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)

Day 15 - Just a short one today

Early start, early finish

I had real life things to do today (like watching the mighty Arsenal play) so I only played for an hour or so in the morning. It was a fairly underwhelming journey to be honest. Because I was already in Jita I thought I'd give exploration a go in Caldari space. I think I found a whole 1 relic site and it was one of those where 3/4 cans were empty. Well, a couple of hundred thousand is better than nothing but after 10 systems I gave up and headed back down to home base via Amarr. 

That trip was slightly more productive with several sites on the way leaving me with around 10 million in my cargo hold. While this was happening I was also getting the occasional wallet flash from my updated Jita sell orders being bought. 

After reaching home base I logged off 12 million richer with some unsold stuff stashed away for a rainy day. 

Day 15 total: 560 million ISK

Day 14 - A trip to the hubs

Selling all my stockpiles and doing a bit of trading

Only played a little today. Using eve-central I looked up the best prices for all the items I'd stockpiled and with the info I carted 15 million or so up to Rens to sell. In my eyes the difference between there and Amarr or Jita was enough to warrant the 10 minutes it took to get there and back again. 

Next I loaded up the rest and carted it over to Amarr. There I sold another 10 million or so but also bought out a bunch of sell orders on items I could sell in Jita. It was a big chunk of my ISK and I went down to 220 million in my wallet. I was in 2 minds about carting all of that to Jita. Getting suicide ganked on the way would really screw me over and undocking would be the most dangerous part. 

Rather than risking all my eggs in one very squishy Imicus-shaped basket I decided to just make 2 trips. I undocked with 150 million in cargo and warped off successfully. Got to Jita unmolested and suddenly my wallet was looking healthier. I headed back down to Amarr and picked up the rest and again nervously undocked.

Yeah, nothing happened. Sorry. It would have made for a more interesting read if something had gone wrong but in reality it was an uneventful trip. 

I did have a bit of a dilemma when I got to Jita though. The item I'd bought in Amarr would net me a 150k profit per item (factoring in tax as well) selling to buy orders but after the 3 highest had been filled the price would then drop to just above the Amarr sell. Basically I could single-handedly crash the Jita price by 140k with just the contents of my cargo hold. 

Do I sell for the quick ISK and then not have as good prices in the future or do I wait, hope no one else fills those orders and that someone else places buy orders to replace them. Speculation or quick ISK. The more I thought about it the more the quick ISK appealed. I'd been trading in that item for at least 10 days in Jita now and from memory there had been no new buy orders at that price since I'd been trading. It was therefore unlikely someone would put in a high buy order for them when there was a 40k difference between the highest and next highest order with the highest only have 20 odd items left. 

I sold up and crashed the price. It will probably take a while for prices to get back to that level if they do again but the difference now was worth it for me. I'll just move on to a new item to interhub trade and any that I find through exploration will just be sold at a slightly reduced cost. I normally only find 4 or 5 a day where as this trade was more than 100 of them.

I logged off in Jita and went to do things in real life.

Day 14 total: 548 million ISK