Escaping R-AG7W

 So, Horde leadership has completely abandoned any attempt at mounting escape from the dying Keepstar, and Goons have relentlessly "hell-camped" the keep, which involves surrounding it with bubbles and caps like so:

The camp is so complete, that there is no way I can escape. I thought I could sneak my blockade runner next door to XU7 to grab my blueprints and escape to lowsec, but under these circumstances that's impossible.

So I only have 1 option, put all of my stuff in asset safety and then I can grab it from a lowsec station in 20 days for a fee of 15% of the value. In this case for my industry character everything comes to about 1Bn, so it'd be about 150mil.

For my other characters though I  will probably be hit with a bill of about 15Bn. Ouch.

I think what bothers me about this is the way that leadership has screwed up so much to the point of making escape impossible. I've done this sort of thing several times over the years and never been caught, with or without caps. I even escaped Catch when it was being beseiged by PL with a Thanatos before citadels, where I had to resort to safe spots and cloaks to get to lowsec. But this time the announcement was so sudden, so public, and there was absolutely no attempt to push goons off the undock that there is nothing I can do. Which annoys me. Your stuff is always at risk in EVE, but there is almost always counterplay. Almost.

Once I've got everything out I really don't think I'll stick with Horde. There doesn't seem to be a plan for the future, nevermind the next few days. There doesn't seem to be an excited successor to Gobbins, or anything to really get behind. This feels like the death of the Alliance in real time. I had grand plans to PANIC my Rorqual somewhere in tether to try and get a window to help a few people escape, but the capitulation has been so total that it's pointless. Which is really sad for an alliance of this size.

Anyway, I'll regroup my assets in lowsec, get my industry guy to highsec and look to the future. A future where I'm no longer in Pandemic Horde in any capacity.

Horde is leaving Horde

 So, Horde is moving again.

Not long after the last announced move to R-AG7W it's been announced that Horde is leaving the coalition it leads altogether and moving out of dronelands to join forces with Init instead. This also comes with a change of leadership. This is all fine and might make sense from a mixing things up and giving members fun things to do point of view. 

For myself though, it's extremely annoying. 

I have 3 characters in Horde at the moment. 

A "PVP main" (Stranathor) who isn't part of either of my money making challenges and who used to do things like pvp and carrier rat.

My Null sec seller, who also acts as my cyno character for Stranathor.

My null industrialist, who has been winding down operations and attempting to sell up.

Normally when these moves happen I simply move myself in my capitals (I have a Thanatos, Revelation and Rorqual) and between those 3 I can carry everything I own to new staging and set up again. Easy.

This time though new staging is cryptic, and multiple jumps from where we live now. This would be fine if I didn't have 64Bn in sell orders up on one character, 8.5Bn on another and just having had 6Bn more stuff imported. 

I was trying to decouple my null industrialist from Horde anyway, but by selling his own stuff. At this point I think the simplest thing to do is to sell my assets to my Horde seller and get him out to high sec with his blueprints.

For the Null seller, I think I'm going to evacuate him and Stranathor to lowsec for now. The shipping services are all shipping stuff to Otsasai, so I think I'll head there while I contemplate my next move. There are plans to offer services to jump assets from there to Jita in the future, which I will likely take advantage of. 

This plan should mean my industry character takes minimal losses from all this, with my trader taking a larger hit. I have done one of these sort of lowsec moves before when I was in and then subsequently leaving Brave a full 10 years ago now. So I know it's not the end of the world but I have a lot more stuff to think about this time.

This does feel like a good time to reconsider my membership of Horde. I've been in the alliance on and off for 10 years now, though it has been quite a while since I actually joined a fleet. I like the access to Null space and the option to use big toys but Horde has always been heavy on the rules for using them. I don't know if I'd stay and see how this all shakes out, go it alone for a bit or even switch sides and see if the grass is greener. For now I think I'll take my time, evac my assets and go from there. By the time I next have the chance to really have a proper play session I might have made a decision. 

October Update - Industry

 This was on track to be a very good month, until political considerations made me take a hit. I forgot to take a screenshot on the 31st so here's the graph:

My net worth at the end of the month was 37.8Bn ISK. That's an increase of 4.4Bn or 146mil/ISK/day.

In order to make it worth the PLEX I need to be at a point where I am earning 4.75Bn/month (the equivalent of 19Bn for a years Omega times 3). I've fallen just short of that this month, even though I was on track to be over 2Bn ahead of that.

That is primarily due to Horde moving staging, so I decided to wind down my operation there, and move all my sell orders to the new staging to try and liquidate them. This is going OK, though I had to take a big write down as some things are selling for less, I had to pay a lot in broker fees and I also came in from the pub after 6 pints on Friday and decided updating my null sell orders was a good idea. To all the people who got rigs for about half price, you're welcome!

I have moved one of my null characters to high and he's happily churning out rigs, which is great. I also have 2 characters that I'm training and I'm planning to put in a low sec sotiyo as an experiment, to see if that's a goer long term. I'm a bit skeptical about that but for the moment they're just training while being inactive. So my account setup is like this:

Account 1:

- CEO character, does my high sec hauling and builds things based on what EVEGuru reckons is most profitable

- Mobile Depot builder, very simple

- T2 rig builder, currently building large CCC II rigs

Account 2:

- null character, currently offloading to leave Horde

- T2 hauler builder, currently building Cranes alongside some mobile depots

- trainee, currently inactive

Account 3:

- T2 rig builder, currently doing large CCC II

- null builder turned high sec, currently build t2 rigs

- trainee, currently inactive

As you can see I'm starting to have a bit of a theme going, which makes things easier as I can setup buy orders for the limited pool of input materials and easily keep track of my slots etc. The more varied it gets the harder it is to keep track of. CCC rigs are great because the demand for them is huge, I rarely have any left for sale when I log back in after a day or 2 which is fantastic.

The downside is that each run of these blueprints is only measured in hours. So if I can only manage to properly sort my industry every few days then I'm having a lot of wasted slot hours. My CEO character is addressing that a bit by branching into things like industrial cores and mercenary dens but this might be something I need to optimise in the near future. An option is pivoting more heavily into deployables/cores and big ships. Things with long slot times. This could be more difficult to get the revenue for out of a high sec NPC facility but it would at least cut down on lost hours. Something to consider.

Plan for this month is to full extract from null, onlining 7 high sec characters properly, and then set up a low sec experiment and see how things go. If it's too difficult or the lead times won't work I'll just commit to high sec fully like SquadB does. It's working for me so far.

I've seen people suggesting in places like discord and reddit that it's basically impossible to make highsec industry work  profitably, I hope if nothing else I'm proving that wrong.

October Update - Trading

 A more successful month this one, though I only managed to update my orders 3 or 4 times the whole month while I concentrated on Industry and had my play time restricted. My current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.153Tn ISK. That's an increase of 19Bn ISK or 633mil/ISK/day.

That doesn't sound like an increase, but when you factor in that I spent 18.75Bn on a years Omega time for my second industry account it comes to a operating profit of nearly 38Bn. 

As I said earlier, I didn't log in very much to my trading characters. I'm concentrating on improving and expanding my industry setup mostly so my trading is in maintenance mode of roughly 1 trade run per week. My company have also issued a return to office order, meaning I have to commute to London 3 times a week now rather than once a week. This has been very unpopular and has also meant I can't sneak in half an hour here and there at lunch which is a shame.

The main story this month has been HyperCores. Someone (and judging by my transaction history and the market spike I think it is one person) bought out all HyperCores up to 444k, massively spiking the price. People then flooded in to try and liquidate long held stores and the price has fallen back. It has had a few days in the high 380s sell price now, and I suspect that is where it will stay for a while as people try and sell some of their stockpiles for a profit. As the price seems volatile I've listed the Jita Buy price on my investment section, so potentially undervaluing them a bit, but I'd rather do that than overvalue and then face doing write downs which are just depressing. If things stay stable or slowly increase I'll switch to using the Jita Sell like I do with everything else.

HyperCore insanity

 For a long time, HyperCores have been very steady price wise, creeping up very slowly over the last few weeks. This week has had a steeper climb up for about 347,000 by yesterday.

For a long time now, I've had a sell order up for 349,000 for about 27,000 of them, from the last time the price spiked to this level. I use an out of game tool eveos.space price checker to keep an eye on prices from my phone. Today I noticed that HyperCores have gone berserk.

Someone has spiked the price massively, leading to a sell price of 430,000 ISK! That's an increase of 24% overnight. The volume doesn't even look excessive though we'll have to wait for after downtime for firmer numbers. 

What's also surprising with this is that buy orders have jumped too, though not as much. Up from 330,000 to 353,000. Still nearly a 10% rise.

I suspect the price will fall back to somewhere in the 380,000 range as people trip over themselves to cash out, and tbh I might cash some of mine out as well. I will however wait a few days for prices to stabilise as i don't want to be left with a big sell order sitting there for months (again). Interesting times!

Horde staging moving again

 So for the second time this year, Horde staging is moving, as laid out here:

Horde Staging moving

I don't like the title of the thread but the content is true, Horde have announced they are moving to a new staging system, R-AG. This just so happens to be 1 jump from where I've been doing my industry in XU7, so in theory makes my life easier, but as outlined in my last post I'd already taken the decision to wind down my operations, and this really solidifies my decision. 

Not that moving is the end of the world, it's part and parcel of null sec life and I'm not complaining per se, but it adds to the inconvenience of industry in null and I think I just want to simplify at the moment. So the builds that are in progress will be my last. What I will probably do is cancel all my sell orders in E8- and then sell my wares to my null trader, since he's going to be moving over to new staging anyway, and take those funds to my high sec operation.

You could argue that this is cheating a bit and for the "true" experience I should stay and sell those myself or have them shipped to Jita and cash out that way. To that I say, you're right, but I think I'd rather just divest and get back to what I'm enjoying about this whole thing.

On a sort of related note, I watched this video recently:

SquadB Gaming's How to get started in Manufacturing

Where SquadB, an industrial Trillionaire, goes through his setup and offers advice to people getting into industry. I'd thoroughly recommend it to everyone. In it, he explains how he is based out of an NPC station a few jumps from Jita, just like me. He also had bad experiences with player run freeports and losing assets. I find it interesting that he came to the exact same conclusions as me, and I may just end up running a scaling manufacturing outfit like him in high sec out of an NPC station for the safety, security, easy logistics and certainty that nothing is likely to change, other players cannot scam you out of your assets or blow the place up.

The only things making me refrain from that decision permanently are that a low sec sotiyo could offer me reaction slots and the capacity to build capitals. Reactions are a potential good income stream on their own or profit multiplier, and capitals are just a goal of mine long term. 

For now though, I'll sit tight and see what sells over the next few days while I'm away, then move everything to new staging and my industrial character out of null, one way or the other.

Beginning to consolidate

 I've been thinking a lot about my setup the last few days. I've come to the conclusion that null is just not scalable for me right now. So I've decided to start winding that down.

Step 1 of this is to move my second Null industry character out to high sec and quit Horde. This character was criminally underutilised anyway so it should be a net win. He has 10 build and research slots and can already build T2 rigs, so should slot straight into my setup and be a net win easily.

I only had to sell a mining barge in E8- on this character, which I did in situ, then flew all the way to Akonoinen in his kestrel. This was entirely uneventful.

As I had a stock of materials I could immediately put him to work building Medium CCC IIs, which is nice. I also got him copying some blueprints immediately.

The other thing to consider is I've had a "return to office" order from work, which means I'm now commuting to London 3 days a week. This means much less lunch time run updating, and a lot more money spent on commuting. Not happy all round. The upshot of this for EVE is I might need to consider moving to a more 2 day run time for my slots, if possible.

Next step is to start to wind down my other null characters operations, and sell the assets I have/have them shipped out of null so I can slot him in with the rest of my characters. This will take a bit of time and I might even sell my outputs to my null sell character to get him moved quicker. That will have the advantage of having another character that can fly T2 haulers, so I can fly 2 DST loads at a time to/from Jita which will be great.

Then I need to start my low sec experiment. But I should end up with a much simpler, better utilised setup as a whole that can scale better.

All that may have to wait a little though, as tomorrow I'm in London and this weekend I have family down, so I'm probably not going to get to play the game again until middle of next week. Feeling happy about this line of decisions though.