Friday, November 26, 2010

Invested Learning?

Since our Rattlesnakes have been out in null with our Ammunition and Drone Assembly Array's we haven't found much reason to leave the system other then to refine our loot.
Making easily 150 million+ a day from bounties alone there is little else to do and other then finding ways to increase the cash flow life has become rather stale...

As newly appointed Director of my corp I figured i would turn my attention to bolstering our numbers, this idea was very short lived as within hours an alliance mail was received stating all recruitment to all corps was closed.

Having recently heard the news from the dev blog about the soon to be removed learning skills debate was sparked in corp chat as to the training of learning skills to 5 to use their increased training time to put the points into skills with lower SP per hour, investing if you will.
I myself only have about 700,000 SP to potentially spend when this is dropped and thinking about all the ways to turn SP to a perfect carrier pilot has become somewhat of an obsession of mine.

The Character Bazaar on the EVE forums is a very interesting place, for a price you can get any character you want delivered straight to your account, no assets, no money but still if you have the money to throw into a character that cost several billion ISK i'm sure you saved enough to fit them out in the ship you bought them for...
With the learning skills being a bank of SP i've been looking for characters with perfect learning skills close to carriers, and the price difference is amazing!
Roughly 7-12 billion for a cheap carrier pilot.
Roughly 3-5 billion for a pre cap pilot with 5 million SP in learning skills..
Seems someone with a bit of money could make a fair profit over the next few months buying an investment character turning them into a perfect capitol pilot and selling them off again...
Wish i had the money to do that!

As for news of the War between us and the NC, i bring positive news!
With NC on our doorstep... more like half way through the door but you know what i mean, they have had little defense over their other area's allowed I.T to attack from the other side and now Pandemic Legion have entered the fray! to whom their allegiance stands is a mystery to me, i believe they fight for themselves but in any case the damage they have cause to the NC is incredibly beneficial for us, though it hasn't stopped the roams coming though our home system forcing us to sit in our pos while we wait for reinforcements...

And finally we welcome back Tom to our corp, heres hoping he finds the riches we did!

This Snake needs no Venom.

Alot has come and gone since my last update and I only hope I can remember it all!

The ratting in our null sec has been fantastic to me, dropping over 2 billion ISK my way so far it has to be the most fun I've ever had not shooting at another player!
Not in the form of bounties though, no that would make the game too easy, it had to come in the form of 4 overseer's personal effects (valued at 620 million ISK) and a Machariel BP (Valued at 744 million ISK) which presented us with a major issue at the time...
With us being at war with the overwhelming forces of the NC any easy route to high sec has been under constant attack and even with a Covert Ops Transport we were unable to successfully move a single item out!
Until one fateful morning when i drearily hit the scan button once more in my Buzzard, and found a Worm hole straight to low sec, heart racing i filled the frigate with billions worth of loot and set off on a journey i would not advise to those with weak hearts...
But alas i made it to Jita safely and sold off the loot. \o/
With the money made Jason (the CEO of my corp) and I decided upon a few items that would make our lives that much easier in the harsh depths of space.

Number 1: An Ammunition Assembly Array, making our own ammo seemed like a great idea as it was our biggest expense so far.

Number 2: A Drone Assembly Array, drones are also expensive and making our own also seemed like a good idea.

Number 3: The big one. The Gurista Flagship, The Rattlesnake!

But our troubles were far from over...
Moving a 700 million ISK ship through low sec was a stupid idea, gate camps along the way would tear us apart, our only hope was to wait for a worm hole between high sec and our null sec. After weeks this didn't happen i finally gave in and asked in alliance if someone could move them out for us and to my amazement someone offered.
And so we set out, piloting our faction battleships through the safety of high sec before reaching the low sec where our Carrier friend was waiting.

What we didn't quite expect when we warped to the Carrier was to find a Nyx Super Carrier waiting for us... Talk about safety!
After a short talk about how much bigger super carriers SHOULD be, Jason and I docked our Rattlesnakes away and Jump cloned, or in Jason's case self destructed, back to null sec.

Though i must say the Nyx looks rather large from the point of view of a pod.

Monday, November 8, 2010

A Short History.

I've tried many different tactics to make money in EVE, none of them so far have said "stick to me! I'll make you the most!" but I think it's this jumping that makes EVE such an enjoyable game. Well played I say to you CCP, you have made the game balanced enough so that those of us greedy enough to pursue wealth in the universe have so many options that picking one and sticking to it is an almost impossible task as at one point we all go "well i could give that a shot I suppose"

Todays post is a short history of my plans to get rich quick and how they resulted.


Number 1: Mining.
When I first started this seemed like a great way to make ISK with little to no risk and very little commitment. This was true I did make ISK in decent amounts with little risk but as time dredged onwards it seemed that although this appealed to some, the option of "higher risk higher ISK" seemed to be more for me.

2-12 Million ISK an hour (high sec)


Number 2: Missioning.
This tickled my fancy a little more, the steady increase in difficulty and reward coupled with a healthy influx of death to those I came up against meant an interesting time spent whenever i logged on...
At least for a while...
It seems with the universe expanding, downtime getting shorter and the hundreds of thousands of players keeping the many worlds turning, not one person is capable of writing perhaps 20 new back stories for the missions! Yes they did a good job making it so every mission is not just kill X of Y at Z and letting us choose our own style of missioning was another good move by our beloved CCP but even if we are killing X of Y at Z I personally would appreciate the story to change a little bit... how many times have I killed my agents mother in law? enough to make me question his love life...

Varies Greatly with skills (I made about 8 million ISK an hour on level 3's)

Number 3: Wormholing.
This was an interesting journey and a short one for those who have read my other posts you would know this, the money in everything you do is amazing. The problem these days is finding an unoccupied worm hole that you can occupy, this doesn't sound too hard with over 2000 active wormholes currently in EVE* but let me assure you it is. The risk is relatively low unless you happened to pick a static high sec wormhole and you are in a corp with less then 40 active members. The main problem i found with living in a worm hole is that any money you make sits in its raw form (those of sleeper parts or ore) for days or weeks until you ship it out to sell, this doesn't sound too bad either except you then run the risk of 2 things; first you have all your hard works ISK in one place thats a god send to anyone who happens to stumble across whatever your using to move it. Secondly you run the risk of leaving yourself stranded on the other side after your worm hole collapses from too much traffic (this isn't too bad if you have corp mates with probes inside).

15-25 million ISK an hour. (sorry no pics)


Number 4: Ratting, Belt and Anomalies.
This so far has been my favourite past time to make money with, the Sanctums in my home system provide much in the way of ISK to those who clear them and the drops and salvage are more then enough to fit any ships you want (up to meta 4's) the main problem with this style of profiteering is that your eyes are pinned to local and every time a threat enters system your finger hovers over the warp to POS button. The only other problem i've had in this method is that it takes a decent amount of SP and newer pilots would have incredible trouble with even the easiest of anomalies, however this does come back to my theory of method jumping.


Number 5: Planetary Interaction.
This is not a full time devoted way to make ISK but it is a method none the less and I have given it a shot and it seems to work out ok. The problems with PI are simple, Its not user friendly. Once you get the hang of it, it proves to be no problem at all. I've met people in my time in EVE that are absolute masters of PI making hundreds of millions of ISK a week from their planets, and I by no means am one of these masters, I set up a new planet today in the system over from my home and it took me a good while (with some much appreciated help) to get it up and running. The plus sides to this venture seems to outweigh that of the negatives though. The whole PI operation requires very little SP, meaning you can start this very early on in the game, and it also takes little in the way of ISK to set up. The other advantage to running your own planetary setups is that it only requires you to be on (at most) once every 4 days!! And only for about 15 minutes at that, this also means you can run this in the background of every other venture you try to make ISK.


Number 6: Trading.
This was a great area for me when i begun, high profit with little SP needed and little risk if your knew what you were doing. In fact trading was the whole reason i started this blog!
Trading is a very fine art that requires lots of attention and patience, you sit in a fairly slow ship all the time moving from 1 location to another most of the time manually to keep your ship from getting high sec ganked...
It is a wonderful way to get on your feet though if you're just starting out, reading guides online and finding the routes will take you about an hour and after that its a steady stream of money to get that ship you've always wanted (within reason).

Varies too much for estimated income.

I have yet to try my hand at many other forms of making ISK and I would love to hear your stories about any form of profiteering you can think of! leave a comment below or email me at evepurelybusiness@gmail.com

*Requires Verification.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

A sight to behold... For those who were there...

I am quite sorry to say I missed the biggest battle in the history of the drone lands from a writers point of view, but as that of a gamer I am quite glad I missed it...

The fight over our station beat Jita's record with a staggering 3500 pilots including 4 Titans! Though they were only there as a show of power. I regret to inform you that we lost. Though we haven't given up and we continue to halt the advance of NC as they try their luck at taking us down.

Though the battles may be epic the losses are crippling and the threat of our transports to high sec being intercepted is a massive worry as with everything in eve war cost money... lots and lots of money.

With my freighter training completed I decided to start training up tech 2 modules in area's i'd overlooked or deemed less important then upgrading ships and now that those skills are nearing an end i looked once more into the pool of things to train for...

After a good 2 hours on EFT (Eve Fitting Tool) I stumbled across my old pipe dream the legendary pirate ship the Rattlesnake, with a base shield of almost 13,000 and the drone capabilities a pure Gallente ship would have problems matching, I drooled over the numbers as they flew up with each module i fit.

The numbers (with my current skills) were amazing, over 1000 tank and 600 dps, with this kind of firepower i could easily solo sanctums and havens and rake in more money then i'd ever seen before!
Of course to every upside there is a downside, and for the Rattlesnake it's the cost, 500 million for the hull alone is a fair bit of money, and there is also the issue of moving said 500 million ISK ship through over 20 jumps of low sec and null sec...
Unless we use a carrier...
Which we will.

In other news our Corp has split into 3 corps, 1 for null sec life, 1 for the people not yet ready for null sec life and 1 for high sec war decs, 2 of my characters live in null sec and today the third joined the war dec corp having finished his training for a Wolf (Minmatar Assault Frigate) and the specs on that little bastard are beastly for pvp! Almost wolf like...

Specs (With min SP)(With Max SP)
Sig Radius: 33m/33m
Max Speed: 709mps/861 mps (with T1 AB)
Cap: Stable at 70%/90%
Dps: 139/232
EHP: 8732/9745

Very cheap and in my eyes a fun future to look forward to!