Short Personal Update, O and T1, T2 construction/invention in wormholes is dumb.

Short Personal Update:

TLDR: What I have been doing, challenges, updates and introspective thoughts

If anyone has been reading blog for a while you may have noticed that what keeps me going in live and in game are personal challenges I set for myself. I set a goal I think I can accomplish and attempt it, simple.  I’m not original in this idea, many people live their lives like this. For the past few weeks my goals out of game have been many and my goals in game have been few. This is why there haven’t been many blog entries recently.

So for in-game stuff this is what I have been up to.

Industrial attempts.

Living in my C2/C2/LS, people for the most part leave me alone. I brought in every single one of my characters under the old SUSU flag. I set up a large Amarr tower with some industrial capabilities. My goal was to see if there was any measurable gain in creating T1, T2, T3 items in a wormhole. With the recent industrial changes I wanted to experience them myself.

I wanted to do it from square one to finish and catalog my progress. I could take time and show charts, graphs and all sorts of other shit, but the last time I did that with the T3 profitability market I got railed. People said my DOC was shit, it may very well have been. It took me a week to create that doc and point the formula at the correct cells with the correct math. In my opinion it was spot fucking on. Sadly google docs and the API pull from EVE central don’t talk well and the formula would fail at multiple locations. Not only that, but there were variables in the math that fucked with my numbers. Example. T3 research skills some how effecting the success chance percentages. This isn’t listed anywhere in game, its just some formula that some people found and posted.  Shit like that annoys the hell out of me. So when I did my T1, T2 tests, I said fuck it and didn’t keep good records.

Honestly if the response to my T3 profitablity findings wasn’t well received, I would be fooling myself to think that the T2 and T1 findings would be any different.

So here they are, summarized.

T1

I constructed ships at first and discovered at best you can make about a 7% profit. AT BEST! Anyone who tells you they make more money than that isn’t selling to a competitive market or is fudging the numbers somewhere.

I constructed some T1 drones, T1 ammo to see if volume sales could impact the bottom line. It didn’t, in fact the margins are even smaller and even in the best market places (mission hubs, Newbie systems) the competition of other sellers and the tiny margins made volume sales a total pain the balls. It’s simply not worth it.

The whole time, making these things I kept the price of the materials in my mind, the time it takes me to move those items to market and update the sell orders from the wormhole platform. I figured out that I could do nearly ANY other activity anywhere and make more money.

Conclusion – If you feel desire to construct T1 objects on a small scale from a wormhole, you are doing it as a hobby, not a profit gaining venture. I’m ok with hobbies, hell I fly fish. I spend hundreds dollars to travel to distant area’s to catch and release fish I could just buy 2 blocks away from my house.

T2

This market is one of the most fucked up in the game. When I say fucked up, I mean the least understood by most and no one seems to care. I went from square one which was T2 invention to outcome. 1^st I constructed two ships.  1 Paladin and 1 Vaugur. I invented them, I harvest the materials I could and bought the rest with buy orders in major hubs. Took everything I could into my wormhole and build them. The ME on both of my BPC’s was 8 of 10. Fairly good IMO.

I lost about 10 to 20 million Isk by building the ship and not just selling the materials it took to make them. This isn’t taking into account the price it takes to create the BPC or any cost savings I could have made on the T1 ship it took to create it.

 I’m told by some indi friends that I fell into the trap of building ships and not modules. They tell me that ships aren’t profitable.  So I build some mods. Guess what, mods aren’t profitable either. My friends in indi land are either ignoring the meta 4 costs used during BPC research or are thinking the BPC and the facilities used to create them are “free”. I don’t know.

Conclusion – Fun hobby, there is a gratification of building something yourself that happens when you spend so much time acquiring the items, researching them.. whatever.. But it’s a negative isk gain operation, plan and simple. The T2 BPO issue in the game has totally screwed this market place. Anyone who invents a T2 item, has just shot themselves in the foot if they plan on competing with anyone else in the game using a T2 BPO.

Player growth.

I’m calling this player growth because I’m not sure what else to call it. All this solo life and industry numbers chasing has provide me an opportunity for some soul searching. I have 5 accounts and each character is contributing to wealth of me as a player but at the end of the day the activities of all 5 accounts isn’t paying for self if I simply played the game differently.

One idea that I have had is to change my life style in game. Turn off my other 4 accounts and simply buy 4 plex every month. Or use that money to fund my out of game activities, or hell… other game activities.

I don’t think I would ever quit EVE,  I have too much fun but focusing on chasing isk for a month or so now is really depressing me.

New challenges

Before this latest expansion I took a page from the Oklahoma sooners and planted a scout in a C4/C5 Black hole. Not only that, but I put in a Medium tower to stake my claim. Upon patch day I was rewarded with an additional C2!  This makes my 2^nd hole a C4/C5/C2 Black hole!  Great right?!  Easy way to get to K-space when I need to and an easy way to tangle with C5 gas and anoms.

But I’m dreading setting up 65 more PI planets across all my accounts. You could say, “just don’t” but that PI cash is sooooo good. If I could tell you how little effort it takes to maintain it after its done and how much money it makes for my accounts each month… uggg.. SOOO much money. 300+ Isk in coolant every 3 or 4 days, and that’s not even me trying hard.

I have some ideas for doing sleepers out of the norm in this Black hole. I made some snipping ravens that (in my black hole) have a cruise missile range of 389k. I can only target to 250k. So my challenge is to try and snipe sleepers. I’m not sure the range a sleeper can shoot or if they can shoot out to 250, but I’m going to find out. As the sleepers approach I would just MJD away from them.

Another challenge is to perfect my marauder skills in both the C4 and the C5. Bastion mode sniping golems.

Options;

I could stop now, turn off 4 accounts and join another corp with an active player base.

I could continue on my solo adventure across 2 wormholes.

I honestly don’t know.  

That’s my update.