2024

Stratios: Doing the Math

It was time to do the math on the Stratios, and see where I would end up.

I paid:

  • 10m ISK for the BPC (thank you hypernet)
  • 260m ISK for the materials (I had already collected a bunch of them, but this is what their value is set at)
  • 990,075 ISK for the industry

Total: 270,990,075 ISK

If I were to purchase the ship in Jita today, it would cost me 314,700,000 ISK (this gets more expensive as you get away from Jita, which is not my preferred area to sell in, I tend to avoid Jita at all costs) so I saved myself some ISK by crafting it myself. This isn’t always the case, so it’s important to make sure you’re doing the math and figuring things out.

I’m very excited!

As always, fly your way! o7

Earning LP for SOE

The ‘easy’ way for me to buy a Stratios would be to just use ISK and buy it off of the market – but what fun is that! Having goals (large and small) in EVE Online is essential to game play. My goal, is to earn enough LP to purchase the BPC and then to craft the ship myself.

SOE sells the BPC for 120,000 LP (and 30,000,000 ISK). Because my game time is limited, and I don’t want to burn out by running missions (they’re not the most exciting things in game to do) I’m going to aim at earning around 5,000 LP a day. That will mean it takes me approximately 24 days to earn enough LP to afford the BPC. Give or take. Right now I CAN work with L4 agents, but I don’t think my Tengu is the ship of choice I want to use for that – so I’m sticking to L3 agents. If I can find a reliable L4 mission runner that I can actually fly, I will probably swap over. Getting into different combat ships has been difficult for me, I’m so used to flying just a tiny handful and doing pretty specific things. I think I’d like a little reprieve from the ammo heavy missiles I’m used to, and I might even head towards some sort of drone ship. Maybe an Ishtar? Rattlesnake? Marauder? There’s just so many suggestions out there. I’ve already got skills in drones from previous years I played, but I have no clue when it comes to deciding what to fly. It doesn’t help that EVE is so old that a lot of the posts that show up when I do a google search are from 14+ years ago, heh. I’ve taken to adding the year at the end of my searches so I can try to find something a bit more updated.

Speaking of updates! April 30th marks the beginning of Capsuleer Day, and it will be my first time ever participating! I’m excited. Expect future posts!

Fly your way.. o7

GMs still Exist!

** Before I start this post, I do want to say that I know I pretended to be new when I wasn’t, and that isn’t the greatest behaviour, but I *was* on a new account, and I thought it was neat that they reached out **

I have 3 EVE accounts. One account has my ‘main’, and is in a corporation of just me right now. I did try out Catskull Cartel but it wasn’t for me. That’s OK, not every corporation is going to be a forever home. I have a second account, far less skills, this account has my Signal Cartel (love this corporation, can’t say enough good things about them) character on it and two PI alts. The account has been around since 2009 or so, but I barely ever kept up with it.

Then I have a 3rd account, this one is brand new, and is linked through steam. I created a character on the account in the hopes of doing something completely different from the norm (for me, at least), and I wanted to get some blog posts in about starting a fresh account and doing the AIR Career path along with whatever happened next. I also wanted to see what was available as an alpha, and test out content without having the omega skills. I see lots of YT videos following this path, and I find it interesting.

While I was finishing up the AIR Career path a GM Maverick reached out to me, and asked how I was enjoying EVE. They said they saw I was a new player (the account is 41 days old, alpha). I didn’t mention that it was just an alt account, instead I went forward as though I was a new player. I explained what I thought about the introductory quests, and they offered some advice on what I should do next, and where I should go. The interaction was wholesome and I loved it, especially in an age where very few MMORPG have these sorts of interactions any more.

They gave me a few beginner friendly ships (the same ones the AIR Career will provide) and a Gallente welcome package, which was neat.

In fact, the more I play EVE, the more I fall in love with parts of the culture – and that’s not to say there isn’t also a lot I dislike about the culture (it can be pretty rough) but surrounding myself with positive influences has been key. Anyway, I hope GM Maverick knows that their interactions made a difference and were greatly appreciated.

Fly your way. o7

Spreadsheets? We’ve got Those

I’ve been back in EVE Online since March 15th, and of course one of the first things I did was set up a spreadsheet to start calculating industry profits, and then another spreadsheet to calculate my total daily ISK earnings (across two accounts). We already know that in order to afford one month of game time, you need 500 plex, which (at the time of this post at least) comes to approximately 2.5 billion ISK. That means each day you’d want to earn roughly 84 million ISK in order to afford a single month of game time.

Earning currency doesn’t change much from game to game. Learning the markets takes time, but you already have a pretty good foundation if you’re already doing it elsewhere. It’s also not reasonable to expect a brand new player to be earning as much money as someone who has been around for a number of years and knows how to optimize (and who also has higher skills in the game, and higher skills in general). Most of the ISK on the main account (account E) came from industry. I’m just shy of the 2.5b mark for the month, but considering I just returned to the game, I’m very happy with those earnings. The ISK earned on my second account (S) is from selling off components of a package I got (I think I got the platinum bundle?) which included skill injectors (I sold them empty, I can’t afford to give up skills). Those numbers are highly inflated, and shouldn’t be considered ‘real’ numbers considering the lack of effort I put forth.

It does give me a nice nest egg. I’ve got a few months of game time on each account, and enough ISK to invest further into industry. I need to swap some PI around on my 2nd account, right now the components I’m making have almost zero market in my system, and while I know a lot of people adore the instant shopping in Jita, I prefer to stay away and sell slower (but for a slightly inflated price). Figuring out what sells, is the new game.

In the meantime, there are the constants. Ammo, drones, and a few meta ships. Consumables always seem to do quite well and you can really push out some nice numbers. I live in a system that happens to have ice mining, so I’ve started selling items related to that – and people are buying, even though they’re a higher price than other systems. The next challenge will be to beat this months earnings.

Fly safe! o7

The Most Annoying Quest I’ve Done (so far)

It is day one of my attempt to work towards a Stratios BPC – and of course I didn’t research everything properly, but oh well! I’m going for it. This BPC is sold from the SOE LP store, and while I have done the SOE introduction quest chain (there’s 52 quests, it’s a lot) it doesn’t count as LP missions, so I have zero (I believe). I have lots of standing with them though, yay. I searched for the nearest SOE agent and off I went – not realizing that they’re not really a regular agent, they were part of an event chain. I believe it is called Minmatar COSMOS? Whewps.

It was here that I came across the most annoying quest I’ve done to date. The first two missions were simple, transfer some infected militants, kill some things, and then I reached the 3rd and final quest which was to obtain a random drop from Cybertron Patrol/Sentry/Watchman. The thing is, this quest chain went from holding your hand and telling you exactly where to go / what to do – to telling you NOTHING. I had to look it up on the wiki, and even then I got it wrong.

First, I had to figure out what the ‘Contested Minmatar Army Complex’ even was. Thankfully that showed up on the overview, I didn’t even know there were static types of events like this. I activated the first gate, and found myself in a room with two gates. None of the encounters were the one I needed, and my first time through I actually went to the wrong gate, and then spent an hour killing the wrong encounters – no bounty, no loot. Whewps. I warped out and started again. Activated the first gate, found the second gate in BEHIND the gigantic structure blocking my way, decided to stealth, made my way around the structure, and finally activated the gate to the ‘Overrun Security Corridor’ – where I attempted to kill the Cybertron stuff, but there’s all sorts of other things in there, including a group that were too close to where I warped in and were not what I needed at all.

I over pulled on my first attempt, and had to warp off after killing only one Cybertron. I am not sure what I had on me that didn’t like me, but something out of the group of 20 or so angry ships HURT. Due to the nature of gates, I couldn’t just go back to where I was, nope. I had to activate the first gate, sneak around the structure and activate the second gate, and then finally find myself (once more) in the room I needed. This time I was much more careful about my pulling. I killed 15 ships in the system – everything I could see – and did not get the drop.

I waited a few minutes, and a few more encounters that I needed spawned. Eventually, I managed to get the random drop I needed.

This quest was a pain in the ass! Between making sure I was ducking through the right gates, to making sure I was killing the right things (in a mess of other things) and the lack of actual direction or instruction on where I should ever be – oof.

I did walk away with another huge chunk of faction, and a storeline BPC that seemed pretty neat. I suppose that was worth it, but I was still frustrated. Tomorrow I hope to find my way to an actual mission giving agent who rewards LP so I can start that grind.

Fly safe! o7

Nomadic Gamer