Don't Ever Try to Sell Capitals

Two days ago, I faced the unenviable discovery that my alliance had changed its priorities, and no one had bothered to tell me. I found myself about two months behind the meta, holding onto ships I didn't need any longer.

Now, this happens all the time, of course. Doctrines change and ships become obsolete. This time, though, the problem was the kind of ships. We weren't talking about a few frigates here.

This is how things typically go when you decommission a doctrine. You somehow get your ship to Jita (typically contracting or hauling it), you repackage it, and sell the components on the market for either whatever you can get, or you set up sell orders to move it at the optimal price, if you don't need the isk quickly. Then, you pick up the new ship and make your way (or ship it) back to your staging. 

Of course, there are complications. Maybe you're deployed in deep null with camps along the way, and you need to use a courier service and alliance contracts. Or maybe you want to repurpose the ship and just need a few modules to retrofit it. I've certainly done that more than once. In the latter case, that involves inventorying what you have and what you need. There's nothing more annoying that going through the effort of hauling modules in only to realize you forgot to bring the T2 rig that makes the whole fit work.

But with capitals? It's a giant headache.

Knowledge Gaps

Eve is a game of horizons. You can play for years, skilling towards becoming the perfect pilot for a specific ship. Just when you reach that goal, you find yourself keenly aware of your limitations. So, you need to train for the next one, and the next.

For my part, I wanted to learn to be a good solo and small gang PvPer, so my first priority was to play “catch up” by topping off all the basic fitting and competency skills (shield, armor, etc.), then top off my cruiser/medium-and-below spaceship command and weapon skills. Only after that did I start working on capital skills.

Now, Talvorian is sitting pretty well, able to fly all carriers and dreads, as well as T2 siege. In fact, that’s been the case for about a year now, though I rarely fly capitals.

You see, capital warfare has always been beyond the next horizon for me. I can sit in them, I can follow commands, but I really just don’t “get” them yet. With my schedule of availability, I’m hit or miss for large capital fleets, and there were always other kinds of gameplay I needed to practice more.

Yesterday, I went on a fleet that had several of my corpmates multiboxing capitals, and it made me jealous. I wanted to do that. But, I have enough awareness to know I don’t have the “soft skills” to fly them. I completely missed the boat on the carrier changes; I read the patch notes of course, but I never previously flew carriers in combat situations, so I didn’t really take the time to understand what those changes meant.

Making Trading Easier

A couple days ago, someone on reddit asked what sort of tools for Eve the community was asking for. At first, nothing came to mind, but after deciding to start up a trade empire (read: market stocking), I do have a suggestion after all.

Any time you do any trading, there are a few key things you want to know. What's your buy price? How fast are you likely to sell through your stock (allowing you to replenish and put that profit back to work as principle for the next round)? And, most importantly, how profitable is it for you?

Now, this last bit is actually quite difficult to calculate. To understand it, you need to know the price you buy at, the price you sell at, and the quantity moved. Now, if you're selling one item, that's not that difficult to keep track of. You can open up a spreadsheet and pull the data, then compare the results to see what you're making.

But what happens when you have a hundred different items selling piecemeal as you adjust your prices to reflect the competition? Your sell prices are all different? They're interspersed with other items, with restocks of items you sell through, etc. etc. Your wallet balance can't tell you if you're making money, since your profit is being fed back into your operation.

Plus, you may salvage or loot any number of additional items, rendering "Transactions" useless too.  You may be looting missions, looting wrecks from your kills, and repackaging and sellling ships you don't need anymore, creating a lot of mess.

At any given time, your wallet balance is an imprecise measure of your profitability.

So, if there are any enterprising individuals out there, I'd like to see a tool that allows you to track your market orders and calculate profit and loss over time, filtering out unrelated items. In an ideal world, you could customize which items you track, either by a clipboard pull/copy & paste or by tracking items sold on market order. If it pulled directly from the api this would be a tool I'd use every day.

I'm relatively new at trading as a profession. In the past, I've tracked perhaps ten items at a time, and the prospect of doing it with jump freighters, full fittings, modules, ammo, and implants is definitely going to require some additional thinking on my part.

I'd love to hear how other traders do it - not their items and routes, of course, but what tools do they consult every day to do their business? What's the first thing they do when they log in?

Crowding Out and Moving Up

I have quite the history with purchasing characters on the bazaar. I started out buying and selling characters as my training appetite changed. Each time, I managed to sell for a slight profit, until I worked my way up to selling 70-80 mil sp characters. It wasn’t great isk, and I didn’t do it for the profits.

Rather, each purchase gave me access to a different kind of play style. I put some in faction warfare. I put others in low- or null-sec groups to get some different action. I found out very early that I had no appetite for awoxing, corporate theft, or scamming.

Not that I didn’t try… in fact, I once managed to fake my way into a corporation in NPC null. But I soured to the whole idea during the Teamspeak interview with the recruiter, when I realized he was a chill dude, and clearly cared about creating a positive environment for his pilots. I don’t have it in me to intentionally inflict harm on another player just trying to make the gameworld a little better. It’s one thing to shoot a player, providing content and presenting an opportunity for a lesson, but it’s quite another to enter into a corp with malice to inflict harm. The way you treat people says something about you, particularly when you think you can get away with it. I ended up leaving that corp the next day with nary a word said; I felt too bad.

But over the years, I’ve built up a number of former characters. Xinraea, Alexandra VonKarl, and War Hippy are just a couple of them. There are about a half dozen others I flew, PvPed, and then sold when I lost interest.

Naglfar and Thanatos for Sale

This is a quick one and in no way "crowds out" a regular article.

I'm selling a Thanatos and a Naglfar, if anyone would like them.  Both are located in Ihakana.

The Naglfar includes 20,000 hydrogen isotopes and 3  Capital Trimark Armor Pump I rigs and is listed for 2.6 bil.  The Thanatos includes 20,000 oxygen isotoles and 3 Large Capacitor Control Circuit I rigs and is listed for 1.45 bil.

If you're interested and reference that you saw it on this blog, I'll take 100 mil off the Nag and 50 mil off the Thanny.  (You can either accept the contracts as-is and I'll reimburse you, or I can pull the contracts and private-contract it to you; the former will be faster, the latter more secure).

Station Trading - Initial Learnings

I have a business trip this week, so I’ll be doing little playing of Eve.  And this past weekend, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the family before I have to go.  Fortunately, I’ll have plenty of time to write.

One thing I did have time to fit in, other than some time in an Oneiros on a fleet this weekend, was my initial station trading.  I started with 20 bil, and set up about 40 buy orders to stock myself with some some fodder with a good buy/sell split.

I started buying a wide range of faction modules, ships, and subsystems I’ve used in the past and whose value I have a good handle on.  My buy orders started filling pretty well, and I learned one cardinal rule of station trading: be careful picking items that have a very low number of sales per day.  I got myself into a few items that had only a couple dozen resolved trades per day, and while the buy/sell split was very good, I had to babysit them to constantly refresh the sell price.  With one trade an hour, I didn’t have the luxury of being the third – or even second – best option on the table.  High-grade implants fit into that category as well, and I was stuck with four High-Grade Snake Deltas for nearly the whole week. 

Lesson learned: I’m going to stick to items that sell at least a hundred units a day.