300% profit guaranteed!!!

Check this out:

3500 AUR = 1 plex = 365 million isk

3500 AUR = 365 million isk

1000 AUR = 104 million isk

Men's 'Precision' Boots = 1000 AUR = 104 million isk

Oddly enough, although almost everything in the AUR store follows this approximation (easy version: aur/10 = isk value in millions), the boots have actually been selling for around 50 mil over the last month (they are pretty ugly...). But, check jita prices for the boots today.

Since everybody got 1000 free AUR, and since the boots are the only thing that costs 1000 or less, a lot of people got the boots and put them on the market, and suddenly there are sell orders under 15 million. If somebody were so inclined they could pick up a bunch of boots now, wait for the free AUR thing to finish and the market to equalize, and make a pretty decent profit.

Just saying. My guess is it will take a really long time for the market to equalize, since a) everybody got 1000 aur and b) aur store items seem to be fairly slow movers, but opportunities like this don't come up every minor content patch.

Selling a supercapital using a third party

I set out to sell my nyx because I'm not using it and could use the isk. Originally I was thinking darkness or chribba, but they weren't available while me and the buyer were on and we agreed to use somer's third party service.

The buyer put up a passworded pos in the system. He and somer warped to the pos; he transferred the isk to somer; I warped to the pos, ejected, and he got in. He verified the fittings and somer transferred the isk to me.

It went down like this (edited for brevity):

Buyer> isk sent
Somerset Mahm > Confirming I've received 23b ISK. You're clear to join fleet
Autumnries Mahm > what's the POS password, please?
Buyer> ******
Buyer> clr to warp 0m to me
Autumnries Mahm > POS entered successfully
Me > warping now
Me > Okay. If it's a trap and the nyx dies, I get the money. If it's stolen by a mysterious third party who has the password, I get the money. If the fit is wrong, I get the nyx back.
Autumnries Mahm > correct :P
Autumnries Mahm > on all counts
Buyer> i am ready to enter
Autumnries Mahm > Okay, I see Nyx in shields. Buyer: again, please verify that everything is correct, as this is your only chance to do so while being secured
Autumnries Mahm > Since this is your POS and you won't leave immediately, once you confirm everything is okay, I will release the money
Me > Oke, ejecting. Don't press self destruct, don't press self destruct....
Autumnries Mahm > okay, Nyx is empty
Autumnries Mahm > and now Buyer is in it
Autumnries Mahm > Please check fit :)
Buyer> in the ship
Buyer> everything is here
Buyer> thank you very much
Me > Thank you.
Autumnries Mahm > okay, great!
Autumnries Mahm > I'm now sending the money to [me]
Me > I have the isk

What I'm doing now

I mentioned a few weeks back that I've gone back to empire and am changing direction in my gameplay. I've been sort of putting off posting about it since I'm still working out how the whole mess is going to work, but I guess now is as good a time as any.

Short version, instead of being 0.0 elitepeeveepee, or indeed any pvp at all (for the forseeable future), I'm going to be doing science and industry.

LIKE A BOSS

Fortunately, I have some pride so I won't be sitting in jita and adjusting market orders by 0.01 isk. I'm awesome, you see, so I'm going to be building capital ships, mostly in lowsec, and I'm going to be doing it from BPOs.

Here's how it's going to work:

First, I now have a personal corp for building. When building capital ships it's helpful to have more than 11 manufacturing slots, so I will have two characters in this corporation. Capitals are a 2-stage process, manufacturing capital components first and then the ship when the components are done, so all the minerals and parts will be kept in a corp hangar, and jobs will be installed on behalf of the corp and delivered to the corp hangar, which makes manufacturing with multiple characters much easier. All the lowsec manufacturing and market orders will be accomplished by the two characters in this corporation, isk will be kept in the corporation wallet, etc. And nobody else will be allowed in.

A third character, in NPC corp to avoid any possible wardecs, will be used to move minerals from jita to the lowsec building system. Moving minerals will be accomplished thusly:

First, the ships to be built will be indentified. Using the power of spreadsheets the mineral requirements for those ships will be found, then the minerals purchased. The expensive minerals will be moved directly to lowsec via jump freighter(to avoid possible ganks), but first everything that doesn't fit in the JF will be moved via freighter to a highsec system adjacent to the lowsec building system. After the jump freighter moves the high-value minerals to the lowsec building system, it will then jump via gate to the system with the low value minerals and back to the building system until all the minerals have been moved. This saves a lot of jump fuel compared with jumping from jita to lowsec repeatedly, plus I can get in two loads of minerals for each cyno cycle.

Since the third charcter will not be in my corporation, it won't be able to help build in lowsec. Instead, the third character will build freighters (and probably orcas later on) in jita, using the freighter to move minerals to a station with shorter manufacturing wait times than the 4-4 station.


So uh, that's my project at the moment. I've been afk-working on this for a couple of weeks and it's only partially set up; the situation currently is that the third character is currently the CEO and sole member of the building corp, jita manufacturing won't even start for another 10 days and the two lowsec building characters are only partially trained. I have gotten some ships built, though, and sold two carriers at 20% profit. The jerk-head who told me I was wrong about the margins on carriers when I commented about them several months ago on somebody else's blog can suck it.


My goal with this is to at least be able to pay for plex on two accounts, and I'm confident it will do so once things are up and running. It would also be nice if I could turn a decent profit beyond that, which we'll see about. If things do work out, I've identified some other business opportunities which spare liquidity can be invested in. Plus I still want a titan.

EDIT: This is my second ever post using the 'industry' tag. The first was in december of 2009.

The method works!

So, convert a video to .bik and put it in the right folder with the right name and you can watch it in CQ. This raises all sorts of possibilities. You could use it to watch combat videos...


(click to embiggen)

...instructional videos... have CQ-only music...

ooooorrrrrrrrr you could use it to watch ponies.


(click)

(click)

(don't click)

CQ and incarna are now fully justified.

I was there

So CCP is starting a new media site thing and encouraging players to send things in.

Did anybody not immediately think of this?

Firesale

Since I'm changing direction in eve, I'm selling off unused assets. I have started by gathering my stuff which was in empire and putting it up for sale, and at the time of writing I've sold about 3.2 billion isk worth of items and still have 2.6 billion on the market, plus a bunch on contract. That's just from empire, and some stuff I evacced from 0.0 -- an evac which was incomplete because I was hardly playing at the time. Also, it doesn't include capitals.

I'm discovering some interesting things in the process, mostly about how things can build up when it's faster to make money to buy new stuff than it is to move old stuff. I have in jita 58 units of 1400mm artillery, 30 t2 (3.1 million each) and 28 'scout' (5.3 million each). I found two battleships I haven't used since before I left highsec three years ago; dozens of battleship BPC which I was using for manufacturing in 0.0 1-1/2 years ago; and dozens of researched ammo, drone and (cheap, e.g frigate) ship BPO (npc price to anyone who wants them).

I haven't even started on items stuck in 0.0. There are a more of those.

A lot more.

My future... in SPAAAAAAAAAACE

So about a month ago I said that I was going to let my accounts lapse because I'm not playing. Instead of doing that, I'm going to pursue a new direction in eve. One that doesn't require much time investment or commitment.

I am letting one of my accounts expire, my 'main', who is my capital and super pilot. I'm also getting out of pvp for the foreseeable future and doing my own thing. Say, something I can do in a few hours a week while at work. More on this in a few days.

What this means for the blag I'm not sure. Some of the things I'm looking into I won't be posting about, and most of the rest will only be interesting for like two or three posts. I guess we'll see how it goes.

CSM done good

So, we got everything most people wanted. All wrapped in vague timelines and corporation speak of course, but anybody who didn't expect that probably can't type and breathe at the same time.

Newai. If you're reading this you've already read the official poast and trebor's post, watched the video and read the reactions, so I'm not going to go on at length.

But, you remember back when the blagosphere was sperging with nerd rage about mittens in particular and the new CSM in general? And when I said that the CSM would be good and mittens was a very effective politician? [1] [2]

Yeah, I'm going to take this opportunity to rub it in, and gloat a little. I didn't get where I am without being petty and vindictive.

Exploration income

Poasting old stuff crew checking in. Before the NC died I did exploration for income for about a year and a half. I ended up using two characters, one with a scout/scanner/tank tengu and the other with a golem for DPS. In July of last year I started keeping track of weekly income with the intent to make a graph at some point.

Here's the graph.

Income from exploration is highly variable, but I usually made a minimum of 100m/h. My best run was 400m/h averaged over 10 hours, and my worst was 40m/h averaged over 8 hours, which was a really impressive outlier.

Guristas are shit for exploration. I don't even like to think how much more isk I could have made doing angels or sansha instead.