July update - Eve on backburners due to wardecs and summer.

Hi fellow pilots,

Just a quick report on my activities in those past 2 months. After a string of useless WarDecs by griefers, most of my activities were tunned down. I moved my BPO research activities to a couple of NPC stations for my main characters, and I trained two PI alts to have 6 research slots (most of their research skills are at IV and not V).
So, now, I have 40 research slots available, and as of today, 38 of them are in use. I kept those two ones free to move some 30+ days research to that alt.

As a side effect of World War Bee, it seems that some goons minded guys have moved from Null to HighSec, and are now having fun at ganking T1 hauler, and occasionally Freigher. They have their base of operations a few jumps away from Jita, and are pretty successful at that.
They have a non incorporated spy siting at a gate in a Gnosis (in a NPC corp), scanning Haulers and Freighters passing by. In the meantime, the gankers are waiting, in the next system down the pipe, inside a POS forcefield, a mere 500k km from the gate. As soon as a suitabe target is spoted, they align to the gate and start their count-down. Most T1 haulers have a 3 AU/s warpspeed, so it's easy to know when it will arrive on the gate, thus they warp precisely to arrive a few seconds before their victim jump in, and a couple of seconds before Police and Concord become active.

So, I'm now pretty reluctant to use my freighter to move stuff. I've more than 2B of minerals sitting in Jita, for less than 300 000m3, that I'm not willing to move myself. I will have to use some courrier contracts to move them past that "choke" point. The issue will be the same while I will try to move my production back to Jita.

That's the situation for the past 4 weeks. In the meantime, I took some vacactions with my wife, and simply filled my research slots with BPOs to research. As I went back I noticed that a lot of my Buy Orders and Sell Orders were gone, and I was left with a few billions siting in my wallet. Due to those pirates activities, I realized that I was loosing money by having that money just siting there.
I decided to go on a BPO shoping spree, and bough some for more than 4.5 Billions.
I have now less than 300m ISK left in my wallet, and barely playing Eve at all. I spend more time around the pool with a beer than on my computer.

I did tried the Serpentis event, but got bored after a couple of hours. IMHO, the design of this event is flawed, the event revolve around the principle of grinding. People with the most free time, will stand a chance, casuals like myself, don't.
But I must say that it was an ok way to make money, at around 3m ISK per site (the biggest one) and an additional 1m via salvage. I was using a drake with heavy missiles and a caracal with ligh missiles, I must say that clearing those sites was fast. For salvaing, I was using a catalyst with 4 salvagers and 4 tractors + a MTU. that was nicely efficient.

Now, for the next couple of weeks, here's the plan:
_ update my LMeve VM. The Citadel release updated a couple of stuff in CREST, and my old LMeve release seems unable to cope with these.
_ concoct a plan to keep building and selling stuff, without using my freighter. I will have to use courrier once again, so, I will have to adapt my calculations with these costs.
_ code a prevision tools, and an alert tool, to spot oportunities on the market. I'm collecting stats since january, and I have yet to build something to use them.
_ find an other system, in an other region, to start over. Jita is the biggest market for sure, but there's way too much goon-minded pirates in the surrounding regions.
_ Play the market. Since I'm now cash striped, I'm playing the market. Buying items at below my own building costs (sometimes waaay below), and waiting for the price to recover before reselling. I could take weeks, but I'm a very patient guy :-)
_ spend as much time as possible around the pool, with a good book or a few friends and beers, before the winter make its return.

To be honnest, the last goal is the one with which I've the more successes. :-)

Until next time,
Fly safe o7