Secret donations

 So this week FC put out a security update:

https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/eve-online-security-update-8-september-2026

I had already heard rumblings of this on the Oz discord but it was good to et some clarity from FC as to what was happening.

Essentially, someone modified their client and used 4 characters to spam over 1 million characters with 0 ISK donations. Something about the response to that deposit call returned the wallet balance of the wallet being donated to. This didn't return other wallet balances other than corp master wallet and personal wallets. So no PLEX balances or anything.

I don't know if donating to a character would also get their corp wallet balance, I would hope not.

I've seen some speculation that the list of users was scraped from zKillboard, but I'm not convinced as my market characters have been affected. I've not done a thorough inventory but all the characters I checked were affected. My industry corp wallet however does not show a donation so might be unaffected.

There is a limit to what someone can do with this information, unless they can map characters to accounts somehow and therefor have targets to hack, or alternatively use the knowledge of who has large wallets to target them for social engineering or phishing. So as the article says you should enable 2FA on your accounts.

Fortunately, none of my characters have more than a few billion in their wallets, so I don't look much like a target which is nice. If they could see PLEX balances that would be a different matter.

Here's hoping this is as far as it goes, but be very careful if you receive suspicious EVEMails or emails from "FC" over the next couple of months!

A Capital sized investment

 For a while I've thought and talked about wanting to build bigger ships, particularly Freighters and Jump Freighters. I t was a factor in my move to send a couple of characters to low sec for industry.

After running the numbers through EVEGuru to check for profitability and coming out in the 20-25% margin range across the board (with perfect skills) I decided to bite the bullet and buy the blueprints needed to build a Charon. Which cost a little bit of ISK...

Terrible picture, but the red line at the top is my net worth, the dark blue is ISK in wallets and the green is asset value. My net worth dropped by 1.1Bn, ISK on hand down 11.7Bn, and asset value up 13Bn!!! (I did sell some stuff there to explain the discrepancy, the light blue line is sell orders).

So why did my net worth drop? Surely it goes from the ISK in my wallet to the NPC value of the blueprints which is what I paid? Well, yes, but also...

That's 640mil to research a Charon blueprint to 8ME. Then there are a lot of component blueprints to also research as well! 

So it'll be a while before I actually produce my first freighter, and even longer before this venture turns a profit but I'm pleased to be along the way to achieving a goal for myself, which is what EVE is all about really.

August Update - Industry

 A disappointing/transitionary month this one, a transition that's only just starting really. The graph:

My current net worth is 64.1Bn ISK, a decrease of 1.1Bn ISK.

Another month, more losses. This is easier to explain. I've been aggressively chasing prices down as Logic Circuit prices have fallen in order to liquidate stock and transition to new items and ventures. I've also been having a slightly more holistic look at my setup, and while I do that I've not used most of my characters. Most of the time just 3 have been building anything.

I know I want to keep building mobile depots, I can churn those out for eternity with 1 character and a 10% profit margin basically to the end of time, though prices here have fallen recently as well. Input materials across the board seem down which makes chasing profit much harder.

I also know I want 1 character to build ad hoc things that EVEGuru says are profitable. These tend to be mostly odd t1 rigs, where I can produce 10 or 20 from a single production line for a day and make a decent profit, but not commit fully to.

When prices level out I want 1 character to continue with medium rigs as well, as these have a consistently good demand and have been a nice earner for me.

Beyond that I'm less certain about what I want to do. I would like to transition my low sec setup to looking at building freighters, and to that end I have started picking up capital parts blueprints and researching them in lowsec. This activity will have a lot of lead time (and start up cost) but I think should therefore lead to some good margins.

With my other characters I am looking at other items with better, more consistent margins. I have never lost money making large EMP Smartbomb II for instance, so I'm making those a regular part of my rotation.

I'm also considering industrial cores. I have made them here and there in the past, and the margin is consistent along with demand, so I'd need to be careful about how many i produce, but they have a long lead time and take a lot of bulky tritanium to build. Which isn't the end of the world, but I am very strongly considering buying a freighter to accommodate that.

A lot more work to do here, seems the puzzle is going to take some real concentration to figure out, which I just haven't given it this last year.

August Update - Trading

 I was away for some of this month, and working silly hours for other parts, so an underwhelming month. The raw numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.263Tn ISK, and increase of 16Bn ISK, or 516 mil ISK/day.

Hardly impressive, but as I say, I've hardly played for a lot of the month. To be honest with my trading I've just been going through the motions, doing my same old same old, watching the numbers tick slowly up, while focussing on other things.

One thing I have been doing is building up PLEX stockpiles using profits. Up to 99k now, 1000 more and I'll be at the 100k I was hoping for to take into the next FOMO sale.

I have been trying a little bit to get started in null on my main, which is actually a slightly more involved process than I remember. A lot about null life is getting to know the geography, what systems are where, where the Ansiblexes are, where the industry parks are, etc. etc. etc.

I fell into the simplest thing of death cloning, buying a ratting Gila and going not far from staging and ratting enough to pay the Gila off by doing Forsaken Hubs, but I haven't achieved much more than that. More on what I'm doing to get settled in another post but I'm trying to keep my game time focussed on that, or else I'll never really get the most out of the experience and I might as well stay in high sec.

I've also noticed, and I don't know if others are the same, but when there is a lot of stress going on in my real life, for whatever reason, I struggle to motivate myself to do things I find fun, such as play EVE. So you will always see a bit of a drop off in terms of activity and progress when I have other things on my mind. This is probably a natural response to stress, but I've noticed it more consciously recently where I finally finished work, and had a bit of time to log in, and wanted to, but just...couldn't bring myself to, and went to bed instead. 

Fingers crossed the worst of the work stress is behind me so I can get the lay of the land. I half remember the lay of the land in Catch from over a decade ago, but Tenerifis is a completely different animal that I'm still getting used to.

Attempting to get organised

 So, I'm trying to work out a slightly better process for my industry characters in order to utilise them better and start extracting some actual profits from them again. To that end I've added a new tab to my spreadsheet:

At the moment, I'm only really doing much on the first 3 characters, which is pretty criminal. But that will change as I get myself organised. 

I've decided that going forwards I'm not going to use more than 1 character slot for a single rig/module production, so as not to flood the market. Something that's all too easy to do.

I've also settled on trying Jump Freighter production in lowsec, but this will take some training and setup in terms of blueprint acquisition and research, so more of a long term goal that I can get 2 of my characters initially training towards. In the mean time I will have to find more reliable work for characters 4, 6, 7 and 9. 

Currently my routine involves picking up the bits needed for my mobile depot production, setting off runs of medium CCC ring with character 3, and with character 1 I check EVEGuru for more ad hoc items to produce and make them. This is a fine base but I need something reliable for the rest to do. 

I also need to finish using up all of my Logic Circuits. I typically have 1-2 thousand on hand bought through buy orders as I use quite a few, but the price is dropping like a stone at the moment:

As there is nothing fundamental that has changed in the supply or demand of logic circuits, I suspect this has been someone with deep pockets and a desire to pump and dump a bottleneck industry input. If that is the case they succeeded, but I don't see the price recovering now. As such I will be holding off on rigs using them until the price stabilises, probably at a lower level. They historically sat at around 500,000ISK a piece, not the 2 million they are now. 

July Update - Industry

 An abysmal month for Industry this one. I barely did anything. The graph:

As you can probably discern from the huge gap in the graph, I basically didn't even log into these characters for a month.

My current net worth is 65.2Bn ISK. That's a Decrease of 1.9Bn ISK!

So, what gives? 

Like I say, I barely logged into my industry characters at all. Another period where salvage prices tanked and my net worth dropped felt like I was producing items and not just treading water but actually losing ground despite keeping slots busy. Therefore I just lost motivation. Towards the end of the month I did pick this up again, and did turn the slide around, though not dramatically.

I think really I rely too heavily on a small basket of good, and am therefore very susceptible to price movements within that basket. When prices rise I make hay, but when they fall the whole venture feels pointless. As the main component of most of my industry is salvage, and probably 50% of the value of all I make is Logic Circuits, I am very reliant on the prices of that one item, over which I have no control and little visibility (I know they come from exploration sites in the Dronelands, but I don't know how much explo happens there, probably more now that there is effectively peace in Null sec again).

I am therefore going to try and mix up my style and diversify. Current plan is to have no more than 1-2 characters producing any given item at a time. So 1 character on Medium CCC 2s, one on mobile depots, one on large em shield reinforcers 2s, etc.

This way I should be less beholden to price fluctuations, or at least be producing a smaller proportion of a days volume, allowing me to shift stock faster. We shall see.

July Update -Trading

 A delayed update as work has been insane with a lot of out of hours work followed by being away for a week on holiday, but July was a fairly standard trading month, with not a lot to talk about. the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.247Tn ISK, an increase of 27Bn ISK, or 870mil ISK/day.

As I say, not a lot to talk about here. I just went through the motions doing my normal regional trading strategy of buying in Jita and paying a public contractor 1% of collateral to fly the goods to Amarr/Dodixie/Rens/Hek and selling them there. It's easy, relatively brainless, and works out to about 1Bn per day if I do a trade run at least once or twice a week.

The only other notable thing is I have been buying up PLEX with my ISK I got from cashing out the last FOMO sale. I'm up to 96,000 PLEX at this point, and will probably pause accumulation when I hit 100k. Then use it on the next sale and on and on it goes.

I had been more focused this month on trying to work out a home for my main, settling on Brave Newbies. It was quite an involved process getting in but aside from doing a tiny bit of ratting I haven't actually done much here. Hopefully things should calm down a bit IRL now and I can get some proper play time in.