Ship production 101 & mineral price update

Well, at the weekned Jax started ship production after months of waiting for the blueprint to be researched, and its starting to pay off, 2 ships sold already. To the tune of 700K isk per ship profit. Thats monster profit and our highest per-item profit so far - and selling 2 per day = a nice little earner.

Downsides are the mineral stockpile is depleting quite quite rapidly. An example is Zydrine use. A couple of months ago, 4000 Zyd would have lasted a couple of months production. Now its lucky to last even 2-3 days. We purchased > 15k in the Sat->Sun period alone. The good news is Zyd appears to be being priced reasonably now, and availability of the high-end minerals is good and is "just about" keeping up with our demand.

Bad news is Trit, I don't know if its the release of the Orca causing this, but Trit is at 3.20-3.50 locally. A couple of months back, 2.91 or below was normal, and 3 was expensive.

Whats interesting though is despite the increase in costs of all items with Trit, prices of T1 items on markets are still continuing to fall. Watch out T1 producers (especially those with unresearched BPO's) as this may cause you problems.

Interesting ship piloting mistake

I hate to think of the cost to repair the station - I hope they don't charge me and their insurance covers it. The corporation couldn't afford to pay a few billion for repairs either! Thanks to Jax for the picture.

In news, corporation had total of 180m of items on mkt yesterday, and we've discovered a few new high-profit, but slow selling lines. As the profit is 200k per item its a nice little earner (selling ~5-6 per day)

We're also going to get into ship production due to the high profit we have identified in some classes of well-selling ships now we have both minerals and researched BPO's available. (note to those not in know, a non-PE researched ship BPO cannot make you money in many places from our experiences). Hopefully the ship business will result in faster turnover for corp (which will nessessitate us training for bigger haulers).

Industrial activities aside, will have basic skills for COSMOS missioning I hope for Monday. Archaeology will be available from then.. Then its onto the probing skills - then finally cov-ops. Then back to the basic skills to enable running of multiple R&D agents simultaneously. COSMOS to improve standings rapidly... thus allowing use of R&D agents... and probing to enable exploration. With the upcoming expansions next year, I think getting exploration/probing skills good will be a good start.

Certificates & Videos

Okay, in news, if you havn't seen it CCP have released the 1st batch of EVE online fanfest video goodness - in decent quality professional rips. So you can watch most of the presentations and love the Tech-3 goodness.

I've been off work sick the last 2 days - and I spent some of the day sat on the laptop computer in bed watching the above videos, and planning skills with evemon...

Certificates have been a great addition to the game, and have shown me that it may be better for me to get some basic all round skills to level 2/3 before skilling up to level 5 on the "specialist" skills. Specifically I was missing some of the armor hardening skills.. so these will be trained shortly...

Also, am preparing for COSMOS missions - should be starting those from this week/next - . Its all going to plan in the "survey" boat skill plan. Plan you see is that I have one character skilled to fly cov-ops, prober, codebreaker combined ship... its a long-way off, but should greatly help in low-sec. In the meantime I understand you need archaeology/hacking skills in cosmos, so will help with that also.

EVE Memory leak?

Last night myself and Jax did notice what appears to be a small memory leak in EVE post the new patch. Basically on every jump memory increases a little it seems (on both our PC's). As Jax had jumped all over Essence last night he'd ran out of ram.. and just restarting the client greatly sped him up.

In good news - post-patch as a general rule my clients are running a lot smoother.

We spent some time yesterday running missions - and Jax sorting out some nasty market undercutting going on in some of "our" systems !

This weekend, another venture into low-sec is planned - scouting another region to get an idea of if the residents are the yarr type. Will update results on Monday...

CCP - Please release fanfest videos

Okay, we have 24 hours downtime. Fanfest has just happened.

Why not... - release the videos from EVE TV of the fanfest presentations. It *may* just keep the EVE population from getting cold turkey withdrawal fever. At least it'll give all the Europeans something to do today. Call me crazy but the guys doing the server work will not be the EVE TV guys, nor the website content guys, so I really can't see why they can't do this.

Myself - well, I'm at work (this was written by email on the train on way to work), but er, once I get home, I'd love some fanfest videos in decent quality. Crazykinux done a great job doing videos and pics on his site during fanfest... but they are not the best quality, which I'm sure he'll admit.

If this doesn't happen, tonight/today I'll be doing non EVE related things for once, including catching up on the mountain of TV waiting to be watched on my Sky+.

What are you planning in downtime?

Low-sec shenannigins

Well, last night we went for a roam in low-sec... not local low-sec, in Essence, but more further afield.

In good news, we found a very unpopulated system and what appeared to be anti-pirate setup nearby. Its between 15 and 20 jumps away. The system has plenty of moons, and is .3 so is a possibility for pos placement.

First... need a covert ops ships to go moon scanning around all the moons in system that don't already have pos's... This requires use of a cov-ops and all the scan skills which is about 2 months off - could use a non-cov-ops, but one is required ideally.

Second... need a POS.

Third, need fuel for a POS. Which means we need (for emergency's only) ability to ICE mine at a reasonable rate. The cost for the pos, should in theory, be supplied by the moon minerals - at least in part - and thus should be able to pay for high-sec fuel services from a 3rd party.

Fourth, need a defense force situated in/near said POS to defend.

Downsides are the investment the above will take. I'm proposing saving starting now for the project..

As of this week we're moving mission hub system... now the main corp refiner has standings for 0% refines in Ours (allowing recycling without loss), we can move agent hub system.... so we can move to L3 Q17/18 agents or even L4 missions.

Eve CSM voting

Guys... please vote - its a good way of targetting how you want EVE to develop. I have already voted with my 2 accounts (for 2 different individuals both who I think will improve the CSM).

Now I know others have commented on this... but basically:
Don't vote cause they are in your corp
Don't vote cause they want a free holiday

What REALLY gets my goat on this is the amount of candidates without a campaign website or blog. Fair enuogh I COULD trawl the Eve online forums for this BUT... a blog/campaign website surely is the best way to get the message across. Put bluntly for furture reference CSM folks, if you don't have a website/campaign setup, you ain't going to get a vote from me.

Next year I have decided I WILL be running for the CSM personally. This year I'm not, as to too many of you I'll be too new a character/too new in the blogosphere... and I already have some campaign ideas. But I'm not going to blog about them until the website is setup and I'm confirmed as a candidate.

CSM represents a big time commitment, and is not something I'll be taking lightly (as personally I'll earn less real world money as the time I spend doing CSM commitments will conflict with my IT related overtime etc work!). Before that I may actually publish some information about myself and what I do in real life - and why I believe I'd therefore make an excellent CSM candidate.

Eve online infuences UPS...

EVE does influence me in subtle ways.

I tend to plan more both ingame and at work now.... with longer-term plans.

One more recent effect has been to make me realise what would happen in a powercut to my characters (especially if running a mission or worse pvp) - and just how financially disasterous (in terms of ISK, and in terms of loss of primary PC potentially) it could be for me in the longer-term of my characters development. I'd been planning a UPS anyhow for my gaming rig to replace a old broken one that I'd been putting off replacing. My advice - don't buy belkin UPS's - they die after 3 years consitantly... The office-rejig and a free older APC UPS I was donated from some of my old work colleagues meant this pressing need is now filled for no cost!

As of last night, my EVE rig (with both monitors (17" and 22") will last for ~ 10 mins in event of a power cut. Should be enough to avoid ship destruction style events I hope...

With the above some may think I'm taking things too far, but I've had a UPS for years (the last one died so badly it needed a full new unit) - and the power in my street fails once a month at least for 1-4 hours...
I can highly reccomend UPS's for online gamers of all kinds who live in the country like me with dodgy power. It's a shame my donated one needs new batteries to restore it to its full 30 min runtime... but that can wait, 10 mins will do for now...

I am also in process of buying a 2nd UPS - a small unit that should keep my wifi up for 2-3 hours in a power cut if I've sized it right - it'll ONLY run the DSL router. (wifi for the laptop, iphone and EVE PC once I transfer it from the other UPS). Its funny how when you use iplayer and other online entertainment a lot how much you can miss it in one 4 hour power cut!

Does your EVE rig have a UPS? Has EVE influenced any kit purchases for you?

Hints in devblogs. Jovians?

In this Dev blog there is a very interesting line of text...

There will be some totally new aspects to the game and possibly some old friends revived that you have long missed.

Old Friends. Jovians perhaps? How awesome would a new race and new ships be? Would it totally change the PVP landscape... I think so!

In game last night, I brought 20m of blueprints for some drone related items I want to "test" the market with. I have to fly around a bit to pick them all up later in the week.

Big big moment last night though. It was the 100m of items for sale on market barrier for me personally (corp wide this was beaten a while back). And got a new "big" seller. It made >500k ISK of profit in around 1 hour last night! The industrial factories will be beating again producing more of these hot items shortly... I almost can't wait to get home to see the profit made today.

Trading update, 4 months in, corp has around ~200m of blueprint originals, most of which are material efficieny researched at the very least... and as of this morning 60m ISK on-hand, with 140m of items on market, and with approx 60m of minerals in the corp mineral hanger awaiting production. Not a bad growth rate from humble beginnings for the 3 corp members. I don't know how much we have on-hand in terms of value from the loot we have not refined/sorted/kept right now, but I suspect its a reasonable amount.

Phew... that was close

My game time almost expired today, without me even realising it... Due to expire in 3 hours from now, and I simply hadn't realised. It does mean however, this marks the 4 month point in EVE for my characters...

I have bitten the big one and renewed both accounts I own for 12 months. With exchange rate fluctuations I couldn't bring myself to pay by GTC as I have the past 120 days. Paying in 12 month installments is a reasonable compromise. It works out roughly equal a monthly basis than I had been paying until now (without risk of the pound going down the toilet and me having to cut down to the one account).

The downsides are I havnt been able to log in except for skill changes since Tuesday... this isn't a good thing - but was down to unexpected work on Thursday, and ditto Sunday. It does suck being on-call. But this week I have a completely free week/weekend and not-on call. So lots of EVE-time at long last.

This weeks plans involve mostly missioning for ISK. The good news is some of the rig BPO will soon be finished research. Meaning I'll be making some rigs for my missioning Myrmidon with left over salvage. Sure.... I could sell salvage, but personally I like to use it for my personal ship customisation needs.