April Update

 First one of these in a little while! Feels good to have come back to the game, and I'm enjoying my time without going too deep into it. Not a full month as I only came back to the game on the 5th, but here's my position as of 30th April:

I currently have a total of 841.6Bn ISK. That's an increase from the 5th of 43.5Bn ISK. Considering I've been back in the game for 26 days that means a daily average of 1.67Bn ISK/day. That's a really good result and far exceeds what I was expecting to achieve in my first month back. In fact, that might be the best monthly update I've had! That said there are a couple of caveats.

When going through all my characters, a lot of things came out of the woodwork. Most of which has been accounted for, but I also found 2 dreadnaughts on my nullsec character (a character I don't use for trading) which I had bought for investments that I decided to sell and include in my trading. Which may sound like cheating, but you could reduce 8Bn ISK from my total if you wanted to consider this a pure challenge. however, I feel this is mitigated by the worst mistake I have ever made in trading:

Yes, that is a 6.7Bn ISK broker fee, for a 451Bn ISK sell order. I honestly don't know how I did this. I was putting a implant up for sale, and clearly didn't clear the box with the default value out properly, or read the values correctly. I also frustratedly dismissed the warning box several times to force it through, so I only have myself to blame. So if you put my "extra" dreads and this mistake together that puts me ahead 1.3Bn ISK of where I should be. So I'm calling it a wash.

One major change I've made is I no longer do my own hauling. For each seller now I buy the items, contract it to my remote sellers, then create a public contract to deliver it to my sell hubs. I've been putting up a 1% reward, and over collatoralising by 10-15% and almost all of them have been delivered within a few hours. This has saved me so much time and probably has lead to improved profits counterintuitively. This is because instead of spending my time mindlessly flying around in space I can use that time to consider new items to buy or new ways to go about things. 

I have 4 accounts, with 11 characters dedicated to trading:

Rens Seller

This has always been one of my top performers, and so it is proving again. I no longer haul using this character, but he's performing well. Currently 127Bn ISK in sell orders, and he's made sales of 58Bn ISK this month. Given that I aim for a margin of around 20% this probably amounts to profits before fees of about 12Bn, which is pretty nice.

Manufacturing character

I've done nothing at all on this character. Something I want to look at over the next month.

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 131Bn and has made sales amounting to 112Bn ISK this month! Seems that even with the change of geography making Amarr harder to get to from Jita it is still a great place to do business.

Hek Seller

A little disappointing this one. Has 52Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 31Bn. Essentially half the size of my Rens business. I need to take a look at what I'm selling here and maybe add or mix up some items.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar in scale to my Rens business this. Currently 99.5Bn sell orders and income of 56Bn. Given that Dodixie is a bigger hub than Rens it should probably be reflected in the numbers, so I clearly need to look at what I'm dealing in here. Still not a bad performance.

Nullsec station trader

This one is a little more interesting. I moved this alt with my "nullsec main" to PHs home of MJ-5F9, which is fortunately within 1 capital jump of the old home of R10-GN. As this character is trained in cynos I used him to cyno and my main to jump all my capitals and ships to the new home, and put a bunch of "investments" up for sale. Mainly carriers I bought anticipating a material change to increase their value, which I'm honestly not sure of the scale of. I then set about station trading, and had some success, making 3Bn profit since the 17th. I can tell exactly with this character going forwards as he doesn't need to send money to corp wallet, so his money is his own.

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold my investments and attempts to sell them. Currently trying to offload 29Bn in investments.

Tash-Murkon Seller

This is one I think I need to make drastic changes for. Has only made 1.8Bn ISK in sales from 96Bn in sell orders. Tash-Murkon used to be a nice little earner, but now I have a lot of items where I am the only seller, selling at similar prices to the rest of the region, but I'm getting virtually no traffic. I don't know whether it's the items I'm selling or the system itself has fallen off, but this is a high priority for a re-evaluation.

Amarr station trader

Also a bit disappointing this one. I admittedly don't watch this character closely but having only made in the region of 7Bn of buys and sells he's not making vast sums. I will keep this going for another month or so and then evaluate my options here.

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita. Has made a respectable 40Bn in sales this month, so one to keep plugging away with, though the exact profit is a little difficult to discern here.

Sobaseki Seller

Another one requiring a real rethink. I decided to try and sell more "standard" items, t2 modules, rigs, drones etc rather than my usual high end items list, as sobaseki is not a main trade hub. This has however lead to virtually no sales. So I need to either invest more or rethink my entire strategy here.

For next month then my plans are:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day
• Try to come up with a better strategy for my tash-murkon and sobaseki characters
• try and get at least 1 manufacturing run done

I'm enjoying my time back in game, and hoping to approach it in a way that should avoid the burnout I've experienced previously. It's good to be back!

Examining tooling

 I've recently been reading back over my own blogs to get a better idea of what I was doing, as well as consuming a bit of EVE trade media to work out what other people are doing (notably Croda and Oz_eve on youtube) and what has struck me most about what I was doing was the sheer inefficiency of it all.

I have my trade spreadsheet in OpenOffice which I create and update manually by logging into each character, and typing out their buy/sell order totals and wallet balance. 

I haul my own goods.

I do not use market analysis tools much to select what items to trade.

I do not accurately track what is selling well in order to weed out what isn't.

The list goes on really. All of this contributes to my trading time taking much much longer than I would like it to, which in turn contributes to burnout.

On my commutes and downtime I've been thinking about what I would like to do or change about my current setup, and this is the list I've come up with so far:

• Use a tool to pull my assets and populate my sheet for me
• check out manufacturing
• start paying hauliers to haul my goods for me
• look at getting back into tash-murkon
• investigate other hubs e.g. frarn, stacmon
• Use a tool to tell me what I've sold and where

I've a software developer by trade, have been for a number of years now. Specifically a backend developer. So while there are some excellent tools out there to help with some of this, I think for the sheet population and accounting I can create something that will cater to my exact specs, and allow me to collate all my info with a click of a button.

Last time I was playing, I did make a start on a desktop app written in Java. Java is my speciality so doing the data manipulation in Java is easier for me, and as I don't current plan to host anything a desktop UI is fine for now. All I managed at that time was to get a basic app going that would log you in to EVE and get basic character info. Fancy.

Last night though I revisited this and added a tiny bit more, adding a button to print out a characters market transactions and another to test if I can get auth for several characters at once working, which I could. So I can print out the character info for several characters at once both on the same account and on separate accounts. This means I should be able to do all my top level sheet data collection with a click of a single button, which is very nice. 

The one remaining thing is to work out and test the auth token refresh mechanism. Auth tokens only last 20 minutes and I don't want to have to login with every character every time I want to get my info, so I'd like to see if I can utilise local storage and keep the auth tokens and just refresh them when I want to retrieve data to save all the logins. If I can I should have a neat little local tool that saves me a ton of time and removes human error from the equation.

Here is the sexy UI at the moment:

You can tell I'm a backend developer!

A cool new visual

 A bit of a small detail that's changed while I've been away, but one of the sort of details that I really appreciate about EVE is that when you're in a Keepstar now (and maybe other citadels, I haven't checked) you can see your other ships in other docking bays if you scan around, not just your active one.

You can see my Ferox as active, and in the background a Gila and Machariel. the same goes for all subcaps as far as I can tell, though Capitals seem to exist in their own instance somewhere. Minor but I think really cool.

On the finances point, I realised in my original accounting I had forgotten to update the spreadsheet with my Dodixie seller, who I'd taken 30Bn from to pay for my PLEX. But I also found some freighters in Rens that weren't anywhere on my sheet and some asset safety in Ashab from a discontinued Upwell hub. So I've got a slightly more up to date and accurate total for my assets:

You might also notice that I've only got 176Bn in cash now, as I did a buy run for my Amarr, Rens and Dodixie sellers. For now I just went down my old quickbars and bought everything, but when things sell I'm planning on adding them to a "seller" folder and phasing out the ones that don't sell over a couple of months from my quickbar to make room for more lucrative opportunities. This will take place over a month or two and not something I'm rushing but seems like a reasonable step as I feel like my quickbars are very bloated at the moment.

A Brief Accounting

So, I've managed to go through all my characters and have a quick look at where they are, collect a few errant bits, and put some expired sell orders back up. At the moment I've just blindly put things up for sale, and put up very few buy orders. I want to get things a little cleaned up and then assess what I was trading and see if it still makes sense or if there are other items I can be looking at.

There were also a couple of characters who were operating out of upwell structures (such as the Tranquility Trade Tower) that no longer exist. When this happens you get a Asset safety container appear in your assets containing the items that were in that structure, and you have to pay a small fee to retrieve them. I think I paid about 30mil for 6Bn in goods.

I also assessed my long term investments and a few were up a lot, such as Orcas going from about 1.2Bn to almost 2Bn. So I put some of these assets up for sale.

After all that, this is my current position to the best I can see:

That 17Bn in items to sell is some capitals and other items in a PH Keepstar. I need to re-apply and see if I can sell my goods there, thought I suspect I may have to firesale and start again in null trading depending on the political landscape. There were 6 PH members in the station with me so it's definitely not Hordes capital anymore.

All told then that's a net worth of 778Bn ISK. Considering I just bought and used 65Bn ISK in PLEX, I'd say that's a great position. For reference, my last update before my break I had 782Bn, and if I had used real money rather than spending that ISK on PLEX I'd have 843Bn. Frankly that is a lot better than I was expecting, and I'm looking forward to what can be achieved with fresh eyes for this.

It'll take a few days before I get all my skill queues worked out and decide what to start buying again, but this is a great starting position, and 313Bn ISK in cash is a lot to work with.

 

Cost to PLEX

 So, This has been my thoughts on how to go about adding Omega time to my accounts.

The old way

Up until my break from the game in 2021 I funded my game time as follows:

- 3x accounts paid for with real money, month on month at £15.99 each

- 1 account paid for by 500 PLEX, month on month

so a total of £47.97 and 500 PLEX. This seems like quite a lot written down, and not something I really want to do going forwards. so I considered the following options

Month by Month PLEX

With 4 accounts, the maths on this is fairly simple. PLEX currently stands at 5.34M ISK each, and normally to PLEX month on month costs 500 PLEX per account. So that would be 2000 x 5,342,000 = 10.7Bn ISK.

There is however currently a 15% discount on Omega with PLEX that brings the cost to 425 PLEX/account or 9.08Bn ISK. This offer will eventually run out though and revert to the original 500/acc/mo.

Annual PLEX

This isn't an option I've ever really considered before, even at the height of my EVE addiction, but buying 12 months of Omega at once almost halves the costs of PLEXing an account, assuming you're going to play for all those 12 months. With the current 15% discount this would cost 3060 PLEX per account for 12 months, or 255 PLEX per account per month. that would mean a total cost of 65.38Bn ISK for all 4 accounts for a year. 

That sounds like a lot, but when you break it down it actually means 1.36Bn ISK per account per month, or 5.45Bn ISK total for all 4 accounts. This is significantly less and thus will impact my profits less, whilst also totally alleviating the real life money cost.

The Choice

With everything written down like that, it really is a bit of a no brainer for me. The monthly total PLEX cost is not vast amounts more than I would have normally paid to PLEX a single account under the old system. I could factor this huge purchase into my assets and slowly write it down over the course of a year to give a proper accounting, but since this is a (relatively) clean start and I never did truly proper accounting like that anyway I think it's easier for me to just take the hit and note down my true assets as they stand. 

As such I bit the bullet, moved the cash around the corp wallet and bought and redeemed it all.

I'm back! 

How does this game work again?

 So,  it's been a little while!

I got hooked into TBC and then Wrath Classic for World of Warcraft in a big way, along with having 2 children so I let my EVE subscriptions lapse for the first time since 2009 and haven't logged in in 3 years. But with Wrath coming to an end and frankly feeling a bit of burnout, I've recently found myself thinking about EVE more and more. 

So last night I booted up the launcher and waited for it to update. I honestly had to scan for a number of seconds to work out how to even launch the game! (I know, but the launcher is quite different now). All I've managed to do is log in and have a quick poke around, to try and get a feel for what characters are where and what the hell I was doing in early 2021. My nullsec characters have both been kicked from Pandemic Horde (understandably) and I will likely re-apply and move myself back out there to keep that part of the game going. 

First and foremost though is activating Omega on my accounts. Historically I paid for 3 of my 4 accounts with real money, and a 4th was PLEXed with in game currency. I'm having to carefully consider how I do this going forewards, as money is a bit tighter than it used to be (childcare ain't cheap and the UK economy is not in a good way right now) but PLEX prices have risen in my absence to almost 5.3mil, which pushes the price for one account to almost 2.7Bil. Across 4 accounts that would be almost 10.8Bil just to PLEX, when my overall profits were usually in the region of 30Bil. Ouch. There is a sale on at the moment which means you only need 425 PLEX for a month but it's still a significant outlay, when at the moment I have no idea what the state of my in game finances are and frankly how hard I'm going to get back into things.

In terms of my net worth, I have no idea frankly. In my last saved spreadsheet from March 2021 it said I had 787Bn ISK. After updating my long term investment prices (but nothing else) that improves to say 836Bn, but I strongly doubt that's the truth as most of my characters item hangers look something like this:

So I have a lot to update before I can get even a reasonable approximation for my net worth. 

This time around I think I'll try and diversify what I'm doing and just enjoy the game a bit more. I burned myself out on doing nothing but trading last time so this time I want to also do a bit of nullsec, some manufacturing, some exploring, as well as seeing what's new in the last few years. 

Immediate plans ten are to get my accounts PLEXed, straighten out my assets, and explore what's changed in my absence. I'll do another post once I've got it all straightened out.