EVE Content I consume

 So I've been meaning to compile this list for a while, but I'm going to list the blogs and youtube channels I consume related to EVE if you're looking for recommendations.

• https://marketsforisk.blogspot.com/ Market blog, the one that inspired me to take on my own regional challenge a decade ago, and still going strong. Written by Croda.
  
• https://evehermit.wordpress.com/ General EVE blog (and some other games such as X4), One I've dipped in and out of for a long time
  
• https://tellicorp.blogspot.com/ EVE Industry blog, relatively new
  
• https://alphatoomegawithregionaltrading.blogspot.com/ New player regional trading challenge blog, still in the early stages
  
• https://alwaysanoob.com/ General EVE blog
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@OZeve CSM and trader the OZ. I am also part of his discord which tends to have a lot of good chat on EVE economy and trading. Provides weekly analysis of the economy. Croda a frequent guest here.
  
• https://declarationsofwar.com/ General EVE Online podcast. I was invited to be a part of episode 299 and got to talk to CCP Okami and CCP Kestrel about the Equinox expansion and aims for the economy, a really cool experience! I haven't listened back  to it though as I hate the sound of my own voice recorded.
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@strange_Net Dedicated EVE industry videos, somewhat inactive now
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@CEOPyrex Economy and industry focused channel, a lot of good guides and insight here, very active.
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@Gamingsincethe70s/videos Industry channel run by Thanak, charting his experience running his own personal industry, as well as a high sec corp and a null sec one! Gives a bit of insight and a peek behind the curtain at corp leadership
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@EVEARDCO/videos A new one, Ardel Corvallon charts his attempt to start a fuel block building empire in high sec, has a close association with Thanak and corp. He's recently invited me to join his "think tank" and provide whatever help and advice I can. Early days but hoping to see this enterprise flourish!
  

When I first started playing EVE there was a plethora of blogs and content related to all things EVE, then it felt like a few years ago there was a bit of a lul as some of the old guard dropped out, but in the last year or so things have picked up and there is an awful lot of great passionate people keen to share their experiences with this great game we all play. Long may it continue! If you have any good recommendations I haven't listed here I'd be keen to hear them.

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.