Vacation in dark places

Ace Rimmer - what a guy!

I'm on vacation with my family this week, so I thought it was a good time to get one of my main's clone into an exploration adventure. I put a couple of cheap probing implants in his head, jumped in a Helios and found a wormhole. I'm torn between running pirate relic sites in C1, C2 and C3 wormholes vs the same thing but in nullsec. I think I'd prefer nullsec, since I'll definitively know if anyone is in the system with me, thanks to the local channel.

It took me a couple of days (just a couple of hours of play time though) to get out of the first wormhole, since all the exits closed while I was out with my family.  The locals were very helpful, letting me what system their lowsec static had re-opened upon, but I was already in the next wormhole, searching for that elusive nullsec exit. I did actually start to run a relic site in this hole, but warped away when an uncloaked stratios warped in.

I've scanned five wormholes so far and found no exits to nullsec. This may not be as easy a way to get there as I'd hoped. I believe CCP recently reduced the number of wormhole-to-nullsec connections, to prevent their fleets from easily using them as shortcuts.

Being stuck in chains of wormholes means I also can't jumpclone back into my "main body", which is sitting in Fliet. If I can't get to nullsec soon I'll take the first exit that lets me find a station at which I can dock, then jump clone back to Fliet.

I found one wormhole today with three pirate relic sites: exactly what I'd been looking for! Sadly, my risk aversion told me that, with the killboards showing explorer ships being ganked there today, and a high-sec static exit, this probably wasn't a safe place to risk running relic sites.

--

August 5th

Success! I made the 21 jump trip across nullsec to the Venal region, docked up and jump-cloned back to Fliet. I had looked at the system map and it said there was almost zero activity along the route, so I took my chances and jumped. Only one system had anyone else in local, so it was an easy trip. Later I plan to jump clone back out there at probe/run relic sites.

It was kind of awesome to see new (to me) anomaly names, and find that they included maximum difficulty combat sites such as "Drone Horde", just sitting there un-run. I guess its true nobody runs drone sites.

* I tried to find a picture of Arnold Rimmer on vacation, touring the diesel engines on Red Dwarf, but couldn't find one :( Internet, you have failed me!

Asset Rich, ISK poor

From flickr user NoHodamon

Hi everyone, I'm back! I wasn't doing enough of interest to warrant posting, but that's changed and Ima start posting again. I have a long video of a fun and busy 3 days of Eve I played a few weeks ago. It's edited but needs a voiceover.

Trading

I seem to have found a small flaw in my trading plans: I'm doing a lot of "buy low" but opportunities to "sell high" are few and far between. As the price of Jump Freighters drifted downwards I acquired them for 6.3B or less. I assumed that the price of each would drift back up to around 7B, as they have all done regularly over the past six months.

Sadly no.  The prices just continued to drop (except on the Rhea, which I wasn't able to acquire)...and I now own eight white elephants. 4 Nomads, 3 Ark and an Anshar, which I picked up last night for just 6.1B.  When I checked the fuzzworks manufacturing calculator it says these ships cost 9-10B to make....how are they selling for 6B?!

My liquid cash is less than 300M, but I have an enormous amount of goods that I could sell: Eve estimates the JFs are worth 51B, my trade hangar stands at 19B...that's the bulk of it.

I got into this predicament by having a high resistance to selling something for a low price...I'd rather hold it and wait for the price to go back up. This was ok when I had more ISK to invest than I could easily spend, but that time is past.  I spent my last chunk of ISK on some cheap PI material and now I'm in danger of missing other bargains if I keep my stock. I now need to be aggressive in selling off what I have, starting with the items that will sell fastest and still make a profit.

I'm hoping that Fozziesov will spark something in the market that pushes the JF prices back up, and quickly. Changes in the Caldari-Gallente faction warfare system might help push datacores back up to 125-150k, where I'd see a tidy profit.

Update on 7/20/2015 - Good news! I sold my Anshar for 6.37B, amid fierce competition. In addition the price of several datacores spiked to 150K and higher and I was able to sell several thousand of them. The wallet is now fat and happy at almost 10B, the trade hanger is around 16B and I plexed my account.  I also asked a question about the cost of building jump freighters. The answer was about 7.3 - 7.4B ISK, which leads to the question "why are they almost always sold for far less than that?"

Exploration

I've dipped a toe into wormhole exploration, looking for relic sites - no luck yet, but I have completed Archaeology V and thus I'm able to use a tech II relic analyzer. This should make relic site running a lot easier. My plan is to get a clone out to deep nullsec, via wormholes, and see what I can find out there.  I've run a few low-sec combat sites with corp mates and the rewards can be great, plus you get to socialize which is always a reward in itself.