The Spice Must Flow!

What do you do when your source for isk suddenly dries up?  How long do you go before adapting?

With Repercussus’ move to Goonswarm, we had the inevitable adjustment period while we all move our ships to exactly the right place, find new homes for everything we do on a regular basis, and generally find ourselves a nice groove.  This happens at both the corp and individual levels.

It hasn't been hard to find PvP content.  RP is stepping up even further to keep the content flowing for the corp, and GSF is great at providing a range of options even during a relatively dull time (wars winding down, holidays, etc.).  Logistics take a little longer as our logi pilots learn the new routes and danger spots, but it’s still flowing pretty well.

But, for me, my isk has generally come from cosmic signature ratting.  Lots of scanning practice (which has a clear PvP application) and high-yield time actually spent ratting.  But we’ve gone from an alliance of 3,000 to an alliance of 12,000, and the time zone focus has shifted to our TZ from the EUTZ, meaning there are a lot of competitors for those sigs.  So many, in fact, that it’s not viable any more.

I’m sitting on a good pile of isk, but dropping 5 billion on three months’ game time for two accounts throws into sharp relief the fact that I’m going to need to create some new revenue streams within the next year or face a significant cut in my net worth.

This requires effort.  This requires education.  This requires time.

This is sort of like starting over, learning new ways of making isk, but I still have all of the same monster consumption issues I’ve had over the past year.  Add to that the fact that I simply can’t deploy my primary PvP character everywhere I want to at the same time… jump clone timers and jump fatigue limit me to a handful of regions on the same day… and I realize I need to redeploy my former PvE character to a PvP capacity.  So there’s that issue as well.

Fortunately, I’m already about four months into a training regimen for a new ratting character to replace her.  But that’s still a hedged bet on the assumption I can find a steady diet of cosmic signatures for him.  So that’s not really a solution at this point.

Changing courses in Eve can be a traumatic experience.  We face them with such an eagerness for what they could provide based on optimal conditions.  But things are rarely optimal.  I read about exploration and the profits that one can make, but my own half-hearted attempts haven’t been very successful.  I read about the profits in stocking mission and PvP hubs, but question how effectively I can do it while still making profits and balancing it with my desired Eve activities.  And I dabble with moon mining, but the profits are subject to wild price fluctuations.

But now, I’m forced to double-down on at least one of them.  The way I work, I tend to prefer diversification.  So I’m using my free 20-day skill training to work up an exploration alt with heavier hacking and archaeology skills than any of my current characters to make the harder sites more successful.  I’m going to restart my moon mining for the moons whose outputs have adjusted in price.  And I’m going to get serious about market-stocking (which will involve research for about 95% of the effort-phase).  It’s going to be a lot of thinking, studying, and analyzing, and not a lot of playing.

But it has to be done.  And I suspect it’ll help me learn more about other parts of the game.

As a happy side-effect, learning more about the mindsets of players of these activities will improve my ability to kill them.

So, win/win.

But who knew sustainable living could be so hard?