from doing that, maybe not quite as much as buying them cheap but profit is profit. 

So as you can see I've been focusing on other areas recently rather than exploration. I'm just generally trying to branch out a bit an try my hand at a few other aspects of the game. With my game time nearly up and only 400 million ISK to my name I'll probably just pay for the next month unless I somehow get lucky in the next 3 days and my "passive" income from trading really kicks off. 

I'll get back to exploration at some point. I have Covert Ops trained and nearly have cloaking to 4 meaning I'll be able to warp cloaked within the next 24 hours. I've also trained up missile skills because I'm going to try my hand at stealth bombers and finally get into some pvp action - hopefully picking on the poor newbie pilots who are just starting out with low sec exploration.  But before that I'll be trying out an Anathema and might take a trip to null to see if I can PLEX for a second month running or just fail horribly and get podded... at least it'll make for an interesting read!

Month 2: 400 million ISK (250 million tied up in the market, 150 liquid)

Days 19-21

Where to go from here?

I completed my trial to PLEX challenge with 3 days to spare. What to do now? 

Well I spent days 19-21 just messing about in game and doing stuff in real life. I actually bothered to learn mining frigates to level 1 and did a bit of semi-afk mining while cleaning my apartment as I was hosting guests. I also began doing DED complexes in my Mauler and in the first 3/10 I came across I found a Centi-A module worth 90 million. Pretty good going for 10 minutes in high sec and it was even in my home system. Bonus. 

Real life will be catching up with me soon so I'm not sure how much I'll be able to play in the coming month. Hopefully enough to maintain the account and maybe even enough to begin an indy alt. 

I think my next challenge will be to have 1 billion in liquid ISK. It's not a huge achievement to aim for but I feel I should shoot for attainable goals with my upcoming busy schedule. Even at the end of 21 days I had 150 million liquid ISK and a PLEXed account so lets see if I can get the rest!

Day 18 - The final push

Nearly there.

2 great days in a row where on a couple of hours exploring an a couple pottering around hauling and/or selling stuff meant I was very close to my target by the time day 18 came around. I thought I'd try for a final surge over the finish line and complete the challenge with a few days in hand.

I had a few sell orders to update and I even cancelled a couple of buy orders in Amarr that were obviously not going to fill any time soon after I'd been massively outbid on them. This put me around 20 million closer in liquid ISK 20 minutes after logging on. All I need is one good exploration haul and I'm golden.

Before setting off I checked up on my PI planet and began another round of Felsic Magma extraction which I routed to my Silicon-making machine. Unfortunately I couldn't do much more than that because of the CPU limitation of the level 1 command centre which I can't upgrade on a trial account. Soon though, I'll be able to.

Next I planned out a circle route on the star map and undocked in my Imicus. The feeling of reaching the end was definitely upon me but I tried to stay careful and fly safe. No use in getting into the habit of making mistakes at this late stage.

Something quite funny did happen after a few jumps though. Well, I thought it was funny so the average person probably wont but I entered a low sec system with 2 others in local and began scanning. The star map showed the area was pretty inactive with very few jumps made in the last 30 minutes and zero ships lost in the last hour and only a couple lost in the last 24. I found a site and warped to it. There's an Astero there hacking a can and before I've even finished my warp to let me warp away he's gone - blowing the can in the process (reminiscent of me a few days ago and a Probe.) He must have been watching the overview ever since I entered local because he was lightning quick escaping. There are two reasons I found it funny. 

Firstly, in a one on one match up I'm probably going to lose to the Astero every time. He has more drone cap than me and I'd imagine better shields and with the Amarr frigate bonus, certainly better armour. So him fleeing from my highly intimidating Imicus is amusing. Secondly, he blew the can meaning he'd already failed once. I would have thought if he was comfortable flying an Astero around low sec he'd have high enough skills for the tech 2 variants of most things including Analyzers and his higher skills would mean easier hacking games. I would have thought it would be very difficult to fail a low sec hack but maybe he just had more money than sense and didn't mind flying a 70 million ISK ship with sub-par skills when a 400k ISK ship will do almost the same job.

So yeah, mildly amusing - I made a guy in an Astero poop his pants.

I continued on my way but actually had to have a pit stop to drop some loot off because I was running low on space. I'd started at 7:35 and all of the above happened in the first 20 minutes so at 7:55 I dropped off 21 million and had a bit of a break to grab food an make coffee. About half an hour later I undocked again and went through a high sec portion of the round trip which netted me a further 11 million after 40 minutes. Into low sec. After another 40 minutes I was carting 28 mil around and 20 minutes after that my round trip came to its conclusion with 46 million in my hold. A total of 67 million in 2 hours of flying with a bit of a break in the middle. 

Now it was time to go and sell. I flew up to Jita and starting offloading all my wares. Right click, sell. Right click, sell. Right click, sell... etc. etc. 

My wallet flashed wildly. I open to reveal...

796 million ISK

I check the price of a PLEX.

794 million ISK

Woo! Mission accomplished!

I didn't actually buy a PLEX then and there. I had a mind to start investing the money in order to make more over the remaining 3 days of my trial but at the time I logged off because real life called. I was out for around 6 hours and when I came back online I thought things through a little more. Granted I could probably make more ISK and set myself up a little better for the future of my playing days but I also wanted the trial restrictions lifted so I could learn cloaking, PI related skills and also contracts. 

I checked around for the best price on a PLEX and it turned out to be 783 million in Dodixie. Quick trip over to Gallente space and I had 30 days additional playing time and was a lot poorer for it.

Mission accomplished in 18 days out of the 21!
Day 18 total: 1 PLEX and 12 million ISK

Day 17 - The end is nigh!

Seems I'm getting very close to my target.

Yet another low sec run this morning. It was better paced than yesterday's run but for the most part, uneventful. The only real highlight was being "followed" by a Tengu. We crossed paths multiple times as we both weaved our way in a big circle. Only ever saw his ship at a gate and never in any sites but it was strange. I assume he was looking for combat sites but maybe he was hunting frigates. 

Got back round to home base with another 40 million or so in loot and loaded up with the 90 million from the last two days. Back into the hubs to sell up. Again I bought a few things in Amarr to transport up to Jita but again the trip was uneventful. I docked in Jita, set up a few sell orders mixed in with selling straight to other players' buy orders and opened my wallet.

700 million ISK

Getting close! I checked PLEX prices.

793 million ISK

Well at least they've come down slightly from the 800 they were a few days ago but I'll have to think about where to actually buy one.

I logged off for a while but checked back later to find a lot of my sell orders had gone so I ended the day even closer to my target.

Day 17 total: 710 million ISK

Day 16 - Sunday, day of rest my a....

Good thing come to those that wait

Another morning run out into low sec. I had a long (50 jump) route planned out and a real feeling that I could edge within reach of my PLEX goal with another good haul. In the couple of high sec systems before reaching my low sec target I scanned down a few sites and got in a bit of early looting. Nothing spectacular but a steady start at least which continued through the first few low systems. A couple of sites here and there, more loot for the loot god. That's about where the good part comes to an end. 

The next string of systems were barren. Some systems were occupied by several people so I gave those ones a miss and the rest were pretty much devoid of anything, players and anomalies alike. In a stretch of around 15 systems, mostly 0.3 and 0.4 with the odd connecting high sec system I found less than a handful of sites and the ones I did find were about as barren as the systems I was scanning in. 

Not good. I was still flying with about 20 million in the hold so it wasn't all bad but hitting empty after empty after empty was demoralising and frankly boring. I persevered however and was rewarded in the very last low sec system of my trip! 

3 anomalies and a bunch of normal combat sites. I warped to 100km of the sun and began scanning, one eye on the currently empty local. The first site, much to my joy and amazement, is a relic site. Yay! I hit warp to and began scanning the second anomaly. While speeding over to the first can I discover that site number 2 is a data site. More yay! I scan the can and have to look twice. That's a lot of Intact Armor Plates. I crack it open. 20 million! Even more yay! MWD over to can number 2 probe scanning away at anomaly 3. Cargo scan can 2 and discover more goodies at the same time as discovering site 3 is another relic site! More yay that you can possibly imagine! Crack the can, grab the loot. Rinse and repeat. 

Site 1, 23 million ISK. Warp over to the data site. Hack the cans, grab the loot. Another 8 million. Things are finally coming up Spaktula. Site number 2 cleared. Warp to site 3. It was at this point that I remembered about the blog so actually took some screenshots of site 3. 

Here's a couple of examples from site 3 of what you can possibly find while low sec exploring:

I was rather pleased to say the least. And all of this came from the last system. I guess the game decided to reward me for my mindless scanning of wormholes and DED complexes with some nice juicy hacking sites. Also it's really not bad ISK when you consider the low skill requirements and the fact I'm in a ship that costs 20 times less than the contents of one of those cans. 

I made my way back to home base with 80 something million in the cargo hold. Deposited it there to await transportation at a later date and moved on to something a little different for a while.

Planetary Interaction (PI) is something I've so far glossed over but am vaguely interested in getting into. After some brief reading up (but no where near enough) I bought a command centre, a new Magnate and 4 tech 2 cargo expanders to transport said command centre. If I wasn't on a trial account I would have just bought a cheap indy ship but meh. Turns out with all the reading I didn't do I missed several key aspects of setting up a successful colony but I actually lucked out a bit. I won't go into too much detail but scanning properly, checking tax rates on the customs office and a multitude of other things are actually pretty important. 

I'll probably go into a bit more detail with my PI experience at a later date but for now it was a 2 million ISK sink that will hopefully start making money in the future once I've learned more. Worst case scenario is that I redo the whole thing. 

Anyway, not a bad day. Much closer to my target with plenty of time left to achieve it. 

Day 16 total: 560 million ISK

(90 million unsold)