Life Speeds Up...then it goes away
Faction Warfare Missions
I've had a productive couple of weeks lately and I think there's enough material to tell a story or two. I have been out with friends and run Level 4 faction warfare missions, earning about 360K lp in two sessions, totalling about 5 hours. The second set of missions we run seemed to be cursed from the start: my friend undocked his Proteus and the Eve server crashed. When he logged back in he found himself on the station undock, but luckily nobody had attacked him. We set off on our route and suffered two more disconnects. Most of the first missions were mine and we happily blasted through them, noting how quiet the systems were. "I've probably jinxed it now!" said my buddy.Yes. Yes he had.
When we warped to his mission in Asakai he found a Succubus on the gate, waiting for him. He got scrammed...I landed just behind him and jumped into the mission. I wondered if he could use the acceleration gate too, but it seemed that being scrammed prevented him jumping in with me. I pressed ahead, getting into the field of rats, wondering if I should bounce out and go help my friend.
As in many engagements, the question arises, "whose friends will get here first?"...presumably our attacker had allies coming and we had nobody...but wait! Who just jumped into system?! X Gallentius, a well-known Galmil FC. I quickly convo'd him and asked if he could help. He said yes and we waited...my friend's armor was going down and a Pilgrim had landed to help the Succubus. He was being neuted too, and it was starting to look bleak. Still no sign of our blue buddies landing.
Into structure and a couple of galmil began to arrive, but it was too late. The Proteus turned to wreckage, but the Succubus and his friend were scrammed and destroyed. The gal-bros were kind enough to send some ISK to my friend to help pay for his next ship.
My luck held and I completed my sixth and final mission on my own and headed back home, where we turned in our missions and collected our reward.
Jita Trading and PI
My Jita alt has added some Planetary Interaction skills so I could take advantage of a low-ish tax rate on a good set of POCOs I found near Jita. I did a little math and found a setup that I think will work. I screwed up my first batch and sold them for one-tenth the cost I was looking for, but I'll make that back shortly. I'm using the Customs Code Expertise to lower that tax rate even further. I'm sticking with the same setup I have in Fliet, buying level 3 PI materials and producing level 4s. I could have tried going from level 2 to level 4 but that's frankly more logistics that I care to deal with. Three-to-four will make me about 80-100K profit per unit produced, which I'm perfectly happy with.
The jump freighters I bought are on the verge of returning to higher prices so I can finally sell them. It was an interesting experiment, but too slow to be worth it. I'm going to return to the quick flip, even if the profits are lower. Some of the other items I've been stockpiling have just had a nice price spike so I'm trying to offload them now. I've also written a piece of software that will be capable of watching that information for me, when I get around to writing that part of it.
