An interesting thought

As I said earlier, I do follow closely a youtuber named Delonewolf. In his latest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDegLW4E2Xc) he came to the conclusion that most industrial players will move to a public Raitaru instead of deploying (or using) their own POS for their activities. Interesting thought, since I came to that same conclusion a few months back when CCP announced the engineering complexes, and released a few details about them. 

For me, it’s a hassle to plan for the logistic needed to deploy the POS, while using it at its max potential for a few days: I have to have enough fuel in it for 1-2-3 days in a row, I have to stock up enough minerals in a NPC station to be able to produce items around the clock while the POS is up, with as minimum downtime as possible between batches, across 6 characters. My goal is to extract as much work as possible per fuel block, for the amount of time the POS is up.

For a solo corporation like mine, keeping the logistic up for more than a few days is not possible. I have to ferry back and forth million of m3 of items and minerals, with just one freighter. In a 24h period, I could build more than 2 million m3 of items (ships/modules/rigs), and need at least 2 trips from my production system to my tradehub, more than 40 minutes per trip. Then, I have to keep buying minerals, without buying too much of them, and ferry them back to my production system. That’s close to a full time job if you ask me.

Now, having a bunch of public engineering complexes available, I won’t need to be as committed as before at keeping the pipe full of jobs. For sure, I may have to use more than one engineering complex, to profit from the various rigs. I may split my production to various engineering complexes, and maybe even to multiple systems, but at least, I won’t need to move hundreds of millions of m3 of minerals each day. A single Kryo, or two, may be enough for most activities. For sure, I will have to adapt my logistic chain, but I could deal with that. 

My first immediate benefice is that, I won’t have to bother with the inherent cost of running the POS , while nothing is running in it (slightly less than 3m ISK per day, and less than 90m per month), and only paying the factory tax plus the system factory index. 

My real biggest issue with Ascension, is to find a way to hack my excel sheets to deal with the new way of calculating taxes. The owner of the engineering complex could change it whenever he want, and change its rig configuration without warning. There must be a way to find this information from the CREST API interface.

Post Ascension Release

Hi there.

First of all, congratulation to CCP. I truly think that Ascension is a success. Of course, there were a few glitches, but I think that, globally, that release went well across the board.  I could see that the market is now in a complete chaos, there is so much trading now in the T1 market that it's pretty impressive. I can't produce fast enough to re-fill my Sell Orders. 

Those new industrial complexes will be a game changer I think. After two weeks, there's already an incredible amount of them around Jita, and even, at least, one large one has been deployed by Eve Mogul in New Caldari. When properly rigged, they are slightly slower than a POS, and costlier too. If you make it public, with a decent tax, they may pay themselves overtime. I've seen some at 0.1% up to 8%. The extremely low tax may be doable close to Jita due to the amount of jobs you may potentially attract, but 2-3 jumps from Jita, forget it. As for those at 8%+ (un)rigged Raitaru, they are just marginally faster than a NPC station and quite less secure. If I had a 500m-1B isk BPO to research, I would still use a NPC station for the last 3-4 steps in ME/TE.

Industry

On the industry side of my activities, I'm currently building an incredible amount of T1 items, and I just can't produce them fast enough. Some of them are in such demands that I sell all my production of the day in a few hours. I realise that I should have more than 3 or 4 BPOs for most of my items, which is not the case. Of course, I have a bunch of BPCs for items that I don't produce often (structures mats, standup, etc) but you can't use BPCs for a day-to-day production of modules and ships as a BPC most often runs out before 24h. 

My main goal here is to use all my mineral stock in my production system to prepare for my next steps in Eve Online (more about that later on). I still have close to 6.5 Billion ISK in minerals in a NPC station, so, I'm not done producing. Sadly, my intense industry activities are increasing the Factory index tax of my system to a point that I plan to move my tower to another one and resume from there.

As I'm doing my planning, I found out that I have been extremely lazy on my PI activities. Most of the time, I forget to restart the extractors after 5 days, and I was collecting the PI materials maybe once a month at best. The annoying part was that my PI planets were in systems that were partially taken by TEST please ignore back in World War Bee, and the corporation which set the new POSes did put a 25% tax on them. I had to stop using most of my P3 factories since it was way too costly, hoping that, at some point, Project Mayhem or CO2 would retake these planet and reset them to a more bearable tax.

It never happened, and thus, my PI activities were almost halted for the last 6 months. As my planning continued, I decided to move all my mats closer to my industry system, and find a couple of 10-15% planets to setup P3 factories to use those PI mats. I did jump when I realized that I had more than 4 million m3 of PI materials! As of 29^th of November:

PI stock value:
P1:	432 487 577,89
P2:	11 322 504 633,81
P3:	2 993 157 041,98
P4:	0,00
Total:	14 748 149 253,68

I still have to find the time to plan carefully which P3 to build to extract the maximum possible of ISK from those items. My initial planning indicates that I would need more than 15 days to transform most of them with 5 planets. I don’t want to redeploy more than 1 character for that operation.

I try to keep all my research slots used, but I find that quite hard to be honest. It's quite easy when you have one account, but on multiple accounts and multiple characters per account, it could become a bit messy. I'm thinking about creating a script to check my industry/research for each character via an API key, and send me an email when a job is about to end (in the next 6 hours or so.). Of course, this may already exist, as a phone app or another integrated tool, but I'm a bit paranoid I think, and I don't really trust an online app with my API keys :-) 

Trading

On my trader alt, things are going well. Or I could say, thing are going extremely well. I feel a bit ashamed to profit from other people's laziness: instead of doing a 2-3 jumps trip, they are willing to buy items at an inflated price (and sometimes, at an incredible one). I could make a 100m ISK profit on an item, which could be purchased way lower at 3 jumps from where I sell it. That's just insane.

To go back in time slightly, with the release of Ascension, there were a lot of opportunities to do a lot of ISK with some risks. I did manage to get a hold on a truck load of items that I know would sell well when Ascension will be release.  If I had enough ISK at that time, I would have even risk more of them by the end of October, but I've been too "conservative", and kept a good amount of ISK in my wallet, limiting my stock to approximately 1.5B isk of items. I resold them for close 3B isk a few days after the release, and honestly, I should have waited until the week after. Prices for those items skyrocketed on that week.

Yesterday, on the 27th of November, I had to make a decision. On my 145 possible orders, I have only 2-3 free. I would need a dozen more at least, but I try to keep those 2-3 free, in case an opportunity arises. My wallet was oscillating around 2.8B - 4B for the past week, and I don't like to have too much idle ISK since it doesn't help me getting richer.

So, what to do? Try to gamble on some items, and hope that their price will recover at the next big war? (I have already 1.3B of items in such gamble) Stock some items that will sell for sure over time? (Doable, but I would have to make another excel sheet to keep a track of them). Or what?

While I was pondering about my options, I noticed the ad on the launcher: Black Friday sales on the CCP website. I took a look at the PLEX price, and noticed that it was dropping since the last two days. My mind was set; I would buy two PLEXs at some point Monday morning. 

Upon buying them, via a Buy Order, I was smiling. When I started this operation, back in august, I had only 25m ISK, and PLEXing the account was a long time dream. But now, at the end on the 3rd month, I already bought 2 PLEX, I have 3.6 B isk in Sell Order (2,9 B with a 20% loss), 1.8 B isk in Buy Order (full escrow), close to 3 B isk in un-sold items in stations or in transit and a 200m wallet. That's around 10 B isk in about 3 months, that's pretty insane IMHO.

Now, let's see how things will go on December for that character.

Time to move on.

For the last 2 years and a half, I have been playing in High Sec, doing some mining, a few weeks of missionning, lots of industry, PI, explorations, etc. I've been playing for a couple of months in low sec while I was trying to get closer to Jita for my industry activities, before retreating back to High Sec a few weeks before World War Bee really kicks in. Lonetrek was already a nightmare by that time.

Some months ago, Delonewolf (a youtuber that have a similar play style to mine, https://www.youtube.com/user/delonewolf) did a couple of videos about Providence, and how enjoyable it could be to play in a NDRS environment (NDRS, Not Red, Don't Shoot.) Since those videos, I always had that idea in the back of my head. Moving to a Null-Sec system, with people who would have a similar philosophy to mine: Do your own stuff, help the ones in trouble and stay clear of drama.

When I connect to the game, I'm there to have fun. For me, it means doing my industry activities, plan my next batch, space trucking stuffs (my own logistics), answering in the help channel, even getting ganked if I'm careless,  killing a bunch of rats in a belt if I have nothing else to do while chatting in local. 

I spent already a couple of hours in Providence, in a mining op, with 2 ventures LOL !  That was quite enjoyable. I've started to move hundreds of BPCs, a couple of BPOs, some ships and I plan to move all my characters down there by mid December. My alpha character is already there, in his pod. I will have to create another alpha to set in Jita, to keep an eye on the market, and let my trader do her own business in her trade bub. 

Before moving, I want to consume all my stocked minerals, refine most of my PI materials and then selling them. I will let most of my costly BPOs, ships and items in High Sec, and start almost from scratch in Providence. I think that it will be fun. I will give news here, as always.

Until then, fly safe.

o7

Trader update, 31th of october.

Quite an impressive week I must say. On my last update, I was saying that I reached the 1B ISK in my wallet. Since then, I'm hardly able to use all those ISKs without selling an equal amount a couple of hours later. Here's the big picture:
Sell order: 1.697 B isk
Buy Order: 1.040 B isk (Escrow, I didn't trained the skill that lower the amount taken in escrow. I think it's a better way to control my expenses)
Wallet: 1.149 B isk
In transit or un-sold: approx 1.3 B isk.
paid taxes: -236 410 476,69 ISK  (broker fee + sales taxes)

So, overall, considering a 20% loss with the Sell orders, I'm at 4.8 billions ISK !
For the record, I start playing as a trader with a 25m ISK budget on the last week of august 2016, which mean a 19388.44 % increase in 2 months. That's pretty insane.
Now, I have to go deeper, and find new niches items, and that's the most time consuming task I think.

What about PLEXing my account ? well, considering current PLEX price, at more a 1.2B ISK, it's not worth it I think. I will wait for a couple of months to see if the price go down around 1B / PLEX.

On my industrial characters, I've been busy researching a tons of BPOs (46 currently in research), to be prepared when alpha clones will get there. They will use a trendemous amount of munitions, ships and modules.
I intend to keep adding new cheap BPOs to my library for the next month, and building some stocks in the last week before the release.

In the meantime, fly safe.

A milestone has been reached: 1B isk.

Oh well, it's done. This morning, my wallet (idle ISK) reached 1 B ISK. I did start my experience around the 27th of August, less than 2 months later, I have a wallet of 1B ISK, 1.2B in Sell Order, 700m is Buy Order and around 40m of unsold items.
I sincerely doubt that I would have such a continued growth for the next couple of months, but I could say that I'm deeply impressed by that result.

Early october update

Things were really smooth for me since my last post, I tried to get into new markets to diversify my products. I got some successes, but I can't say that I'll keep most of these markets later on.
In the past two weeks, I send her (my trader character is a woman) some helps in the forms of two "combat" characters. Both are indy characters with some weapon skills and ships. I sent them to her to help raise my trader's corp standing with the corp owning the station.
After going to the painfully slow process of level 1 distribution missions, I decide to switch level 2 security missions, and train her some social skills to speed up the process slightly.
She's now at a standing of 7, and I'm farming level 4 missions as fast as possible with a T1 battleship and a T1 Battlecruiser. The BC take care of small stuff (Frigates, destroyers, cruisers) while the BS deal with the battlecruisers and battleships. I don't even bother to loot nor salvage wrecks.
As I don't share the mission rewards with my other toons, I collected a couple of dozens of million ISK that way on the trader, while the "fighters" keep the bounties (around 90m ISK in the course of two days)
I intend to raise that corporation standing up to 8 or 8.5, then I'll see if it's worth it to raise it further, for trade purpose.

For now, I don't complete those storyline missions, since it'll lower my status with the other half of the empire, and I'm not ready for that. I want to be able to move freely in empire.

As of today, here's the report:

Market Orders	1 247 417 046,12
Gain	531 412 115,34
Wallet	292 532 325,44

Some of those ISK in the wallet are due to missioning sadly, I didn't do the math, but I suppose that at least 30 to 40 millions ISK are due to mission rewards.

Now, let's see if I could get some new profits by the end of the month.

An small update on the trader experiment.

I was supposed to be involved with a trader experiment for this month, but I was kept away from the game for almost 2 weeks, due to RL stuff.
On the first two weeks, I managed to find a couple of niche items that I was able to trade for some ISK, then bought more items to sell on a longer term.
I could say that it played well, and I quickly came to a point that I didn't have enough play time per day on the following weeks to be able to find new items to sale, and ended up with more than 150m ISK in my wallet.
As of today, Monday 26th of September, I have a 230m wallet, 898m in Sell Order and my current net gain is slightly over 485m ISK. Not too bad for a character which had only a 25m ISK wallet one month ago.

I do not expect to be able to have a such net growth next month, but hope to have at least an additional 250m to 300m gain in general. My most pressing issue is to find new items to sell ;-)
During the month, I realized that I forgot that I had already trained the PI skills for this character up to 5 planets with Command Center Upgrade at 4. I then spent some time finding a half decent HiSec system to build some PI. that's when I remembered how painful it was to run PI in HiSec: planets are so weak, and produce few resources per cycle.
I eventually found a system, and built a setup to produce some T2 at a relatively slow pace.

On its skill queue, there's still some skills to research at level 5, especially Broker Relations and Accounting. I realized that I would need to do some missions with that alt too, to further lower my broker fees. I tried, at first, with destribution missions level 1, but quickly saw that it will take me for ever to reach 2.0, so I switched to security lvl 1 plus some social skills to raise the corporation faction faster.
I eventually sent one of my more combat oriented character, in a destroyer, when it was time to move to security missions level 2. And I must say that missiles boats are really nice to farm those missions quickly.
On a speed tanked corax, split the 7 missile launchers in 2 groups, and kill all (non-elite) frigates/destroyers in 2 or 3 volleys. For cruisers, concentrate all missiles on a single target, and it will blow off in a 3-4 volley too. (2 T2 BCU + 7 'arbalest' LML + T1 missiles, as I didn't bother to raise my skills enought T2 LML with that character.)
The thing is that I don't know if I will raise that corp faction up to 8, since it mean a very long grinding period. I already did that for a couple of factions on my main characters, I can't say that I'm excited to reproduce that again.

On my other characters, I finally spent some time to produce items for two days in a row, with around 50ish industrial jobs running at the same time per day, and generating around 4 millions of m3 of items to move back to my tradehub.
I don't use build queues longer than 23 hours, in case of that I got wardec'ed once again, and had to remove everything before the war kick in. The last time I used a 48h queue, I got wardeced, and lost hundreds of millions ISK in mats at canceling jobs.

Oh, on a funny note, after more than 2 years playing the game, I finally fitted my very first battleship on TQ (I did fitted and lost 2 before on Sisi for a mass-test) and went to test it in a belt.. battleship vs 2 frigates rats, overkill you said ? :-)

On the current Purity of the throne event, sadly, I've been barely able to participate, I've been mostly AFK for two weeks, my region is way too busy/farmed to find one, and I didn't really took time to fit a good ship for it. I went only in 3 of them with my battleship, just for the fun.

The trader experiment

From time to time, I read the Markets for ISK blog (http://marketsforisk.blogspot.ca/), and I must say I'm quite impressed by that player. If you have some interest in understanding the market perspective in Eve Online, you should spend some time reading his blog.
I'm pretty sure that his (or her) day job is related to the economy industry (banking, trading, or something like that).

As I was daydreaming in the subway last week, I decided to make a small experiment for a couple of months, just to see if I could make it works.

I will use an alt as a trader in a low volume tradehub (Dodixie), with a limited budget (25 millions of ISK), no access to my corporation assets, and 2 ships: a Heron from a career agent (400m3 cargo haul) and a Wreath (fast align T1 hauler, 4000m3 hauler).
My ultimate goals are the following:
+ to generate, at least, a 20% gain per month in wealth in the first few months (as I doubt to be able to keep such a growth rate at some point)
+ To have as little as possible of ISK in my wallet (1% to 2% of my wealth)
+ less than 1h/day, to adjust Sell Orders and buy new items.
+ PLEX that account.

For that last goal, I'm supposed to do it with my industry activities, but I kept re-investing in new BPOs each months, and thus, failed to do it since, at least, a year.

I don't exclude the possibility to trade items from my corporation to that alt. On that case, since I don't build an item if I can't have a 10% GPM selling it in Jita, I will sell them to my alt with a 10% profit for my corp (TCO cost of that item + 10%).

So, I spent the next few days training that alt a few skills (an other 10m ISK worth of skill books, that I don't count in the initial budget of 25m that I gave to the alt.)
As I was scheduled to be out of town for a few days, I did schedule a one week skill queue, that is about to finish this Thursday, and burnt my 25m ISK of initial budget in Thursday 26th of august.

Since I had some time to spare that day, I decided to run some level 1 distribution missions with my heron, to raise some further cash while waiting for Sell order to sell.
I finished buying a venture+fits and buying some weapons for my heron to finish some quests.. bah, to bad for my profits :-)

Anyway, I generated around 1.5m ISK with those missions.
Using my main character in The Forge, I found a couple of items that I could buy for cheap in Jita, and re-sell them immediately in Dodixie for a profit. In a few hours, my 1.5m ISK were now a 4m ISK, then a 6m ISK, that I did re-invested in various items before leaving for the week end.

As of today, Wednesday 31th of august, here's the picture:

This month          
Bought for:    275 291 436,88      
Sold for:    318 546 238,52      
Taxes paid:          
Gain    43 254 801,64      
Account    2 883 602,36   
I did traded some items on Monday and Tuesday, and realized that I forgot to buy and train the Minmatar industrial skill, when I tried to move a 4000 m3 cargo. Most of those trades were quick one, buying for 20m-30m in Jita and sell "immediate" in Dodixie with a 600 000 ISK - 1m profit per trip.

Those profits were reinvested in new items, that are now in sales.

In the meantime, I did spent some time, while moving stuff around, at programming some scripts and database for my trader, to track her
activities. I've not finished yet, but most of it is done.
I still have to handle taxes, to deduce them from gains, and account my sell orders in my wealth calculation.
IIRC, I have 120m of Sell Orders as this Wednesday morning.

I must say that it's not that bad to go from a 25m budget to close to 40m in just a few days. I don't count my sell orders for now, since I didn't integrated them in my excel file yet.

To help me to decide if I will do a profit on some particular item, I did a quick calculator in excel. It helped me to determine if some items were worth it to move between trade hubs.


Broker Fee    2,70%    Sales taxes    1,20%          
Quick Calc                               taxes:           gain:             GPM      
amount:          2                  
Buy at:           1 249 998,00                  
Sell at:           1 800 000,00    -70 199,00    959 606,00    44,00      
Immediate:    1 705 007,07    -20 459,08    869 099,97    36,40   

I will make a post once a month to report on my progress in this experiment.

On my industry buisness:

For my other activities, well, it seems that I did a "slight" miscalculation :-) I just completely forgot to by some mexallon earlier past week, and ended up with close to 10B of minerals, but barely no mexallon at all.

Minerals    typeid    quantity      
Tritanium    34    214 362 418      
Pyerite        35      75 999 780      
Mexallon    36        3 252 496      
Isogen         37      49 141 255      
Nocxium    38        2 544 550      
Zydrine      39        1 199 964      
Megacyte   40          404 327      
Morphite    11399    26 551      
    worth value:    9 590 419 892,21   

I don't want to buy too much of mexallon at a time, its price is still dropping ever few days. And I think that I have an other 50m, or so, units of pyerite in transit to my production system.


Oh, and for those who may wonder how to keep up your production with your minerals, I've come up with a formula which seems to work for me. Since Tritanium is the mineral the most used across the board for T1 items, I base my calculation on its amount:


Minerals    quantity    Cur. ratio    ideal ratio    needed      
Tritanium    214 362 418    100,00    100,00    0      
Pyerite          75 999 780    35,45        30,00    0      
Mexallon        3 252 496      1,52        10,00    18 183 746      
Isogen          49 141 255    22,92          3,00    0      
Nocxium        2 544 550      1,19          0,60    0      
Zydrine          1 199 964       0,56         0,22    0      
Megacyte          404 327       0,19         0,08    0      
Morphite             26 551       0,01         0,00    0   

So, depending on my amount of Tritanium, I need 30% of that amount in Pyrite, 10% in Mexallon, etc. Those numbers seems to hold for me, and are based on producing ships (which are the most mineral intensive products). I may need to revisit those numbers if I start building Citadel related items.