A rare gank attempt

 So the other night someone attempted to gank me.

I was on my way back to Akonoinen, in a DST with about 3Bn in materials for a run, then when I jumped into Vellaine I loaded grid with 7 ships, mainly Oracles. I knew what was up and aligned to warp and turned my tank on along with my MWD. I was promptly locked up and...brought to about half shield. I remembered I hadn't overheated so did that and the second volley hit...knocking off about another quarter of my shield. 

By that point CONCORD had flooded the grid and all 7 assailants died in an expensive fireball, leaving me with 7 kill rights to use, which is nice. 

I was never going to use them myself, but fortunately I don't have to, so I made them available for all to use for 10 or 15 million each. Over the next 2 days I got these mails:

And just like that I was about 90mil richer. Just goes to show that it's worth having your haulers fully tanked, and remember to train Thermodynamics so you can overheat. 

If he had calculated properly it would have cost me about 3.3Bn, as he failed it cost him somewhere around 700mil and I gained 90mil. Quite the swing based on results.

January update - Industry

 Similar to my trading update here in that I didn't play that much, and there were headwinds that affected my overall profit quite heavily. My current position:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 61.2Bn ISK. That's an increase of 1.4Bn or 45mil/day.

That's really poor. 

The primary reason here is a lack of proper play and investment, so my slots were not kept busy very much this month. Additionally, logic circuits and medium rigs were fluctuating and frequently unprofitable, negatively affecting my worth even when I was producing.

Really, what I need to do is diversify my characters skills and blueprints, so that I can pivot more easily in these situations going forwards. Also, I should buy a freighter, so that I can shift minerals more easily. Rig margins vary quite heavily and can move quickly, but something I produce a bit of every now and again that maintains a healthy margin is Siege modules. And I don't specifically mean Siege Module I or II, but the category of modules that fall under that. In my case I sometimes produce Medium or Large Industrial Cores. Both the T1 and T2 versions are always profitable, though a job run can take a week to do. I suspect this plays into the margins. They are however quite space intensive, usually requiring several DST runs to shift the materials or the modules one way. I can fix that with a freighter, which I think my CEO character can now fly.

The other thing I'd like to do is look into longer running jobs. For a least some characters. Rigs are great for a quick turnaround but I can't always log in enough to take advantage of that, so some longer running things would be great to weave in. Maybe take a look at building t2 hulls in Auner. We'll see.

January update - Trading

 A bit of a delayed update this one, for a couple of reasons. Real life has thrown up a fair amount over the last month or so, with work being pretty hellish. We had a number of time critical bits combined with major incidents and our product owner is leaving us, so I've picked up some of his responsibilities in his absence. So I've had very little time for coding and little time and energy for gaming. I've also been ill this last week or so, well enough to work but ill enough to not want to sit staring at a screen gaming. The worst kind of illness. 

Anyway, my numbers from the end of Jan:

And the full breakdown:

I have a net worth of 1.153Tn ISK. That's an increase of 31Bn ISK, or 1Bn/day.

All things considered I'm pretty pleased with that. I haven't done as many trade runs as usual, but I'm back to making a healthy profit again which is great. I've also gone in and done 1 or 2 updates from some expired orders in sobaseki (far right of the sheet) in addition to my normal sale locations of Amarr, Rens, Hek and Dodixie. It's not a big earner but I want to liquidate that before deciding if I want to pick it up as a proper sale location again.

Some investment increases have helped as well, Large Skill Injectors have taken a bit of a jump, as well as hypercores taking another step towards PLEX parity. I've begun liquidating these, hoping to be completely free of HyperCores by the end of March realistically.

Loans

You may have noticed an extra line in my summary, "loans". This is just one loan actually, but I've left it as a plural in case I end up giving more out. Ardel Corvallon, COE of ARDCO and creator of the series Zero to fuel tycoon has begun expanding into wanting to run a buyback to support his miners and get some materials for his corps fuel block production. I've spoken to him on and off over the last few months, he seems like a good guy who's passionately trying to carve out his own niche in EVE, and a number of people seem drawn to his enterprise. I've been keen to support him, even though creating fuels blocks doesn't really fit with my style of industry, so I offered him investment if he needs it. 

I was initially turned down, as he was keen to learn from a smaller base and build up, which is probably the best way and I respect that. However to get some seed money for his buy back he came to me and one other anonymous benefactor asking for 5Bn at a 4% interest rate, with an unspecified return rate.

Now on the face of it this isn't great for me, 4% return for an indeterminate amount of time isn't great. However, this is really about me supporting another content creator in the game, and helping to make the EVE cluster feel more alive, so I'm more than happy to provide this, even if, through burnout, personal circumstance or simply a scam I never get the 5.2Bn. It's hardly a major loss for me (I've lost more to erroneous broker fees than that!).

I'm keen to see where his journey takes him, and how he can make this scale and work in the future.