Distractions

I’ve pulled down most of my Market Buy Orders, and am putting my Trading endeavours on hold. It seems like months since I have given it any real attention anyway. The process has proven successful – even in a relatively low volume backwater. I could take the lessons I’ve learnt and scale the operations up if I wanted to, but frankly that doesn’t sound like fun.

I want my Corp to earn around 15M ISK a month to pay for the Alliance fee and the Corporation Office. The POCO tax income has been poor and won’t cover that, so I will have to ensure I do at least one PI run a month. Otherwise my two Trade/Industry Alts will be quiet for a while. I’ve already moved training on that account to my Primary Scout Alt.

I kicked off the character transfer of my Secondary Scout Alt. I set that up using the Collector’s Edition game card. That will bring me back to three accounts. While she can fly Covert Ops and Scan ok, I have a couple PLEX allocated to allowing Dual training, just to buff those skills out. I don’t actually have any immediate plans to use that character, but I want it there, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

I’ve been to Jita another half dozen times since my last post. Some of those were in an Interceptor rigged for Warp Speed, carrying low volume but high value goods. On one of those trips I found the Jita gate was closed due to traffic issues. It only took a couple of seconds to warp away, but it made my heart skip a beat. No one wants a 600M unarmed Interceptor loss on their killboard.

I’ve sold off about 5B ISK of stuff across my Main and Corp, with more to go. (Although some of what remains is bulky or will be slow to sell.) I don’t actually need the bigger bank balance, and I have no plans on spending or investing it. It would have been smarter to leave the ISK wrapped up in goods that should appreciate in value. This process however is more about de-cluttering and removing distractions. When I do get time to play, I need to stop spreading it out across so many different areas.

In between hauling I ran 14 basic anomalies in my home system last night, getting three faction drops and earning around 35M for the hours work. It has been good to be undocked and doing a few things in EVE again.

One of the ship hulls sold off

Moving cake slice by slice

I’ve spent a little time undocked this week – although not doing anything that will generate new wealth. I’ve been selling off collected loot and excess assets and supplies, such as 75% of my spare Faction Modules. It is a task that fits in well with my current limited play time.

I’ve made 7 round trips to Jita so far. Some of this necessity relates to volume – I’ve sold off a couple dozen ship hulls, but most of it relates to limiting the value I carry in each run in a T1 Hauler to around 500M or less.

In Dungeons and Dragons Online when I want to sell off loot and spare equipment I go through it to see if anything will sell well on the world wide Auction house, otherwise I buff my Haggle skill and dump everything at the Bar Tender on the Guild Ship.

In EVE almost everything has to be sold to another player. You have to decide if you will sell it on contract or on the market, then where you are going to sell it from, how you are going to move it to market and in what ships and volume / value, if you are going to accept a buy order price or list it yourself, how much you are going to undercut other sellers, how often you are going to update your price, how long you are willing to wait, or even if you want to end up refining the goods into their raw ingredients for easier sale. In amongst all that you have to worry about people ganking your haulers, scams, mistypes and misclicks costing you money.

I guess it sounds horrible, but there are so many ways other people can be involved in the process. You can haul and sell your own goods like I am. You could be the person with buy orders looking to flip goods for a profit, you could be someone scanning ships as they pass you in choke points, you could be the suicide gankers who attack rich ships further down the trade routes, or the pilot who picks up the dropped loot, or you can offer hauling services, or have buy orders across regions to save people the hassle of moving things (at a discount of course). There are lots of decisions, possibilities and risk to weigh up. The very market is a sandpit. Or you can play another game where every Bar Tender buys your goods at a set value.

Irritating

Daylight Savings started here on the weekend and that effectively moved the daily EVE downtime from 9pm to 10pm.

I had gotten into a pattern each evening of catching up on a recorded TV show with my wife, then coming into my study at around 9:30pm ready to play EVE for an uninterrupted hour or two. Now I am sitting down in my study knowing EVE will be going down shortly, and ending up getting nothing done.

But that is not what I am referring to in the subject of this post.

I do tend to have time to do my Trade Updates.

I question why I comment on my trading in this blog. It seems if I ever remark on things being quiet or profitable, I am immediately flooded in game with competition. Since the start of the month nearly every area I operate in has had 1 to 4 new traders join. It is the most I think I have ever seen.

I don’t blame this blog. It is not because people are responding to what they have read here. Frankly there are not all that many of you! No – it is Murphy’s Law, which tends to be very cruel.

But that is not what I am referring to in the subject of this post.

No – the thing that I find irritating is that a number of the new traders use a tactic that SHITS ME TO TEARS.

So you have a buy order up

1,000,000.01

The competition comes along and puts in

1,008,000.02

Because of the game font, you don’t always pick up on the 8 being there instead of a 0.

I am happy to admit I fall for this and variations of it every so often – particularly on some of the bigger buy orders with 8+ digits in them. However, I ALWAYS refresh the Buyers list after I update my orders and immediately notice if I have not moved up on the list to where I expected. I then note the item down, and return 5 minutes later to update it properly. Usually I will spitefully cut out 10% of the profit when I do so.

1,100,000.03

Sometimes I get sick of the constant daily grind of updating my trade orders.

Except for when people are using that trick.

Then I feel compelled to update those orders at least daily, so that the annoying shits don’t win.

Store or Part with

So I’ve redeemed my Collector’s Edition pre-purchase rewards, a tattoo, the CA-3 and CA-4 implants, and the Nefantar Thrasher. All up they are going for around 1.8B in Jita at the moment.

The marketing on the collection clearly states these are timed exclusive items that will be made publically available via the market or promotions at a later date. Do I cash these in now, presuming I can buy them back at a later date for a much cheaper price, or do I just add them to my collectibles container?

I suspect the tattoos will be an expensive item in the Noble exchange, so might not lose too much value. The implants on the other hand will likely end up going for around 20-30M mark the CA-1 and CA-2 implants are currently going for.

The industrialist within me says sell, the Gollum within me says these precious’s are all mine.

August Done

I post these for myself, as a way of measuring and tracking what I am doing in game.

 

Game Hours & Play

Hard to judge how much game time I had this month – real life was very busy with work regularly trespassing well into my evenings. I did spend a bit of time logged in earlier this month selling off stuff.I did very little with my main – maybe 4 or 5 hours of trying to sort gear and review ship fittings. My main alt spent less than 10 minutes logged in. I did do regular PI runs and trading updates – but that was more 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there.

 

Fluid ISK in the Trading Corp at the end of month

I only keep an amateurish measurement of my Trade and Industry profits – based around fluid ISK.

Cash, Stock & Supplies

11.1B Wallet
0.5B Escrow
0.3B Stock on Market
0.5B Manufacturing Supplies
0.1B PI
0.4B POS Fuel
0.0B Long Term Speculative Stock (Not valued)

Fluid ISK this Month
12.9B

Fluid ISK last Month
11.8B

Position Change
+1.1B

 

Industry / Trade Details

I definitely saw an impact from dropping so many profitable – but higher effort trade items last month.

It was made up for however by the once off clearing of speculative stocks I had of special edition collectibles, which turned an ok profit. Add 12 or 13 PI runs, and consistent daily updates of my orders, and it turned out to be a reasonable month.

I finished my month by returning to some of the high profit but slow volume items that can be annoying to on-sell. I had effectively dropped out of these markets (salting the earth as I went) due to competition, but they seem to have moved on.

Speaking of Competition, it went from moderate to light this month. Trading volumes continued to fluctuate, and ended up being a little lower than average overall.

Next month’s profits should be a fair bit lower.

 

Training

Account 1 (Main) – 129M SP. Got every industry skill up to at least rank IV, covering off all the Ore and Ice Processing, and Industry Reconfiguration. I am currently working on PI skills.

Account 2 (Main Alt) – 122M SP. Trained Siege Warfare Specialist V, and currently working through Armored Warfare Specialist V.

Account 3 (Industry Alt 1) – 42M SP. No Training
Account 3 (Industry Alt 2) – 8M SP. Got Hull Upgrades V, and been working on all her Drones skills.

 

Plans

I have a list of things I want to do with Odyssey 1.1 that I flagged earlier this month. I also want to continue with my PI. I didn’t do any Hi-Sec exploration, so am hoping things are not so busy in September. I do have a project or two I am thinking about when I can get a few more jump clones – but nothing worth mentioning. I really haven’t been that effective at following through on plans. I’ve had no choice but to focus on Real Life this year.

Still logging in

Real Life has been rather busy, but I am still managing to log into EVE daily. I am just not doing anything out of the ordinary.  As such today’s blog is made up of just some random thoughts.

I have noticed that I currently only use the EVE Client Launcher once per day. This is just after down time to check for any updates or news items. Otherwise I am running the client executable directly. It gives me the “log off” option and is faster. While this survey of one lacks statistical merit, I feel the second iteration of the launcher still hasn’t really hit the mark.

(In the unlikely event someone reading this doesn’t know where the executable is, it is called ExeFile.exe, and is in the bin directory of the EVE client install. On my Windows 7 system, it is C:\Program Files (x86)\CCP\EVE\bin\ExeFile.exe)

I’ve been persistently plugging away with my trading, doing one or two updates per day. I seem to be back to only a handful of active competition in the areas I operate, and generally get to spend an acceptable amount of time with my orders at the top. It turns out one of the most important traits for backwater trading is stubbornness. I research and watch list my main trading competitors, and have found most stop logging in / being active in the area after a few months. I am enjoying the current small lull while it lasts.

This month I’ve also been persistently doing my PI runs every second day. Each cycle I process 48,000 Processed Material units (Chiral Structures, Precious Metals, Reactive Metals and Toxic Metals) into Robotics. I started by working on getting my ingredient stockpile down to the point where after I load up my factories I have extracted just enough to cover the next full run. That is the sort of efficiency my wife – who works as an Analyst in Warehouse Management and Logistics, could appreciate. I have got to that point with 3 of the 4 materials, and should have the fourth right in the next couple of days.

I can’t explain why, but the process has made PI a little more interesting again. I am not just mindlessly processing every planet, but instead keeping a running track of what I am picking up, and missing certain planets from the cycle where I have enough materials. Next month I will work to clear up some of my other stockpiles.

The Clearing Continues

I sold off about 60% of my manufacturing ingredients, dropping stocks from 1,400M ISK to 550M ISK.  These cleared quickly.

The sell off of my speculative stock continues in Jita – a somewhat laborious effort with lots of market updates required.  If I sold to buy orders I would make around a 25% profit on them – so I can always resort to that when I have had enough.  Generally I am making 200% to 800% margins, but you can end up with a dozen sellers competing for one or two sales a day.  I’ve already covered all my costs and have passed 200M profits, so I guess overall it was worthwhile.

I’ve passed 10B ISK in my Trading Corp accounts.  I know the professional traders would see any idle money as lost opportunities – but my operations are really small scale, and there isn’t a need to have it all in play.  I currently have 2.6B ISK of buy orders up.

The Venture is really a fun little ship, even for a High SP Player

Clean Out

I’m in the process of cleaning out my Corp Hangers.  In particular l am selling off some of the speculative buys which didn’t turn out to be quite the cash cows I’d hoped.  I am also sorting through the excess build ingredients laying around that I am unlikely to be use given my current Trading focus.  My Second Industry Alt is in Jita playing the 0.01 ISK game trying to selling some of the more unique items.

I hate dealing with trading bots – which I appear to be in some of these markets, so I resort to pettiness.

Put up sell order on 1 item for 10M ISK

Within a couple minutes a sell order with 40 items undercuts mine by 0.01 ISK

Update order several times over the day, but the 40 item sell order always undercuts it by 0.01 ISK within 5 minutes

Update order several times the following day at random times, but the 40 item sell order always undercuts it by 0.01 ISK within 5 minutes

Cut price by 1M ISK, possibly costing me 1M.

Within 5 minutes 40 item undercuts mine by 0.01 ISK, possibly costing them 40M isk.

Cut price by 1M ISK, possibly costing me 2M.

Within 5 minutes 40 item undercuts mine by 0.01 ISK, possibly costing them 80M isk.

Cut price by 1M ISK, possibly costing me 3M.

Within 5 minutes 40 item undercuts mine by 0.01 ISK, possibly costing them 120M isk.

Cut price by 1M ISK, possibly costing me 4M.

Within 5 minutes 40 item undercuts mine by 0.01 ISK, possibly costing them 160M isk.

Cut price by 1M ISK, possibly costing me 5M.

Within 5 minutes 40 item undercuts mine by 0.01 ISK, possibly costing them 200M isk.

Assuming they also have the winning buy order (they have the biggest stock of this item to sell), they would still be making a profit – but it has been cut by 62%.  I ran out of time – but will continue to drop the price while trying not to have them buy my item out.  I am then happy to leave that item up at the new low point to keep their profits down.  That is just the sort of thing which keeps me amused.

I am also in the process of cleaning up my Main Toon’s hangers, getting rid of ships he doesn’t fly, double checking fittings are still appropriate etc.  I’ve thrown most of his spares and collections in the one container to sort through.

A rough value of 10.7B ISK.  That is going to take me a while…

July done

I post these for myself, as a way of measuring and tracking what I am doing in game.

Game Hours & Play

I had around 35 hours of game time, half of which was over one weekend, with one 10+ hour day. About half was spent on my Trading Corp, a quarter on doing stuff in space, and a quarter on upgrading a number of ships with bling.

 

Fluid ISK in the Trading Corp at the end of month

I only keep an amateurish measurement of my Trade and Industry profits – based around fluid ISK.

Cash, Stock & Supplies

9.1B Wallet
0.5B Escrow
0.1B Stock on Market
1.5B Manufacturing Supplies
0.2B PI
0.4B POS Fuel
0.0B Long Term Speculative Stock (Not valued)

Fluid ISK this Month
11.8B

Fluid ISK last Month
10.7B

Position Change
+1.1B

 

Industry / Trade Details

I cut right back on the number of trade items I was covering, down to around 50 at the moment. This should see a drop in revenue of 100-300M ISK a month, but will halve my trading efforts. I also plan to cut back on my Manufacturing Supplies, since I rarely find it worth making things these days.

Competition was moderate this month, while volumes fluctuated from excellent to dismal every few days.

There were no PI runs in the month. I do want to start clearing out some of the excess stock sitting in my hangers.

 

Training

Account 1 (Main) – 128M SP. Finished Tactical Shield Manipulation V, Corporation Management and Diplomatic Relations IV, and currently working through getting all Ore and Scrap Metal Processing skills to IV.

Account 2 (Main Alt) – 121M SP. Picked up Drone Durability V and Fuel Conservation V. Working on Siege Warfare Specialist V.

Account 3 (Industry Alt 1) – 42M SP. Completed her Drone updates
Account 3 (Industry Alt 2) – 7M SP. Covered the base Trade skills to IV. Working on Hull Upgrades IV.

 

Plans

None basically. I will continue with the Hi-Sec exploration. I tried to complete my 16 mining missions but had to abandon it at 11 or 12 – it was just too boring. I also need to go back to my PI installations and try to clear the backlog of supplies I have sitting around.

It all adds up

I try to get myself to spend at least 5 minutes actively earning ISK every time I log in for a proper EVE session. In 0.0 this might be to run through the belts until I get a Battleship Spawn. In Empire it might be to update my trade orders, or do a PI run, or clear out an anomaly or fill the hold of a Venture. It doesn’t matter how much it earns, it is just important that you are active.

There are two reasons for this. First – don’t undervalue the small ISK windfalls from these endeavors. They have a habit of adding up over time. Second, it can help get you into a mindset of achieving something with your EVE time, and reduces the chance of you ending up spinning ships for a while then logging off.

I remarked the other day about earning only 4M ISK from an hour of Hi Sec exploration. Despite the jokes, I did not view that as wasted time. I was 4M wealthier than if I had of remained docked. I was also playing the exploration game with its random drops. A couple of months ago I undocked, ran one of the lowest of low Anomalies, and had a faction Spawn which earnt me 180M. It took less than 5 minutes.

It’s that old adage of having to be in it to win it.

On the weekend I started my EVE session with running two Level 4 Mining Missions. I dual boxed these with my Main and Main Alt, which halved the time. It took 40 minutes from logging in to completion, and between LP and payouts, was worth around 10M ISK.

While I was mining I logged my Industry Alt in and update all my Trade Orders, taking around 15 minutes. The value of this time is not clear cut – but over the last few months I have been earning well in excess of 50M ISK for each hour I put into trading. I’ll estimate my earning at a very conservative 30M an hour, so that session was worth around 7.5M ISK. **

I moved back to my nearby home system and noticed a lot of anomalies on scan. I grabbed the PVE Retribution and ran 6 in quick succession. It took around 15 minutes and my journal suggested I earnt 2M in bounties. I did not loot or salvage, but bookmarked the first wreck in each site.

On the last site I had a Faction Spawn, which dropped a 5M module.

I returned to station, swapped into a Noctis, and quickly cleaned up the 6 sites. I got lucky with Armor Plates and an expensive T1 module in the drops, and made another 4M ISK.

So after a bit over an hour of just doing small little tasks, I ended up earning myself around 28.5M ISK.

Now – I have three accounts so I could dual box mining while also updating trade orders. You could argue the ISK return was poor. Still, I’m not complaining. As I said, that sort of ISK – which is very achievable, adds up over time.

**

The example above – obviously there to make my point, was not entirely honest. I actually took note of how much I earnt in those 15 minutes of trading. I flipped a ship hull which gave me a profit of 100M within a few hours, picked up a Faction Mod (60M profit a few days later in Jita), a Mining Barge Hull (20M profit turned within a week), and a dozen smaller items (which would have flipped for more than 10M profit over the next week or two). In effect I earnt closer to 200M in those 15 minutes, for a total of around 220M for my hour. That doesn’t happen every day, but it can be surprising what you can achieve when you are in game and active.

Trading Changes

At the start of the month I swapped training from my Primary to Secondary Industry Alt. That Alt has historically been used for PI and minor hauling, but is now getting the full assortment of trading skills. The thought was to send her out to another backwater region and set up a second trading area.

Over time I’ve built up a list of goods that turn over in my little backwater in enough volume, with adequate margins, and sufficient frequency to make the effort worthwhile. I’m not talking about making me lots of ISK – it is only small change, but it is worthwhile because it keeps me amused and I find it fun.

A couple weeks into the process I was hit with a dose of reality – what the hell was I thinking?

Setting up a second trading area, to do in effect what I was already doing, wouldn’t make the game any more enjoyable. So that left doing it for the ISK – and I already know it would not be worthwhile in that regard. So I dismantled the fledging trading hub and moved the Alt back home.

At the moment about 30% of my trading income comes from flipping T2 modules, small ship hulls, and a spattering of T1 items like probe launchers. The margins are good – around 50%, and the turn over consistent. 70% of my trading incomes from flipping expensive hulls or stuff like faction gear. The margins can be as low as 10%, but the profits can be as much as 100M on each sale. This is much less reliable, and there can be months on some goods between sales to buy orders.

Competition from other traders varies. Most of my buy orders for the smaller stuff last only a few hours at the top, so I tend to update them 2 or 3 times a day. Competition on the more expensive stuff varies wildly, from none for weeks, to updates just as often as the small stuff. I check those maybe once a day.

Knowing I am doing this more for fun, I decided to make some changes to cut back on the amount of work the trading is taking me. It will certainly cost me ISK, but hopefully I’ll be less inclined to burn out on it.

First of all I have dropped a lot of the T1 stuff. The T1 probe launchers would turn over quite well at very high margins (buy for 6K, sell for 50K) – but a month of sales would only be worth a Mil or so in ISK. Not worth it.

One of my longest and most reliable sources of income has been flipping destroyer hulls. I tend to make 500K ISK on each flip, and might do 40 to 50 a month. However they can be a bit annoying to shuffle about and centralise, and competition can be very active for them, so I dropped those and some other small hulls too.

I also made a bit of ISK on flipping T1 Industrials – but again, they were a big pain to consolidate purchases for minor (~500K ISK each) profits – so they were dropped.

There are other items that I buy on occasion with very good profit margins that won’t sell locally, and turn over only slowly at major trade hubs. While I could make 50+M on each flip, I might be stuck at a trade hub for days constantly undercutting prices until they go. Some of the faction gear and even certain Transport Ships fall into that category of annoying to re-sell – so I dropped those too.

It has been an odd turn of events. At the start of the month I was branching out into a second region, by the end of the month I’ve halved the number of orders I was managing and scaling back my efforts. The training of the second Alt in trading won’t be a waste however, they will be used for some of those more annoying efforts to sell stuff at trade hubs, and also pick up more goods for resale.

As an aside –the trade volumes have been odd this month. Even before I started dropping lines there would be a couple of days where the turnover is exceptional – and then it could go days where literally nothing happens.

June Done

I post these for myself, as a way of measuring and tracking what I am doing in game.

Game Hours & Play

I would have had almost 20 hours of game time this month – mostly in the first 3 weeks. A bit over half was spent doing Hi-Sec Exploration, the rest trading.

 

Fluid ISK at the end of month

I only keep an amateurish measurement of my Trade and Industry profits – based around fluid ISK.

 

Cash & Stock

7.9B Wallet
0.6B Escrow
0.2B Stock on Market *
===
8.7B ISK

Input Assets

1.6B Manufacturing Supplies
0.4B POS Fuel **
0.0B Long Term Speculative Stock (Not valued)
===
2.0B

Fluid ISK this Month
10.7B

Fluid ISK last Month
9.5B

Position Change
+1.2B

Known Expenses for the month

12M Office Rentals
4M Alliance Fees
===
<0.1B

(* Stock Value calculated at 80%, roughly at fire sale to Jita buy orders)

 

Industry / Trade Details

I’ve added 30+ items to my trading list to test the waters. Makes updates a little bit more of a chore, so don’t update everything as often. There is nothing particularly exciting to talk about.

Competition is back to more normal levels.

There were no PI runs in the month.

 

Training

Account 1 (Main) – 126M SP. Finished the remaining Social Skills to IV. Picked up Shield Compensation V, Shield Upgrades V and Caldari Electronic Systems V. Now working on Tactical Shield Manipulation V.

Account 2 (Main Alt) – 119M SP. Picked up Frequency Modulation V, Long Distance Jamming V and Missile Bombardment V. Currently working on Drone Durability V.

Account 3 (Industry Alt) – 42M SP. Exhumer V completed, and continued on Armor, Repair and Jamming Compensation skills to IV. Currently working on Drone skills.

My skill training is a bit ad-hoc at the moment – running my eye down the list and just arbitrarily picking the first thing that stands out.

 

Plans

None basically. I will continue with the Hi-Sec exploration, I want to finish the first lot of 16 mining missions, and maybe revisit wormhole space in light of the Odyssey release.

Mild surprise

The trade battles continue – both with the old players and some new. I am spending too much time updating orders, so have turned to salting the earth and ruining margins. That should hopefully cut down on the number of updates I need to do.

I ran some L4 mining missions the other day – after reading Goblin referring to them a while ago. It requires a retriever set up for Ice mining, another for Ore, and a Venture for Gas mining. I then have to double that as my Alt needs the same set of ships – I decide on dual boxing so that I can complete each quest without having to dock. They seem to take around 20 minutes from accepting to handing in. They are more relaxing than belt mining, but otherwise not particularly enjoyable or especially rewarding. You can semi AFK some of them. I will see if I can get to the first storyline.

I ran some sites (pre-expansion) with my Exploration Legion. It’s a drone boat. My god the NPC agro on drones requires far too much micro managing. It would have easily added 30% or more to the time it takes to run each site, and forces me to remember to repair them constantly. I will have to go back to lasers or missiles – so will shelve or adjust the Legion. A pity, I really enjoyed flying the current fit.

Regards Odyssey – I think CCP is on the right money with some of the graphic changes, but they just need additional polish. The flashing strobes when you undock need to be more obvious, maybe even lower the light levels in the hanger at the same time. The jump gate effect is nice – but even on my nicely spec’d desktop there is always a point or two in the transition where the animation stutters, which really ruins the whole effect. Then when you drop out of warp, the occasional rubber-banding just destroys all sense of immersion. Not quite a success yet in my eyes.

I think the Exploration changes will see more people on average using that content. It is a simple case of leaving the scanner window open and you can run anomalies any time you have a few spare minutes. The hidden belts in particular seem to get hammered quickly. I haven’t actually dropped probes – there is just too much competition at the moment, but I will get around to it.

I had a couple nice surprises today. I was crashing through some local systems farming anomalies when I picked up a True Sansha Statis Webifier. Pleased with my luck I was returning to my home system to drop it off when my jaw dropped at a name in local I recognised. It was the first person in my RL circle of friends to play EVE, and the bloke who suggested I play. He hadn’t been in game for years. Apparently one of his friends had no one to fly with, so threw a PLEX his way and asked him to come on some frigate roams. I expect there won’t be much interaction while he is in game as his play style is different (blood thirsty verse my Carebear tendencies), but it will be nice to see someone else online on occasion.

May Done

Game Hours & Play

I would have stayed online 100+ hours in May – but actually played around 12 hours. Most of that time was spent on trading.

 

Fluid ISK at the end of May

I only keep an amateurish measurement of my Trade and Industry profits – based around fluid ISK.

Cash & Stock

7.2B Wallet
0.3B Escrow
0.2B Stock on Market *
===
7.7B ISK

Input Assets

1.4B Manufacturing Supplies
0.4B POS Fuel
0.0B Long Term Speculative Stock (Not valued)
===
1.8B

Fluid ISK this Month
9.5B

Fluid ISK last Month
7.9B

Position Change
+1.6B

Known Expenses for the month

16M Office Rentals
4M Alliance Fees
===
<0.1B

Probably my most profitable month for my trading corp.

(* Stock Value calculated at 80%, roughly at fire sale to Jita buy orders)

 

Industry / Trade Details

I made reasonable ISK on flipping Gnosis when they were first handed out. I only stayed in the market for a day or two.

I started to buy Mining related modules – where there was less competition than usual. I also picked up a few mining hulls at very good prices, although that opportunity soon passed.

I had heavy competition in basically all low volume / high profit areas were I had previously had the market to myself. This resulted in a fortnight long trade war and the deliberate ruining of a number of these markets. My exposure (when my buy orders are at the top) are down to around 20-30% for the remaining items.

Otherwise general trading volumes and competition was around normal.

There were no PI runs in the month.

 

Training

Account 1 (Main) – Explosive, Kinetic and Thermic Armor Compensation V (rounding out the set), Citadel Cruise Missiles IV, Social V and now working on getting some of the Connections skills to IV.

Account 2 (Main Alt) – Most of the month spent getting Exhumers V, along with a couple of social skills to rank IV

Account 3 (Industry Alt) – General ship skills this month – working through getting the shield, energy, electronic and armor related skills to rank IV.

 

Plans

None basically – although setting up to try some mining missions, just because I haven’t done so previously.  I also plan to carefully read the expansion notes to a make a list of things to do or try when it is released.

Oops

Just a quick update.

The trade battle is in effect over.  I stayed online for long periods of time, quickly trumping most of my opponents aggressive order updates.  After a week of this they seem to take a step back and now only update a couple times a day.  That gives me enough room, so I’ve also been a lot less aggressive.

Otherwise I haven’t done much.  In part because I spent a few days away without Internet Access, in part because I put my back out yet again and can’t remain sitting for too long.  I’m aware that I am not undocking my main characters at the moment – and really have no goals for them either.  While I am sort of looking forward to the next Expansion, I’m not sure it will alter the fact that the only thing I am really doing at the moment is relatively mild trading.

Easy come, easy go

I had an unexpected ISK injection from a very generous competition run by Ardent Defender

I didn’t want this to just disappear into the bank balance, so I spent some time considering how I would spend it. I wanted this to have some sort of impact on my game.

This weekend I went to Jita on a shopping trip, purchasing:

. 60 odd Shield and Armor Ancillary modules and a pile of Nanite paste and Boosters to feed them. (I haven’t actually used them before, so I am going to play around with some fittings)

. One of each of the Aliastra, Intaki Syndicate and InterBus Catalyst’s, to add to my collection

. A couple Keres and Sentinel hulls – as I’ve never used them before

. And Curse hull, just because

Goal achieved – should keep me busy and interested for a while.

Following some fairly heavy market PVP, my Trade nemesis has at least temporarily stepped back. After a week of up to 10 to 15 order changes per item each day, they have dropped back to 2 to 4 updates. (Which is still a lot for our little backwater area.) Having them watchlisted, and a seeming level of good luck is helping keep on top of the buy orders around 70% of the time.

There you are – gosh that is a horrendous hair cut

It cost me about 10M ISK and 50 odd jumps on 2 Toons, but I have the name of my new trade adversary.

(Manipulate prices until one of their hull buy orders was within 5M of Jita price.  Fly my main to Jita (he was the only one able to fly that hull), buy one, and return.  Move one of my out of Corp Price Check Alts to a nearby station.  Transfer the hull to them so it doesn’t have my finger prints on it.  Sell to their buy order.  Move my Price Check Alt back to its trade hub.)

They are 21 months old, and haven’t moved out of their starting NPC Corp. Their updates were infrequent today, and they seem to only log in for short periods then log off. It doesn’t appear to be a main – but one of possibly many trading Alts. I’d guess the speed at which they identify what orders they need to change suggests at support from 3rd party software.

Combating this one will likely require a lot of stamina.

Maybe I am the bot

I am still playing the 0.01ISK battle with the recent arrived competitor. Their updates are more sporadic and human like now – although they come in spits and spurts at almost any time of day. They are quite persistent.

I wonder what they think of my updates. I’ve left my trading toon logged in all day since the weekend, and am generally adjusting my orders within an hour of theirs. (Or like just now, within minutes.) It isn’t a huge effort, given I work from home and I just leave the EVE client running, but my doggedness probably suggest at a character flaw. As it stands, my behaviour is probably more bot like than my competitor.

I am still completing on a couple of items, but I ruined the market on half a dozen other items with buy orders at or just under the breakeven point. They dropped out of all but one of those markets immediately. The remaining item I left their buy order at the top, as it is not worth playing the 0.01ISK game for the profit that remains. I’ve left my order there however to keep theirs high.

By pure luck, there has been more turn over in these markets than usual, and I have been at the top of the buy orders for most of them in recent days. I don’t expect that will continue, but profits for the month should be higher than my average.

If I took this effort into a market hub I’d have made substantially more ISK. Strangely that doesn’t seem appealing.

Bot batting

I update my trade orders any time between 5am and midnight local, on any day of the week. I can go days between updates, or I might make 20+ updates in one day.

I’ve remarked before about how much you can learn about the people you compete against in a backwater region. When they update, how they update, what sort of competition they provide. Some are in it for the long haul; others appear in a rush and then fade away.

Then every so often you run into a Bot.

Mostly these only appear during hot moments on hot items – after a DEV blog or expansion hits the markets. Just lately however I’ve been competing against one in a particular segment of the market.

There initially seem to be randomness to its updates so I thought I was up against a no-lifer trader, who just happens to be online 16 hours a day. But then patterns started to stand out.

I update a buy order, only to have it beaten within 5 minutes. I update my buy order as soon as I can, and it is again beaten as soon as the competitor can. This cycle continues a number of turns before the opponent appears to give up. Exactly 60 minutes later however they update their order again. This then repeats, on the hour, for another set number of turns. I haven’t worked out the next cycle fully as I simply can’t play and pay attention to EVE for that long, but the whole process will restart again with the 5 minute cycle and progress in the same pattern.

I know the person behind the bot turns off his computer to sleep – as there are 6 to 7 hours a day where there are no updates.

When I have had enough of working out how the bot has been configured, I will deliberately crash the market in all the items we are competing on, with buy orders than only break even or even take a small loss. I’m happy to be annoying like that.

That is not however taking a huge amount of effort – I have been catching up on some recorded TV shows this weekend, and just left EVE running on the adjacent screen.

Tonight I actually undocked and did some running around. I’ve had various POS fuel components stockpiled, but was missing bits and bobs and wasn’t able to convert them into fuel blocks. I finally remedied that, and those are now in manufacture. There should be around 500M worth, which makes me wonder why I didn’t get around to that earlier.

I also spent some time watching JonnyPew’s latest EVE Youtube videos. I do like both the radial menu and cinematic stargate effects coming up in the next expansion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUv73akegEM&list=UU6L76TQIxYnWrkQrF7tErSg&index=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoAMoRNZICU&list=UU6L76TQIxYnWrkQrF7tErSg&index=3

Orca’s?

I wonder what is going on with the price of Orca’s?