Escoce - Eve Trader

Low Sec Forgetten? I think not!!!

2010-09-29T00:01:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the twenty-first installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month topic comes to us from @ZoneGhost who a few month ago asked "Is Low Sec the forgotten part of EVE Online?" Is it? I'd like us to explore this even further. Is Low Sec being treated differently by CCP Games than Null Sec (Zero-Zero) or Empire space is? Can one successfully make a living in these unsecured systems where neither Alliance nor Concord roam to enforce their laws? What's needed? Or is everything fine as it is?

Lowsec is forgetten? Certainly not, it's just a place that everyone avoids. Too bad really, because lowsec is a really interesting place. Where else can you say you are truly living by your own wit? In High Sec, you have concord to help keep you safe. Sure you can still get killed, but concord makes killing you less desireable. Null sec is the very same situation, the only difference being CONCORD is a player entity with your corp's or alliance's name attached instead.

Want to learn how to be productive in low sec? I mean really productive, not just burning through case with a pirate, and making money with an alt to support your pirate habit. I mean do you want to learn to be productive and safe in the face of danger? Then run over to http://lowsec.org/, where the United Trade Syndicate (the low sec industrial and trade alliance), is publishing the information YOU need to operate safely and productively in Low Sec.

Fitting for Low Sec is Fitting for High Sec

2010-09-08T12:38:00.001-05:00

As many High Sec residents are learning, High Sec by no means is an indication of safety. Sure High Sec is safer, because there is a less pronounced and less spontaneous PvP activity in high sec, but it is not safe. Nearly every high sec PvP victim is a result of fitting with the false expectation of safety.
So what does this mean for the everyday eve pilot? It means that no matter what you are doing, what task you are performing, or what ship you are flying that you fit and prepare for PvP. PvP does not necessarily mean fitting for in your face battle. It means fitting your ship so you can respond appropriately when under threat. In some cases this means fitting your ships for in your face pew pew, but it can also mean fitting your ship for evasion and being able to get out of dodge before it’s too late to get out.
I fit all my industrial type ships (Industrials, Exhumers, Orca) to be able to evade threats. My ships are fitted so that when flown properly, I can bust through gate camps without a scratch. My hulks are fitting to get to warp under 4 second. I also fit most of my ships with ECM or EW modules and a flight of ECM drones that will help me to escape in the unlikely event I do get snagged in a trap. No they don’t guarantee I will get away, but they grant me a dice roll 2nd and 3rd chance to get away.
My mission running and ratting ships are fitted pure ‘poke you in the eye’ PvP. They are not the most efficient for PvE, but when I get snagged, I am not sitting in a PvE ship, I am sitting in a PvP ship. This is something many aggressing PvPers are not counting on. They are counting on you to be fit like rib racks with those little chef hats on each tip, in other words, to die under their fire. However, you can turn the tables on them simply by being ready.
Another long term affect this would have, is if all pilots fit for PvP of one sort or the other (evasion or poke you in the eye), then aggressing PvPers at large will all think twice about your ship being simply a tasty morsel on the buffet table. Beyond your individual survivability, Eve as a whole will change for both the PvP and non-PvP playstyles. There will no longer be the jaded division between pirate and carebear, but the division will more equivocal. Yes it means PvPers will bring larger teams and fly solo less often, but that is good for you, because it means the roams will likely be more condensed, less profitable for the pirates, and therefore a less frequent encounter. Of course that only will happen with a paradigm shift of basic fitting styles at large.

My bitch about a bullet point linux advocacy article

2010-08-31T13:04:00.000-05:00

Please read the original article first, what I have written below is a respone to this linux advocacy article.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/204423/five_reasons_linux_beats_windows_for_servers.html#addyours

Comment/Reply:
Ok, please forgive ment because this is going to be a critical comment. I would like to point out first that I am a total linux adherent, advocate and geek, and I ALSO agree that linux is better than windows products for most applications. I take exception to this list however. One of my pet peeves of advocacy of any sort is to ensure that if you are listing reasons or advantages that those items be pretty darn accurate. I am also a beekeeper, and I often hear that natural honey is so much better for you than HFCS, because HFCS produces traces of HMF (a toxic substance) when heated. Well that's true that honey is better for you than HFCS, however honey ALSO produces HMF when it's heated, so that _reason_ is false and only hurts the credibility of honey and honey advocates. It is the same story here with this list.

1. Stability, yes linux is much more execution stable (doesn't crash) that windows when all things are equal. It will even continue to run after a hard-drive crash so long as no data calls or writes need to be written to the damaged media. HOWEVER, the statement that linux doesn't need to be rebooted after updates is mostly false. Both Windows and Linux do not to be restarted when minor updates are applied, but when kernel space updates and other core systems are updated, both systems need to be restarted. Yes the linux system _can_ run without a restart, but it is _not recommended_. Windows can also continue to run without a restart after core updates, but it is also _not recommended_. System admins should have a regularly scheduled backup and restart program in place to help identify problems that escape notice on systems that are never bounced. It can happen that a system running for years is suddenly unable to restart because of problems that have stacked over the years but have gone undetected. If the admins had a regularly scheduled down-time, they could have identified each problem and dealt with it ina timely manner rather than be forced to reimage the whole system because the stack of undetected problems is too insurmountable and unresolvable within a decent time frame.

2. Security, honestly this is highly arguable. When everything is all patched up both systems are equally secure. What makes one more or less _inherently_ secure than the other is between the time when a new vulnerability is discovered and by the time the proper patch is applied. All other security and vulerability related issues are almost strictly the responsibility of the architects and administrators. Sure Windows XP might be less secure than linux 2.6, but uhm....it's also outdated. Windows XP is also more secure than linux 2.0 too. Vista is more secure than Windows XP, not because it's inherently free of vulnerabilities, but because it plug the holes of well known and nothing we can do about it vulnerabilities of Windows XP. WIndows 7 is also grandly more secure than the earlier iterations of Windows. Again it's all down to the space between vulnerability discover and patch deployment and administrative practices.

3. Hardware, new polished versions of Linux stand zero chance of running on the same hardware that windows cannot run on either. You can choose a distro wrapped around an older kernel like 2.0 or 2.2 or sometimes 2.4 on the not too damned old stuff, but you can do the same thing with Windows. Try installing ubuntu 10.04 on your Pentium Classic 300 laptop. Sure you can install redhat 6.3 on it if you like, but you can also install and run Windows XP on it too.

4. TCO, This is arguable, but not necessarily right or wrong. It depends on your point of view, but mostly is just changes where you put you money rather than eliminating spending.

5. Freedom You are mostly right, but only to a limited degree, and completely wrong about vendor locking and such. You can just as easily get stuck using a piece of open source software, unable to update if the project was abandoned or otherwise stangant, nor change to another alternative if the data format isn't exactly the same or they don't have conversion tools already in place. No you don't have to purchase a new software license package true true, but you have to spend the time and money either to do in-house development of the old project or spend the money converting all your data into something freindly to the new system you wish use. In the end, it is _always_ recommended that you research your exit costs, no matter whether running open source or proprietary systems and software.

I wish to reiterate I am a vocal champion of GNU and Linux and free software all around, but I also like to ensure we are giving true, accurate and compelling reasons in our advocacy. I cannot agree with this article for the same reasons I will not say that honey is better for you because HFCS has HMF.

Seriously? Seriously?

2010-08-07T22:39:00.000-05:00

So I get a lot of crap flying my Orca through low sec. I mean, you know I pretty much have just converted the crap into tears which I collect just like any good pirate would if the circumstances were reversed, but seriously...

If I hadn't figured out how to fly industrial type ships out in low sec, then you Mr. Baddy Bad Pirate wouldn't have any targets except the occasional clueless newb and other pirates. Is that really what you want? Seriously?

Wouldn't you rather have some big juicy targets that are harder to catch, but a whole lot more valuable and a whole lot more frequent? I mean really, low sec is low sec, of course and that means we have to defend ourselves out there, not CONCORD to help us out in a bind or take retribution. I get that, but you seriously would rather I wasn't flying my Orca full of goodies around low sec, and you seriously don't want me to spread the word how? Seriously?

death race 2010

2010-07-31T13:11:00.000-05:00

ya so I entered. I know what strategy I am going to use, but not which ship. swift, fast and evasive is my trade mark, but I don't want to get caught in a ship with a paper bag for armor. hmmm, what to do?

yes this is meant to confuse you, I can properly fly, fit and pilot almost ever ship battleship class and down, just not sure which way to go.

EDIT: I mean I can pilot all my race's ships. But I can also fly T2 minmatar frigates.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Blog Banter

2010-07-21T09:06:00.000-05:00

I also am electing not to participate in the CCP vs. CSM blog banter. I don't find this discussion interesting in exactly the same way I don't find Windows vs. Linux discussions interesting. The discussions are usually full of bias and prejudice and often have little bearing in facts.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

My ship broke

2010-07-07T21:20:00.000-05:00

Egad, battleship rats are rough on Catalysts!

Low Sec Hulk

2010-07-06T17:33:00.001-05:00

Yes that's right. After much thought and deliberation as well giving up time after time, I finally have come up with a low sec hardened Hulk setup. In fact I have two sets of fittings for different circumstances.

Due to the safer nature of the Orca setup, I recommend moving hulks into, out of, and around low sec in the Orca's Ship Maintenance Hanger with the Hulk agility maxed. (2x T2 Istabs and 2x T2 Low Friction Nozzles). The agility fittings provide a 4 second align to warp which if you are on your toes is most likely safe and suitable for safe mining so long as you follow proper safe low sec mining protocols (bookmarks, distance from belts, etc). Not everyone can do this though, and so here I have two setups, the one briefly described above, and the one that follows.

The following setup is safe for busting through gate camps as all my low sec hauler setups are, but they have an additional training componenet to make the setup work; Thermodynamics. Overheating your Y-S8 Hydrocarbon After Burner gives you just enough boost to push you past the minimum 75% warp speed needed to go to warp as you decloak. It's tricky getting the fittings on, and it requires fill Engineering Skills training to make it possible.

Highs: 1x Improved Cloak II
Mid: 1x Y-S8 Hydrocarbon Afterburners
Lows: 2x Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Rigs: 1x Low Friction Nozzle Joints II, 1x Ancillary Current Router II

How you chose to fit your other slots is up to you, maybe if you sprung a few more ISK for Micro 'Vigor' I Core Augmentation variation of the power core, you could give yourself even more power grid and fit some extra shields, ECM Bursts or whatever. I choose to fit for max evasion so anything that gives me an extra slice of time to get away, I fit it. That's shield extenders, ECM Burst, ECM Drones.

Now, the procedure. Although it's nearly identical to the Occator and Orca and just as those two ships have slightly different operating procedures, so does the Low Sec Hulk.
1. Align to warpout.
2. Overheat Mid Rack
3. Start Afterburner
4. Initiate Cloak
5. Turn of Afterburner
6. When AB is EXACTLY 75% complete, turn off cloak (this gives a half second of extra AB boost while decloaking before actual warpout occurs.
7.Immediately hit Warp.

This procedure is exact. It must be followed precisely to maintain invulnerabilty between decloaking and warping out. You will gain a few percent of AB boost between decloaking and when your AB cycles down, and that pushes just past the minimum warp velocity. Any deviation from 75% increases the amount of time while decloaked, and leaves you vulnerable.

I am very happy to present these Low Sec Hulk Fittings, and I hope you find them to be of good use.

Yours Truly,
Escoce

EDIT: For those of you who haven't thought about this yet, you can carry a third strip miner in your cargo hold, get to where you want to mine, dock up, refit stripper and Istabs. When done, redock refit Cloak and Power Cores and AB to move to next system. You are using bookmarks to undock right?

Fail Dec

2010-06-28T10:40:00.000-05:00

So my corp, and thus my alliance was wardecced yesterday by an 11 member highsec wardec Corp called Deaths Right Hand and run by a fellow named BravoFoxtrot and has perhaps 3 truly active war fighters.

Guy, do your homework. We live in lowsec. 1) chances of ever running into one of us again is rather slim 2) we live where everyone and their whole families are trying to blow us up every chance they get.

Do you really think we care about you?

With utter disregard,
Escoce
United Trade Syndicate

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

I Am Escoce

2010-06-17T13:27:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the eighteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the
monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by none other than
me, CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of
gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a
week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting
articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead
serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the
EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out
other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

On May 6th 2010, EVE Online celebrated its 7th Anniversary. Quite a
milestone in MMO history, especially considering that it is one of the
few virtual worlds out there to see its population continually grow
year after year. For some of you who've been here since the very
beginning, EVE has evolved quite a lot since its creation. With the
expansion rolling out roughly twice a year, New Eden gets renewed and
improved regularly. But, how about you the player? How has you gaming
style evolved through the years or months since you've started
playing? Have you always been a carebear, or roleplayer? Have you only
focused on PvP or have you given other aspects of the game a chance -
say manufacturing. Let's hear your story!

I am Escoce. I have always been Escoce. I do not have alternate identies and Escoce grows and deals with the consequences of all my actions, whether that is doing well on the markets, mining asteroids, busting gate camps with more vocal bravado than normally recommended or not. That is who I am and who I will always be within New Eden.

If one wishes to read all the details of my history they can start at te beginning of this blog with post #1, because I have kept a loosely organized journal of my goings on. However, I'll try to sum it up briefly with what I think the greatest changes are that I have made.

I started out very timid, mining asteroids in the cistuvaert system. I was afraid of getting lost and didn't even jump out of the system for at least several days. I had no idea how detached one really is from their home system. I think I made my first excursion out of Cistuvaert when there was no asteroids left to mine. I had no choice but try another system. I found one next door called Aidert. I minted for a bit there, and learned about NPC pirates and I got my little frigate blowed up if I recall and I became scared of 0.6 security systems. I tried to stay in cistuvaert as much as possible since I didn't know of any other 1.0 systems near by (remember I was a newb who had no idea how small geographically or astrometrically the game actually is to a more experienced player). I ran into my first player pirate can flipper from Whiskey Pete's Dry Cleaning, and got my butt handed to me. Later when I could fly a vexor, which I used for mining I also started carrying flights of drones and I ventured out into aidert once again and let the drone take care of the rats while I ignored them.

The same can flipper showed up, flipped my can. And I went ahead and sicked my drones on him. I actually almost had him, he was deep into hull before I went pop. Ah well I felt pretty good for the try, but I was still mostly broke as new miners typically are. So I started again with the frigates. I graduated to industrial ships and when I didn't have time to mine with 1 minute cycles into cans, inwiuld park my uterine of various grades over time next to the asteroids and jus let the laser fill the cargo bay before thenroids went pop. It was still really slow progress. I could barely afford new skills let alone ships.

Anyway I kept in mining until I could fly and mastered mining with the hulk. I went into debt to get the hulk sooner, but had to work hard to pay it off. All that work soured me to mining. I was so sick of mining.

I figured i could still deal with minerals since I know what they are worth and I sold my hulk and used the capital to start buying minerals in Arnon and its neigbors and selling them in Oursulaert and Jita if the price warrented the longer trip. As I could afford rigs, I fitted them (this was when they were still one size and ultra expensive). My Iteron V was gradually become more costly than an obelisk, but it was a little at a time. After about six weeks of all night back and forth, I was about halfway togetting a freighter.

I ended up borrowing a billion isk from a total stranger (believe it or not), and I bought my freighter, realizing after the fact that I still had 4 days to go to complete Spaceship Command that I needed to train Advanced Spaceship Command so I could fly the darned thing. So anyway started hauling with the freighter and the ISK started to flow. Over a period of a few weeks, I started carrying mining equipment to Arnon to sell as a loss leader to get the miners working in Arnon and neighbors to stay put and mine more rocks for me. It worked. I started pulling 3-5 freighter loads of tritanium out of that constellation every single day since people don’t like hauling Trit. It takes more time to haul the Trit to Oursulaert than it does to mine an equivalent amount of ore for the other minerals.. After some time it dawned on me that the names of the people dumping minerals on my buy orders were rather random looking and I realized I was buying Macrod minerals. I filed a petition saying that look, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I think I am buying illegal minerals in a legitimate manner. The GM told me so long as I procured them in good faith at a fair price and I wasn’t buying them for something like 0.01 ISK, that I was safe and thanks for the notice. Well that combined with my internet connection going out for 10 days or so, the whole market collapsed. I tried to restore the mineral market, but my steam was gone, and it was no fun and a constant trade war with the other people who moved in while I was gone. So I changed everything and became a low sec trader.

I had trained for bigger and better ships, and I started flying occators through low sec to pickup minerals I bought with region wide orders than I could get cheaper than staying in high sec. I hauled those minerals for cheap out of low sec (for a fair price, just a better price for me). I did just fine with that and the extra margin made up for the loss of volume. I stopped trading tritanium because now it wasn’t worth it for me to haul it anymore since I couldn’t use my freighter to pick up minerals in low sec, and I started hauling the higher valued minerals (Pyrite was never good for trade for me). With the fit I had with the Occator, I was pretty much invincible with the shield extended up the wazoo and I carried WCS in my cargo hold in case I found a heavy gate camp to bust. I did just fine with ammo bouncing off of my shields until I went to warp until I ran into my first Heavy Interdictor in low sec. I didn’t know they could use their Warp Distruptors in low sec with a special script, but I learned it that day. All low sec operations halted while I figured out how to make this work again. I finally developed the Invulnerable MWD/Cloak/Warp for the Deep Space Transports. I haven’t lost another Occator since.

Every since then, I have been figuring out how I can draw more people out to low sec to reap the benefits of low sec, and increasing available space for all pilots by spreading out a little and all the other benefits that go with that…more targets for pirates, better targets that are harder to catch and so more fun to hunt, safer grounds for the industrialists that aren’t too carebear-ish for low sec. I began developing “safest” fits for industrial ships like mining frigates, mining barges and exhumers. I started an alliance meant to foster this education and use of low sec (which is still very much in development due to lots of spring time outdoors AFK from many alliance members, but mostly me).

Finally, the piece de resistance, the low sec Orca fit I recently developed and wrote about. I have been using it to bust camps with great confidence and non-chalance since, moving tons more stuff through low sec than ever before possible without a jump frieighter (requires alts or cyno team mate and 5 billion isk for just the ship). It can be flown solo, and carries roughly half the stuff the jump freighters can carry. Good shit!!! My mission is to continue to help develop low sec, write an article for E-ON magazine describing how to fit, fly and behave as an industrial based character in low sec in order to survive and thrive. I will continue to be very vocal about the benefits of being in low sec and how one can fly there safely if one follows the basic rules of low sec piloting. One might even be safer in low sec than in high sec if one considers that they let their guard down in high sec. I honestly can say that since I have lived in low sec that I have lost more ships in high sec than I have in low sec…all because I drop my guard.

That’s who was a timid miner afraid of leaving his home system to become, low sec trader, low sec developer, low sec industrial educator and crazy ass pilot finding ways to make the big ships safe to bust camps.

I am … Escoce

Participants:
CrazyKinux's Musing: The Heroes with a Thousand Faces
StarFleet Comms: Life. Evolved.
A Carebear's Journeu: This Carebear Thinks He Is Developing Teeth
The Elitist: Our ventures in EVE
A Mule in EVE: From a guppy predator
Travels of the Ronin: Evolution and Adaptation
The Ralpha Dogs: The Past Through Tomorrow
Where the frack is my ship: A journey, not a destination
I am Keith Neilson: 7 Year Itch?
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: Evolution Me
EVE Opportunist: A long history of a short time
Roc's Ramblings: Things Change
Guns Ablaze: Onwards and Upwards
EVE On Real Life: Haven't you grown up yet?
More as they get published...

[Delicious Tag: eveblogbanter18]

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Reverse petitions and hulkageddon

2010-06-17T10:45:00.002-05:00

I know CCP has ways of detecting macro-mining pattern in the logs if they are made aware by a player that points out the potential offender in a petition.

Well I have a good though unlikely to be implemented way to wreak worse havoc on macros.

The reverse petition in conjunction with hulkageddon. A police force of volunteers who roam the belts in search of baddie-bad micro miners. When a potential macro is found, a special type of petition is filed, which grants immediate immunity for what would ordinarily involve CONCORD intervention. The macro hunter would reap the rewards of the drop, and gain a sec-status boost just like they were ratting. Now of course mistakes will happen, and there is a way to deal with that too.

The reverse petition filed will flag the pilot with something like a convo request popup, but clearly a warning of impending doom with a countdown. If they do not acknowledge the accusation within say 15 minutes, the accused is criminally flagged with a standard counter and anyone may freely dispatch their ship (but not pod). Alternatively, the accused could be flagged only to the petitioner.

The method to avoid abuse (macro spamming), would be to limit the number of petitions each pilot may send between down times, as well as limit the number of petitions a pilot may receive. If either number is exceeded, then the petition fails and the miner is safe from both explosion and safe from macro spam.

Also, the same pilot cannot petition the same accused more that once per down time regardless of how many petitions either has left.

So this still opens doors to problems of abuse. There are ingame ways to prevent this. Firstly, a faction should be setup, one lime CONCORD but specifically for combating macro miners. Individuals or corporations would have to join this faction in a similar way to the militia for faction warfare. Trial accounts would be ineligeble, and there should be a security standing minimum requirement.

If the pilot makes a mistake and the accused was not using macros which a review of the pilot logs will reveal, and the pilot just had to go afk for some legitimate reason ( which he doesn't have to validate, he wasn't macroing after all), and files a petition, the the macro hunter would be forced to pay the replacement cost of the ship and all it's mods and cargo contents (crystals for instance). As well the macro hunter would suffer a security status just as if he killed a pilot under ordinary circumstances. If the security status falls steeply enough due to repeat mistakes, the pilot is unable to file the macro hunter petition until sec status is returned to acceptible levels or enough decay time occurs to nomalize the sec status they have now, say measured in days or weeks. If sec status falls below minimum entry requirements, the member (or Corp if it's a Corp membership) gets booted from the faction. So corps would be very careful to monitor their members or risk Corp expulsion.

This system would help improve the proposed goal, by ensuring only legitimate macro hunters would be interested and that they would be careful of who they mark as macros.

I know there are still holes, but in general what do you think?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Low Sec Orca Fitting

2010-06-14T11:19:00.003-05:00

UPDATE: In the fittings, I changed T2 Covert Ops Cloak to T2 Improved Cloak. My mistake.

Ok I have been researching fits for the Orca, and I have dramatically improved flying safely in an Orca for Low sec. I feel as comfortable flying my Orca through low sec as I am now with my Occator. You too can fly an Orca safely through low sec. That is if you have a few billion ISK to spend.

Implants in your head: Full Set of 6 Nomad implants, Alpha through Omega

Faction implants have secondary effects in addition to the attribute boosting effects most people are accustomed to. The Nomad faction implants give you +2 to each attribute, but in addition to that primary effect, they also grant a boost to your agility. With a full set of 5 implants, you get a raw 15% agility bonus, plus 10% bonus for the set of 5 implants granting a total of 16.5% agility boost. If you have the sixth Omega implant, you get a further 25% boost to the bonus giving up to a little more than a 20% bonus to agility. Better agility lets your ships turn and accelerate faster. These cost approx 2 billion isk at time of writing, though haggling can get them for less though. I got mine for 1.5 billion ISK by haggling with people who had contracts up for 2.1 billion ISK. That’s a 600 million ISK savings. Of course if you have 400,000 loyalty points or so with the right corporations, you can buy them from the NPC corporations that sell them. Phoetec Pharm makes them; I don’t know who else sells them for loyalty points.

Ok so you are asking, “Why would you spend 1.5 to 2.1 billion ISK for 20% boost to agility? You can get that with a T2 I-Stab”. Well mate, yes you are right, but consider this. My low slots are ALREADY filled with T2 I-Stabs and I still need the extra agility. “So why don’t you just use Low Friction Nozzle Rigs?”. Answer, I did that, but it still wasn’t quite enough. Plus I _discovered_ Engine Thermal Shielding, which boosts my MWD duration by 20%. Two of those and my MWD cycle is 14.4 seconds rather than 10 seconds. That’s 144% duration to my MWD cycle, the length of the MWD cycle means I have more time to align to warp WHILE CLOAKED. Which means I stand a MUCH better chance of being in warp before my cloak has dropped. So…..implants, these give me that extra sliver of agility that guarantees that I am in warp before my cloak drops instead of _almost_ in warp. Being _almost_ in warp, means you are going to eventually be _not almost, but actually and really_ dead.

That 1.5 billion ISK has let me fly my Orca in low sec with exactly the same confidence I have flying my Occator through low sec. What does that mean? That means, with my skills, I am able to fly a transport style ship through low sec that can carry 34,500m3 in the main cargo hold, 40,000m3 in the Corp Hanger, 50,000m3 in the Ore Cargo Bay (if I carry ore, which makes sense to carry some ore instead of minerals for this purpose). Plus several assembled (depending on size) ships in the Maintenance Hangar. My Occator could carry a little more than 38,000m3 which is pretty big, but this is MUCH bigger. No it’s not a freighter, and it’s a bit smaller than a jump freighter too, but I don’t need a Cyno team member, nor an alt…e-gad…and I fly normally carrying a lot more than the largest regular industrial ships you see flying around.

What are the drawback? The cost obviously…I have a lot of ISK in my head right now, so that really means I have to stop auto piloting around…even in high sec…unless I am flying a ship that can take a beating while waiting for CONCORD to come and clear the area for me. Last night, on my way to picking up the implants, my Helios was destroyed and I was sitting in Jita in my POD. On the way back I Auto piloted again (dumb mistake), and when I got back, my ship’s armor was gone and half the hull was gone, but my shield had fully recharged. CONCORD successfully intervened just moments before my ship was destroyed. I shouldn’t have been auto piloting a little light ship like that anyway, but it was REALLY stupid of me to do it with so much ISK on the line now. Never again. If you are going to autopilot through hisec, make sure you are flying a ship with enough raw hit points and resistances to take a good beating until CONCORD shows up.

Ok so the fitting:

Implants:

Nomad, full set of 6

Rigs:

2x Engine Thermal Shielding, for a 44% increase of MWD cycle time.

1x Ancillary Circuit Router (gives extra Grid so you can fit an MWD)

High Slots:

1x T2 Improved Cloak

2x of whatever else you want(I fit tractor beam and salvager)

Medium Slots:

1x Meta 4 MWD (You can’t fit a T2)

1x T2 ECM Burst, so you get another roll of the dice to get away if you do get caught.

1x Large Regolith Shield Extender for extra hit points to your shield so you last longer while trying to break target locks with WCM Burst and ECM Drones. Invulnerability Shield Hardener for Resistance Boosting (Giving you even more effective hit point on the shield)

Low Slots:

2x T2 I-Stabs, for more agility…i.e. faster align and acceleration times

Drone Bay: 5x Medium ECM Vespas (to gain more dice rolls to let you escape if you get caught…If you are doing mining support in low sec, launch these drone ahead of time so they automatically lock an aggressor, also keep your distance from the belt and stay cloaked until you need to tractor a can in, your tractor beam can pull from MUCH farther away with ship role bonuses.)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Orca 1 : Pirates 0

2010-06-09T13:04:00.001-05:00

So I have been busy and mostly away from both Eve and therefore by extension haven’t had anything really to write about. In March, I spent a week in the desert speaking at the 3rd annual organic beekeeping conference. Being out in nature and away from all thing internet for a week really changed my perspective a bit, plus spring has arrived and all the outdoor work that is involved in that, including beekeeping stuff, like building beehives and managing the colonies that survived winter, etc. Anyway, so much in Eve for me hasn’t happened except to log on to manage my skill queue and ensure I am still training something useful.

Well I have been spending some time in low sec as you all know, and in fact I hadn’t been back in high sec in several months, except for a few weeks ago I did take a few loads of minerals purchased in lowsec over those months to sell in high sec for some quick cash.

Last week however I decided to bring my industrial gear deeper into lowsec where I planned to operate most of my industry related stuff, so I did a brief scouting of the route in my Helios checking for local activity along the route (not just kills). I returned and hopped in my Orca full of working ships, and headed out along the way. Immediately someone popped into local, and we apparently arrived together at the same gate along my path, and of course my heart skipped a beat before I realized it was a Bestower. Ok no big deal, so we went along on our business following mostly the same path, and nothing else exciting happened.

I hadn’t flown the orca through low sec in a while, so I was being as careful as I could be to hone my gate camp busting skills at each gate even though I didn’t need to use them. It’s a good idea really to do it in low sec anyway. You have no idea how quickly you can get targeted and HIC scrambled compared with how long it takes to align an uncloaked Orca. As I approach the last gate to my final destination, I discovered the blood rush pounding in my ears could get louder than it ever had before, or rather at least as loud and hard as the last time it happened. I flew right into a big cloud of pirates.

For the sake of disclosure, I cannot purely say I have never lost an Orca in low sec, but at least I can say I haven’t lost one due to a lack of skill or negligence or poor piloting. I lost one many months ago when I first skilled up and learned how to fit and make safe an Orca for low sec use. I can legitimately say I lost my ship due to my client locking up. You see I run LINUX on my computer which then in turn requires I use WINE to run windows applications on my LINUX system. This ordinarily works perfectly, however the release of WINE during that encounter had a known bug (which I didn’t know about), that caused a Fatal Exception Error to occur during certain types of graphics glitches (such as shading and texturing of models) which are common but barely noticeable for Eve-on-WINE users. Anyway, as soon as I got shot, the graphic representation of the Orca has or had one of those glitchy graphics and being hit caused my client to crash. I had to work fast to kill all the EVE and WINE related processes running and stuck, so I could restart Eve to hopefully find I had warped to a logoff safe spot. Well, when I finally logged back in, I found myself in my backup clone with about 3.5 billion to spend to replace what I had lost. That was the first time the blood rushing in my ears pounded this loudly. But look, I am not a carebear. It hurt, and it wasn’t my fault and not fair, but it was part of my choice to live life this way and the only thing to do is file a petition, and hope and just move on forward. I don’t recall getting even a response for the petition…I don’t even remember if I filed one…ah well besides the point.

So here I am in space, in an Orca, just flown into a gate camp, and they were 5 or 6 sensor boosted HICs waiting at the gate for my arrival. This isn’t the time to think about what to do, either your training takes over and you just do what you are supposed to, or you die. I am glad I spent months training all my navigation skills to max out my agility and align times and fit all the modules and rigs to bring my ship to bear quickly on my warp out point. I spent weeks perfecting the timing involved, because the operation is slightly different than the Occator which I am as comfortable in as my own skin, but that slight difference in operation is the difference between life and death here and now.

I jump through the gate. There is one pirate on the other side scouting that side of the gate. Again, there is no time to let them to regroup and get ready, I must act instantly. Within the bat or two of an eye, I align to station, hit my MWD and cloak. Pirate ships are jumping in all around. Boy the ship sure does turn quickly when she’s at stop, agility boosted, and with the MWD going, and the cloak running. Yes the cloak helps your turning speed by slowing down forward acceleration. This helps the ship turn faster since a moving ship turns much slower a ship that is stopped. I turn off the MWD and wait for the cycle to reach that critical moment to shut off the cloak and hit warp. More ships jumping into local, four, five then six of them all trying to find me. There, I do it, and I am sitting there waiting for the Orca to lurch forward. It sure seems like I am visible and vulnerable for a long time. Then finally she accelerates to warp speed.

To sum up what followed:

The very next thing I see in local from some girl toon is:

 /me jaw drops to the floor
Next thing I see from someone else is:

 ^#%^W cheater

The girl said something like, “Hey, you’re the guy that does ”

I said, “Yea, you read my blog then?”

She, “sometimes”

Me, “Well now you know I wasn’t bullshitting”

She, “That was really impressive”

In private convo shortly later with the gang leader who didn’t want his guy to start swearing angry again so made it private told me when I asked that my ship was totally invulnerable to target locking during that episode. I thought that was pretty awesome to have feedback from someone genuinely trying to kill me.

All in all they ended up being a really straight up gang, and I think I made some friends, though I am certain they’ll continue to try and kill me. I’ll update this blog post with their names, but I am writing this at work and don’t have the chat logs with me. I’ll also post the edited for brevity chat logs in another post tomorrow or the next day after I can clean them up a bit.

Anyway, I thought you might like to read about my first TRUE gate camp busting episode with an Orca.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Canoeing in Canada

2010-02-09T15:10:00.000-06:00

I love the outdoors, especially the wilderness, and as a child I was
very lucky to be raised in a family that enjoyed an outdoors
lifestyle. We lived in the Appalachia of New Jersey, and merely taking
a short walk outside granted access to less than travelled wilderness.
However; one of the best places to experience the wilderness is
Canada. Canada has some of the most beautiful wild country, and I have
been lucky enough to see some of its more spectacular wonders. The
forest carpeted mountains, and glacier hewn bedrock valleys have
produced a wild variety of sights to see. The royal and provincial
parks of Canada are some of the best places to experience the northern
wilderness untouched.

If Canada is one of the best places to experience the northern
wilderness, then canoeing through the various systems of finger-lakes
is perhaps the best way to be there. My family including my aunts,
uncles and cousins would travel each summer to one of the provincial
parks in Quebec , Ontario or other province and be dropped by sea
plane into the middle of a lake somewhere near nowhere at all. After
off loading our canoes and camping gear, we’d paddle away from the
plane and make our own way through the lake system for the next two
weeks. We always brought a topological map with us to help find our
way and also to record where we have been. The only food we took with
us fit into a small wooden box made backpack of condiments, herbs,
spices and a few boxes of Red River hot cereal for breakfast.
Otherwise, we were completely and utterly on our own and only ate what
we managed to find or catch on our own. If someone got hurt, there was
no way out until the plane returned to pick us up where it dropped us
off. Soon after being dropped off, we looked for a suitable camp site
on the map. These parts were bear country, so a suitable place was
usually on an island big enough for room to pitch up to ten or twelve
largish tents and to provide enough privacy for bathing and other
requirements nature demands from us.

Each morning we would select a new site for the next evening. Then we
would pack up our gear; load up the canoes, clear the area of debris.
After hopping in the canoe, we would start paddling out into the lake,
and find our way along to the next site. Often the next site was in
another lake, and the only way to get there was by portage. A portage
is when you pick up your canoe and carry it over land to get to the
next waterway. Sometime a portage is just a few feet, but other times
you can carry the canoe for a couple miles or more. One time when
taking the canoe out of the water, I slipped and fell. My elbow
cracked against the bedrock with canoe fully in hand. Although I
didn’t break my arm, it swelled up pretty badly and I was unable to do
any serious work for the rest of the trip. Even when you don’t have to
portage, sometimes you can paddle ten or fifteen miles or more to the
next site. Either way, you are getting some serious exercise.

Setting up camp was a chore. Uncle Bob, the patron of the camping
trips, would get the fire started; some of us would pitch the tents
while the rest of us went fishing to catch dinner. We quietly spread
out across the lake in our canoes, and since there were quite a few of
us, someone almost always caught a walleye or northern pike for
dinner. Sometimes you caught some lake trout or sun fish which we
saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. Later if you were lucky you had some
free time to explore. Sometimes I would just hop in a canoe and paddle
gently around the lake edges, or maybe I would get lucky and find a
patch of wintergreen or wild blueberries. Score! A handful of fresh
blueberries to add to our already awesome Red River cereal is
amazingly good fortune. Maybe you just went swimming and cooled off
with the leeches if you didn’t mind them. No matter what, I always
found something to do.

Just before evening, we quickly retired to our tents because there is
an alarm that goes off as the sun starts to dip in the sky. A steady
hum grows steadily louder, and the skies darken. It’s the mosquitoes.
I don’t mean mosquitoes like you have even seen around here. I mean
hoards. Millions upon millions of biting, poking, itchy little insects
rise out of the wet ground cover and lake edges and take to the skies
in search of you. They know where you are, and they want you. You
either were in your tent, or were hovering in the smoke of the fire.
No other place was safe. As the sun was setting, you could see their
shadows gathering by the hundreds on the outside of your tent. That
marked the end of each evening.

Mornings are a much cheerier affair. Other than having to wake up at
all in the morning, which is never much fun for me, you are greeting
by a mist covered lake and the call of the loons. It is hard to
describe the pleasantly spooky, eerie and alluring call of the loons
that carries clear across the surface of the lakes. It sounds like a
long warbling sort of owl hoot, a description that does it no justice.
The call of the loon is so alluring, that there are recordings you can
buy to listen to in dark solitude. We made hot Red River cereal,
hopefully with blueberries picked the previous afternoon, and
sometimes we had some lake trout too if we had caught any. We sat
fireside and lakeside and ate while mystified by the call of the birds
or maybe we even sighted a bear, moose or caribou. Eventually though
and every day for two weeks, the lazy morning was over, and it was
time to plot the next stage of our voyage, and break camp. Then
finally, and with reluctance, we had to go home.

I fondly remember each and every day spent on those canoe trips. Maybe
now the days blur together, but I remember everything in detail. The
maps have been framed and are hanging on our walls. After I cracked my
elbow, I later found that I had broken a chip off in my elbow. I still
have that chip today, and I know exactly which rock did that to me. I
still love my Red River cereal. Perhaps it’s just the memories, or
maybe it’s really is just good, but either way makes no difference to
me. There are lots of very lazy pleasant moments as well as tough
times when camping in the deep wilderness. It’s rough and often hard
work, but it’s worth every single moment when you get to see things
that most of civilization has forgotten. I haven’t forgotten because I
have been there, and I remember.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Oops, one of my CEOs killed someone

2010-01-30T22:20:00.002-06:00

Re: Weathers - attack in Providence
From: Escoce
Sent: 2010.01.30 21:36
To: United Trade Syndicate, Jivane Cys'Veren,

Dear Jivane,
If you would like to attend one of our training seminars "lowsec for carebears", let me know and I will forward you an application. It's excellent training for pilots in all security status spaces. No one should expect to be safe and no one should fit their ships believing they will be safe unless you are willing to take the risk. You rolled the dice, and you lost the dice roll. I am sorry, that's my official stance.

Let me know if you would like me to forward an application for one of our training sessions for "lowsec for carebears"

Sincerely,
Escoce
Executor
United Trade Syndicate

--------------------------------
Weathers - attack in Providence
From: Jivane Cys'Veren
Sent: 2010.01.29 01:12
To: Escoce,

Hi Escoce,

I was attacked by a CEO of a corporation within your alliance today. From what I can see, your alliance is trade based, and I was suprised to be attacked.

Are you able to arrange compensation?

I am obliged to send you this email prior to lodging a request to have alliance/corp flagged as KOS within Providence.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Jiv

As below.

2010.01.29 00:43:00

Victim: Jivane Cys'Veren
Corp: Graduate School of Applied Knowledge
Alliance: Ishuk-Raata Enforcement Directive
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Iteron Mark V
System: D61A-G
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 2573

Involved parties:

Name: Weathers (laid the final blow)
Security: 0.4
Corp: Smoking Minerals Syndicate
Alliance: United Trade Syndicate
Faction: NONE
Ship: Hound
Weapon: Electron Bomb
Damage Done: 2573

Destroyed items:

Warp Disruptor I, Qty: 2 (Cargo)
Expanded Cargohold II
Warp Scrambler I, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
Medium Cargohold Optimization I, Qty: 3
Ultraviolet S (Cargo)
Type-D Power Core Modification: Capacitor Flux (Cargo)
Type-D Power Core Modification: Reaction Control (Cargo)
Ultraviolet M (Cargo)
Ultraviolet L, Qty: 3 (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Expanded Cargohold II, Qty: 4
Xray L, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
Warp Core Stabilizer I, Qty: 12 (Cargo)
Voltaic Nanite Regenerative Membrane I (Cargo)
Tungsten Charge M, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Tritanium, Qty: 3832262 (Cargo)

Been sick

2010-01-28T11:07:00.001-06:00

My family and I have been very sick lately, starting with each of my kids, then my wife, and finally me with pnuemonia, so there hasn't been a lot of eve activity at all.

The only things I have been up to are skill queue management, some light weight trading, and easy collection runs of product that has built up over time.

I missed the last blog banter, but I think I will try and get it rolling late anyway. In essense the only new plans I have for this year are developing the alliance I accidentally created in December with the help of Casiella Truza and the other CEOs who will help take charge. An alliance cannot be run by one person alone and I will be relying on them to step up and take charge of the different operational aspect of alliance management from op organization to coopertive efforts in trade and industry. I'll have more to say on this shortly after we have had a chance to have our first real summit of alliance leaders.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Back to School

2010-01-09T20:22:00.001-06:00

So I am taking 'ENG Writing Composition I' which I don't have credits for. They didn't want me to register classes until they got my transcripts from the University of Miami, but was like look I know what I took and I am not willing to waste my time and money so it's ok, just sign my in. So he wrote me in for a math class for 4 semester hours, and I don't remember 1st year courses being 4 credits, he said it's a non credit course to prepare me for higher math. I am incredulous. I scored well in trig, but not so good in algebra, so you want me to take a non credit course? Good god, I finally said, I'll just take the exam again, I have a stack of professional certs a few inches thick that says o can prepare. I mean I decided to do this all in like one day and didn't have any prep time, have perfect scores in all sections except one and you say I am not ready? No thanx, I'll just take something in english and take the exam over thanx.

So I start school again on the 18th, my transcripts should be approved by then and I can take whatever the hell I want in the summer. Maybe I'll go back and add a second class for the first semester.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Going Back to School

2010-01-08T12:47:00.000-06:00

So yeah, I am going back to school, and I don't mean studying refinery efficiency or corporate management. I mean real life school. I just completed the Compass exam which is like the ACT exam for placement. Did very well in all sections except college algebra. Gah! When I took my SATs 20 years ago I scored a 1480, but I guess when one doesn't practice algebra one really does forget. I even did better on the trig section than the algbra section. I guess it's cause I remember Soh Cah Toa.

I am waiting to speak to an academic advisor to pick classes. Just going part time with one or two classes until I get comfortable with a larger course load.

Wish me luck!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

My Skill Pie Chart

2010-01-01T20:37:00.000-06:00

Low Sec Mining and Probing Gravimetrics Sites

2009-12-10T13:17:00.001-06:00

So in the spirit of preparing people to move into or at least make use of low sec, I decided to try a few thing I hadn't yet done. This is a justification, not a howto. I have linked two sites below for good tutorials on how to do this.

One of those thing to do is mining. Well when I ran the numbers, I realized it made no sense to mine in low sec. I could make slightly more money in High Sec, for far less risk. Wait, did I just say that? I did, and it bothered me a bit to say it.

But wait...

Astrometrics, the science of cartography helps you find better stuff right? Better rats, better complexes, all sorts of things. Well what about asteroid belts, after asking around a bit in my favorite channels, I got a good amount of data about astrometrics and probing, but no one knew a whole heck of a lot about scanning down asteroid belts. So I reviewed my skills, and luckily I already had the basic requirement to start scanning down deep space sites. I did a little bit of reading on http://rift.chromebits.net, and some stuff written by ccp greybeard on the eve online website. I hoped into a covops ship I already had (a Helios) since they are given astrometrics role bonuses, and fitted it with all t1 gear for scanning.

Since it was my first time, I did some practicing I. High sec and learned the basics of making the system work, then in an hour or so I headed out to low sec.

I systematically probed out each system in the region. Let me tell you what I found. I found null sec ores. Yep, I found crokite, dark ochre, and gneiss. Wow, that's the stuff that alliances work really hard to protect from foreign miners out in deep null sec, and it's already right here in empire.

Now before you ask, no you can't find this stuff in high sec, I looked. In high sec, if you successfully scan down asteroid belts, you'll find they will be higher quality high sec belts, and some of the standard low sec asteroids that don't warrant scanning down in the first place since veldspar is worth more than low sec asteroids, and it's the same stuff that made going out to low sec to mine really stupid.

So this means that if you are willing to hunt down some belts in lowsec, you too can mine some 20 million isk an hour asteroids with joining or paying a null sec alliance to do it.

You do need to spend a couple of days training g to be able to scan grav sites. You'll find them, but with only the basic skills, you'll not be able to pinpoint them enough to actually bookmark or warp to them, but it's worth it to be able to mine stuff worth 4x as much as the best asteroid belts in high sec.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Swooosh!!!

2009-12-03T14:01:00.000-06:00

Yep that's the sound of 1 billion ISK flushed down the toilet. As 00Sage00 kindly pointed out, when I completed Empire Control V, which coincided with the release of Dominion, I decided to toy with the alliance interface.

Now in all honesty and in the spirit of full disclosure, I did and do intend to create an alliance. That is the specific reason for my training all those Corp Management skills. I wasn't however ready to create an alliance yet. I was trying to discover what I needed ready and what I needed to know ahead of time.

Now, nearly every other interface in the game has a confirmation window. Buy orders, sell orders, contracts, cancelling a contract creation, quiting the game. Everything that involves ISK, standings, or your online status has a built-in confirmation process. Why in all of New Eden, there no confirmation window for the two processes that potentially have the greatest and most expensive ramifications on the game? I mean the only thongs more expensive than an alliance are capital ships. But you still have a confirmation window when you want to buy 1 round of ammo or 1 unit of tritanium.

I have put on a petition to have the action reversed. I suspect CCP won't honor that request, but for the sake of all the gods, at least let me rename it and give it ticker I would have givenore thought to if I had known.

Lesson here? Don't toy around with the alliance interface. Too many catastrophic accidents have occurred already, and many more are likely to come.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

I'm sorry...

2009-11-30T20:32:00.000-06:00

Ok first off this post is meant to help, honest. It is advice, but it's going to sound bitchy well cause it is a little.

People, quit saying you are sorry for not posting in x days or x weeks. No one cares. You aren't helping your image by starting every 1st, 2nd or 3rd post with "sorry". One of the more amusing facts is that it is those people who don't post often that say sorry most often. Don't be sorry, that's just how often you post. If you keep saying sorry, you really begin to sound like you didn't want to blog anyway but felt obligated. Just post and say what you want, and be done. If you and me and the rest of us are lucky well hear from you again soon. If not it's no big deal...honest.

Saying sorry all the time is a negative connotation and you are literally pointing out the problem for all to see. Ex. Sorry my resume is wrinkled. Sorry I am late, sorry I ate the last piece of salami, sorry i look like shit, sorry all i have is cheap ass wine and only a rusty corkscrew to open it, sorry genie I can't wish you free.

For all that is holy and unholy, please stop saying you are sorry.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Arnon and Peccanouette

2009-11-26T18:01:00.000-06:00

It's been a long time since I had been to Arnon. However; in the course of the mineral market taking a downward swing, my bid to buy minerals in Essense region reached Arnon and the surrounding systems in the constellation Peccanouette. I flew over there in my freighter to pick up the massive amounts of minerals that quickly accumulated. I was amazed at how much the place has grown since the days I built up the mineral market there.

When I began my career as a miner I lived in the Peccanouette constellation mining plagioclase, omber, scordite and veldspar, but mostly plagioclase. I quickly learned that bringing your minerals to Oursulaert was much more profitable than selling to the nastily cheap bids to be found out here on the far edge of the region. Another thing quickly learned was that a hauler full of tritanium and/or pyerite didn't get you a whole lot of extra money and it made more fiscal sense to just dump your cheap minerals on the market where ever you were so you could fill up on more Mexellon and Isogen. Since I soon got bored of mining on my own, only getting into large mining operations on a rare occasion with my friends, I tried something different.

I started buying the tritanium that people didn't want to haul to Oursulaert and carried it for them. Some people still hauled their own tritanium when the price was really bad, but if I offered a fair bid at about 30 cents less than the bids in Oursulaert, people were more than happy to sell it to me. I was giving them a fair and much better price and there was enough margin to operate profitably. I soon began working in both directions, carrying at first mining crystals, and then mining modules and mining frigates and finally mining barges, exhumers and strip miners.

I started talking to miners in the newbie systems and invited other veteran miners out to Peccanouette to reap the benefit of a cluster of good mining systems plus a mineral market and mining supply chain right there in place right where you are. I soon found in my Iteron Mark V, that I couldn't haul enough to keep up with business. I was running back and forth constantly between Peccanouette and Oursulaert and inventory grew faster than I could move it, but so was my net worth climbing as well, and one at a time I fitted rigs to my Iteron Mark V until I maxed out what it could carry.

I finally bought my Obelisk, and steam rolled Peccanouette and built it into a really nice marketplace, and the best part was i was making enough to stay ingame strictly by buying GTCs with isk to pay for my subscription. I was in a great position to keep the competition out, and I learned market warfare and all that stuff that makes life easy for me but hard for the other guy. Things like artificially raising prices letting the others penny me and each other up, then going ahead and dumping my inventory on them for a profit without having to haul it anywhere, and setting the market back where I wanted it.

Seeing my project grow from something I created to support my own habit, into becoming the central mineral market serving three regions really tugs at my emotions and pulls out the best salty carebears tears...tears of pride.

Anyway, why am I telling you this again? Because oh my god, the tiny mining hub and mineral market I created has grown to colosal proportions. It's the mineral equivelent of Oursulaert, not quite as big but pretty close focused on stripping all mineral resources of Peccanouette. And...everyone, everyone, everyone, my corp, my mining associates, and traders alike...all of them thought I was crazy to haul tritanium, and it made me a multi-billionaire. Today, people are now calling me crazy for turning efforts to low sec, and say I can't possibly create a market hub in low sec. I am now done focusing on one region's low sec and beginning to branch out into a second region of low sec. What do you think?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Most Embarassing Ship Losses

2009-11-09T14:08:00.001-06:00

Bill over at http://journeytoneweden.blogspot.com/2009/11/oh-no.html, posted about his most embarassing ship loss. Well since I haven't been inspired with fresh material and since I have a couple embarassing
moments, I thought i was share them. Good topic Bill.

My most embarrassing ship loss was also a total newbie move on my part as well. As previously written about, I had gotten very good at running missions with frigates and assault frigates, and subsequently
moved out into Low Sec to further my trade career. I stopped running missions as the principle need for running missions for me was for corp and faction standings. Anyway, I guess my mission skills had
gotten stale.
My then corp mate who plays with a rather spotty schedule, asked for some help with some level 3 or 4 drone nest mission since he was still relatively new at running them. Since I was online I offered to come
on over to help him complete the mission. I got in my ishkur and headed his way. The first room was mostly cleared and he hadn't gotten into the second room yet, so we headed that way after clearing out the
remainders of the first room and finding the trigger to unlock the warp gate to the second room. I proceeded to warp on in, and my corp mate followed, and I hight tailed it over to the first closest group
of drones (which included some cruiser and battleship class drones). No problem, I start getting hit, and I speed tank the damage as well as running my reppers on full. When all of a sudden, I started taking
on massive damage very quickly.
I went to warp out, and I wasn't warping either. I informed my corp mate I was about to die, and then waited for the inevitable and just trying to take out as many drones as I could before I did finally pop.

I quickly warped to the nearest semblance of a market hub and fitted me up a replacement ishkur, warped back in through the gates to the second room, and proceeded to get my ass handed to me yet again in
short order. This time however, I noticed that I was getting webbed and scrammed. I hadn't noticed it the first time, and lost a second ship because I was "too good" to worry about such things in a mission.
I was a Low Sec pilot after all right? Holy cow, 2 ships with 200 million isk each lost within a period of about 5 minutes.
This time I refitted a new ship, came back and slowly went to work on the drones, kiting them out with my drones, and pulling them in small groups to range, and we finished the mission, but at too great a cost.
I mean I can afford the loss, and my corp mate worried quite a bit too much about it, but it was embarassing as hell.
There was another time I lost two ships back to back last year sometime. I lost two domi's in a level 4 mission I was trying to run solo, but just couldn't get it done alone with the domi's. I let
myself get in far too deep a trouble before aligning to warp out and one time actually saw my ship explode in warp. After loosing two ships, I ended up asking my then CEO to give me a hand and he was
happy to. He came in with an Ishtar (T2 HAC), which had the most amazing shield tank on it. I couldn't even come close to breaking the tank with Domi, guns and drones combined. Anyway, just splitting the
aggro in that one room that was giving me trouble ended up being more than enough to help.

Both situations embarassing, but the ishkur losses were the most embarassing, being a hardnosed low sec pilot now after all.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Blog Banter #13: Missions with player adversaries

2009-10-27T14:03:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The first banter of this 2nd year of EVE Blog Banters comes to us fromZargyl from A Sebiestor Scholar, who asked the following: On the EVE Fanfest 2009 page are pictures of prizes for the Silent Auction that was held during the event. One of these photos was entitled “Design your own EVE mission”. My question now would be what kind of mission would you write if you got that prize? What would the mission be about? Would it be one using the new system of epic mission arks? What would be the story told by it? Feel free to expand upon his questions and put together your very own mission!

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I know I always spin the banter a little off course, and I do it here again, but bare with me please, because I believe most post really hits the crux of problems with missions as they stand today. With that, please carry on....

Roc Weiler always has wonderful ideas, and I quite like his train of thought on his version of the blog banter. As such, I especially like the fact, that his line of thinking doesn't necessarily involve fire power, but choices and timing. What we have now is essentially a cookie cutter system, with variations of themes for sure, but cookie cutter never the less.

All missions are good for 1 week, if you complete them within a predescribed early interval, you get a bonus. If you start a mission, but fail to complete it before the next down time, you are forced to (or get to, depending on your perspective) do it all over again from the beginning as the mission parameters are are reset at down time. For people who mission and mine or have corps that do this, this is a source of income, in that mission runners scout out good missions to "hold open" for themselves or their corps, and run arround completing the missions but not reporting them, and then their mining compatriots and salvagers swoop in for some clean pickings and mining in relative peace and luxury from competing mining organizations, save for the rare ninja mission miners which usually look for looting missions not mining missions. So what we have a week long cycle of people running missions, and mining them of everything of value, failing to report the mission and doing it again.

In those cases where people do not take advantage of the resources provided in missions, they simply run missions for standings, and rapid fire missions as fast as possible. I did this myself when my goal was in increase standings for this or that corporation for tax reduction, increased refining efficiency or whatever reason. And people who do this, learn to play the missions like a chess game, a prescription of events and how to finish these missions in as fast as possible a manner.

When I was getting bored with missions, I learned to mix it up a bit, and I would try to do things differently. Many mission runners just run high end missions with battleships or battle cruisers and rarely do anything outside the prescription of that mission (usually found on eve-survival). I on the other hand tried something different. After being able to complete pretty much every mission that was thrown at me, I upped the ante a little bit. I started running missions in Frigates, and found I could complete almost every mission except a couple level three missions, and found I could even complete a few level 4 missions in a frigate. Don’t get me, wrong, I very often needed to warp away or try again tomorrow if I screwed the mission up somehow, and often got my ships blowed up, so I am not saying I am calling myself a perfect mission runner by any means, but the point is that I could complete these ubber tough missions with a frigate. After than I tried running missions with Assault Frigates, specifically the Ishkur, and found all those other missions I really couldn’t finish with a Frigate I could finish with my assault frigate. I mean really? Level 4 missions with Assault Ships, or even Frigates no less? Something is wrong with that, I mean I know there is some real person skill to missions, but seriously a single Frigate taking out a whole fleet of battleships, cruisers, drones and whositz? Obviously that’s brainless, it obviously has almost NOTHING to do with the size of the fleet or how the encounter is scripted that should ordain a mission “tough”.

With that said, I don’t have so much a mission or mission arc, but rather have a bunch of mechanics ideas that I think would add a lot of fun and force some player interaction on mission runners. Yes I mean taking Missions and making them singular PvP events that have a LASTING affect on the environment and dynamic backstory. There should be missions that ARE tough, but tough no matter which ship you bring in, Frigate or Super Carrier, and require planning, cunning and wile more than the prescribed method the complete mission xyz. This again requires more than an algorithm controlled npc fleet, it requires real people. The point shouldn’t necessarily be to “go to system XYZ, warp to coordinates, fight, fight some more, get item(s), come back with item(s)”. Missions should be a hunt, or otherwise more complicated process, or even better. How about PvP missions. There are always missioners looking for missions for almost every corp and faction out there. Perhaps we could have Mission Agents send you out to find “enemies of the state” or race to get or destroy an item before the enemy gets their hands on it, or get the item before the enemy destroys it. Or perhaps a race to get a vital commodity to some starving world first so our mission corp/faction gets public credit for the humanitarian aid.

There should be grand missions that really do require the coordination of a whole corporation or at least a part of it performing as an “agency” of the empire, to perform greater feats, such staking claim to some certain moon by anchoring a POS on it and you have to get there before the enemy does, or even before the moon is claimed by a random non-missioning player. Perhaps this might include a full battle wing contingent to defend the area from the competing missioning corps AND the other randoms that might show up so you can lay claim to this moon in the name of your mission faction. Or perhaps throwing mission runners into faction warfare, even if only as a singular event thus developing personal reputation with the faction warriors for both good and bad.

Faction Warrior might request backup through their faction commanders so that these requests filter down and through to NPC corp and faction mission runners.

The PvE and PvP aspects of the game are currently only loosely associated through the industrial chain and the random Salvaging Ninja, or Gate Camp getting in the way of “personal progress”, and they have little to no true interaction between them outside the industry chain. I believe these ideas, tying the PvE and the PvP aspects of the game together, would only make for a better immersion of the game, environment and backstory and really glue these aspects of the game together, and make for a much better game for PvPers and PvEers alike.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Partyin with Hellcats

2009-10-25T08:40:00.003-05:00

So ~~tonight~~ last night (i feel asleep while writing this) we had us a party. The hottest chicks in the eve universe hosted a PvP party in Evati and it was a blast. I didn't give myself a lot of time to get ready, and threw a bunch of Rifters and fittings in my Occator and headed on over to Evati.

Rule #1, when getting ready for a PvP fest, don't get dressed in a hurry, I had decided to go full vanilla T1 because I knew already I was going to get my ass handed to me over and over again. Well being in a hurry I showed up with the wrong ammo. You see T2 ammo doesn't fit in T1 cannons. Gah!!! Mynxee was kind enough to bring lots of toys for us to play with, but I was too embarrassed to ask for a new ship every minute and a half (that's about how long all the timers last between getting killed and being able to finally undock again). So I flew off to go buy some proper cannons for my ships. Paid a terrible price for them, but in was in a rush looking for the closest group of 30 cannons and not looking for the best deal. OMFG, only 24 autocannons fit in a rifter cargo hold...GAH! Lesson here again is don't wait till the last minute to get dressed for a party.

There were billions of ISK in prizes handed out and the evening was absolutely crazy. Faction ships, cash, T2 rigged ships, corpses, exotic dancers and all sort of other fun stuff were passed around, one prize per 10 minutes I think was the going rate, I think it ended up hovering around 1 billion ISK being handed out every 30-45 minutes.

Events finally started to slow down, I packed my things up to go since we were talking about it being pretty much over. I didn't get to fight mynxee or Shae Tiann, but halfway home I hear they're out dogfighting...er is that catfighting? GAH! (I seem to be saying that a lot in this post) I missed to chance to fight with the two greatest loves of everyone's Eve lives. That alone would have been worth every ISK in my wallet. Ah well.

The Hellcats PvP party was truly a blast, and I hope to be invited to the next one. It inspires me to host an event of my own, but with a different spin, instead of random PvP fest (which was a blast, but that belongs to the hellcats).

Mynxee, Shae, and to the rest of the hellcats; thank you so much for a great great time and gratz on a job well done indeed.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so deal with the spelling, grammer, and odd out of place or mis-autocorrected word.

A sort of page two...YOU WANNA DO WHAT???

2009-10-21T01:20:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned earlier, it was a little premature to post the mission and goals of Interstellar Tritanium (Ticker: ITTRI), but I honestly needed to post it having not posted anything on the blog for a while, and the fact that I have been sitting there doing not much except performing some of those said roles instead of recruiting and getting people on-board with it. Let me try to explain a little more about the purpose of Interstellar Tritanium....This is another lame attempt at writing well, I also wrote this in a rush, but here goes with round two of the initial recruitment docs and orientation about who we are and what we do.

First and MOST importantly, the mission of Interstellar Tritanium is to get more people into Low Sec. Yes that means by increasing ITTRI membership, but that's a small sliver of the mission. It is ITTRI's mission to get OTHER poeple out to Low Sec. Why would we want to do that? Well most people once they've either taken heed of others or experienced the perils of Low Sec on their own and paid for it and DON'T want to go to Low Sec unless they have aspirations of Piracy and Faction Warefare. Currently low sec is like a DMZ, on one side you have High Sec which is controlled by CONCORD and the Empire Factions, on the other side you have Null Sec which is sporadically controlled by alliances. Pretty much, if you stay in your own space, either in High Sec or you own alliance owned Null Sec regions, you are fairly (though not completely) safe. In the middle you have this DMZ or no man's land, where there are really no consequences to being out there other than being vulnerable...honestly though you are only vulnerable due to your own weaknesses, but I digress.

Wait a minute, rewind a little here. Why would I want to do this?

There are more valuable things to do in Low Sec than in High Sec, but no one except the very confident, daring or stupid go to low sec. Why? Because of the added Risk vs. Reward factor. Currently since nearly the only folks that inhabits Low Sec as a home are Pirates and Faction Warriors, and of course yours truly, the risk to spend time in Low Sec to get that better percentage of value is too high, but that real value is there. There is more valuable ore not to mention more of it since no one is mining it, the missions and complexes are usually much better. There are more Ice Belts, there are OMGWTFTONS of empty queues for Manufacturing and Researching. There are OMGWTFTONS of EVERY resource left untapped and wasted.

Ok so why don't you go out and grab it?

Well I am, that is what I am doing right now on my own and doing it successfully from a profit margin standpoint, but I have also realized this space would become a LOT more valuable if more people came out here.

Why would more people make it more valuable?

One word. Volume, but .... Well because right now using myself as an example, for it to be effective I have travel all around 5 regions in a Deep Space Transport (much much safer than a freighter) gathering all kinds of different stuff at fuck cheap prices from minerals to ammo to modules to ships, to bring it all to central staging points in High Sec, so I can pick it up from those staging points, carry it in a freighter to drop it off in another staging point in High Sec to near a Low Sec Market turn around and bring it back out to Low Sec in way far too many DST trips to sell it at Market. It takes days and weeks to make a single complete cycle. I operate profitably and I have a constant flow of merchanise because there is real demand for stuff in low sec, but by keeping my prices really low, I make sure that people buy from me rather than hop into freighters with their alts, go to Jita to buy expensive stuff (which puts money in OTHER people's pockets). That's a little backwards IMO, and I think it would make more sense if there was a more viable economy right there in low sec where I am working.

Huh? Who cares?

Ok, so lets say I am mining in Low Sec and I now have all these wonderful minerals that could be used in manufacturing. If I want to make a profit from these, I have one of two choices, I can haul it all back to Oursulaert or Jita or Hek or whereever else, and turn quite a tidy profit, but I have to haul it all there...in order to do that safely, I need to use either blockade runner or deep space transport (I prefer the DST for low sec hauling BTW), but those ships are so so tiny compared to a freighter, but I really can't safely fly the freighter in low sec because of the danger involved. OR I can dump it on the market, and sell it to the highest regional bidder (currently yours truly). The first way, ensures I make more profits for what I mined, but the second way means I can stay put and mine some more. However, hauling it out has it's risks, you have to get through the gate camps to and from your mining spot and high sec. And if you get your ship blowed up, it was full of sparkly highly valuable minerals that you just lost. Plus you loose valuable time hauling it. The second option is safer because I am not running gate camps full of minerals (which are likely more valuable than my mining ship), I am risking only the loss of my ship and with a modicum of sense and piloting skill I can get to safety with relative ease. Not only that, do I REALLY want to carry Tritanium and Pyrites over multijump routes to get them to a market? It is really worth it?

Wait a minute though, there are all these unused research and manufacturing facilities out here. What if I could just drop my minerals off here where I already am. I wouldn't have to haul them away, and because I am not wasting my time I can sell them for a little bit less that I would have to if I were hauling them all the way to market and I can make more money because I can mine more minerals. Not only that, but the people using these facilities wouldn't have to bring their own minerals either, meaning using these facilities would be a LOT more attractive for all parties...AND AND (yes that's right two) because everything is a little cheaper and less work, THEY can afford to pay someone to haul the products out so "I" don't have to do it (well what I mean is, "I" want or someone else wants to haul YOUR shit for you), or EVEN BETTER sell that shit right where they are, or only a couple jumps to the closest market hub, which incidently the closest market hub will likely be in Low Sec, instead of in Oursulaert which is probably 9 or 10 jumps away. Gosh can you imagine how much easier all that is? It's like High Sec, but not as congested. Being able to mine, manufacture and sell stuff all in the same station or system, or Holy Shit even just in the same constellation would be nice for a change.

Have you ever tried getting a manufacting or research job in Oursulaert? Really, have you tried it? How long are the waiting lists? Did you look in the rest of the region? I am willing to bet that in Oursulaert the waiting list approaches 2 months before your job even starts. In the rest of Essense High Sec, it probably trickles downward the farther out you go to a average of 1 month, and if you are lucky MAYBE you can find a single slot with a job that can start in 5 or 6 days because no one grabbed it yet, but it's 12 jumps away and you gotta haul all the materials out there before you can queue up the slot, better hope someone else doesn't jump on it before you can pick it up. Lets not even talk about queue camping. Ok, back up again....There are a CRAP TON of empty research and manufacturing queues in low sec....Did you catch that?

So this is how more people getting into low sec makes it more valuable for EVERYONE, and that includes for ME too because now I don't have to haul this shit to and from kingdom come to make this work alone.

Ok this actually makes some sense, but how are we going to do this? I mean there are still pirates out there looking for exactly this opportunity finding a fleet of hulks in an asteroid belt and drooling over the t2 components that are gonna drop when I get killed...

That's a great question really. And this really applies to all scenarios in Low Sec. Pirates are looking for targets regardless of what that target is, miners, haulers, mission runners, etc etc. I have developed a friendship and trust, and I am working with the various prominent Low Sec organizations to foster an unofficial alliance or blue chip corp/alliance wide standings to help make our job a little easier (by not shooting down our members). By us reciprocating Blue Chips with each other will help in two important ways; 1) Since we're blue to them, they won't shoot us, 2) since they are blue to us, we know we have are in the presence of friends.

Why would pirates want to give up targets? Why would they let us pass and do our business freely?

Because of the mutual benefit. Yeah on face value it looks like they are giving up targets, but honestly without the arangement YOU wouldn't be there anyway right? So they havne't given anything up. Further, if you consider everything I mentioned above, we are going to be DRAWING customers out to Low Sec, all those customers are fair game, it's only our corp and alliance that enjoy the negotiated peace. Plus once all those people do start coming out, there is some safety in numbers. If a pilot is flying around solo in low sec, you can almost guarantee that if a pirate is hunting, they are hunting that solo pilot, but if there are 50 other random pilots flying around, the buffer of additional pilots dramatically increases the chances of that one pilot flying away safely. The more people there are in low sec, the better the place will be for everyone, carebears, faction warriors and pirates alike. Safer for the carebears and more fun for the pirates.

But why would I want to help a bunch of asshole pirates?

Well most people who are carebears don't really understand very well how this game works. And I don't mean from a spreadsheet understanding the math and mechanics of the game. I am talking about those two or three buzzwords, "the sandbox" and "the butterfly effect". Carebears tend to think this game shouldn't be a PvP game, or think that since I am a carebear you should leave me alone mr baddy pirate. And groups of carebears tend to hold hands and perform the "carebear stare". Well it doesn't work, but that's besides the point. Before you get your panties in a ruffle, understand...I am a carebear...we actually, I am an industrial/trader pilot who doesn't consider himself a carebear. Why? Because I face PvP on a minute by minute basis flying around 5 regions of low sec to perform my "carebear" stuff. PvP isn't just head to head or blob to blob combat, and this is where people seem to not understand this game at all, especially the carebears. Here I explain why and what's missing from their understanding.

A trader is constantly PvPing with other traders for money. We are constantly trying to get the best deal before everyone else, we are taking their money and putting it in our wallets. But at least I am not shooting anyone. Aren't you? When you are trying to make a buck trying to sell your stuff or buy your stuff and that guy ALWAYS seems to get his order for one penny better than you before you can move your stuff? You can't seem to sell it for a profit because someone is always making the deal sweeter and putting you out of business a little, or forcing you to mark down your items below profit margins. That's not PvP? Well ok, but what about me? I am just a miner and all I do is practice Player vs Rock, I don't PvP at all. That's what you think, how much fun is it when a corporation operation comes in and wipes out all your asteroid belts in your favorite systems and leaves you nothing but scraps. How about when you spend hours just looking for a belt to mine and can't find one? Or how about this? What do you think those rocks they were mining is going to be used for? How about your rocks, what do you think they are going to get used for. Sure you are just selling your rocks on the market or dumping it on some cheap buy order, but you aren't PvPing are you? I am afraid you are...there is only ONE reason you are mining, you are gathering the materials required to blow up someone else. What the fuck are you talking about? That's right...your rocks are getting other people killed. You think your rocks are going to get used for some peaceful activity? Sure in some stages of the game, maybe. They'll get used in science and manufacturing, sure sure, that's true...but why is that person doing that? To make shit to blow someone's ass up. Funny thing is, it's very possible that you even got your self blowed up because you mined the particular minerals that we used to make the ship that blew your ass up. That's what this game is about, blowing shit up...end of story really.

Yeah but pirates are still assholes and they suck.

Really? Why do you think you have a job in Eve? ..... Anyone? Because someone blew up someone else's ship up. Just as much as I tell the pirates to shut the fuck up because they owe carebears a debt of gratitude for doing the stuff you don't want to so you CAN do what you want, you carebears also need to shut the fuck up because you owe the pirates a debt of gratitude for making it possible for you to do what makes YOU happy. You wouldn't be mining anything at all if it weren't for pirates because they blow shit up so YOU can sell your stuff. Pirates are a VITAL part of the economy in Empire, both High Sec AND Low Sec and also have an effect on Null Sec too because that's where lots of the T2 building materials come from.

Well you are wrong, most ships are blown up in alliance wars and elsewhere in null sec.

Well that's true for the most part, but what you seem to misunderstand is that most of those big giant deep space alliances support their own independent economies. They have their own groups of miners, scientists, researchers and manufacturers. Most stuff they produce on their own and get blown up all on their own without having the slightest effect on life in high sec. Yes it's true some of it does trickle up to high sec, but very little in fact except the T2 building materials I mentioned previously compared with the amount of ships blown up by pirates and NPCs. Besides, what's the difference? Someone got blowed up that didn't want to get blowed up, maybe most of those battles can be considered "consensual PvP", but the whole game is PvP, miners, traders and everyone are PvPing on one level or another. And anyway, do you REALLY think that when an alliance totally destroys another alliance that it's not the same or worse than you loosing your mining ship to pirates? Holy shit, that hurts a whole crap ton more than the pain you feel when you get blowed up, or when a salvage ninja comes to get your wrecks....Honestly. People loose trillions of isk, and have to abandon several freighterfuls of stuff in stations they'll likely never visit again, but their asset window will unendingly remind them of their massive massive defeat. Of course they could just "trash" the stuff so they don't have to look at it anymore. How would you feel to "trash" a few carriers, mauraders, and billions of units of isogen?

Ok ok I get it. So now back to your corp, what's the catch? What do I gotta do?

No catch. You gotta be able to support yourself. You have to commit to align with the corp mission and actively work towards that goal. You need to be comfortable losing your stuff, cause it's gonna happen and you need to be ok with it. We'll provide training and coaching on how to pilot safely in low sec, but after that it's up to you to practice and keep your senses and reflexes keen. The only thing I ask you to do is practice your career in low sec, in a coordinated fashion with the rest of the corp to maximize our footprint and prevent intra-corp and intra-alliance competition. I.e. one person takes gallente ships modules and ammo, another specializes in Minmatar kits, another does mining vessels, another does minerals trade, implants, rigs, etc etc. Keep the market divided by product so we can all work together on the same systems with the same goals without getting in each other's way. Once we have a good economy growing in one region to the point where we have drawn competition into low sec with us (remember that's good), we can continue growing our numbers take advantage of MORE of those untapped resources and finally spread to other surrounding low sec regions and make us all some more money.

Low sec was designed to be a bridge between High Sec and Null sec, instead it became the pirate's private little hell where life is hard. Lets turn Low Sec around and build it into the bridge where null sec alliances and high sec citizen comingle together and do business with each other as was intented. Pirates get a kick back from this, all teh extra targets that otherwize would have said at home.

Low Sec Recruitment (Non Pirate Corp)

2009-10-20T01:32:00.004-05:00

Ok this is a little premature, but I really needed to get this posted. Interstellar Tritanium has opening recruiting. Please read below for the Mission Statement, Goals, and Guidelines and see if this is something you would like to do.

Interstellar Tritanium

Ticker: ITTRI

Mission: To make low security and bordering null security space accessible to the masses. We recognize the hurdles in bringing the masses to low security space, and we shall do this by developing a flourishing market and industrial complex beginning in low security space, with intentions to eventually secure and/or negotiate general access to some null security systems and regions which border the Empires.

Recruitment: OPEN; We are looking for pilots of all sorts who aren’t afraid of a little action. We are looking for multi-talented traders, haulers, miners, builders, cyno and fighter pilots. We aren’t diving right into battle, but due to the nature of a low sec operation, people will be coming to find us.

If you are interested in pursuing your current industrial career, but want to bare your teeth and show the galaxy what it means to be a tough industrialist, the read on. Below I have some goals and guidelines laid out. One of the primary benefits of being a corp member is the recognition you will get. People will know you are an Interstellar pilot, and the negotiated access and respect gained from being a prominent member of the corporation alone makes life a little easier in low sec. Low sec pilots of every sort appreciate the easy access to the goods they need.

How do we plan on accomplishing this feat?

1. Develop solid market platforms in low security - High Security space has some established market centers mostly notably Jita, Oursulaert, Hek, Jel, and others. There are secondary and tertiary markets as well in almost every region supporting more rustic areas. To accomplish our goal, we need to identify systems in a low security system that sports greater than usual traffic. Candidate systems provide a convergence points in routes between two or more regions or to null security space similar to old world highway or railway system cloverleaf interchanges or perhaps because a system is part of a pipe to null sec, or maybe because there is a great deal of faction warfare and pirate activity in the area.

2. Do not discriminate - Everyone is our customer. People coming from High Sec to buy our cheap goods, faction warriors, miners, industrialists, haulers, and yes even pirates and alliances are our customers. Everyone in the galaxy must buy stuff, there are all therefore our customers. We like ships to get blown up, because it means another kit sold.

3. Not Red Don't Shoot (NRDS)lately - We are NOT pirates, we are NOT pirate hunters. This is part of the non-discrimination item above. We want those low sec denizens to return the favor and not shoot at us. I cannot guarantee they will reciprocate, but I CAN guarantee that whomever you start shooting at will NEVER give you the chance to fly safe in their presence. Remember, everyone is our customer. If we continue to provide good service (measured in consistent cheap goods and not aggressing), we will have a continuous sales channel.

4. Scouting, Escort Support and Cyno Services - We shall provide escort when requested when we are available and capable of performing said services. If available this service to should immediately executed for corporation members. For customers, it is appropriate to charge a fee, because this service will sometimes cause a conflict of interest with our other customers. We may find ourselves in an escort situation that involves conflict between the ship or fleet you are escorting and a customer pirate, remember NRDS and remember they are both our customers. We must defend who we are escorting, however if there is a way to satisfy both parties involved, such as sharing some or all of your service fee with the pirate gang. If negotiations fail, you must honor your agreement with your customer, and you must defend them. Win or lose however, remember the pirate is still your friend and your customer and offer them up kind parting words for a good fight. Remember we are NOT hunting pirates; we are only defending ourselves and our customers.

5. Coaching - It is always a good idea to coach our customers before they enter low sec. If a customer who has contracted you for escort arrives in a poor choice of ship for low sec, kindly advise them on which industrial ships are best suited for low sec and null sec (Deep Space Transports and Blockade Runners), and how to fit them properly for survival. Remember, industrial ships should be fitted for evasion, not for battle.

6. High Security Standing - We are NOT pirates. We are NOT mercenaries. We must maintain high security standing in order to provide our inter-security services. All members are highly encouraged to continuously improve on their security status as well as their faction standings.

7. Busting Gate Camps – If you are fitting properly for evasion, and you execute proper protocols when jumping through low sec, busting gate camps is child’s play. As already hinted at, it requires a ship fitted solely for busting gate camps, and learning and executing the proper sequence of protocols to be warping away before the gate campers have a chance to locate or target you.

7. Wardecs - Remember we stand the chance of gaining a war declaration. Since you fly low sec anyway and are comfortable doing so, then a war dec should pose you no problem. A wardec only allows a small group of people to fight with you in high sec, otherwise it has no affect in low sec whatsoever. While at war, simply treat high sec with the same respect we have for low sec. Keep on your guard, wear your low sec goggles and you will have no difficulty. In fact, you may quickly find you laugh at war declarations. When at war, feel free to blow up the opponent, but remember that they are still our customer and when they replace their kit, they have to buy it from you. Also, remember many of our members are not combat ready and only prepared for combat evasion and may not wish to engage the enemy with you.

One more very important thing about Wardecs, sentry guns in both high sec and low sec will NOT fire upon your wardecced enemies, so keep that in mind. Always wear your low sec goggles.

Learning Skill Tree - My Turn

2009-10-09T12:48:00.002-05:00

So lots of good thoughts and arguements going on about learning skills. I recommend you take a look at the following blog posts. The arguements are varied and each different:

http://www.tigerears.org/2009/10/08/skill-training-continues-towards-damnation

http://eve.finkeworld.com/2009/10/08/i-should-be-allowed-to-think

http://podsandpills.baywords.com/2009/10/08/learning-skills-and-why-they-fail

However, now it my turn. I think learning skills are and important part of the game and allows each of us to model our characters differently than the next guy. Beyond the limited selection of attributes we may further advance our training to any degree we see fit. We can either choose sucky attributes at character creation and leave it there or we can spend a little time and money training our attributes higher. Yes you, me and the next guy may say that training your learning skills is essential to playing this game, but I know plenty of people who hadn't and are quite happy with their characters. As well I have seen people who hadn't trained learning skills at all, but after a while of playing wish they had. This is a choice all of us has and we need to live with these choices. The person who chooses not to train learning skills is early going to be ahead of the training curve, but later on behind the curve.

I really agree with Kename Fin when he compares the learning skills with science and social skills. I'd also like to make the next leap and compare them to all skills in the game. Yeah it sucks training your learning skills to max, no one REALLY wants to do it. In fact I have not done it, though they are fairly close. All my rank 1 skills are maxed and my rank 3 skills are all at 3, 4 or 5, further I only have cybernetics 4. Yeah I trained up the bulk of the skills to where I am happy with the amount of time and effort and the payback I get from them. I may eventually train them all to level 5, but chances are the only one I am going to do that with is cybernetics since I get to boost all 5 attributes at once (of course with 1 billion ISK pricetag I know). But really, this is just another choice, my choice.

Learning skills cost money. They cost a lot of money for the early game. I saved up just to get the rank 3 skills. Learning soils take time, but just like every other part of the game you get to choose how much time you spend on them. For a person on a trial account just trying things out, learning skills would be a waste of time, but for those of us in game for a year or longer the skills have already paid off. I train at somewhere around twice the speed than I did when I first started and inal glad I took that time.

So training learning sucks, yep, but does it suck any more than training 40 or more days for battleship 5 to get that sliver of an extra bonus, or how about traing for a hulk? Maybe I should just have been able to fly one right away without traing frigates, barges and astrogeogy first.

At least learning skills aren't a prerequisite to other skills or equipment. So I think y'all should harden the fuck up, or lighten up, or just sit down and shut the fuck up. They all mean the same fucking thing anyway; quit crying.

Missions Collide Podcast ep4

2009-10-06T18:22:00.003-05:00

So casiella and I were guest speakers to talk about trade in eve. Was great fun, you can download it on iTunes. I'll place a link to the podcast itself after it gets moved.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Alts, pirates and carebears...oh my!

2009-10-06T14:37:00.001-05:00

So, I am bringing up an old topic from not too very long ago actually. More specifically, I am merging a few topics. And, I am going to sum up my angst with just one question. How can you call yourselves not carebears if you have to resort to alts to get around the game mechanics?

Every complaint I hear or read about carebears and descriptions for them is summarily dismissed in practice when you use alts.

As it seems to be the trend today, I say harden the fuck up and learn how to play this game within the sandbox paradigm. Put up buy contracts or hauling contracts to gather shit in and out of high sec. Might find a profitable meta career in trade or contracting without wimping out and buying an alt to experience high sec in all it's glory.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Blog Banter #12: Dynamic System Security

2009-09-29T22:03:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

Cas at Ecliptic Rift completely covered almost word for word what I wanted to talk about in the blog banter, so I had to think of something else. It's interesting that Cas and I will both be guests at on this weeks Missions Collide podcast. Anyway, here is another idea that I somehow though about this evening, I hope it's a worthy idea, but honestly I can't see how this could go wrong, in fact I think it's nothing but right.

Dynamic System Security for Empire Space

Yep. Instead of the security status being static, and no matter what happens in each system the security status remains the same. Well how about when the goon squad rampages through Jita, is that still HISEC? Come on....How about all those high sec systems out at the edge of empire, the high sec islands in the middle of low sec where you see no one and the system is surrounded by systems loaded with red blinkies? So how about those LOSEC systems that you never seen any badies in, only see unmolested industrious care-bears going cheerfully about their business, is that system really lost to the depths of bedlam?

Imagine what it would be like to be a pirate, only to wake up the next morning and you have to make a mad rush to LOSEC because the SEC status of the system you slept in was bumped up a notch while you were sleeping. Imagine being a miner working at the edge of HISEC, when all of a sudden the SEC status drops a point into LOSEC. Goon squad totally rampaging through Jita, intentionally trying to cause mayhem and push the SEC status of Jita down to really low LOSEC status, and the surrounding systems too, forcing pilots far and wide to change their plans for a while. And another benefit, it could totally kill Jita lag, because the market would be forced to move around

It really shouldn't be too difficult to setup. I mean security status goes from +1.0 to -1.0, it's just a value with 0 being in the middle. There must be some balance algorthim that could be used to dynamically change the SEC status of each system at each downtime, but the SEC status can only move a max of 0.1 per night, so that seriously broad sweeping changes don't happen over night, the line of scrimage so to speak should only move forward or back a little at a time. HISEC should still be protected by COSMOS, but ganking and other security lowering activities should affect the direction of the move each downtime. The security status of the surrounding systems should add weight to the SEC status of the system being evaluated, for example, if a HISEC system has five jump gates out and four of them go to LOSEC, then that should weigh some on the security evaluation routine.

Conversely, the number of HISEC status people who travel through and populate each system should weigh toward the positive climb of SEC of a system. Successful mission running, and ratting and killing of player pirates by players should improve the security status of a system. Obviously seriously low status players (ex. -10) couldn't be in a HISEC system, but if they were dispatched in the system adjacent, it would have a positive weight to the surrounding systems.

To offset the possibility that HISEC were completely overrun by LOSEC seeking players, the Regions of each empire should have heavy weighting, to simulate each empire and COSMOS exerting their influence.

I am by no mean suggesting what the technical security status routine should be really, I am just tossing ideas into the aether of how it “could” work, but you do get the gist of it.

This could as some serious news reporting and story telling possibilities as well. Dynamic system security, I can see that being SOOO much fun.

Cloaks

2009-09-25T12:54:00.002-05:00

Here is my take on Cloaks. You pirates who cry about crybabies need to stop crying. You are crying true Carebear tears dontcha ya know. “Boohoo, they won’t let me target them…waaahhhh.” Sounds a lot like, “Boohoo, they won’t let me mine rock in peace…waaahhhh”. Grow up and take it like the man or woman you pretend to be when you tease carebears for their tears.

You want us out there so we can be targets don’t you? Cloaks make it possible for carebear types to have a half a chance of survival in unprotected low sec/null sec. You want us to stay in high sec or you want the targets? Or are you really a closet carebear using PvP as your farming method, but want it carebear easy? “Waaahhh I want it easier to kill carebears…”
What you don’t understand is that the cloak brings more people out to low sec, and brings you more targets, maybe they aren’t sitting ducks for you, but then what are you? A pirate or a carebear in disguise?

1) Evasion is just as much a part of PvP as head to head gun blasting. I don’t mean hiding in high sec, I mean those of us industrial and trading types that flying right in your face out in low sec and null sec. We aren’t chicken, and we aren’t hiding from you, we are using the skills of evasion that we have learned the same as you are using the skills you learned to try and track us down and destroy us. It’s perfectly fair to use whatever we have in our arsenal to evade you in our non-combative ships.

2) Only special ships can use the Covert Ops Cloak, and those ships have specialized tasks and usually aren’t good for fighting, they are good at “Covert Ops”, hence the name.

3) Ships that can't fit the Covert Ops Cloak are at a severe disadvantage, their speed is reduced to 10 or 25% when cloak is active, and all you need to do is fly towards your cloaked target with drones flying to uncloak them. Plus we don’t get to warp while cloaked with normal cloaking devices. You get to see where we went off to.

4) Targeted ships cannot cloak.

5) Ships uncloaking can’t target for some time.

6) Ships cannot cloak while undocking until they get well outside the docking ring (2000 m)

7) Fitting a cloak reduces the number of High Slots available, thus reducing DPS if a combat ship, if not a combat ship, it's often a choice between weapons and cloak. So ships fitted with cloaks effective can't fight back or are severely hindered from doing so.

8) It already takes a player some practice to get good at cloaking, other than the covert ops cloak ships, which are useless for anything like fighting or carrying cargo honestly, you need to learn how to cloak successfully to make it an effective fitting, otherwise it’s just like any other tactical skills. So what if you can fit it, if you don’t know how to use it properly, it’s just going to get you killed.

The Occator

2009-08-31T12:25:00.006-05:00

Ok it's time I talk about a hauler ship and fittings for use in Low Sec. As the title implies, I am talking about the occator. A lot of people continuously recommend I fly a Viator instead, however I believe the Viator really is a weak choice for Low Sec hauling. Let me explain why.

Firstly, my first fitting for an Occator was totally invulnerable to attack. I fit it thusly:

Highs:
Small T2 Smart Bomb (for keeping interceptors and frigates out of blaster range)

Mids:
2x F59 Shield Extenders (double shield HP, and therefore double shield recharging)

Lows:
A mix of Cargo Expanders and Warp Core Stabalizers (depending on cargo needs and danger level of the system)

Rigs:
2x T1 Cargo Optimization Rigs

This ship resulted in a hauler that could literally just sit there and take a pounding while waiting to go to warp. Never had any group of PvPers or Pirates broken past 50% of my shield. Until one day, I learned about HICs in Low Sec being able to destabalize your warp core no matter what level of warp strength your ship is fitted for. I began that encounter not worried in the least bit, until I realize that I wasn't warping. It took 12 minutes for that ship to take me out, but between being distrupted and being webbed to something like 12 meters per second, there was nothing I could do to escape. I lost a VERY expensive ship, and my cargo, and therefore a month's worth of income. Ouch.

So a Viator DOES seem like the best option. Well no, I still don't think so. First off, it's cargo hold is WAY too small to have any positive advantage to going out to low sec. One tiny shipload at a time, over and over and over isn't a lot of fun. The risk of low sec is still there, and the more back and forth between two systems in low sec, is just asking for more trouble. The ONLY advantage the viator has is it's covops cloak. That's a big advantage for sure, but honestly, I can mimick most of that advantage with an MWD and an Improved Cloak. You might ask how? Well, all cloaks stop working if you are too close to your station, so you can't cloak until you get outside the 2000 meter circle, so you are vulnerable while trying to get to 2000 meters, and if you get target locked before you cloak, you won't be able to cloak at all. Therefore those of us who fly slower ships should use Instant Warp Undock Bookmarks. Even a Freighter can warp instantly out of a station if you have a good bookmark setup. So make your bookmarks. Use a fast ship like a the faster frigates, interceptors or covops ships to find the spot WAY out in space that you can warp to instantly, and book mark it. Test it, because if it's a little off, your Occator is going to take a moment to align first, and you are going to get Warp Disrupted by a HIC. If the bookmark is "perfect", you will warp within 3 seconds of seeing your ship in space and while still inside the ring of protection of your station. Then you have a few moments to get your bearings, and warp off where you need to go without worrying about that red blinky blinky that was on your screen at the station.

If you work on your timing, you can do something similar to using an instant undock bookmark at the gate. This involves coordinating your use of the MWD, cloak and warp drive. The sequence of events goes like this. After you jump and while gate cloaked, hit "align to" where ever you are going (gate or station), then hit your MWD, and then hit your cloak. You will align quickly, and be accelerating towards your warp point. As your MWD is about 75% complete in it's cycle, turn off your cloak, and hit warp.

You may ask, so what does that do? Ok well, the MWD does two things. It helps you align really quickly, and it builds your speed up, and you'll be at about half speed with your MWD one when you hit the warp controls. However, when your MWD turns off at the end of the cycle, because your MWD isn't on anymore, your speed is now somewhere between 75% and 200% of top speed. Thus....Insta Warp.

If you mess up your timing, either forgetting to shutdown your MWD or missing your high speed window of opportunity, you'll just have to wait to go to warp, hopefully you don't get scrammed before then by a HIC. (slight chance only, but still very real)

So how do we fit this occator?

High:
Improved Cloak (for higher speed and agility)

Mid:
f59 Shield Extender (trust me you want some tank)
T2 MWD

Lows:
6x Cargo Expanders (the 2+ native warp stabalizers should be enough for the extremely short moments you are vulnerable)

Rigs:
2x Cargo Optimization Rigs

You really need the Shield Extender. I have been caught and shot at before, even with the warp schemes, and this saved my life. An occator "CAN" be brought down in a single Volley by a heavily enough armed ship. One pirate even took the time to ask me how I survived that one shot before going to warp. The answer my friends is that Shield Extender...in one volley, that pirate brough my shields down to almost 0%. If I hadn't been trained in my Shield Skills, and been Shield Extended, my ship would have popped in one shot like an Iteron.

So let me restate this. You REALLY need to train all your shielding skills.

The occator is a great ship to fly in low sec, so long as you keep your guard up and don't get lazy and keep up on your keyboard and mousing skills, you'll have a wonderful time moving through low sec carrying your merchandise with ease to and from your Low Sec Market hubs, and watching your various pirate nemeses get frustrated with you constant slippery nature.

Remember this is a Low Sec fitting, not a 0.0 fitting, the rules are different, and you'll get caught with your pants down in 0.0 if you try to use this setup out there (think bubbles).

Happy Flying

Returning to Eve and the Low Sec Market Project

2009-07-31T11:04:00.002-05:00

Ok guys, I am back. I took a break for a while, I really needed it. I have been trading in the real life markets and doing ok. Not great, but I haven't lost anythign either really so it's an overall positive experience that I plan on continuing. However strategies change, and I am working slower in the markets than I was when I started this in the spring.

Anyway, I am back, and have been for about a week or two slowly getting back up to speed and trying to get poised, and I am going to return to hevrice with some goods sometime in the near future. I however am not going to set myself up for constant catching up to keep the market going. As soon as I am ready and have lots of applicable stuff to dump on the market, I will be doing so, as always I am goign to try to keep it the cheapest goods sold in Empire, but that always depends on how cheaply I can get it myself. I have to turn a profit ya know.

Anyway, I am back and I hope to see you all soon. Anyone want to help drop me a line, because it will be easier to do with with lots of help than to do it myself.

Texas Philosophies for Eve

2009-07-31T10:59:00.000-05:00

Eve Online is a lot like Texas, everything is bigger and tougher in Texas.Here's some texas philosophies applied to New Eden

1. Texas: Never slap a man who's chewin' tobacco.

2. Good judgement comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.

3. Lettin' the cat out of the bag is a whole lot easier'n puttin' it back in.

4. If yer ridin' ahead of the herd, take a look back to make sure it's still there.

5. Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.

6. There's two theories to arguin' with a woman. Neither one works.

7. If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'

8. Always drink upstream from the herd.

9. Never miss a good chance to shut up.

10. Don't squat with your spurs on.

Real Life Trader

2009-04-06T14:21:00.005-05:00

Once again I am apologizing for not posting, however this is a little different.

I haven't been spending much time on Eve last few weeks, and I have a good reason. I made a ton of cash in eve as a trader. I don't know exactly how much I am worth in eve, but I have had as much as 3 billion isk in cash, plus a few extra billion in assets, e.g. Obelisk, 2x billion isk iterons (rigged), 6 rigged occators, 2x battleships, many t2 frigates, etc etc all rigged, not to mention a few billionion in minerals out in wayward corners of my trade routes.

So anyway, this game has very much become a job. Not a fulltime job mind you, but at least a heavily involved part time job. I decided to do something about that. I am now taking the skills I honed in Eve online, and applying them to the real world. I have been trading on the stock markets for last few weeks. I started out with $770 in cash which I was saving for the sole purpose of burning on the stock market. Last Monday I made about $300 on a good and lucky trade, and on Friday I lost $50. So for the week I am up $250 and that puts me around $1000 in my trading account. Last week I cajoled my wife into letting to put another $1000 into trading, and that will clear today or later this week, and then I can upgrade to a margin account which doubles your buying power. Margin is very similar to but not quite eve online margin for buying stuff). When I finally close a day with $25,000 that will allow me to upgrade my account to a Pattern Day Trader account, which grants me 4:1 buying power (so long as I close my trades by the end of the day), and will let me make MANY trades in a single day rather than having to wait for trades to "settle" before being able to perform another trade with my money. Settlement is like waiting for a check to clear. You have to wait 3 days before you can use your money again just to make sure the round trip(round trip means you made a buy trade, then sold it again) trade went through properly. So with a cash only account, you are stuck with one trade every 3 or 4 days. With a Margin Account, you can make as many trades as you want, because you have margin, but there are other rules that limit the number of trades you can perform. Pattern Day Trader rules limit your trading ability until you qualify to be a pattern day trader. A pattern day trader by law must have $25,000 in their trading accounts to be eligible to perform more than 3 intraday trades in a single week (5 business days). If you make 4 or more intraday round trip trades in any week, your account gets frozen into cash only again for 90 days. Yuck.

If I continue to have forward momentum and grow the account naturally through trade, I will try and get my wife to give me some more money which will be coming to us hopefully soon. It all depends on how well I perform before then. If I can perform I am already certain she'll give me every penny if she thinks we are going to make money with it. Again it all depends on me.

I don't know how interested anyone will be, but I will keep everyone up to date here on a weekly basis. It might be fun to learn how well someone can take their eve skills and apply them to real life.

Getting things done before Attribute Swapout

2009-03-18T14:24:00.003-05:00

Well, I am finally completing my Trade skills shortly. With the new Nueral Realignment program that lets you redistribute your base attribute points around, I have decided to focus on combat based attributes. I have been training combat related skills for many months now, and have developed some very good skills. However, since you can only do this once a year, and since my attributes now are better suited to training Trade than anything else, I have elected to finish training Trade skills before I redistribute my attributes.

Are they perfect for training trade? No, but I need to complete Tycoon training because I am now very quickly and too often running out of market slots, and maybe even Broker Relations and Accounting to level 5 as well. It is not worth focusing my attributes to train those since we are talking at most a couple months of training, so instead I have halted my combat training, and will complete my trade skills, and then redistribute my skills to be a more balanced but slightly combat heavy training arrangement and return to combat training.

No matter what, once trade is done, my training will be MUCH MUCH faster in combat and other areas than it ever was. How many of us made poor decisions when selecting attributes as a new player? I was one, and I stuck with my character who is now 1 ½ years old and exceeds 22 million skill points.

Once done with trade, I’ll be returning to combat training…most specifically training for the Ishtar….mmmm I have been in love with my Ishkur for many months now and it is the little ship that made me train for it's bigger brother too.

Hevrice Market Report #1

2009-03-09T11:45:00.004-05:00

So it’s been an interesting week. First, I'd like to thank the people who provided their valuable input and guidance regarding which items to be avilable would be most valuable to them most likely to sell quickly at first. I think otherwise, that I have received mixed feelings from the regular denizens of low sec regarding the establishment of a low sec hub. Many individuals have disbelief that a trade hub in low sec will be possible or have any effect on their lives. Some are happy to take advantage of having supplies readily available. Then there are those in the middle who seem disinterested, but have stated something along these lines, “if you put it up for sale, maybe we’ll buy it”.

The first thing I did was a mistake which was to make a run to Jita and picked up some quick items to throw up for sale. The costs of doing business that way ended up being too much, I mean this is how organizations were getting their goods anyway, so what positive affect would that have? None really, it just made sure I made a very skinny profit. I did need some things right away to make good on my promises though, and so I went through with it. Most items I was able to put up for sale at a fair profit, a few items I took a loss on (as a loss leader), and other items I simply couldn’t offer as cheaply as I would have liked. I do however hope that those items will still move simply due to the convenience of them being there and present along with the rest of the product I placed on the market. On Friday I put up a few billion worth of Railguns, Blasters and Autocannons, plus some Warp Scramblers/Disruptors as well as some Armor plating. I however will not be making runs to Jita for this project again. I will gather the items from around the all the regions as I have in the past with minerals finding the best deals and picking them up as I make my regular rounds. Now that I have the first part of the market in place, the rest will slowly come. I have been gathering Rifters and Incursus as well as the most used ammo for the guns I put up for sale already and almost had time to get them to Hevrice before it finally got so late that I had to abandon the delivery until the next day. When I get into my pilot seat tonight, I will make that my first priority.

Next comes the cruisers, I placed orders for Stabbers, Vexors and Thoraxes last night, and so I hope I will have something to collect within the next day or few, as well as some other items that were requested such as various propulsion modules and other miscellaneous combat oriented items. I will probably add T2 ships to the market once things really start rolling and I can count on the Hevrice market to move everything I have placed for sale. T2 ships tend to not move as quickly as the simpler frigates mentioned above, plus they are a greater investment for any trader.

I am sure there are going to be traders who are going to look for ways to get between me and Hevrice and knock me out of the market loop when it starts moving. It may surprise you or not that I invite all traders to Hevrice. I however would encourage each and every one of you that might be considering bringing competition to Hevrice to reconsider just a little, and instead of bring in completion, bring in new goods that aren’t already available. You’ll be doing a service to yourself by not competing for profits, which are already slim by being the cheapest goods in empire already, but by finding the best deals and bringing them into Hevrice and being able to provide the best prices in empire yet still turn a profit. You’ll be bringing other pilots out here looking for those deal and you’ll make this market the hub it could be. The very first and very real lowsec market hub. I invite all of you to come and be part of bridging the gap between high sec and low sec.

I have also made some good friends, which in many ways is more rewarding than the ISK. Some I might not yet trust to be in the same system with but people I enjoy being social with and talking with none the less. I really believe I have found my calling and circle, or at least am making a significant move in that direction and I enjoy spending time with the folks in low sec. These are good people, pirates and faction warriors yes…They are callused warriors and scurvy rats, but they are good and honorable people within those tough exteriors. I am happy to be there and I am happy to know them.

Finally, I encourage ALL Lowsec individuals, corporations, alliances and other organizations to participate and take the stuff that you collect and PLACE IT FOR SALE on the Hevrice market as well. As a single trader, I can only keep so many open market orders, and 2/3 of them are used in procurement of goods to sell at Hevrice. The more cheap stuff we as a group can provide the denizens of empire out here in Hevrice, the more these people will be forced to pay attention to us, no one will be able ignore Hevrice. Bring them all out here, FOR GLORY…FOR GOLD!!!!!

Shopping List

2009-03-06T12:05:00.002-06:00

Ok, I have started shopping for things I think need to be sold in low sec, however I am sure many of you have better ideas than I. So I request that you place your wishlist in the comments below. Please be complete, even if you see something in another comment, please go ahead and list it on your wishlist too, this will let me know how much demand there might be for an item.
Keep in mind I can only provide so many different things, so I will need to prioritize what I supply initially, and hopefully drawing other traders out here to bring more of other stuff too.

Thanks

Don't try this at home!!!

2009-03-06T00:22:00.005-06:00

You know, i am a pretty good guy and I try to share a market with people. There is usually plenty of buyers and sellers to go around. I try to take my turn when it comes to buying and selling stuff, and let the other guys get their buys and sales in too.

Well there is always one apple that spoils the barrel for everyone. I had a region-wide buy order for megacyte at a reasonable price and for not so much in quantity that I was being abusive to other traders. Another trader came in an upped me a penny, ok that's fine I'll wait my turn. When my turn came, he placed a new 100,000 unit buy order for 1,000 ISK per unit higher than everyone else. I guess he decided he needed the minerals more than the rest of us. Or perhaps he was trying to discourage the rest of us.

It ended up being ok, because I happened to have 100,000 units of megacyte which I happily supplied for him. I hope he appreciates how quickly he was accommodated.

All is well that ends well.

People of Lowsec, lend me your ear!!!…and give me your opinions, your love, and your money too

2009-03-05T10:59:00.001-06:00

Ok guys serious, hopefully you read the last two posts, and perhaps even the earlier posts before I dropped off of the blogosphere, and you know I don’t really believe that Mule Characters and Multiple Accounts used for muling are truly a good thing for eve. Yes the income for CCP is important, and I do think multiple accounts are good for CCP and even good for Eve when they are used to experience different facets of Eve, but mule accounts I don’t like them. One of the things that I believe is that ALL of you are missing out on a rich facet of the Eve experience of YOU having to interact with traders and high sec residents as YOURSELF. Look, let me us myself as an example, I started out as a Miner and I did really well, but I got bored of it and moved on to trade, and I do really well there too. I also run missions out in low sec, and I now I also trade in low sec and hopefully will bridge the divide between these two aspects of Eve. I don’t run multiple accounts to “get away” with having a lowsec life as well as a high sec life. I live that life together. I want people to remember me, as a badass. I don’t mean someone who can just Yarr, I mean I want to be remembered wildly as a success in all aspects of my life.

I want people to say, “Ooo Escoce, he’s a good guy…and he’s all over the place…he controls vast swaths of the market in high sec, he goes anywhere he wants, he opened low sec up to everyone bringing good ands people out there, he’s not afraid to fight and can fight really good, and he’s got lots of friends and lots of money and so you don’t want to screw with him either...get on his bad side and he and his friends will damn well make sure you and your mates spent most of your life in the recovery room of the medical facilities. I am glad he’s my friend, and I am glad to know him. Eve is a richer place because he cares about Eve.

So do you see what I mean? I am not threatening anyone here, honestly. I am just sharing the “image” of not using mules and shadow accts. I am talking about the fact that, I am not using multiple accounts to “get away” with being a shadow. Escoce is my identity and everything I do is as me, whether that is to organize a mining operation that wipes out twenty belts of asteroids in an hour, or bend the market to my will, blitz thirty-five low sec missions in a frigate in an afternoon or bring freighters filled with goods back and forth between highsec and low sec and create new markets and defend those markets with zeal. Or guarding miners with my Nyx to make sure they at least have time to fly to safety when molested. It [is/will be] all me and the other great real people I do or will work with…no mule and no hiding behind a shadow pretending to not be me to “get away with” doing something entirely out of character to avoid the consequences of who I am or the path I have chosen.

Dread pirates can too, instead of having shadow accounts that let them fly to high sec like a good ole pretend newbie good guy and sneak those good back to home, they can live the life of a pirate and still have people of their corporations perform things such as public relations, get traders out to low sec and bring competitively priced goods out to places where you can buy and trade and mingle and sell your loot. Perhaps instead of expecting ultra high prices, you work with the traders to get them out to you and then back home safely, this service you provide might convince traders to come out there with normal competitive pricing who would otherwise be afraid of the risks, or otherwise brave the risks but hike their prices to offset the risks. Me I am not afraid, I am already out there with you, but I can’t create a market by myself, I can only try and help get one started. If you want more targets and you want more people to brave the colds of low sec, the only catch is you gotta give them reason to come out. In other words, you gotta have the most reasonable prices, not the most expensive. So if I can do this, and you can work with me and we encourage more and more people especially traders to get out here, what say you?

Anyway, I solicit your sincere thoughts and opinions…please…I am no wanker, and some of you already know me in game and out. This is a sincere attempt to enrichen the experience and life in lowsec.

What say you?

6 Months later, highsec trader to lowsec regular

2009-03-04T14:19:00.004-06:00

So what has been going on in Escoce’s life? I have been thru and done a lot in the last 6-ish months. I gave up on securing my old mining constellation operation. In this now defunct operation, I was developing the market of a small constellation in Gallente Federation space. By providing consistent and fair pricing to miners for their minerals, and also by ensuring there was a ready and cheap supply of mining ships, equipment and consumables ready and for sale, I was able to develop a high volume/high profit market. I communicated with miners about the presence of the mining constellation and the market and slowly built a multi-billion ISK per month operation that included my picking up low end minerals from four contiguous systems and carrying those minerals to trade hubs first in my Iterons and then finally my freighter when I could afford one. Of course I also borrowed some money to make the final purchase, but let us just say, I was able to pay off that loan ( 1 billion ISK principle + 50 million ISK interest paid weekly) in 1 month. Before I got my freighter, I was making too many several trips between my mining hub and the market hubs and never quite catching up with the volume ever. When I finally got my freighter, I was moving 300-600 or so million units of minerals EVERY DAY, except maybe on Sundays and Thursdays when many miners take some time off for other activities. So it was a good operation. Now due to circumstance entirely out of my control (OOC – I moved and my internet connection was down for three weeks), it flew the coop. Other traders caught on, and moved in and the lack of consistent service and pricing to the miners caused them to move on to greener pastures.

I didn’t feel like starting over, so I moved on to something new. I do that occasionally, such as when I got bored with mining, I moved on to trade, when trade couldn’t keep me occupied, I added combat and missions. I still keep tabs on that constellation from time to time, and it has never come close to even a fraction of the productivity I helped develop.

Moving on I started placing buy orders for minerals across the region, doing pretty well and eventually building my capital enough to spread out to cover 4 regions of select systems and constellations, never quite having the ease of point to point trade I enjoyed before, but still producing honorable profits. I shrank out of one region simply due to the logistics of managing 4 regions of market space, and now focus on 3 regions and doing quite well.

After having honed my trade skills to what I call near perfect, they aren’t perfect. I have level 4 or 5 competency in all the trade skills, but it is enough for me to be a very effective trader, and I began to focus on combat skills. I had already trained most of what I call the core skills to level 5 already (skills such as navigation, electronics, engineering, etc. etc.). All the skills the unlock the various modules needed and learning how to use them so effectively that the equipment becomes more efficient. I started running missions, and practiced enough at that so that I was comfortable running all level 3 and most but not all level 4 missions in a T1 or T2 frigate of whatever sort suited me and the mission at the time. Many of the best agents are in low sec, and I was becoming comfortable with flying out in low sec, confident in knowing how to fit a ship to get through the fray when the fray comes to me.

I should say here that I don’t think of myself as a PvPer, I just feel comfortable operating in low sec normally, not that I am looking for a fight by doing so. I still avoid the fights if I can. But becoming comfortable with Low Sec, and having had to retrieve errant goods from misplaced buy orders on several occasions I decided to try low sec trading on purpose. I recently decided to carry my operations out to low security space in a test region, and I placed some region wide test buy orders to see how well I might be able to do this. The test was quite successful, and it became worth it to fly out into areas where others weren’t willing to go to pick up my wares. I have estimated that if I get killed once a day, I will still be turning a profit (albeit a small one) from low sec. I haven’t been killed yet, but just for mathematic’s sake and for safe financial planning I use 1 death per day in cost analysis for operating in low sec.

This isn’t to say that Low Sec is safe, it isn’t. It is dangerous, in low sec, people want to kill you. Many Pirates will be cordial and kind after the fact, and honor their word when they give it, but have no doubt. Their goal is to take your money, get you out of your ship and sometimes even get you out of your clone. On the first day out collecting my goods, I was attacked I am guessing 6 times in the period of 45 minutes. I was even attacked by a pilot flying an Archon, which I didn’t expect, but there you have it. I didn’t die, in fact my ship was barely scratched. I however, didn’t stick around to get killed either. I simply have learned how to properly fit a ship to escape and learned how to fly those ships properly. This doesn’t mean I can’t fight either, in a ship fitted properly to fight I do very very well, it simply isn’t my goal right now. My goal is trade, and some lowsec public relations and hoping to develop genuine realistic and fair market places in low sec for low sec residents, and thus in turn hopefully pulling more people from highsec into lowsec.

And with this, I move on to my next post which will hopefully tie the loose ends …

My thoughts on Blog Banter #5: Meta Gaming and Multiple Accounts

2009-03-04T11:58:00.008-06:00

I know I am not a member of CrazyKinux Eve Blog Pack, and I haven’t been invited to comment, however I felt the need to comment. And, once again, it’s been quite a long time since I have posted. I really ought to post more. Lots of stuff has gone on and many exciting things to report. I have no excuse other than I didn’t feel like. Oh I have had moments when I wanted to say something about what is going in New Eden, but I haven’t taken the time to write anything. However, the recent blog banter #5 about Meta Gaming and Alts has made encouraged me to make a few points. I’ll try to keep it short.

I am one of those of the opinion that multiple accounts do take away from the game. Do I feel like forcing this posture on other players? No not really, but I would hope to encourage other players who do have multiple accounts to use them for different purposes. The game was designed to strongly encourage team-work and player-to-player interaction by making certain activities much harder to do when performed alone by providing logistics challenges or training time limitations so that a person who wishes to become an expert in a particular field really needs to focus their time on that, and not multiple fields at once. It is designed to be more realistic in the sense that one person can only do so much.

I do however believe that Alts can and should be used to play two completely different play styles. One might have a pirate character, and another industrial character, however I would stress by this I mean that they are separate operations, not facets of the same operation to used to support each other. Perhaps even in vastly different parts of the galaxy with little to know chance of ever meeting.

Anyway that’s my take on multiple accounts. In summary, I believe that multiple accounts should be used to experience different aspects of the game, but I don’t think that alts should be used as mules. Mule here being the term coined in most MMORPG games meant to mean an alternate character used to carry stuff for the main character. This game was specifically designed to be as social as possible, and I do think mule characters are just a way to get around that. Think of the social possibilities of real reliance on other player character and organizations. For PvPing players, this can provide gaming elements to give you reason to yarr when disatisfied or disappointed as well as provide rewarding and potentially profitable elements for the friendships developed outside the Circle of Yarr (tm).

DISCLAIMER: This is only my opinion, I certainly do not wish to force my ways on others.

P.S. In this vein I have more to tell soon to be posted on the next post or two later today or tomorrow, a proposal of sorts I’d like people to consider.

Trade Wars

2008-09-11T12:22:00.003-05:00

Well lots has gone on since I last posted.

I found myself taking an unexpected vacation for three weeks. Something happened to my communications modules, and I was unable to get information or interact with the market or any other spacer activities. Ce la Vie. Before this, everything was running pretty much business as usual. I expanded my markets to include some of the higher end minerals and was hauling several loads of minerals a day.

When I lost communications, I was stuck waiting for everything to be repaired and come back online while I was stuck drifting aimlessly. When I came back online, I found my trade routes highjacked and in control of my competition.

So begins the trade wars. You lucky miners. The price for minerals has gone up tremendously since I started the trade wars. At some points in time the price for minerals at mining outposts has exceeded the price offered for minerals at the trade hubs. Not the best situation for a trader of any level, however I didn't let that stop me. Eventually things started to settle out and the prices offered at trade hubs were increasing since the supply was dwindling. No one is going to sell minerals for less than they pay for them, and I am no different. I may take a small hit in percentage and allowing myself to just break even to continue the trade war and regain control over my regions, but I won't sell my self short.

Instead I got sneaky. In the old world market place, this would be considered illegal, it would be considered market manipulation. Here is how it works. Because I am trying to regain the market place, I increase my buy orders. However, instead of my competitors letting me do so, they are also raising their prices. As I mentioned earlier, eventually the average price for minerals at the mineral outposts was exceeding the highest prices offered at the trade hubs. I can find orders FAR out, but as you know running REALLY long trade runs is a major loss in productivity. I give up trying to beat them out, and I sit wondering for a few days how I can work this out. Then it dawns on me. Each time my competitor raises their prices, they are now offering to buy minerals for MORE than I paid for them. Hmmm. I can sell them my minerals without moving them anywhere. The profit isn't as high, and I still have to pay taxes and brokers fees for the transactions, but I am not loosing any money. I also realize I can buy minerals cheaper at the trade hubs than I can at the outposts. Couple that with a couple of good buy orders in adject low sec systems, and I find myself in a profitable situation again. I am now running minerlas TO the mining outposts at a profit.

So lets run this again. Since my competitors will NOT let me regain my systems, I keep THEIR prices high by competiting with them for buy orders. While their prices continuous are raised higher than mine, I sell them the minerals I would otherwise have brought to the trade hubs. So they are paying MORE for MY minerals, because THEY keep wanting to raise the prices. Hey they may be making a profit, or maybe not. I don't know I don't care, but they are by the very nature of the beast, by their very competition have given me an opportunity to exploit them and profit myself. As it turns out with quite a bit less work also.

I have also started buying minerals in lowsec. Not far into lowsec, just one jump in on those border systems where low sec status pilots try to sell their goods because they can't come directly into high sec. I can get minerals a lot cheaper there for sure, and when things get hard like I have described here, it can help boost those lost profits.

Its risky running into low sec, but I don't do it stupidly. I make sure the system is safe to enter before I enter, and I get out as fast as I can. And I run when someone shows up in the local channel. No need to court disaster. I have even considered purchasing a second freighter, so that if I must temporarily abondon a freighter docked in low sec, I still have a freighter in high sec for continued normal use. It's still risky, remember I never said there wasn't a risk. You however just need to not be stupid about it.

So I have learned something here, I have learned how to conduct a trade war successfully. I don't even think my competitors have a clue what's going on either. Though they may, and they may not care. And I may quite possibly be letting the cat out of the bag here, but that's a whole nother thing entirely.

Finding your first good trades

2008-04-22T16:32:00.001-05:00

It can be difficult learning what is good to trade and when to know when you are looking at a really good buy or a really good sales opportunity. This comes with experience, but there is a tool available to help you learn and decide what those good deals are. Its called the Market Window, when you are looking at products, learn to use the detail view of the item. This will show you how much things are going to cost you and how much you can sell them for in the whole region. If an item is being sought or sold, it will show up on the detail. The way to read the detail is to look at the order details, look for the cheapest sell order for the product and make sure the item is NOT in lowsec if you are not comfortable. Now find the most expnsive buy order, also making sure it is not in lowsec. Very often the prices will be very close, but usually there will be enough of a gap to make a profit.

You have to decide whether that gap is big enough to justify making the trip or not. If you can make a deal, travel only 1 jump and profit 5 million dollars, that is probably an amazingly good deal, especially for new traders. If you have to travel through 15 jumps and you only profit 20,000 isk, although yes its a profit, it may not be worth your time. You also want to make sure that your taxes and broker's fees don't turn that 20,000 ISK gross profit into zero net profit. The fastest way to build capital (money), is to find the best deals that create the least amount of work. For instance, in my case, sometimes Jita will have a buy order which FAR exceeds the value of a local buy order for my product, and although I might make 20 millioin ISK more for a single deal, I probably will be forced to travel between 15 and 20 jumps to get to Jita. My frieghter takes nearly 1.5 hours to get to Jita from my area of operation. Then I have to return FROM jita, and that's another 1.5 hours. In that time, I can literally make 4 or 5 trips in my normal routes, and gross profit 40 million ISK each full route.

Was it worth chasing that extra 20 Million ISK? Most definately not, I probably lose between 150-250 million ISK worth of gross profit if I did that. Needless to say I have only made that longer trip two times with my freighter, and its not worth it. I lost money, and I was so bored that I fell asleep at the COMM several times that evening before docking somewhere and getting some shut-eye.

Important Skills for Trade

2008-04-22T16:31:00.001-05:00

Trade
without this skill you are useless as a trader. You need to train this up to level 4 I think to get access to the more advanced trade skills. Each level grants you 4 more outstanding orders. Level 4 I think is the highest level I recommend until you decide otherwise in your advanced career.

Marketting
If you have an item in a station other than the one you are currently in, you need Marketting to sell it. Otherwise you have to get into your spaceship, fly to that station so that you may sell that item. Marketting allows you to do that without being forced to fly there.

Procurement
does the same thing as marketting except it is for buy orders rather than sales. It lets you place a buy order in a distant station. Note: Anyone can by something for sale anywhere in their region without Procurement. Procurement only affects placing a "BUY ORDER" it does not affect buying something that is already for sale.

Day Trading
Like Procurement and Marketing, this skill lets you "adjust" the price of orders without having to be docked at the same station as the order.

Margin Trading
lets you place a buy order even if you don't have the full amount handy. This is useful if say you want to buy 10,000 units of tritanium, but you only have the money for 7,500 units. You can still place the buy order, and while it is slowly being filled you have time to make some more money to cover the purchase. Note: you still need to have the money at the time the buy is executed, otherwise the transaction simply fails, the buy order is cancelled, and you loose your broker's fees for the full transaction. As a larger buyer, I often place many buy orders across several systems and regions knowing that I will not be able to cover all the purchases. I however have guaranteed that I will get my orders filled to whatever I "can" afford regardless of whether business is slower in one area rather than another. The broker's fees are a small fraction of my profits, and I can afford to pay those extra broker's fees as a crude form of insurance that my buys get filled somewhere.

Retail
Once you have trade to lvl4, you need to train in Retail, this increases the number of outstanding orders you can manage at once. Increases your number of outstanding orders by 8 for each level.

Visibility
When you are placing an order at the same station as the order, you can by default choose how far away you want people to be able to fill your order. For instance, if you place an order for 10,000 tritanium and set the range to Region, you will soon discover that you have a few units of tritanium scattered all over the region and you have to go pick them up. Seems like a pain in the neck and it is, but setting range is also quite useful when you only have space for one more order, and you want people in several nearby stations to be able to fill this order. Visibility provides the ability to set this range in exactly the same way but while you are setting up an order from a remote location, just procurement allows you to create remote buy orders, visibility allows you to set the range of remote orders.

Accounting
Not a "necessary" skill except that it allows you to train for Margin Trading. Accounting has no real short term value, but over time it will save your lots of ISK that would otherwise be eaten as taxes.

Broker Relations
Also not very important, it does not enable an advanced skills, but also over time can save you lots of money. Until you get into really big trades, this skill is too expensive to be worth it. ROI on this skills can be measured in month and even years unless you trade hundreds of millions of ISK per trade.

How to get started in trade

2008-04-22T16:30:00.000-05:00

Ok well, some people that I know in game have asked how to get started in trade. Many of these people are veteran pilots who just didn't know how to have successful career in trade. There is no other career in New Eden that has the profitablility that trade offers. No single other career path can approach the profit potential of Trade. Within a few weeks, even an entry level trader can make as much as a veteran miner, pirate or mission runner if they are smart about it.

So how do you get started?

It doesn't matter if you are a new pilot or a veteran player, the basic principles of successful trade are the same. As a new player, your first task is to make some money. Without money, you cannot operate. You can make some starting money by running missions. Your first training missions are a good place to start. You can also mine, or you can even run some trade routes if you have a few ISK to work with. The key is that you develop enough ISK, to own as big a ship as possible. For trade, especially early trade, the biggest ships available will come from the Gallante Federation, however whichever race's spaceship command skills you have chosen to train will do just fine. Although the size of your cargo hold makes a big difference in your profit potential, the way you operate is profoundly more important than the size of your cargo hold. A bigger cargo hold not only allows you to make more money, it also allows you to make bigger mistakes. So other than training your Industrial Spaceship skills, you want to learn how to operate smartly on the market above everything else. Start small, buying things you can afford and selling them for a little bit more than you paid for them. You can even make money on the market without even owning a space ship, however it is much harder early on without having the money to make the market malleable.

Where's the ISK?

2008-04-21T14:38:00.007-05:00

After some toying around and paying attention to the mineral markets, I have determined that the cause of my new competition is literally caused by the removal of government subsidized ship markets (aka NPC shuttles). Because of all the speculation and movement in price of minerals, more people are speculating that the value of minerals will increase, and continue to increase.

I on the otherhand am operating normally, buying and selling. I am not sitting on stockpiles any longer than is required to get out to my systems which have minerals waiting for me. My immediate margins may not be astronomical at the moment, but the fact that I continue to operate normally and have many times more trades within a given period of time, I am certain I make making a lot more money than the speculators of similar net worth. Obviously if on has trillions of isk tied up in tritanium, a single sale can net a lot of money which I cannot compete with. At the same time, however, it isn't easy to sell that much tritanium at once unless you have buyers ready. Those people who are sitting on one or a few hundred million units of tritanium are definately behind the ball compared to my income which is rather significant and regular and perhaps most importantly, I can depend on it.

I similarly to Ka Jolo, a low-sec pirate who blogs at http://eve-pirate.blogspot.com/, am a young trader still learning the ropes but doing pretty well in the process. I estimate on my average days that I am still making about forty million ISK an hour of actual work. I do not mean that I make this money while I am offline, though my operation does continue while I am offline because people are selling to me ever few minutes of every day. However, it takes me approximately 1 hour to work a full load of minerals, and I can run at least one load a day, usually 3 or 4 loads. Over the weekends when I can spend more time babysitting the market and running my freighter to and fro between many end points, I can get in 5 or 6 full runs.

This Sunday however was abysmal. I was lucky to get two partial loads all day. Now I don't like to run partial loads, but I had buy orders ready to fail if I don't have the ISK to back them up. I needed to make those runs to make sure my wallet can cover the big trades so I don't loose money to my less deserving competetors. I don't actually loose money, but I do loose the profit.

Three days ago, I set up a public chat channel called "Interstellar Tritanium". It is my corp's public channel, however it is an open channel which I will use to keep in touch with friends I wouldn't otherwise be able to keep, and also as a place for local (meaning within the regions of my reach), miners and mineral traders to chat together in a place where we all have common interests and activities. I have connected with around 10 old friends so far, and made a few more.

Market getting tighter

2008-04-18T15:51:00.003-05:00

Because I started mineral trading on the large scale only about 2 weeks ago, I am not really certain about the source of this effect in my area; however, the markets in my regions of operation have been getting a little tougher.

First, although I have been trading around two of these regions for a couple of months, I have not been much of a moving force. I have farmed more miners in the some of these areas by providing local places to sell their minerals for a fair price, but nothing compares to the power of a freighter when it comes to the ability to more minerals to mineral trade hubs.

I believe though I have literally created furtile ground for my own competition. You see traders review the activity of their regions when they place buys and sells. You can tell which systems have active trading even if you don't "log" that activity. You can tell because of pricing and volume. In places where minerals move a lot, and where there is competition, the buy price and the sell price of your product will be very close to one another and the majority of buy orders will tend to be larger.

Let me try to explain how I might have affected this.

In an Industrial Ship, you have the means to place buys and move minerals to the order of 5 to 10 million units in productive mining systems without locking your assets up. Larger orders will get you stuck with tons of minerals that need hauling and no money, anything less and you are running around a aweful lot just to fill the cargo hold of your Industrial Ship. This size of buy orders doesn't draw very much attention in the active systems, because they generally get filled in a couple of hours or less. There is some safety in this. Being a small time buyer means that the big boys aren't worried about you nor your short term competition. Their larger orders will still get filled once your small order is done getting filled. Since most pilots can't baby-sit the market for much more than a couple hours each day, the hit they take is tiny. In productive systems, your order lasts 2 to 4 hours maybe, which literally means you are not interfering with the big boys' trading for at least 20 hours of that day. Ultimately, the big boys don't even register your existence.

In a freighter, you have the means to move greater than 80 million units of minerals in one load. Generally speaking, unless you have gobs of money. You don't want to let eiter your money or your mineral assets go stale. Stale assets do not make you any money, they just sit there going stale and moldy. So you want to size your buy orders just right, in each highly productive system I work in, I place buy orders hovering around this 80 million unit mark. Instead of placing giant buy orders in one system and waiting for it to get filled over a period of days, I place my buy orders so that I will hopefully have at least one or two full freighter fulls of minerals to carry to the mineral trade hubs. Keep in mind that a freighter is an awesome tool because of the size of its hold, but these ships moves very very slowly. It moves a lot slower than even the largest Industrial Ships. Flying around gathering minerals from all across the region and making stops at stations along my routes is a lengthy process. I try to streamline this process so I am going point-to-point without making several stops, and this helps increase my productivity. There is a tradeoff however.

Larger buy orders take much longer to get filled. In a perfect world with zero competition, my buy orders get filled in 4 or 6 or more hours in those same productive systems. Sounds great until you realize that other traders become more aware of my activities. I have more and more often discovered that my buy orders have only been filled incrementally, and when I take a peek at the market, their orders beat mine for price. Of course my miners have no loyalty, especially since they don't even know they are working for me. They sell their mineral to whomever offers the best price. I wouldn't ask them to do otherwise, but now because my buy orders are larger and last longer, I am running into competition with the other big boys, boys who are much much bigger than me.

Now scenario number two. Maybe more traders are excited about stockpiling minerals since the governments are no longer subsidizing fixed price ship sales (most notably shuttles) which essentially has placed a soft cap on the price of the low end minerals. Since traders can no longer buy thousands of these ships and melt them down into their mineral components, there is no longer anything which artificially holds the price of minerals to a limited range. These traders are banking on the value of minerals to skyrocket, even if only in the short term.

Then again, maybe the problem is both. Big traders trying to get their hands on lots of minerals, and my providing a roadblock to overcome in my regions and they having to continually beat my buys to get a hold of as much product as they can and bank it for later. I don't work that way, I continue to operate normally and I don't invest in long term commodities. I buy and I sell and I move and I provide. This is how I operate, but the extra competition is making the margin a little skinnier than it was just a week ago.

A long winded Introduction

2008-04-17T16:28:00.002-05:00

I am borne of Noble Gallente stock. Today, I am a successful Mineral Trader, but I wasn't always. Let me give you a not so short introduction of who I am and how I got here.
I graduated from the Center of Advanced Studies about 4 months ago having learned how to mine asteroid belts and how to process that ore into the raw materials used to build nearly every item available to the citizens of New Eden. Being young and innocent, I ended up going to school a second time, to better round out my early education. It seems that many pilots have second and even third helpings of school early on, so I was not discouraged. Thankfully, the tuition is free.

Finally moving on, I began mining in Cistuvaert flying my gifted Velator. Although the school provides the minimum required equipment to begin one's career, I quickly learned that the equipment is shoddy at best and is worth about as much as a snow cone to a polar bear. I earned enough money to upgrade my equipment and finally ship to an Imicus, which although does not enjoy the bonus to mining, it does sport a much larger cargo hold compared to other inexpensive frigates available. I fly back and forth between the belts and the space station hundreds of times, until I could afford an industrial ship. I would jetison a can fill it up just enough to to load the Iteron Mark I, and I would fly back and return with that ship. I found I made a lot more money doing this by reducing the number of trips I had to take to the space station with my load. I however often getting frustrated by how choked the asteroid belt can be with competition, and how quickly the belts can be depleted and how long it remains depleted before another stretch of the asteroid belt moves into range. I moved on into Aidert, which has no space station to call home. However; it has little to no competition, and sports higher quality asteroid belts. I quickly learned though that Rats are rampant. Almost as soon I started collecting a good haul of ore to bring home, I was prevented from continuing my labors as soon as a roving band of rats decided to show up. They never leave on their own and stick around, so once the rats have shown up, an ill equipped new miner has no chance of profiting from this system. I returned to Custuvaert to ply whatever scraps I could find available. I however also quickly learned that your ore can be easily stolen. I also learned the hard way that you don't want to do anything about it.

One day while I was mining in my Imicus, a person initiated a private conversation with me, and offered some advice on how to improve my profits and so forth. He also donated 15 million ISK to help me get along. At this time, 15 Million ISK seemed like a lifetime's worth of income, and I initially declined it but he insisted I keep it. I ended up giving the money to another needy spacefarer whom I don't even remember now.

Let me rewind here a little. When I decided to live the life of a space pilot, I had initially decided that I would go at it alone and to prove my individual mettle against the harsh life of space alone. I wanted to show the universe that you do not need to rely on people who ultimately have the same ability to take as much as give. I had my mind set on succeeding or failing under my own power.

Fastforward - After having developed my friendship with that early benefactor name Valushon, decided to give teamwork a try. He convinced me that there are huge resources and experiences that can only be tapped through teamwork, so I decided that perhaps since he is a good person, that the rest of his crew might also be. I joined Ex Caminus with excitement, and also with the feeling of entering that unknown of living a life that requires you depend on you chosen group of comrades. I was given some instruction on how to improve my learning curve but studying the liberals arts which essentially teaches a person how to study and be an "educated" fellow. Very quickly I doubled my speed of learning most things. This is much better than having to go through school twice just to a better grasp of the simplest things. Ex Caminus provided me access to sources of information to swiftly improve my profitability as a miner, most notably showing me where to find the finest work on mining available, "Halada's Guide to Mining". Let me digress and tell you this is the single most essential guide to succeeding in a mining career. There are some things that force me to disagree with Hilada, but overall there is no better source of information for a miner publically available. If you wish to become a truly successful miner, this is must read manual.

After being in Ex Caminus for a few weeks, and having recruited a majority portion of new membership and bringing them up to speed as young miners. The corporation's CEO decided that although I was also young, I had the drive necessary to successfully lead a team of industrialists. He therefore gave me a huge promotion and made me the Director of Mining for the corporation. I literally was leading the mining division of our corporation flying no more than a cruiser. I quickly trained into a Retreiver, and was a productive force for the corporation. Although the Retreiver isn't the productive monster that a Hulk is, if one is persistent and one develops the right support skills, one can mine as much or more in a retreiver as a hulk pilot can with zero support skills. I therefore trained those support skills before training for a Hulk, because I was increasing my profits and benefiting from them sooner that i would had I simply make that beeline in my education to piloting the massive Hulk.

Pretty quickly after my promotion into D-level management, things started to go sour in the corp for me. I found myself becoming more and more at odds with the rest of management because we didn't agree on some very minor but apparently touchy issues. In the end, I gathered up my things and left the corp, and once again had planned on going it either alone, or running my own show as CEO of my own corporation.

My old division mates and I started a new corp Valence Interstellar Operations under the leadership of Veriasse Valence. Our old corp, Ex Caminus, went to war with us over our sudden departure and liberating our assets. There wasn't much of a fight, and we settled our differences, and moved on.

In the meantime I had been studying to pilot a hulk now, and I had all the support skills necessary to reap maximum profit from its operation once I could fly it. One of my corp mates helped me purchase my hulk loaning me the remainder of the money I would need to buy one. I bought one and man, you can mine a LOT of ore in a hulk when you are trained and equipped properly. However as soon as I earned enough money to pay back this loan, I was so sick of mining, and I only mined at times when I didn't really need to pay attention. A Hulk fitted with cargo expanders has a cargo bay just a few m3 short of a similarly fitted Interon Mark IV, so jetcan mining became a thing of the past. The time it takes to run home and switch ships, and haul ore now exceeds the time it takes to just haul the ore home in your mining vessel and returning to mine some more. Couple that with the fact that it takes approximately 15 minutes to fill a Hulks cargo hold, and mining becomes a passive activity rather than one requiring constant attention. I very quickly became bored of mining, and once I paid off my debts, I looked for other ways to profit.

I looked into trading as a profit source, our CEO wasn't so keen on the idea of sinking our assets into trade, having been convinced that the market place is just as harsh a PvP environment as low-sec pirating, so I decided to try it alone with my own assets. I quickly learned there was an amazing market for minerals when they were hauled to the right place. As a miner, I often hauled my own higher-end minerals to far off stations to maximize my profits, but when it came to Tritanium and Pyrite, it was more profitable to just dump them on a local buyer and continue mining than it was to spend the time hauling many many loads to get a few extra percent profit. I had however been training to pilot an Iteron Mark V, and when I fitted that ship out with Cargo Expanders, I found that I profited about as much or more hauling and trading minerals as I was mining in my hulk. After a few days of hauling, I found that I could afford to rig my ship with Astronautics Rigs (the much more expensive rig equivelent of cargo expanders), and this increased my profitability quite a bit. My Iteron Mark V, fully rigged and outfitted can carry a few m3 shy of 49233.1 m3. A full load carried a good profit, and I was making a pretty good hunk of cash for just a little hauling back and forth between mining outposts and mineral trade centers. I reported my successes back to my corporation who was becoming a bit antsy at my lack of participation in the corporations primary function which is mining. I even sold my hulk so I had more working capital to work with. However we worked out that since I was so successful in trade as an early trader perhaps I should be handing trade and commerce for the corporation, and so this is what I began to do.

I however quickly ran into a problem. There was now a conflict of interest, I was trading for the corp and I was trading for myself. That in an of itself is no issue until you consider that the product was exactly the same, Minerals. This wouldn't be such an issue if there was trust involved, trust that allowed me to ameliorate my trading with the corporation's, however the CEO of the corporation wanted to see the trades occuring directly to and from the corporation's wallet. I was not permitted to take the minerals for trade and transfer the profits in from my own wallet. Here is the problem with that. When setting up sale orders or even dumping minerals on existing buy orders, whose minerals do I sell first? Mine or the corps? If I set up sale's orders for myself, and separate sales orders for the corp, then how do I control which gets filled first? In the end it would have been more useful to pool the minerals together, thereby increasing the volume of our buy and sales orders, however it didn't work out. This coupled with the fact that the CEO of our corporation stopped showing up led me to decide I need to move on to my own as I initially intended all along so many months ago. I donated all my mining equipment to the corp, my crystals and mining modules and such, and I relinquished my roles and when the timer ran out, I left the corp. Three days later the CEO finally noticed my disappearance with an apology for not being around and the teaser that he was planning on leaving the corp to me as CEO because he was no longer interested in being a pilot and planned to return planetside permanantly. As far as I know that corp still exists, and I know that Veriasse is still alive, because send him the occasional message saying hello with an update on my life, but I haven't heard from him since.

A few days after leaving ValOps and having made some friends in The Scope, I had a discussion with veteran pilot about whether there was any consequences to firing upon cannisters. Jetison cannister do not incur the wrath of CONCORD and I believed at the time that this would also be true for secure containers as well. She wanted to bet on it, and I jokingly said I would bet 3 billion ISK on it. I thought that would be an apparent joke, but she seriously considered the bet and she asked if I would pay up if I lost the bet. Of course I told her that I was only joking and don't have a tiny fraction of that, however apparently she DID have that kind of money if she was serious. Anyway, although I had at this time several hundred million isk, i wasn't willing to risk it, I told her so and that I really was only willing to bet 1 million because I was saving up for a freighter and it takes quite a bit of time to build that sort of cash. Anyway, we tested shooting a cannister and I lost. I paid up. However, because I was hoping for and looking for people to loan me the money to get into a freighter and/or loan me theirs while I work on getting my own (including my ex CEO from Ex Caminus whom I have become friendly with again), I decided to give her a try. I told her how I have the skills necessary to pilot one, that I was impatient and didn't want to wait the 2 months it was going to take to afford a freighter and still have enough working capital to use it effectively. Anyway, all said and done a perfect stranger pretty much gave me with no strings attached (meaning she just transfered the cash, no contract) gave me 1 billion ISK. Terms are 50 million a week interest paid until the principle can be returned in one lump sum. So if I have the billion in a month, I have paid 200 million in interest up to then, if it takes 2 months, then 400 million. Anyway the weekly payment is strictly interest.

I realized a little too late that I missed one skill in the requirements, and I still had about 5 more days of training before I could fly the ship, and my interest was already kicked in and I would have to start paying in a week. Instead of continuing to run trade routes with my Iteron, I sunk all my assets into buy orders and bought up as much mineral as I could so that when I finally could get into amy freighter I had something to haul and trade right away. That day came soon enough, I made so much money on that first and second day buying and selling, that I made my first payment and retained a lot of profit in the bargin. As it turns out, when you have the vehicle to carry your goods, you can make a major profit just moving stuff around.

In the less than two weeks that I have been flying my freighter, I have profitted nearly 1 billion ISK. Payment Day is today, and it won't hurt a bit. Once I have 2 billion in my wallet, I will pay back the principle of one billion. Why wait that long? Because you need working capital.
I incorporated my own corp this time. It's called "Interstellar Tritanium Solutions Team", and two of my old corp mates joined me. They are doing other things and it is more of a social arrangement with benefits, they mine and hunt pirates, and I buy their ore from them at fair market value. This means I pay them a good price and they make more money than if they dumped their ore on any generic mineral trader, and more than if they hauled it themselves. In fact, all of my miners and by that I mean any and all miners that operates in my four region of operations, I ensure get a fair deal for their minerals. I do't undercut them knowing they have no choice, I want them to want to sell to me because they get a good deal. I make my money by bringing it to the people who need it.

A miner is who I am, and trade is what I do.