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. 

Entitlement and the Brick Wall

As may be no surprise to readers, I'm a big fan of trying to improve myself through my life.  In the same way RPG players try to amass new skills, abilities, and assets to take on the big boss, I believe you should constantly assemble more tools to help you thrive as an individual.  Now, that "thriving" can mean different things to each individual, and the skills and situations you pursue are different from person to person.

What matters isn't that you seek a specific goal, of course, but rather that you regularly test yourself and throw yourself into the fire to be tempered by it.  To me, everyone is born in a state of uselessness, and you harden and improve yourself through your experiences.  It's not possible to "corrupt" or "ruin" yourself, and "purity" is synonymous with "untested" and "unimproved".

So, as one can imagine, in Eve, I genuinely look at losses and hardship as the very point of the game.  Let the simple level-grinding, pushing buttons to earn candy, and going through a process to achieve a desired result rest with single-player games.  Eve, at its core, to me is a live test environment, where the entire point is to implement your success strategies in an environment of friction, chaos, setbacks, and unpredictability.  Eve is the chaos and the resistance pushing against your desires, and within that tension lies all of the satisfaction when you finally overcome and succeed despite all the forces arrayed against you.

I desperately value this element in Eve specifically because the rest of the world seems to be sliding more and more towards a sense of entitlement.  Getting a college degree entitles you to a good job, or even A job, right?  And if you don't earn six figures, why we better sue to have our money returned or our student loan debt forgiven.  Never mind that your degree was in theoretical extraterrestrial sociology...

Or, when you forget to cancel your account by the start of the next billing cycle, you're entitled to have the charge pro-rated, right?  Or you're entitled to not being offended... ever.  Or you're entitled to play an online interactive game exactly the way you want without anyone interfering with your own ego-maniacal Vision playing out before you.  These days, we deem ourselves as gods of our own lives.

I ran into one of these little Gods who decided to throw a tantrum last night, and he exemplified the quintessential bad habit of failed Eve players.

Dipping My Toe in Station Trading

I’m not the richest person in the universe… comparatively.  But I am able to purchase whatever ships I want.  Losing that Archon loaded with T2 and T3 ships set me back about 4 billion, which represented about 9% of my liquid isk reserves.  But, a sting like that still hurt, particularly with PLEX prices rising.

So, though I can afford what I want to buy, I can’t do so indefinitely.  Moon mining is tricky business, with only a handful of profitable moons anymore and those all locked up by larger groups (particularly in lowsec, where they’ve all migrated). 

For a long time, I’ve wanted to try station trading.  I’m told you can make a lot of isk that way.  So, I figured I’d give it a go.  One of my characters can run over a hundred open market orders and has maxed skills to reduce transaction and market order fees.  I figure that’ll do for an initial foray.

Battlecruisers Are Cool Again!

When I began my Eve career, I made the mistake of trying to jump into the largest ships I could.  My support skills were weak, and since I was doing mostly PvE, I saw Ravens as the absolute best ships in the game.  There was little in-game information available to players that explained explosion radius, signature radius, and damage application, so I figured the biggest guns were simply more expensive, not focused in use.

My second ship loss was a Ferox (hilariously poorly fit, by the way…).  I loved my battlecruisers, proceeding to lose far more of them than I had any business losing in the next several years.  Before Tengus, the Drake was my preferred ratting boat, like many.

And then, battlecruisers became fat and slow, and fell through the fabric of the universe.  Combined with the cruiser buffs, battlecruisers were more of a liability than a benefit to a fleet, and more often than not were simply tackled as stragglers in any mobile gang.

The situation became so bad that prior to a week ago (when I purchased some faction doctrine battleships), my hangar included exactly one subcap larger than a cruiser, a hull-tanked Brutix Navy Issue.

But, my friends, deliverance is at hand!  In just three days, with the Vanguard release, we’re going to see battlecruisers become cool again. I’m not going to go through all of the changes, since Crossing Zebras put together a nice battlecruiser review that I’d be hard-pressed to top.

Into the Great Wide Open

Ultimately, Eve is a game that thrives on the desire of each player to log in and interact with the world.  The game is only as powerful and valuable to you as your engagement with it.

If you read my last post, you may be wondering why I was moving a carrier full of ships by myself.  The savvy among you recognized it as a relocation of assets.  That's not so surprising, right?  Null-sec alliances are relocating all the time, and Goonswarm recently redeployed.  Maybe I missed it and had to move on my own?

But, no.  Taken with some of my comments recently about the state of null-sec, it's not as simple as all that.  Increasingly, I'm finding being part of a null-sec alliance uninteresting, and after three months of building status-tension, I've decided I have to act.  The choice was between leaving a corporation I love to find the content I want, or leaving the game entirely.  And I just can't do the latter.

So, my time in Repercussus has come to an end, as a direct result of the changes happening in null-sec.  I'm doubling down on some lowsec "Adversity.".

It Had to End Sometime...

I have been very luck with my expensive ships.  When I’ve flown carriers or dreads, I’ve done so safely and without incident. 

I use solid practices to move them around.  When I light cynos, I do it off of only stations with plenty of clearance in docking range.  I give plenty of distance between my 5 km sphere and all elements of the station, and have never bumped when I lit a cyno myself.  Before I hit the cyno, I do a quick dscan to make sure no one is inbound, so I know I won’t wind up in some random part of the system.

On very rare occasions, I’ll light a cyno in a system that has no station.  When I do, I watch the traffic for a while before I jump, and if it looks to get a fair bit of through traffic, I’ll use the self destruct cyno (setting your ship to self-destruct and lighting the cyno only during the last 10-15 seconds of the cycle, so the cyno is on grid for the barest amount of time), then immediately warp off to a safe and cloak up.

And, generally, that works really well.  So well, in fact, that I’ve never lost a carrier.  I’ve never lost a dread either, but I don’t fly them frequently enough for that to be a habit, as much as a lucky string of events.

So, I’d say I’m a very safe capital pilot.  Or, at least, I was.  My run ended yesterday.  All tolled, the butcher’s bill was about 4.5 billion isk.

And it all happened because of module positioning.

Lessons: Take the Bait

There are many different kinds of bait in Eve.

A lot of times, you see a situation that’s almost too good to be true – for instance, a veteran low-sec pirate in a corp that almost certainly has its own logistics team traveling gate-by-gate in a Megathron.  Sure, you may think you can tackle and whittle down that Megathron, and things are looking good when you get him into half-shield and he still hasn’t called in help.  So, you inch a bit closer to ensure you’re under his guns, and he hits you with dual webs and a scram as local fills up.

This isn’t an article about that kind of bait.  It’s obvious he wanted to be caught, and you should feel bad for falling for it (well, okay, only a little bad, as you were willing to fight and some pilots really do pilot around solo in exposed ships).

But on the other hand, a pilot who’s trying to bait you represents a pilot who thinks he’s in charge of the situation.  And as you know from reading this blog, thinking you know something is usually the first step in a great fall.  Sometimes, walking into a trap with either a firm exit strategy or a means of turning the tables on your opponent is worth the risk.