EVE

Marketing Differences

I’ve spent some time in the past talking about how market & industry in EVE is very similar to how it works in WoW, but now I want to mention some ways that they’re different.

The biggest one, is that in EVE when you put an item for sale, the tax you pay does NOT change based on the length of time the auction is up. When you’re putting an auction up you should always put it up for the maximum amount of time you can list it for. Instead of cancelling that auction, it will (usually) be cheaper to modify the price – how often you want to modify it, is completely up to you. I modify my sales stuff once a day, just after DT, and then I forget about it. I do not participate in marketing PVP or the rush to the bottom – and let me tell you, that works exactly the same in EVE as it does in WoW, except in EVE there’s fewer people (and no individual servers with their own markets).

It is critical to invest some skill points into trade if you want your capsuleer to be involved in working the market. As an alpha that can be difficult to do, lots of stuff is locked behind omega (that means you need a subscription). You pay taxes for purchases, you pay taxes for buy orders, you pay taxes for sell orders. If you do industry, there are taxes for the building you use as well as taxes for POCO, and if you’re in high sec there’s TWO taxes, one from the NPC faction & from the people who ‘own’ the POCO. Before I moved to the wormhole I currently do PI out of, I was losing 20% in taxes on every single transaction. 20% to remove the PI from the planet I was doing it on, 20% to transfer it down to the planet I had set up as a factory, 20% to have those finished products shipped off of the planet again. Your profit can easily get eaten up by these taxes if you’re not carefully tracking everything that you need to be which leads me to the tools I’ve been using:

There’s a lot of tools out there. I love using the spreadsheet from Oz, and I use it along with JEveAssets which uses java and was a bit confusing to get started with, but I think I have it mostly figured out now. I watch YouTube videos, joined discords, and over all just enjoy soaking in knowledge from other long-term players. I won’t ever be a grand scale tycoon player – but the little markets that I’m dipping into are quite fun, and I enjoy seeing the ISK go up.

As always, fly your way! o7

A Solved Game – But We All Still Play

One of the things I keep hearing about since returning to EVE is about how PVE is a ‘solved game’ – it has been around for 20+ years now, and all of the secrets (barring new expansions/ships/events) have been figured out. Players know what ships to use for what encounter in the most optimal way, so spending time trying to argue about these things is a bit pointless. PVP isn’t quite the same, you can’t ‘solve’ it because you’re never certain about what the other players have fit on their ships, and ideally, you want to counter it. In most cases there IS a counter, and some people are known for flying specific things or for using specific tactics, but it’s a game that is never exactly ‘solved’ in the same way that PVE is solved.

That doesn’t stop people from attempting to create a billion different fits to try to ‘one up’ someone else’ fit. I am very bad at coming up with fits, and have only just started to work with Pyfa and figure out what adjustments I can make here and there based on my skills / needs. In EVE, you usually want a fit that can do what you’re trying to do, for the least amount of ISK. There are of course exceptions to this rule, people love to bling their fits – but everything in EVE seems to be measured in ISK value. Gigantic wars are fought and objectives are great but how much ISK was lost is a method of recording the wins.

I know people are excited about the new ships coming on June 11th, and I think this will be the first time I’ve actually understood what’s going on in-game during a release (as much as I understand anything in EVE, lol). I’d love to see the cost of ships come down a smidge, and I do expect there will be some changes / shake up with the new passive moon mining modules, but we’ll just have to see how it goes. I’ve never actually done any moon mining in EVE, I’m not even sure how it works.

Speaking of mining – I FINALLY completed the 3rd AIR Career branch (industry) yesterday, which rewarded me with a bunch of skill points and other various things (ISK, ships, etc). That just leaves the PVP path, Soldier of Fortune. I expect I may never quite complete that one, but I was thinking I could use some alts. The AIR career is great and I highly suggest people work on it if they’re not sure what to do in game, but I’ve never really taken my own advice, lol.

Anyway, that’s what’s up in EVE lately. Fly your way! o7

Local? Not Me

I’m not a huge lover of PVP which makes my decision to play EVE a bit of a confusing matter, I know. Don’t take that to mean that I’m a pushover, though. While I may not actively go out and hunt people, I will employ tactics to protect myself, or to protect a site I want. Here’s what I mean:

Yesterday I was in a WH with my Tengu. I have it fit for combat, but brought along a mobile depot and some relic/data scanner II in case I wanted to swap out. Jumped into a WH (it was right off of HS), there was someone in their capsule in there. Thought that was interesting. Then they jumped into their metamorphosis. I mostly ignored them, scanned down the sites, found three non combat exploration sites (of course I did, since I was fit for combat it just makes sense that I’d find no combat). I took out my combat scanner probes so I could figure out where they were. I also uncloaked, since I was parked in a safe with nothing on d-scan, and they didn’t have probes out, I wasn’t feeling too rushed or in any sort of emergency.

They called me out in local – which I’ve never seen anyone do in a wormhole before. Doesn’t mean it never happens, just that it’s rare. In a WH your local is blank – until you talk. When you talk your picture will stay there in local until you leave / log out & back, etc. It gives hunters some extra knowledge about you. I went to zkill and checked this person out to judge how dangerous they were. No significant solo kills to note, a few group kills, lots of NPC deaths. I decided they were probably harmless. I thought it was cute that they said “I see you” – when I was in a safe, nothing on d-scan. They were just trying to get me to reply, which I didn’t do. Instead I left my combat probes out, and went and set up my mobile depot, swapped out to a relic scanner, and did the sites I had scanned down. I checked d-scan the entire time, used the perch method for extra safety, and cloaked a few times here and there.

Eventually, they left (or logged safely, or whatever) and local was empty once again. The loot wasn’t particularly tasty from the sites I had found (I think it came to around 70 million ISK) but I was glad I stuck to it and didn’t let myself be driven off by someone talking in local. If I had of said something, they could have checked out who I was, and seen that I was 100% carebear with zero kills to my name.

You don’t have to engage in toxic behaviour to play EVE – despite the PVP. Consider your ships are ammo, don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose, and learn the tips & tricks to staying alive. The game has been so much more fun for me this round because I’ve been taking the time to learn all of that stuff. Who knows, maybe I’ll change from my carebear ways in the future, too.

Fly your way! o7

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