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)