EVE

Station Trading Success

stargrace May 29, 2024 0Comment

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

stargrace May 27, 2024 0Comment

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

Thoughts on Security Space

stargrace May 18, 2024 0Comment

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been playing EVE off and on since 2009 (mostly off) and during that time I basically exclusively played in high sec content. To be honest, that’s probably one of the main reasons that I never stuck with the game longer than a month or two at a time. Since returning, high sec has become a thing of the past, and I spend a majority of my time elsewhere. Here’s some bullet point thoughts I have on security systems:

High sec: It’s not really safe. I’ve had most of my deaths occur here. The bottlenecks that head to trade hubs are almost constantly camped by gankers, and there’s nothing more frustrating. I dislike these types of players who prey on people who have no interest in combat when there’s an entire game filled with pvp hungry people out there. I know, no place is safe, EVE is a pvp game, etc. That doesn’t change my mind. High sec is also low ISK vs. other security space, and while there are certainly quiet areas there’s also a lot of competition.

Null sec: This place is still scary to me. People ‘own’ land there (sovereignty I think it’s called), and they don’t like me much. I’ve used some filament to port around, and while I can at least see who is in local that doesn’t really give me any relief, they’re normally huge systems called a bloc, all owned by one alliance with lots of little corporations under their umbrella. I normally spend most of my time in these systems scanning down a WH so I can find a HS connection to get home.

Wormholes: This is where I’m most comfortable. I’ve spent most of my time this play through in a wormhole, and I’ve never lost a ship in one – I know it WILL eventually happen, but whether it’s because I’m *extra* cautious while traveling in them or because I just have a knack for picking quiet places, this is where I feel most at ‘home’. Hence the 90 days suitcase challenge. I love wormholes. I also am aware of a gigantic C5-C6 eviction war going on at the moment, but it doesn’t affect me except to stay out of the way.

Low sec: I’ve spent the least amount of time here. It feels like there are always others around, and since there’s no concord response I may as well just be in a wormhole, which I already prefer. Is there some secret to getting anything done in these systems? I’m not really sure. I’d like to take a cheap exploration ship out and about for a while to learn more about what makes it a popular place to hang out.

What are your favourite systems to hang out in? Where do you spend your in-game time? Let me know in comments, and as always, fly your way! o7