Profit Report for Dec 2014

 Photo credit: Lending Memo

I've decided to be quite detailed about how I'm making money, not only to help others find a good trade, but to also attempt to ruin that trade and force me to find other stuff to trade :) You can read last month's report here.

Updated Jan 2nd 2015 to include all of December.

Eve Mentat shows me how much profit or loss I made for every transaction, so I grabbed the three thousand or so sales rows and dropped them into a spreadsheet to see which categories were best. Here are the results, and some discussion for each category that resulted in more than 100M ISK profit. My total profit this month is around 15B ISK, on revenue of 128.6B and costs of 111B, ending with 17B liquid cash, 4B in escrow plus 14B in stuff waiting to be sold. Also, I invested a 2B with a corpmate, bought a plex for 800M and sent 500M to The Angel Project.

Also worth noting is that these figures don't include tax and broker fees, which added up to, *gulp*, 3B ISK!

This is only data from my Jita trading alt. My main does some manufacturing and trading too, on a smaller scale.

Notable exception: The Small Rig Core category includes Small Ancillary Current Routers, which I screwed up and lost 380M on due to fat-fingering a sell order. I sold 800 of them for 80K instead of 800K. Had I not done that, there would be about 125M ISK profit in that category.

(Jeez, Blogger still doesn't have a simple table editor! Is this the past?)

1. Jump Freighter $6,627,993,972 
2. Mining Upgrade $3,004,757,304 
3. Advanced Commodities $773,508,387 
4. Outer $463,754,567 
5. Tattoos $386,712,236 
6. Rig Hybrid Weapon $382,623,450 
7. Rig Armor $353,975,001 
8. Tops $350,685,372 
9. Datacores $289,117,034 
10. Hybrid Charge $226,129,578 
11. Cyberimplant $223,360,486 
12. Capacitor Booster $174,297,518 
13. Shield Hardener Blueprint $160,999,968 
14. Hybrid Weapon $137,408,656 
15. Warp Scrambler $125,806,889 
16. Miscellaneous $117,160,041 
17. Heavy Assault Missile $114,586,289 
18. Super Weapon $111,897,864 

(Note: there a more posts on several of these topics in the archives, written as I was first doing that kind of trade, so please read older posts for more details.)

Jump Freighters are my new favorites. Since it costs 30M in fees/taxes to buy one, and a further 100M in fees/taxes to sell, I wait till there's about a 300M gap between the sell and buy orders, then try and acquire one with a buy order, in order to put up a sell order and flip it. It takes a couple of days for each step, though I did make one sale just a few hours after getting it. I did 29 transactions (ie flipped 14 or 15 ships, mostly Rheas and Arks), plus four Bowhead freighters (which don't show in the Eve Mentat data, for some reason.) On Dec 31st I bought a Nomad for 6.6B and sold it a few hours later for 7.7B. This price gap is still there, and I now have TWO more Nomads that I'm trying to sell!

Mining Upgrades - the lovely meta 4 Aeode has been so, so good to me! It consistently gives me a 300M profit on a 500M investment. That's the same profit I have to pay 6B for when trading jump freighters. I also bought/sold 13 or 14 of these.

Advanced Commodities are my P4 PI output: Broadcast Nodes, Self-Harmonizing Power Cores etc. Profit is high at the moment because I'm still using up the P3 supplies I bought when prices were lower. I only created and sold 640 units, all Self-Harmonizing Power Cores, which sold for up to 2.9M, a ridiculously good markup. Compare this with last month when I made almost 3000 units, with 860M profit, this month still did very well. This works particularly well for me because my corp, Aideron Robotics, has 0% taxes on our Customs Offices and a very cheap jump freighter service to Jita.

Outer/Tattoos/Tops: Clothing is a hard slog; the most expensive items trade very rarely.  There's a lot of 0.01'ing to do and my profits are actually being dragged down by me still getting through stock from before the price crash that hit some of the tattoos a few months back. But it still added up nicely! I've found that setting up region wide buy orders helps get new stock in, not just restricting my buying to Jita. I use public couriers to get the items to me.

Rig Hybrid Weapon: There's money to be made in T1 Small Hybrid Burst/Ambit/Collision/Locus rigs, if the stars align. They all cost 15-25K to make, and this month they all spiked in price to 100-300K each! That added up, as you can see, to significant profit, and I bought the ingredients, made the item, and sold them at Jita; never undocked for any of it, except to research some extra blueprints at Sobaseki next door.

Rig Armor profit is mostly from Small Transverse Bulkheads, which I wrote about earlier. They cost under 100K to make now, but the price spiked to 500K for several days, and came down quite slowly.

Datacores - I own mostly Gallente-flavored cores, which haven't been spiking to 150K like they used to. Still, it happened once so I sold about 15000 of various types at 130-150K each, some from my stockpiles and some newly acquired. I'm experimenting with buying and selling these at Jita when there's at least a 20K profit per item. I've noticed that they can be bought in bulk quite quickly compared to other items, and sold just as fast.

Hybrid Charge/H.A.M  I have written before about trading Caldari faction ammo, and this month I added some of their, and also Guristas, Scourge missiles to the roster. The supplies come in at a steady pace. Sales take a little longer, but are also reliable.

Cyberimplant Low grade spur gamma and delta implants keep showing up in the list of most efficient LP to ISK conversions, earning 4K ISK per LP, or higher if the price spikes (which is rare). I don't earn LP very often (sad face), so this is a good way to burn up my meager points. They sell very slowly, with the occasional bulk buyer helping move the piles.

Capacitor Boosters are an oddity in this list. I traded Micro Capacitor Booster I, buying at 6M and selling at 20-35M. I read up on them and they're collectors item only. Hard to get, but a very nice profit rate.

Blueprint/Warp Scrambler I found a steady and reliable trade in a blueprint that sells several copies a day for about 2M profit each time. Very little competition...don't know why. There are probably a lot of possible trades like this at Jita. You buy the BPOs from nearby systems from NPCs, then sell at Jita. The Warp Scramblers are meta 4 Faint Epsilons, which I acquire from region-wide buy orders in other regions at less than 2M each, then public courier into piles, and eventually to Jita. A fun trade if you like setting up pipelines of goods.

Super Weapon?! Yeah, when I was looking for items to trade, I saw that the four Titan doomsday weapons had a good markup, and very slow sales; about the same rate as some of the clothing I trade in. Why not try it? Well, I finally got a "Judgement" after about 2 weeks wait, and it took another  week for a public courier to move it to Jita from low sec, then 2 more weeks to sell. Fun once, but I'm not doing that again.

That's it for this month, I hope this post helps you find some good trades too. Take mine, I won't mind :)

Battalyst Fleet Part Two

Hendrik has posted this excellent video of our fearsome Battalyst fleet in action, with the highlight being the last fight, in which they tear apart all comers.

If you want to be in such fleets, apply to Aideron Robotics.

The Kindness of Strangers

Oh, that stung.

I thought I'd outdone myself last week when I blew 500M ISK into dust by selling a pile of stuff for 79K each instead of 799K each, but I made what will hopefully be my biggest and last mistake by evaporating 3B ISK.

I bought an jump freighter for 9.9B instead of 6.9B isk. Nobody to blame but myself; I was placing a new order, not modifying an existing one, and got the first digit wrong by typing a 9 instead of a 6. I've gotten used to typing these numbers out without checking too closely and bam, 3B ISK got spent. Pro Tip: When spending billions of isk in a single transaction, check your digits!

Next day, on Christmas, the story of the Very Shiny Jump Freighter continued to unfold. I had written to the seller asking, if he/she was so inclined, to give me a partial refund since that was a pretty big mistake on my part. I tried to sound non-whiny and assured them that it would be ok if they kept the money. They were very gracious and gave almost all of it back, for which I was very grateful!

The incident reminded me that a couple of days before I'd been the beneficiary of a similar error by someone else. They'd sold me a 300M item for just 300,000 ISK, to my top buy order of 145M. At the time I decided not to alert them, but felt slightly guilty about it. The generosity of the jump freighter seller spurred me into contacting the other guy and letting him know of his mistake, plus giving him 140M. A few hours later he wrote back and that was very nice of me, and that he hadn't noticed his error, and he gave me back 200M ISK!

Well, I can't even give the stuff away!

I reflected on my good luck, and the good nature of these two Eve players, and sent a donation of 500M ISK to Sindel Pellion's Angel Project. Hopefully the rolling ball of good karma will continue to pass to other capsuleers.

The End of the Aoede Mining Laser Upgrade? No.

CCP just announced the latest set of modules to be swept up in the module tiericide project. Unfortunately it includes th'lovely meta 4 MLU, the Aoede, which I regularly buy for about 500M and sell for 800M to 1B (a quick look at EveMon says I've bought/sold 10 of them in 12 days). The previous round of tiericide saw modules get merged together, so I suspect it's possible that the Aoede may no longer exist when the January 2015 release is done.

I owned six of them when the announcement was made, and was trying to sell them for about 950M. I lowered my price to about 880M, and thought for a minute....then decided to sell three of them directly to buy orders for 501M each. I basically got my money back on those, and left three on the market for 880M, hoping someone might buy them anyway, despite the uncertainty.  Luckily for me, a buyer picked up all three in one transaction!

Bullet dodged.
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Edit from one hour later: CCP Terminus responded to a comment I made in the official forums.

Those are become faction modules with the same drop rate as before. Mining Laser Upgrades are not changing as much as some of the other module types when it comes to merging named modules. There will be more info out about the changes very soon.

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Other Stuff

I'm using the free 20 days of multi-character training to buff my Jita alt's ability to fly a PvE Drake, and also buff her ability to research her own blueprints. Flipping Jump Freighters continues to be the most amazing thing I've seen in station trading :) I wait till there is at least a 300M gap between the buy/sell orders, since it costs me 130M to complete a buy/sell cycle.

A really good month of station trading

Piling up the ISKies

Before reading my post, if you haven't seen the new "This Is Eve" trailer, watch it now! I'll wait.

My fortunes shifted in a pleasant direction over the last month or so. I had been saving up my datacores and Planetary Interaction (PI) output, waiting for price spikes....and they all came at once. And other stuff spiked too. In a few short weeks my cash balance went to 12B ISK.

Looking for something to do with it, I trained up another level of Retail, allowing me 53 simultaneous orders. I looked through all the apparel items, including a lot of new stuff recently added to the game, with good profit margin and put up my offers. I also tried my hand at Jump Freighter trading! I'm currently training Retail V, so I can unlock the Wholesale skill and get another 64 order slots in a pretty short amount of time.

Here are some of the trades I did.

It's worth keeping in mind that I did most of the following without undocking -- this is all at Jita, on a character with about 500K skill points in trading.

My best trade was a tattoo that I bought for 800M and sold three days later for 1.9B! It took about 2-3 weeks to actually acquire it, though. Next up, a Rhea and Ark jump freighter, netting 780M and 490M profit each (not including taxes/fees around 150M each). It takes 6-7B to acquire these, so it's definitely not a starter item. During a price spike on Gallentean Starship Engineering datacores I sold 5000 of them for 200K each; a nice 1B ISK sale for around 440M ISK profit.

I pulled in 1.4B profit on my level 4 PI products, all of which were going through price spikes. I'd bought the P3 inputs for them a long time ago, when the prices were lower, so it was pretty easy to sell them in a strong market. The P3 and P4 prices have stayed high, so I'm not sure where this will go next. Remember, the PI stuff I do only works because my main's corp, Aideron Robotics, has 0% tax on its POCOs.

There were a couple of really satisfying sales too. I have a pile of 60 cheap tshirts that I bought for about 500K each, several months ago. I've been waiting for something interesting to happen and it finally did. The sellers all dried up! There was only one guy offering a single shirt, asking 2B for it. I joined the party at 1.5 billion with all sixty shirts...hey, you never know when Chribba might go drunk shopping! We drifted lower on price and I was able to sell one for 340M.

Small Remote Armor Repair IIs made a surprising price swing. They cost about 800K to make and usually sell around 1M each. But they soared to 4M and I had a good amount to sell, making about 500M profit. I'm acquiring more, waiting for the next swing.

There was also 425M profit in trading faction navy ammo, which has surprisingly frequent price swings. I highly recommend this for new traders.

In summary, Eve Mentat says I've made 6.5B profit on my station trader this month (10.5B profit in two months), and I have around 7B JUST in apparel sitting in the hanger. There's another 4B of assorted stuff, waiting for price spikes, to be sold too.

My PI efforts have ground to almost a halt over the past couple of weeks; we have unfriendly guests making life interesting in Fliet :).  I need to have corpmates escort me to/from the POCOs to deliver/pickup from the factories, but I don't have much chance to play Eve at home at the moment, and co-ordinate that activity, there's lots of RL stuff going on.

How Much Should Things Cost?

My homework involves finding out what the base price is for more items. Manufactured items are easy: you ask a blueprint calculator how much it costs to build. Items sold in the game's store are easy too: you check the price of Aurum and convert; i.e many Cybernetic Arms cost 1500 AUR, which is 250-300M ISK.

But there are many items which are not manufactured or bought in the store, including some apparel. I need to find out where they come from and what the "natural cost" would be.

Why? Because one of my rules of thumb is to look for stuff selling below its manufacturing/acquisition cost. That number usually acts as a price floor, especially on manufactured goods. It's not always true, though, especially in apparel. Most of the items available in the game store sell for less than the "real" cost.

High-Stakes Roaming in Brutix Navy Issues

French vs British at the Battle of the Chesapeake

We've been trying to get enough qualified pilots to field a Brutix Navy Issue fleet and last night we finally got the numbers.  We took out our BNIs, supported by Oneiros and Exeqs for reps, plus scouts and a smidgeon of other support roles. I think it's the most expensive roaming fleet I've ever been in, pound for pound, and there were some jitters at first. But we worked them out and went out looking for a fight.

We ran into a nice Templis CALSF gate camp in Heydieles, this Gila, Hyena and a couple of Caracals. It was very satisfying to take out that Gila at range. After docking up in Fliet we heard that some GalMil allies had found an Orca on a gate in Indregulle. We jumped into our disposable Catalysts and went to help kill it. It turned to be a bait Orca, equipped with a cyno generator! He jumped in a fleet of mainly Proteus ships, but it was too late, and their numbers too low. We killed the 700M ISK Orca, losing our disposable Catalysts -- an acceptable trade :)

We re-shipped into our BNIs, hoping to catch the Proteus's and their support ships. As we undocked, though, there were two ships watching us.  One was an Orthrus, a very juicy cruiser. Our FC had us all overheat guns and lock/fire at the same time, hoping to blap him before he could warp out....it *almost* worked! He was in low structure when he finally managed to warp out.

Our BNIs arrived at Indregulle just in time to see the last Proteus warp away, so we didn't get a fight there. We headed back to Fliet with lots of happy discussion on the night's events, when someone found a Harbinger that had been around our area for a few days making life hard for our smaller ships. We sent in a reasonable force to engage him and point him, then jumped in our hungry BNIs to finish him off.

After that, we DEFINITELY docked up the BNIs, imagining that we'd be hot-dropped if we stayed out any longer.

That was a really fun night of Eve, with one fight flowing into the next, and quick re-ships.

Sadly I didn't get any video because my recording software had an identity crisis.

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In trade news, I managed to nurse my buy/sell orders for most of the day at Jita; I was curious to see if would make a difference in the volume of trade I did. It did so, but unfortunately not in anything very valuable: apparel/tattoos/cybernetic arms continue to be pretty elusive. But I bought and sold a lot of other stuff and got good deals on the PI inputs I need, a lot of equipment I use to build ships for the corp.

Battalysts

Our awesome Battalysts in action. This is one of the ships I build for the corp. Thanks to Keewee for coming up with the fit and this video!

Making a killing on Meta 4 mining laser upgrades

From flickr user Psycho Al

I had a lot of fun doing these trades, and it's going to be more fun to share it!

I've mentioned this item, the mighty Aeode Mining Laser Upgrade, a few times in the past, but I got recently got lucky and acquired three of them, for 500M each just as the sellers market dried up. So I was holding three valuable items and nobody else was selling. What should I do?

Jack up the price!

The sales history showed it had never sold for more than 800M, not in the past six months anyway. I decided to try for a 1B isk sale, after taxes. I needed to sell for a little more than 1B to pay the sales tax and broker fees, so here's my first listing. I put two separate orders up to give the illusion that two different sellers were doing this. Notice the orders are a few hours apart to add to this impression.

Partial success! Another seller appears, reinforcing this as the new price for this item.

I don't have a screenshot of my next step, but here's what happened. The other seller made his sale, leaving me with 2 orders still up and still no competition from other sellers.  I decided to raise the stakes and raise ONE of my order's price to 1.5B. That would make the 1B isk item look cheap by comparison.

And it works! I make my first 1B+ sale, netting about 500M profit.

 The buyer immediately relists for 1.5B. If he had checked the sales history he'd have seen the item has never sold that high, and only just start selling at 1B in the last couple of days. He should have smelled a rat.  I list another Aeode that I'd picked up from my buy order at the new 1.5B mark, just in case someone actually is willing to pay that much.

It doesn't happen, sadly, but in the next few days as more sellers enter the market and the price drops back to 1B, I get a pleasant suprise.

A buyer pays me 1B isk for this item, then sells it back to my buy order 1 minute later! 500M profit and I still own the item, ready to sell it again!

Since the events shown here the price has drifted back down to about 590M on the sell, while the buy is still at 500M. What worries me most is that with the ongoing module tiericide that CCP is doing, this module may disappear or get nerfed, so I'm selling my remaining stock.

But this was a fun, fun few days of station trading!

Market Manipulation

A couple of months ago I indulged in a little market manipulation. It stemmed from a need my corp had: we were producing a wave of cheap hull-tanked Catalysts to help in our conquest of the entire Gallente/Caldari warzone.  The key ingredient was the Small Transverse Bulkhead I rig, which, despite only costing 100K ISK to make,  cost about 500K at all the major trade hubs, thus making the ship more expensive than we'd like.

I offered to make them at cost for the corp, a nice way to help Aideron out after all the enjoyment and free jump freighter services I've been given. I bought 10 BPOs, bought the materials started churning out about 400-800 a day.

Why so many? I wanted to also see if I could reduce the price at Jita, and perhaps at the other trade hubs, although I wouldn't go to those directly. It's a really useful rig and hull-tanking is the flavor of the month, so I'd like to see if I can push the price down and get the existing sell orders, and new sell orders to come down to my level.

If I make my sell orders too cheap, and too small in number then people will just buy them and re-sell them at the prevailing higher price. My sell orders need to be too big to ignore and too big to casually buy out.

On the first day at Jita, with my 400 rigs in hand I'm looking at the market. There are two sell orders of 500-600 rigs each at 394K and several buy orders offering about 200K each for 100 or so rigs.  I decide to put up a few sell orders at 225-250K to see what happens. They're snapped up immediately...nice for my wallet, but I need the orders to stay around.

The next day I start higher, listing my rigs at 350K. One of the other big sell orders comes down from 394K to beat my price...got one! The market is moving!  I add more sell orders at 299 and 259, and also fill the the buy orders that were offering 200K. I add a buy order of my own at 100K. I'm trying to create the perception that the rig wants to cost between 100 and 200K, not 200-400K as it was.

Dawn comes and I list 160 rigs at under 179K. By this time, other sellers have been joining me at these levels. zKillboard lists the average market price at 299K. That evening I post another batch of 200 rigs at 138K...there are two good sell orders at 169K. I fill the remaining buy orders and, just to see what happens, put up a buy order for 200 rigs at 75K -- well below the cost of making them.

A wild large order appears, right where I want it.

Then the whale arrives.  Somebody lists over 4500 rigs at 138,599 ISK.  That's a huge order and if it doesn't move, that will lock the market down for a long time. Perhaps the drop in price worries them and they just want to get their stock sold...it's still a 30% profit, after all. zKillboard reports the average price of the rig, not surprisingly, as 138K.

Trying to keep the market low

Interestingly, this is only happening at Jita. The Rens/Hek/Dodixie markets are staying at 300-400K. I'm surprised that no enterprising space trucker hasn't bought our Jita stock and flown it to the other hubs yet.

I think that's what victory in market PvP looks like, though it is much easier to drive the price of an item down than up.

September 3rd
We don't need the price of this item to stay low any more, so I'm going to stop pushing it down. I'm curious to see if it will go back up again. If I stop undercutting that huge order (now around 2800 units) he may feel its safe to raise his price, which should drag the market back up again.

September 9th
After a few days of not forcing the price down, it has returned to the 500-550K mark. My hopes of getting rich quickly have faded, however, since the rig is selling quite slowly. C'mon people, hull-tanks! HULL TANKS!

September 19th 
Competition on this item has been fierce and the price got pushed down rather quickly. We're at 229K, but since Sept 9th I've sold 795 of them at Jita for a total of 318.9M, yielding a profit of 239M. I'm continuing to sell these to corp-mates in Fliet on contracts for 110K each, in sets of 30.

September 29th
In the last week the price has kept swinging between 225 and 550K. It started with a surprise overnight buyout that cleared out all the available stock under 500K, leaving me with a smile and a steady stream of high profit sales. But the price has been gradually pushed down to a mere 220K. That's still a 100% profit, though, which I'm happy to take any day, especially when I can so easily obtain the ingredients to build the item at Jita. The extra cost for building there is only about 10K per item.

October 9th
The price has stayed low and seems like to stay there. You can continue to track the price here, if you're interested.

How not to fly a brawling Vexor

We got into a rather fun fight in Akidagi last night, with Templis CALSF. I died just as we were breaking their tank and taking control of the fight, so here's a look at the first half. It was really exciting, high pressure stuff! Our logi said several of them finished in low structure.

But I made a lot of mistakes; I pointed out a couple in the video subtitles but I've been shown a couple more by our CEO. So in the interest of educating brawling Vexor pilots, here's what I have to work on.

Our Vexors' main drone flight is 2 Ogre IIs, 2 Hammerhead II and 1 Hobgoblin II. Mine also had a Minmatar jam fitted.  Ideally I should have launched drones on landing (waiting till the warp-in was completed!), and tried to jam a Minmatar target. Scythe would have been best, but the Sleipnir I eventually picked was good too. I'm not quick about recognizing the race of ships above cruiser.

Secondly, I spend a lot of time trying to fly to the primary targets as they are called. This is not how I should be flying. My drones should be sent to the primary, but I should have picked my own target to orbit at 500 and hit them with my guns, scram and web. Ideally, make sure nobody else is doing the same to your target, so you're keeping as many enemy ships pointed as possible.  I've heard our FCs give these instructions dozens of times, but I didn't properly absorb the lesson.

(Update: Or not. Sometimes it is better to fly to the primary, MWD on, and burn through it. When the "spread points" command is given, that's when we start looking for other targets to lock down.)

By not noticing my drones hadn't launched, and spending a long time not firing my guns, I missed out on applying a lot of damage.

Lastly, I should have broadcast for reps when all those yellow boxes appeared. I did notice it happening, but I didn't want to distract our logi squad from the repping they were already doing. They said afterwards, just broadcast and we'll get to you if we can. At the very least they'd have time to have me locked up and ready to send reps when the damage started landing.

And on the killmail-whoring side, I had the Loki targeted for the whole time and didn't actually do anything to him! So I missed out on that 200M+ ISK killmail, not that it matters.

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On the other side of the game I'm continuing to build Catalysts, Comets, Enyos and Atrons for the corp. My pet wish is that CCP add a "rename your ship to match the fitting name" in the fitting window, so each ship automatically gets renamed. I've already sent it up the usual flagpoles and I hope CCP Punkturis sees it sometime soon - it seems like an easy change and a good time saver.

My PI operations have slowed down, but I'm still acquiring the P3 inputs I need when the prices are low, then building the P4 outputs, then selling them when P4 prices are high. I'm sitting on a good cash buffer, so I don't need to chase PI quite so hard any more.

I just completed Gallente Cruiser V, so I'm a short train or two away from the Proteus (FW missions!) and Ishtar (kill all the things!).

Enter the Batalyst

It was a fun and profitable couple of hours in Eve last night. I started by running a couple of plexes in once-more-Caldari-held Heydieles and got a nice chunk of Loyalty Points. I've been spending my LP on high-grade implants. They sell very slowly, but are worth up to 8000 ISK per LP, more than four times what I usually consider a good conversion rate. I'm not in a rush to get the LP converted to cash, so this may be a good way to get the most bang for my buck. Check the fuzzwork lp store for a list of possible targets.
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I've recently been building large amounts of Small Transverse Bulkhead I rigs for use in our cheap hull-tanked ships. Last night I had my first opportunity to actually fly one; a 3M ISK Catalyst that we call the Batalyst (here's one).

You can see a brief video here. We ran into a small frigate gang and we took them apart pretty quickly. I picked up 20M in loot afterwards, on the promise that I spend it bringing more of them in from Jita, which I will do.

We had flown past a 16-ship CALSF cruiser fleet during our travels and they were headed to Fliet, looking for a fight with us. Corp members logged in to bring up our numbers and we took our cruisers out to meet them. The results were...one-sided (see 2:55 to 3:00 AM 2014-09-04). We lost no ships and killed 12 of them. Here's a video from Keewee Maleewi in a neuting ship, a perspective I haven't seen before. I flew logi anchor in this fight and I'm happy to say we kept everyone repped and in-range.

My Best Trading Day Ever

And I didn't have to get past Hassan either...

My trading alt had a really good day, selling a couple of big ticket items that I'd been trying to shift for a while. She'd sold an Aoede Mining Laser Upgrade for 692M (bought two days prior for 470M) yesterday afternoon, so I was feeling pretty pleased with that already. But she topped that with a tattoo just a few hours later for 850M (bought 10 days prior for 450M). And a few hours after that, I unloaded a Phanca cybernetic arm for a shade under 1B ISK, having bought it seven days before for 652M.  It's worth buying and holding these big ticket items, if you have a big cash buffer already, because when they have price swings, they are HUGE and can give you a lot of profit in a very short time. Total gain here, by the way, is 970M ISK. Maybe people were selling these in order to buy one of the new cybernetic arms that came out with Hyperion?

I've also found there's a decent profit to be had buying blueprints from around Jita and selling them at the station. People will pay, say 1M isk to avoid going six jumps to buy the same BPO for 125K ISK. And BPOs from other regions have even bigger markups.

On my main, I'm continuing to build ship hulls and rigs for the corp new derp fit. The Gallente militia just took complete control of the warzone so I think we'll do defensive plexing and/or FW missions to rake in the LP.

Hobgoblin II prices tanked - I suspect a zerg rush of new industrialists

From flickr user Aeter

A few weeks after Crius was released we saw a surprising and rapid drop in the price of the most commonly used drone, the Hobgoblin II. I asked around a couple of industrial buddies to see if they knew why this had happened, but nobody did. I suspect, though, it's a simple case of supply and demand. The demand has stayed the same, but the supply must have increased.

The new industry interface makes it much easier to explore your industrial options and I think it gave a lot of people the idea to try some T2 manufacturing for themselves. Hob IIs would be a logical choice; most people can either use them or assume they can sell them easily. What puzzled me at first was the delay...why did it take a few weeks for this glut of drones to arrive? Training!  If you weren't already able to make these, there's a few skills you need to acquire before doing so. I think enough people buckled down and did the training, then invented the BPCs, then built the drones to result in the wave we saw.

Twenty Kills

Not Exploding

I've had a run of luck lately and last night I racked up my twentieth killmail (August 10-20th) in a row without losing a ship. Perhaps this means I'm excellent at Eve?! No? More likely I err on the side of running away, or fly ships that are too small to be primaried, or I'm name-tanked. Either way, it's a pleasant milestone to hit and I was flying everything from Derptrons to a Vexor Navy Issue.

Somewhere in there I popped a capsule worth 243M.  He was a neutral, unfortunately, so it cost me quite a security status hit - I'm -3.3 now. I locked him during a fleet engagement and didn't notice he was a capsule until I pointed him and got off one cycle of guns (Light Neutron Blasters I). He was still alive when I dropped my point but someone else finished him off. I don't have any reason to go to highsec any more, except to attend to my factory in a small highsec island, but I still don't want to be able to be engaged freely by anyone that sees me, so I need to avoid crossing the -5 line. But neutral pods are soooo tasty!

Update 9/1/2014 -- His killright on me has been made available for 50M ISK.

Bargain Shopping

I took a look through the collection of cheap contracts (under 5M ISK) available at Jita and had a fun time discovering a few bargains.  Check out the "multiple items" contracts, you may find someone clearing out their hangar and pick up, say, a large collection of fully-researched frigate BPCs for 1.5M. A few days later I sold just one of the dozens I bought for 1M by itself, almost paying for the whole transaction.  This isn't any earth-shattering new gameplay, of course, but it scratches an itch of getting something for next to nothing :)

Trading With Stockpiles

Too much cash, not enough flow. 

In an earlier post about station trading I recommended that traders sell their acquired goods as soon as possible, so they'll make a profit right away and be able to put that money into something else. I still think this is good advice, but I've recently hit upon a different "mode" of station trading: trading from stockpiles.

My trading alt has too much money! I know, I know, nice problem to have :)  She was sitting on 3B ISK recently and my usual cash-burner, acquiring expensive Cybernetic Arms (500-700M a piece) and tattoos (100M to 600M each) wasn't working...my buy orders weren't getting filled. She also had about 4B ISK worth of stuff in her hangar: datacores, tattoos (the Prototype/Wreckage style) and some level 4 PI products. My PI production was on hold at the time, so I wasn't spending a lot on level 3 PI products for my factory planets, which is something that usually eats up a lot of money.

I could have been selling her items, but I reasoned that it wasn't worth it. All I would get is cash; cash that I couldn't spend on anything worthwhile.  I looked around for new stuff to invest in but didn't find anything expensive enough to make a dent in the cash pile. So, what to do?

I decided to wait. Specifically, I'm waiting for price spikes

Price spikes come along surprisingly frequently. Small Remote Armor Repair IIs, for example swung between 1M and 2M several times over just a few days. I bought a bunch at 1M, sold a lot of it at 2M...but it's currently at 800K, so I have to wait and see which way the swings will go next. There were opportunities to sell at lower prices, or to panic and get out when the price dropped, but patience has paid off.

The price of the Gallente Datacores I own is strongly influenced by the Faction Warfare standing of the militia. They're at Tier 4 now, so the flood of those datacores has finally started to push the price down. The price had stayed surprisingly high while we were in Tier 3 and I managed to sell a lot of datacores around the 150K each mark, or higher. Patience paid off here too, though it was a long wait for these to go up from the 100K or so I paid for each of them to the 150K I sold them for.  I'm going to look for opportunities to buy the Caldari Quantum datacores - they have spiked to over 200K a few times.

The last example is Vaccines, which I bought in vast quanties for about 40K each before Crius. I sold a lot of it off before the new Industry system came out, waiting to see what effects it would have on PI. But I still had a good amount left at Jita, about 12,000 units. The price dropped below 40K and I held on to my stock. Sellers started to dwindle and the cost of Sterile Conduits, the P4 item that Vaccines are used in, surged by about 50%, from 600K to 900K. The few people selling Vaccines got cleaned out...and in steps me, Johnny-On-The-Spot. I put one-third of my stock up for sale at 60K and it's selling steadily. I'll wait and see what happens next, but I think I can raise my price to 70K and still find buyers.

Edit: Update from 8/18/2014: I had a stockpile of Balmer tracking disrutors, obtained cheaply on buy orders. The Jita sell price has been hovering around 800K for a while, but I waited, and yesterday it spiked to 1.4M. I've sold a dozen or so, and am trying to get the rest out while the price is high.

The vaccines price dropped to 57K and I've decided to use them in the manner they were intended; making Sterile Conduits, which are holding their price in the high 800K range. Their usual range is 600K.

I also saw a price spike in meta 4 damps (Phased Muon) and sold my stock into that spike. I went a bit early, though, and the price rose even higher. Never mind, it was still a very nice of 1M on each item.

Moral of the story: be prepared to change your investment rules if you think you can make more money in a different way.

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A nice industrial thing happened yesterday. Our corp needed to quickly acquire some rigs, and it so happens that I'm set up to make a lot of rigs. The market price on these items was pretty high and I was able to quickly tell the boss that we could make them a lot cheaper...80% below market price! Pro-tip: a lot of rigs are sold at crazy markups; you should get in on that! I got the BPOs (that was my alt's first trip to my main's station) to my main character's factory and started 5 lines running. It's nice to be able to help your corp in new ways.

A starter tip for station traders

Kilbey in glorious 80's-O-Phonics - video

"The man at the desk who takes everything he can find..."

Faction Ammo Trading

If you're just getting started in the buying and selling of items in stations, I've found a good starter item: Caldari Navy blaster ammo charges, small size.  Fly your trader to Jita and find, just to pick one of the 8 or so flavors, "Caldari Navy Thorium Charge S".  Click the "Browse to category" icon near the top of the screen; looks like a target reticle) and the left side of your market window will navigate to the folder where all the Cal Navy small blaster charges live.

Click each one and notice all the sell orders average around 500 ISK per bullet, and the buy orders average around 300 ISK per bullet. I've been trading them for a while and these numbers haven't moved, so I feel confident recommending this category as a good starting point. Set up buy orders for a few of the different ammo types, say 10,000 rounds to start with, then sell what you've bought on sell orders; easy-peasy :)

There are occasional spikes and dips in all these flavors. If you can buy and hold, acquire as much as you can of any type when the price is under 300 ISK (some are, right now, close to 200 ISK). When supplies dry up, sellers can achieve around 900 ISK per bullet. Antimatter is the most popular and thus the most stable; I'd avoid it.

Interestingly, even though Federation Navy small charges are functionally identical, there is much less trade in them at Jita, since they are "Gallente" and thus tainted with frog poo.

The nice feature of it is that all the different flavors of ammo cost the same amount to make, so you only need to remember one price range: 300-500 ISK.

Public Contracts and Region-Wide Buy Orders

I have been buying five different items on region wide buy orders, items with a good margin between the Essence (link to region map) region-wide buy order and a Jita sell order. i.e I buy a thing for 1.5M and sell it at Jita for 3M. The hard part is taking the time to pick the items up from the random places I bought them, getting them into decent sized piles and getting them to market.

I was going to create a new alt to use as a high-sec hauler, picking up items I buy and collecting them together for me, in preparation for shipping to Jita. But I've found that public contracts get the job done very quickly and at reasonable cost. I offer 25K to move stuff within a system, and 50-100K per jump between systems. These prices are fine for highsec-only travel; you have to offer more for trips that pass through lowsec, hence my problem with the highsec islands of Allebin and Drosselory.

The items tend to cluster around four main systems: Arnon, Charmerout, Oursulaert and Villore. So I'm using those as staging areas and made the following list of systems that are close to each hub.

Public Contracts for Rat Loot

Jumps to Jita - Collection Point - Systems encompassed

15 - Villore (move stuff to VII-7) : allamotte,pemene,derrintel,mesybier,cat,arant,ommare,vale: atlangeins (3)

12 - charmerout:noghere,yona,jolevier,adrel,

16 - arnon: laurvier,ignebaener

13 - oursulaert:renyn,algogille, duripant, mies,luminaire,synchelle, couster (four jumps from oursu, but whatevs),wysalan (3),

Problems: Allebin,Drosselory (high sec islands), Lisbaetanne (near Arnon, low sec)

You may find a similar arrangement works in your neck of the space-woods: give it a try!

Everythings Coming Up Iskies

From flickr user Jeff Babbitt

The past few days have been pretty action packed for me! There was a grand fight (two capitals were lost, 5 Archons dropped in at one point) in Abune during which I lost my Exequror; I'd burned moved away from the gate and when the order came to crash the gate I was a bit slow in following it. Being the last one on field the guys from Templis and Overload Everything finished me off. BUT that was just the start of the fun! One of our scouts kept eyes on the gate and reported the victors left the field and didn't take the loot...there was loads of great loot just floating around!

I jumped in my travel-fit Imicus and while our mostly Irish gang (God, those guys are fun :) !) were talking about the capital wrecks I grabbed 50M ISK of stuff from the wrecks nearest the gate. I flew back to Fliet and dropped it off. Comms reported visitors from The Irukandji had come to loot too so I jumped into an Atron (our cheap 1.5M Rinzler fit) and headed out to drive them off. We succeeded in doing so and the looting continued: I put 25M ISK of stuff in my Atron and went back to Fliet. I grabbed my Imicus again and put another expanded cargohold in the lows, returned to Abune and grabbed another 30M of loot and drones. I even had a chance to salvage an elite wreck for a bonus 4M ISK of goodies.

That was my first time being in a rich, juicy loot field with good protection and every expectation that we'd clear the field. It felt very satisfying; I hope you get the chance to do it too!

The next night Aideron joined a Galmil fleet which flew out to Nennamalia for a POCO defense; we fought a huge Eagle-based fleet on a gate and , unfortunately, we lost. But I got on 4 Gila kills (1.6B total) with my Vexor Navy Issue, and survived the fight. I think my name being further down the alphabet (so-called "name tanking") has really helped me survive more than my fair share of fights.

And that brings me to last night, when I did a bit of everything and had everything go right. It was quiet on the fleet front, so I did a bit of exploration. I found a relic site in Abune and the first can had 8M ISK of T2 salvage. The rest of the site was not so juicy, but I still got 10M of loot. I had d-scanned Fliet on the way out and saw a lot of T2 drones floating in space so I decided to go and rescue them. I used the new Sisters probe I'd bought to go with the 8 combat scanners I'd looted from the Abune fight and in about 10 minutes I'd picked up 20M ISK worth of drones; most of them were in one cluster, which made it easy. See this video which explains how, if you'd like to try. I really recommend it as an activity for new pilots: you learn d-scan and probing skills and make a good amount of ISK (for a newbie, of course :) )

A friendly fleet entered Fliet while I was taking care of some industrial stuff, so I joined them as they rushed into a FW plex to take on five Punishers and 3 Navitases. We lost three (four?) ships during this encounter, but my name-tank held and I flew through the fight without a scratch. I helped take out all the ships except one. Watching the video I can see a couple of mistakes, though...I didn't have all my weapons running when they could have been. My default orbit was set to 25km instead of 500m...maybe that helped keep me alive?

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Industry: The new UI is nice but is missing a critical piece of information. I'd like to be able to see how many science and manufacturing jobs I can run WITHOUT having to either go to the jobs tab and count the existing jobs OR pick a blueprint and select manufacturing/science-jobs to see the jobs counter display. It's the first thing I consider when deciding what industry stuff to do; what CAN I do right now? All that black space you see when you launch the industry screen is just wasted.

I'm still supplying the corp with ships; the best seller is the aforementioned Rinzler, which I sell in two-packs for 3M ISK. The process of fitting and contracting them has way too many clicks, and I hope CCP revises this soon. The "Copy Contract" function won't work for me; it doesn't recognize that the contract is for a fitted ship, and it will just try and grab a hull and loose modules to assemble. Here's a simple thing they could do (CCP Karkur!) - a bulk ship naming function would be great. Let me select several ships and give them all the same name. Maybe also add a checkbox to the fitting window that, when checked, will rename the ship to the

Track your ship building inventory with custom filters

I came up with this a few days ago and it's too useful not to share. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of it, but I haven't seen anyone else describe it, so here goes.

I mostly assemble my own ships, and was finding it difficult to notice when I was running low on modules for each of the different fits we use. I'd type in each module name one at a time in the inventory window...that's the hard way.

Here's the easy way!

Create a custom inventory filter like this

See only the modules for that fitting in your inventory

Use the "name" match and make a rule for each module. Make sure you change the default "Match All" to "Match Any" at the bottom of the window.

To account for possible missing modules, include the number of modules you need in the filter name (in my example my ship needs 14 different things). When you use the filter, you'll see the number of matching modules in the lower right of the inventory window. If its too low, you might have zero stock of something. If its too high, you probably have more than one stack of something.

I've found this makes it very easy to see when you're running low on something (in my case, only 22 Hobgoblin IIs left) and you make arrangements to get more before it becomes critical. In my case, arrangements means either making more of the item myself, or setting up a buy order at Jita to get more of that item as cheaply as possible. By making those arrangements before you run out, there's no pressure to immediately buy stock at-whatever-price, so this method will save money as well as time.

I started a thread on Reddit; let's see what happens....it went to #1! For a little while, anyway, and sat at #2 and #3 for the rest of the day.

Aideron comms in the spotlight

A recent post on Crossing Zebras caused a minor kerfuffle, mainly about the way that Aideron uses Mumble instead of Teamspeak for communications. I believe we do this for security reasons; it's easier for us to automate the identification of those present and screen out non-Gallente pilots. The original text was even more harsh...apparently some GalMil pilots call us "little North Korea".

The rule is actually more nuanced than that: Aideron-led fleets will use Mumble, but if we join someone else's fleet, we use Teamspeak. We have also built channels for all other GalMil corps to use.
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For my own update, it's just more of the same: trading, making T1 rigs, assembling ships for the corp. I did have a breakthrough in understanding WTF Crius did to blueprints, though. I had some T1 rig BPOs that were partially researched; I only needed 1 or 2 ME points, pre-Crius to make them "perfect" (i.e no material waste when manufacturing), when I made the rig. Crius had a hard limit of ME 10 for the BPO to be "perfect", no matter what your personal industry skills were.

Lets take the example of my Small Hybrid Collision Accelerators, using fuzzwork's BPO calculator. "Perfection" used to be 4-3-5 (4 Contaminated Lorentz, 3 Charred Micro and 5 Fried Interface). Post-Crius this went to 4-3-6, an extra Fried Interface. I took me until just a few days ago to grok that the BPOs ME level applies best on a big job. Building ONE HCA, even with an ME 10 BPO will cost 4-3-6, but building ONE HUNDRED will not cost 400-300-600. It will cost 360-270-540, a ten percent discount on material wasted.

I've moved almost all my manufacturing out of Jita, since I can make the same items near Fliet for much less cost, then move the output to market with our corporate jump freighter service. I've also started selling BPOs at Jita; there's quite a nice markup on some of them if you find the right ones, and you get to buy them from NPCs, so the supply is limitless.

[Update Oct 2014: I moved a bit of manufacturing back to Jita, for the items that I intend to sell there. Why? The fee is trivial compared with the markup on the items. I can easily buy the needed materials there, build the finished items and sell them for triple what it cost to make, without ever undocking. It's not a huge amount of money, but it's better than leaving the lines unused.]

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I'm going to finally use my third character slot soon! Yes, I've played for almost a year with just two characters: my main and my Jita trading (and occasional high-sec missioning) alt. My wife had started playing Eve, but it didn't catch on, so I've been using her high-sec Gallente character as a hauler. However, her account will be timing out soon so I'm going to roll up a new hauler, and possible mission runner, and let the other account go to sleep for a while. I've been turning a very nice profit buying certain rat loot items in Essence, then rounding them up into piles, then using public contracts to get them to Jita for sale. I started this right after the Mordu's legion rats were added to low-sec asteroid belts, figuring that the increased traffic would result in a larger flow of valuable rat loot, and it did!

[Update Oct 2014: Still not using the 3rd character slot! I use public contracts to move my piles of purchased rat-loot into bigger piles, then on to Jita for sale. If I had more time to play, I'd make another PI character, but I don't...there's barely enough play time to make use of the two I have now.]

One More Second

From flickr user Sean T Evans

I still have video/text to post about the last half of my Eve immersion week, but real-life is keeping me too busy for that just now, sorry. But I did have a really cool couple of hours in Eve last night, which seemed to have a different flavor than what I usually get up to.

It was a proper small gang rolling stream of fights; nothing unusual for most people in low-sec, but it was different from what I usually see. I usually log in around 9pm as our regular fleets get set up, and we form a fleet big enough to scare off smaller groups of one or two enemies. This time, though, I logged in at 6pm and there were only 2, 3 or 4 of us at a time, in cheap Tristan/Incursus fits to start off with and no logi. Later someone added a Maulus and Dramiel to the mix as this pesky Garmur pilot kept putting pressure on us to step up our game.

We ran several plexes in Deven, taking four or five fights across a couple of hours. I got some valuable PvP lessons (mostly by losing, of course) and watching the videos back (I record with Overwolf) and seeing where I could improve. In two of the three fights I lost I could see where I made a mistake that cost me my ship.

In one encounter with the pirate Garmur pilot, I was able to to warp out with a smidgeon of structure and armor, just as a war target Cruor joined us in the plex. In my haste to Just Get Out, I warped to a stargate which, of course, did not let me jump through. Unfortunately for me the Cruor had followed and he caught me as I tried to warp away again. I feebly engaged him and got in a few shots before going down. Luckily for me, the Garmur had also followed us, and he killed the Cruor, so I got on the kill mail :)
The other memorable fight was with the same Garmur, who came into our novice plex with 1 minute to go on timer. He fought the 2 or 3 of us, down to just me. With ONE SECOND left on the timer the rat respawns, halting the timer. I quickly decide that if I can just kill the rat I'll get the LP for the plex which more than makes up for the probable loss of my ship, so I send drones and guns after the rat but, under pressure, choose to chase the Garmur instead of closing on the rat. I don’t even notice there’s a few seconds where the Garmur loses his point on me, so I could warp out, so I neither escape nor kill the rat and claim the Tier 4 novice plex LP.

Having video of these events is very useful and I'd urge everyone to install Fraps or Overwolf or whatever works for you and review your fights.
Overall got good fights, 56000 LP (and with Gallente Starship datacores fetching almost 150K a piece, these are worth about 150M ISK!), got on 76M of kills (Cruor), lost 20M ISK of ships and at one point correctly executed a maneuver to web/scram the Garmur as he entered the plex. Had another of my fleetmates been in range too, we’d have double webbed and finished him, but he was able to get out of my web range...since I forgot to overheat my MWD. There's always something, isn't there?

On top of all that I got to have a nice chat with some corpmates I hadn't spoken to yet and do the usual discussion about Eve (making ISK, comparing fits etc) that is always enjoyable and educational.

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Trade/manufacturing is going steadily well. The arrival of Crius doesn't seem to have affected PI prices much...if anything they've gone up slightly, so I'm putting out small buy orders for m'lovely P3 inputs to make m'lovely P4 outputs again. I'm also buying faction ammo (for small charges buy around 300 ISK, sell in the high 500s) and have sold off most of my datacore stores. It's interesting that Gallente datacore prices are so high, considering we're in Tier 4 and the market should be flooded with these things by now. Selling doctrine fits to corpmates through contracts is a good steady business and I'm keeping my T1 rig production lines going flat out. My total assets across two characters is around 18B ISK now, which is starting to get comfortable :)

A Week of Eve: Day One and Two

My family are out of town so I have more time than usual to play Eve. Here's some notes on the first couple of days. Today is Day Three, and so far it's not a good one: my air conditioner is broken (90 degrees outside), I locked myself out of the house after leaving the other car at the dealer to be serviced, and my video editing templates are gone or screwed up.

Day One: Before work I popped over to our local asteroid belts for a spot of ratting. I took my trusty kiting Algos, rigged to apply about 250dps with drones alone, while I sit at 70km away sipping tea.  I found what I was looking for, a Clone Soldier and deployed the drones. To my surprise, I started taking damage! I tried to move further away, and he managed to chase and get closer to me, hitting me all the way! What happened?! I recalled drones and got out with a scrap of armor remaining. I repaired and tried again with the same result!  A little googling revealed that Clone Soldiers got buffed in the last patch: they move faster and hit further out. Small kiting ships can't do the job any more, sadly.

That evening I joined in on small gang roams around Fliet. We found a cruiser gang, and came back later that night and had a big ol' fight in Iwisoda. We lost 3 Exequrors right off the bat, and 1 Vexor but our DPS wore them down and we eventually killed 13 Caracals and Ospreys (here's one kill). The chase to hunt them down took a while and the best part was Marcel's palpable glee when our scouts reported them going into Iwisoda, a dead-end system.

Here's a moment where our three remaining Exeqs saved a Vexor from the edge of destruction; I burned out two reppers because I didn't un-overheat them. I know I suck at logi :) Luckily the fight was swinging our way at that point.

Day Two:  I've read recently that the nullsec powers are bored and have started to come and play in lowsec.  Today I found out it's true.

Overload Everything fleet taking out our POCO

I started the evening with some plexing in Heyd: it's nice to get some LP again since the Gallente militia are in Tier 3.  We then did POCO defense in Fliet and after a few minutes some visitors cyno'd in:12 Abaddons, 2 Loki, Proteus, 2 Archons and an Armageddon Navy Issue from alliance Overload Everything! We warped away and our shield repping Scythes tried to come back and get some last-ditch reps on our poco to slow them down, but we were alpha'd off the field quickly.

Overload Everything quickly destroyed our POCO and set up their own. When their Archons and Abaddons separated we tried to tackle the Archons while we hit the Abaddons with Vexors, but the battleships warped off as soon as we tackled the Archons. We should have, in retrospect, hit the battleships first, or as close to simultaneously with the Archon tackles as we could. We sent out scouts to try and find them, knowing their Abaddons would be slow to move around using gates, but we couldn't find them. Then we noticed there was an Erebus in system!  This meant that not only had they used a Titan to bridge in, they'd used another to bridge out. That's some serious firepower!

After they'd left the system we stayed in our Vexors and started hitting their new POCO. They came back in Ishtars, with Zealot, Scimitar, Lachesis and Huginn for support and took us on. We sent them packing, including this 245M Ishtar and 179M Scimitar piloted by one of the Overload Everything guys.  I think our inclusion of jams on our Vexors always surprises people that haven't fought us before!

Here's video of that fight...we need to have more pilots in small ships to apply tackle and keep their bling on the field so we can kill it. If you're a new player and wonder what's your place in battles like this, watch the video and notice the end, when we're unable to keep the enemy on field: you could have been there to help us! :)

The slightly mood was considerably lightened by this hilarious Firetail which arrived at the end of the fight. 217M ISK of random stuff, including Snowball and Fireworks launchers...we'll take it :)

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We continued our recent run of structure bashing/defense ops in Heyd, attacking a POS and putting into reinforce. On the way back we ran into a Gila fleet on a gate, but most of our fleet had warped off. We lost a Vexor Navy Issue and a Talos, but killed a 511M ISK Gila.

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My security status is dropping and I might just let it slide for a while. I don't have much reason to go to high-sec, except to the island next door for occasional manufacturing, and at only -2.2, I'm not in danger of being blocked from there anytime soon. My PI operations are at a halt, as planned, and I've got plenty of stock for selling Tristans and Algoses to corpmates through contracts: I've sold five so far.

Time to over-indulge!

My wife and son are away visiting family for a week, so I have the whole house to myself.  Shall I catch up on editing family photos and video? Play guitar? Learn to cook Thai food? No! I'm going to play Eve till my eyes bleed!

It's been a while since I could even think about devoting a day to just playing a game, so I'm really going to enjoy this! Fliet is getting some attention from our Caldari militia enemies so there will hopefully be plenty of fighting to go around.  I've started getting into supplying fitted ships to the corp; it's easy (thanks to our jump freighter service) and the ships sell quickly.

Recent Activities

My main activity lately has been station trading, since I haven't had much time to undock and fleet up. With the Crius release coming on July 22nd, I've taken the advice of a corp mate and begun liquidating my PI supplies.  The reasoning is that changes in Player Owned Station (POS) rules will result (we think) in less demand for POS modules. With most PI products eventually being used to make said POS modules, I didn't want to be left holding a lot of stuff that was plummeting in value, so I'm selling it all off and will wait for the smoke to clear after Crius and see what the PI landscape looks like.

I'm through most of the sales and got up to a staggering (for me) 8B ISK in the wallet, with billions more in goods to be sold. I bought some plex at 757M each, just to have some of the cash stashed somewhere safely. The same day I bought them, the price of plex began a steady climb and is now north of 800M, so that was nice!  The money also came in from my stock of Gallente datacores which I accumulated when they cost around 100K or less a few months ago. The Electronic Engineering and Gallente Starship reached the 150K level again, so I began selling and got most of them out of the door.

I've continued trading in Cybernetic Arms and various tattoos. The Wreckage and Prototype tattoos seem to have found a stable price and there's a good 50M-100M profit margin between buy and sell orders.

I've watched a few videos about trading between regions, but honestly, simply doing buy/sell orders at Jita is easy and fun. I even manufacture T1 items in system and sell them during price spikes, which come along more often than you'd think. After Crius, though, this probably won't work, but I've found that if I transport less than 100M ISK at a time, nobody attacks me. I'll probably keep making the same stuff, but a few jumps away, perhaps using public contracts to move my supplies around.

Defending the Head of Kirith Kodachi

A bouncer does his work, from Wikimedia

On Sunday night Aideron Robotics partipated in the "Bring Me The Head of Kirith Kodachi" event, wherein our corpmate Kirith sacrificed a carrier on the altar of content creation. Aideron pilots would act as a defensive force, trying to extend the event as long as possible.  We actually fielded two carriers, which repped each other (I think?) as our 40-strong fleet of Vexor Navy Issues, Mauluses and other assorted ships did our best to take on the attackers.

Video from Aeonicentity

We did too well! The first wave of sniping Cormorants were seen off with Warden sentry drones. The next wave of Caracal cruisers, plus support ships, were taken out with Gardes. Things get a bit blurry here, but I'm pretty sure there was a third wave of something...I fired at a lot of Ruptures. We had some tracking issues and when the opportunity came to dock up we did so, and added some Hammerheads to our drone bays.

Nervous laughter rippled around the fleet as the remnants of the last wave warped out - "Did we hold the field?!" Yes! Our carriers were still healthy and our pilots who had lost their ships had the chance to re-ship. We had been expecting a visit from Pandemic Legion carriers and other heavy ships, so our survival was a surprise!

I think at this point the FCs decided to downship to our regular brawling ships, to give the attackers a better chance. One of the carriers docked up, leaving Kirith alone, with us, to face whoever came next. A Brutix fleet arrived and there ensued a long rumble. I was in an Exeq and got a lot of repping done until I lost my ship. I came back in another Exeq and continued repping; I was actually repping Kirith when he finally went down. And dammit, I forgot to get on that killmail!

(BTW This is all from memory, since my video recording software decided that Eve is unsupported, and I might have to come back later to revise this timeline.)

My thanks to the shield logi that kept me alive several times through this fight! I think that might have all been from the carrier?

My finally tally was 52 kills (see Jun 29th, around 01:00 AM and 1 loss (an Exequror). That includes 12 final blows, a lucky surprise since I was doing comparatively little damage. Our corp suffered 6B in losses, including the carrier, but made 7B in kills! Fliet was reported to have seen 835 kills in the time we fought; dotlan says 1031 in 24 hours, so that's feasible.

Lessons Learned

I learned....wow....lots! Firstly, I couldn't figure out how to switch my drones using the carrier. The Fed Navy Gardes in my drone bay wouldn't leave, no matter where/how I dragged them and if used the carrier's Fleet Hangar or Fitting Service. The need to refit on the fly was a lot more important than I realized. Just before we left our POS to begin the event we heavily refitted our Vexor Navy Issues. Also during the fight the order came several time to switch between Gardes and Wardens, for short/long range work. Our neuts didn't get much use except when we were ordered to neut out a group of Scythes.

I also got into a jumpclone for the first time, just before this fight, in the event that I got podded. I don't know where most of the loot ended up; I think there were some loot-grabbing specialists following the battle; we scooped up what we could.

All in all, that was a really great night of Eve! Thanks Kirith!