2024

Compression is the Way to Go

stargrace March 19, 2024 No Comments

I’ll be honest here, most of my ship builds are *ancient*, the Tengu fit that I used to use was from 2015, and the game hasn’t exactly stood still while time marched on. Some people have a lot of fun playing with different fits, but me, I tend to stick with one until it’s no longer viable to stick with it or until I lose the ship and need a new fit.

That’s how I found out that there’s a new fit I should be using when it comes to mining with the Orca. Especially ice mining, which I do in my home area quite frequently.

One of the banes of ice mining is that it’s SO large and takes up an incredible amount of room. That is apparently no longer the case if you can fleet up with an Orca (or other ship that can fit a compressor, there’s a few types). So I trained the skills, picked up an industrial core, and an ice compressor, and now all the weight of ice mining is a non issue. It has never really been that much of an issue for me in the past because I live in the system and dropping off the ice hasn’t been a big deal, but I can see the appeal. There’s also a lot of regulars who ice mine in my home system, and I’ve gotten to know them over the past week. They’re pretty friendly, offering to fleet up, offering advice on more up-to-date fits, and just chattering. I explained I was newly returning after a long break, and they completely understood (one of them mentioned that they had also just returned after a 10 year break).

It’s not exciting (well, unless someone unsavory pops by) and it’s not huge amounts of ISK, but it’s certainly better than regular mining in high sec, and my home area has quite a few ice fields to pick from. Yes, there are 20+ of us in there at any given time, but I’ve been enjoying this low key aspect of gameplay. It gives me time to read through the Rookie Help channel and get familiar with my new corporation. Plus I’m close to home, in case I need to log off for RL or I have a sudden urge to explore a new signature. I understand that mining is certainly not for everyone, but for now, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Gaming WoW Gold Making

Weekly Wrap Up [Mar10-Mar16]

stargrace March 18, 2024 No Comments

Another week, more sales. I was seeing things in the normal range once again, and it looks like the TSM ledger site has fixed itself too after the hiccup that came with leap year.

Sales this week came mainly in the form of recipes, a handful of pets, and some NLA transmog (we’re talking shirts). I also decided to change up how I had been posting my auctions, just to see if it made any difference. I have about 5,000 items in stock, across 28 servers. It takes me approximately 2 hours to post everything, using two accounts posting. I normally do it first thing in the morning in between doing my RL chores (getting the minions some breakfast, etc) and I normally just post everything for 24h and check once a day, never doing cancel scans. Sometimes RL gets in the way, or I have other obligations, or I simply don’t feel like spending 2h posting auctions so I’ve been trying to think of ways to split things up a bit and ease the time it takes me to post. I’ve been doing this daily since December 2022, with very few breaks between. It has been fantastic for making gold but let’s face it, sometimes we all need a bit of a change.

10.2.6 releases tomorrow – I’m not overly excited, but I think it’s because we really know very little about the event that has been hyped up above and beyond what we’ve seen in the past. I’m excited for TWW, but that’s because I know what we’re getting into. I’m even excited about Season 4 (though I’m feeling pretty cautious about the season changes they’re making). 10.2.6 is a beast of a different nature though, Blizzard having decided to go with no testing (this worries me) and no data leaks. We’ll just have to see what it brings for the gold making community, if anything.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

EVE Gaming

The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

stargrace March 17, 2024 No Comments

I’ve been killed more in EVE this week than I have in the previous 12 years I played – and that’s what feels like it has changed (to me, at least). Yesterday caught me off guard. I plotted a route some where and one of the sectors it had me go through (even though I do have ‘high sec only please’ turned on the mapping – was 0.4, which was in the middle of a huge war that I absolutely had no place in. I wasn’t expecting it at all (in hindsight, I should have probably expected it). 0.4 is lowsec, and dangerous even on the best of days, let alone days when there’s massive amounts of people all over the place (hello weekend).

Now, ideally, I could have just turned around and left right back to the safer side of things, except I wasn’t expecting a bunch of people to be RIGHT there all pew pewing at one another – so I panicked, and of course just sat there like a lump on a log until I was blown to smithereens. Bye bye Tengu 2.0. I think the kill thing said I was shot by 7 different people. Nice. Thankfully I was not carrying around anything of value this time around.

The famous motto in EVE is to never fly something you can’t afford to replace. I know this, and I could afford to replace it, so I did. I decided to go with a different fit this time around though and it’s going to take me a few days to get my skills up to snuff (14 days, in fact). In the meantime, I decided to get some ice mining done. Nice, quiet, high sec ice mining (just watch out for the diamond rats). After, I did scan the sites around my home hoping for a WH with a gas site, but I didn’t have any luck. I did find a high sec relic site, but it had less than 100,000 ISK worth of stuff, gross. I still stand by the opinion that being in WH is far safer than being in lowsec.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.

EVE Gaming

Organizing Those R&D Agents

stargrace March 16, 2024 No Comments

Today I decided it was time to look into my R&D agents, see who I was working with, what rating I was at with them, and shuffle things around so I was working with the highest levels that I could. Right now I’m using R&D to craft drones which I then sell for a bit of income. I personally only have 1 ship fit for drones and I use it very rarely, I prefer the missiles I use with the Tengu. Anyway, two of my R&D agents are L4, one is L3, and one is L2. I want to raise up the faction that’s at L2 so I can work with a higher level agent, but the ONLY agent I could find is in a 0.5 section, and of course I tend to have horrible luck with those places. It’s 9 jumps away from home, which isn’t horrible all things considering, but I did want to be cautious. I only managed to do two security missions there before I had to head back, but I do plan on flying back out later today to get a few more done.

I also started making a chart for my ISK earnings & hangar value. If I want to pay for game time with PLEX, I would need to earn on average 83,000,000 ISK a day for 30 days. Right now I am obviously in no shape to do so but long-term it seems like a neat goal, since I’m all about the gold making in World of Warcraft, some of those skills should transfer over to EVE too. We’ll see. It has been a VERY expensive month so far because I had to insure my ships, and while I am making more ISK than I’m spending, it’s not by that much at all.

Hopefully getting on a schedule for PI & industry will help that out. I also started doing some gas mining, which I’ve never done before even though I had trained for it. Yesterday I was flying around trying to find a gas site (instead I settled for a relic site in a C3 wormhole) but I haven’t had a lot of luck. I’ve also been working through the application process to join a new corporation. I had been in my last one for 12 years, but it’s no longer active, and while I know it’s not absolutely essential, an active corporation is something I wanted to experience. I’m still waiting for an invite now that I’ve gotten through security, but I’m hopeful.

I still feel much safer in a wormhole than I ever did in ‘actual’ space (hi, lo, or otherwise). Maybe it’s just because I can’t see local and it’s an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ sort of situation. I don’t see that changing any time soon. In any case, fly safe and happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Gaming WoW Gold Making

10.2.6 Announced – Finally

stargrace March 15, 2024 No Comments

Blizzard has finally told us that 10.2.6 releases this Tuesday, March 19th – unfortunately that’s pretty much all they would say except that it’s going to be a time limited event that has never been done before in Warcraft. Something to do with pirates. Maybe?

Will there be gold making opportunities with this? Maybe! With no way to test any of it before it goes live (and with no indication of what ‘it’ is) we really will just have to wait and see. Any speculation out there as to what it could potentially be? Let me know in comments!

Compression is the Way to Go

Weekly Wrap Up [Mar10-Mar16]

The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

Organizing Those R&D Agents

10.2.6 Announced – Finally

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Making Gold – One Sale at a Time

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