May 2024

EVE Economy Review: May

I figured I might as well do an economy round up for my ISK earnings in May – these will be slightly higher than my ISK earnings in upcoming months because I had some big time collateral that I sold. I sold a spare Orca (and instead bought a porpoise), sold my tengu (and then bought it back at the end of the month, when will I learn), and bought two Ishtar after getting them blown up (next one I’m building myself, not sure how/why but I have a BPC for it so I might as well).

The above screenshot shows one character, but I actually earned 1b on the other account, too, bringing my total earned to over 7b for the month – very pleased with that. Unfortunately also not sustainable at current levels, but gives me a nice bit to work with moving forward. Ideally I’ll pay for 1 account with PLEX/ISK conversion, and my main account I’ll continue to pay for with RL money. Anyway, where did the money come from / go?

2b came from ratting, that means NPC encounters in space. I did a mixture of this each day, hoping for escalations. Sometimes I got lucky, other times not so much. 2b came from industry / marketing – I’m including PI in this. That means selling drones, selling ships (I didn’t sell many), selling consumables, and I did learn station trading. I also sold a few skins I had kicking around. I think with the changes coming to customization on the 11th of June that the skin market might take a bit of a dip. Thankfully I didn’t stock up on any of those, it’s just items I had sitting around in the hangar. PI was the largest money maker in that regard. Moving to a Wormlife Freeport has been absolutely essential in this process, as doing PI in highsec with 15-20% tax each transaction is absolutely horrible. A little over 1b came from liquidating items I had in the hangar, that includes the Orca, a Tengu (like I mentioned, I bought that back, eep), and some modules that I wasn’t using. I’m trying not to stockpile things too much – and I am absolutely failing at it. I never know when I might need a specific item / fit for a new ship I want to try out. It is what it is.

Exploration rounds out the rest of the ISK profit – keep in mind this is ONLY liquid ISK – this does NOT include inventory value, which I also stocked a lot of because I wanted to keep a lot of exploration items for crafting. I did some mining in there too, but again I’m keeping that for my own crafting use.

One thing I’d like to learn about / maybe do is reactions. I have no idea what these are, or how they work. I’m not sure if they’ve always been a thing, or if they’re ‘new’ to me like compression was. I hear it takes a bit of ISK to invest, and it’s a long term process. Aside from that, I don’t have the faintest idea.

I’d also like to expand my BPO library. Everything I own is already max researched, and while I’ve added a few basics (like the ammo I use, etc) I haven’t picked up anything of extreme value for some time. I’ve looted a few BPO too that I have yet to craft, some are not profitable so I won’t bother, but some are a few million ISK profit for each, and I’d like to clear them out of storage, too.

Overall? I would say 100% of the skills I’ve learned in WoW marketing transfer over to EVE. The products may be different, but the methods of obtaining items and crafting them into other items and then placing them on the market remain the same. In EVE you have a lot more competition since there’s 4 markets in 1 giant server (for the most part) rather than individual servers, and there’s far fewer players in EVE than there are in Warcraft, but I feel like I’m making it work just fine, and coming out ahead in ISK is a good indication of this. At least it’s fun, and honestly, that’s all that matters.

Fly your way! o7

Suitcase Challenge: Day 25 – Locked out of the Hole

Today marks 25 days living in a wormhole (an Orca as my home base). So far I haven’t come up against too many terrifying situations, but there have been a few close calls. These close calls change day to day, sometimes my connections are to empty lands and I never even see anyone, sometimes they lead to nullsec, lowsec, or near Jita – those days are busy. I’m extra observant and vigilant on those days.

Today I took a bunch of items to high sec to leave for my marketing character to deal with. This character just stays in an NPC corps station bound 90% of the time. She’s trained up a bunch of marketing skills, and she’s also trained in some hauling skills, nothing fancy (for now). When I went back to the WH to jump back in – it had closed behind me while I was doing my thing. Now, this isn’t really a big deal because I always have 2 other characters still in the WH who can probe the new HS entrance, but there’s also a chance that it’s really far away from where I got locked out from, and that was the case today. Since I’m so used to scanning down everything I don’t even bother caring too much if a hole is EOL (end of life).

47 jumps later, I was back safely in the wormhole, surrounded by the comforting black darkness of an empty local channel.

There was a C5 connection that lead to mine, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately it was a chain that had been picked clean, probably a WH corporation lives up there some where. I followed it for a while, C5 which lead to C5 which lead to C5 which lead to (you guessed it) another C5. When I turned around to head back home, the exit was gone. No big deal, I scanned down a LS exit instead, jumped into that and got lucky, no one was around. Two more jumps lead me back to HS, and 14 jumps lead me back to my WH. It was a lot of traveling and very little profit, but that’s OK. Not all days have to be all about the ISK. Speaking of, I’m doing very well on that front, too. I’ll post more details about that in the future.

What exactly am I doing in this WH? Well, so far I’ve been doing gas huffing, combat sites, mining, data & relic sites, and just general exploration. Each day everything is new, so if there’s people around I tend to either leave up the chain to find some place quiet, or I wait it out. I’m trying very hard not to draw attention to the fact that I’m living in the wormhole, which is why I’m not putting up a POS, and living out of the Orca. The POCO I’m using has low taxes, and PI has been treating me very nicely. So far, this experiment has been lovely! YMMV though, I know from experience it’s difficult to give up the inferred “safety” of high sec.

Fly your way! o7

Station Trading Success

My experiment in station trading seems to be going well, so far at least. We’ll have to see how the market shakes up after the 11th when the changes to moon mining go through. I imagine the price of things that use isogen will fall, but we’ll just have to see. In the meantime, I’ve been using A4E (adam4eve) to look at profit margins, and to help decide what markets I want to get into. This is a lot like world of warcraft, I am not doing sales in Jita, so my markets move a bit slower – but they do move.

Guaranteed sellers? Consumables. Ammo, drones, and to a lesser degree, boosters. Popular sales? The ships everyone uses when starting out, and the FoTM popular ships (though I’m only dealing in T1 frigates at the moment). A simple thing I’ve been doing is placing buy orders for ventures at 250,000ISK, and then I’ve been selling them at 350,000ISK.

PI is also selling very well for me. I have PI set up in a wormhole with 4.5% tax, and twice a month I haul everything out when it’s safe. My WH has a HS connection, and I log in once a day to re-set the extractor. It takes a few seconds. I don’t bother changing the extractors around unless they dip below 1m resources collected. Then I might move them. I haven’t really had to yet though, so I’ll just continue as I have been.

I have decided to hang on to my exploration loot so I can use it for crafting. I’m crafting drones, they sell like hotcakes. I’d like to be able to do this on a larger scale, but for now things are moving forward at least and that’s all I really want.

Unexpected sales of the week? Afterburners. Another great seller has been shield hardeners and shield extenders. I did also attempt to flip some Mexallon, I believe it’s used for a quest since people kept buying it in 5-10 amounts, and I decided it just wasn’t worth it. Sometimes the profit margins are REALLY tiny, other times they’re quite large. I bought some shield power relay II for 834,300 and sold them for 1,864,000 which was really nice profit. I’m still working through the skills my marketing character needs, but I can adjust prices remotely at least – and that is a big deal. I’m not sure what / if anything else I’ll skill this character in to, they tend to sit in station and not move. For now, that’s good enough.

Fly your way! o7

Moving (an alt) to a Wormlife Freeport

I love how creative the players of EVE Online can be – see a need, fill a need. Which brings me to my next adventure. High sec PI tends to be expensive (via taxes), lacks resources (vs. other areas) and not a lot of fun. Someone told me about Wormlife Freeports over on Mastodon and I looked into what that was. Simply put, it’s some folks who have taken it upon themselves to create structures in wormholes with high sec connections, placing a fairly low tax on the POCO, and allowing anyone to utilize the docking privileges so long as they adhere to some pretty lax rules – the main one being, leave people alone in that system to do their thing (ie: don’t blow them up). Of course not everyone cares / respects / knows these rules, so combat does happen, and they do have a militia set up for certain situations like if someone is attempting to evict. Camps can happen, and hostiles like to make their presence known. Not really a big deal so long as you go about things in a safe way.

I joined their discord some time ago just to watch the happenings and to figure out which wormhole I might want to settle in. Yesterday I finally requested access to the entrance (I’ve stumbled into a few while traveling but not on purpose) and I’ve set up shop with an alt who is going to do PI within the wormhole. The taxes are only 4.5% – around my area of high sec they’re typically 20% (that’s 10% for the NPC and 10% for the players who set their own tax rate). Losing out on 20% each transaction when I’m already earning lower-than-normal PI components simply from being in high sec – sucks. Taking my time to decide which wormhole would be best for my needs also gave me some time to train up cloaking and a few other QoL skills on that character. I know I keep saying I’m going to downgrade from 3 accounts to 2, but now I’m contemplating keeping all 3 active. It makes sense, in Warcraft I also have 3 active accounts, I enjoy multiboxing but I don’t have a lot of experience with it in EVE (yet). The alt was never meant to do anything more than PI anyway, so I figure when the high sec exit is in a good location I can drop off my bits or even send my main in to go collect them. By ‘good location’ I mean close to where I currently live, and not a billion jumps away through shady neighbourhoods. For now I just have 1 of my PI characters at the Freeport, plus two characters doing PI in my suitcase challenge.

Let the adventures continue! As always, fly your way. o7

Industry & Marketing – Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

In a move that surprises absolutely no one, I’ve started expanding my ISK empire in EVE Online. I’ve been watching market videos by Oz_Eve and even though I’ve never been a long term EVE player, I understand the basics of what he’s saying because of the economy I deal with in World of Warcraft. The items change, but the basics stay the same. I’m using A4E for most of my market needs, combined with a spreadsheet that comes from Oz_Eve’s discord. I also now have two dedicated market characters, each dealing with two separate market hubs. I plan on only keeping two Omega accounts (we’ll see how long that lasts) and letting one lapse back to Alpha on May 30th. That gives me 6 characters to play with. A lot of my income still comes from not-so passive activities, like exploration and a bit of ratting. I’m attempting to move one of my PI alts into a Wormlife Freeport, but that’s taking a bit of time.

In the meantime I also decided to take advantage of the MCT sale that’s going on right now, 40% off and I can train multiple characters at once. I need to get some cloaks on the PI alts, especially the one I want to move into the Wormlife Freeport. Like every single game I’ve ever played, there’s a bit of a market standstill in EVE right now as we wait for June 11th and the new ships that will be releasing. There’s a lot of controversy over these hauling ships so far – having risk in EVE is something that is absolutely required, but I feel like one of the ships presented is going to determine the future of hauling, and it’s going to make the other ships redundant – which is not a good thing. There shouldn’t be a ‘one ship to rule them all’ when it comes to EVE. A lot can change between now and release, so I’m not going to be all doom and gloom, we’ll just have to see how it pans out.

I’ve never tried to do any station trading before in EVE, so a lot of the concepts are new to me – like placing your orders in a player station 1 jump away from the major hub to help cut down taxes. I had no idea that was a thing. It’s going to take me quite a bit to learn all of the ins and outs but I’m excited about it. Just another method of game play to add to the things I’m already doing.

As always, fly your way! o7

Nomadic Gamer