Isk report 9 June 12

Some bloggers love to tell you their success stories.  It's very easy to write about what worked; less easy to write about what didn't.

I've been kicking around Eve for a while - at first just dabbling but now spending more time in here and less in WoW.  I started out with:

• 1st set of career starter missions (taking so long that I let a couple expire); 
• L2 distribution missions (Ugg - so little ISK even for a complete newbie); 
• completed both allied factions starter missions (well worth it - made L4 missions available - and gave a stockpile);
• Trying my hand at PI in a single 0.9 sytem, selling raw Aqueous liquids because they were the most abundant (Don't do that - really)
• Ground a little corporation standing with L4 distribution missions (and the occasional L2 to allow Connections to kick in)
• Tinkering with a bit of trading - in one region - with region wide buy orders of ore; converting it to minerals.

On the 25th May, I decided to start working on my Isk, and actually tracking it.

• I have been taking snapshots at random times during the day.  The graph above shows the best of any given day's balance.
• I have margin trading so escrow does not equal buy orders but does represent readily available funds.
• I have chosen a 'liquidation' value of sales at 50% of the sell price.  Given that the majority of my sales are currently minerals with buy prices at 90-95% of the current sell values this is incredibly conservative.
• I do not include the value of stock on hand (not in a sell order), ships, or training in the above graph.  While stuff sitting in a dock somewhere does have value, it won't give me ISK until I get around to putting it on the market.

What happened:

• Week 1 was fantastic : 
• doubling my ISK by trading - woo hoo
• Gallante based (largely Sing Liason) region.  
• Buy orders on Veldspar, refine and haul to market hub.
• Week 2 was bad : 
• Expanded into into new regions; Metropolis and  Hek.
• Lots of work; running very hard just to stand still.
• not quite as bad as it seems as 
• purchased Wholesale costing 25% (31M) of my funds
• Spent 10% (13M) on PI infrastructure.  I may end up throwing some of this away due to non-efficient setup.
• But still bad
• 1 lightly tanked Iteron I (1M)  no cargo (outward journey)
• One tanked Iteron IV (10M) with a 10M cargo load (return journey)
• All in the new regions that I expanded into. Mmmm  There be pirates here.

Current plans:

• Train access to research agents.
• Get a (better) clue on PI.
• Add new buy orders to quieter regions for region.  Miners like quiet; Pirates don't.
• Phase out region buy orders around Hek and Rens, letting the existing ones expire.
• For the ore buy orders fulfilled behind a camped losec system is to fly out to the station in a freighter, refine it, bring back any high value minerals that fit in the freighter and sell the remaining minerals at a discount.  Freighters appear to be hard to pin down even when actively chased by pirates.

Planetary Interaction - Hisec

I have been playing with Planetary Interaction (PI), and it is it's own mini-game for spreadsheet junkies.

You can simply jump in and do it and get some nasty surprises; or you can do your research.  I have included links at the bottom of this page.  Some links I found useful are also duplicated in this post.

In it's simplest form PI is easy;

• Train the required skills (All useful; Remote Sensing 1 appears to be mandatory)
• Find a planet
• Jump to system; place a command center
• Place your extractors and start them
• Optionally 
• Build a storage facility
• Build some processing plants for phase 1 processing
• Build some processing plants for phase 2 processing
• Build a lauchpad
• Link everything up making sure everything is routed correctly
• Keep an eye on things and fill your launchpad
• Once your lauchpad is full 
• jump to system
• launch your stuff
• loot the customs office
• haul your stuff
• sell your stuff

You can even skip the extraction phase and import all your materials, and just do the processing.


Where the complexity come in:

• Deciding what to extract or process.  As always I let the market tell me what is valuable.
• Are you going to extract hard to get low availability items for a higher price?
• Are you going to extract abundant but cheaper items?
• Choose your security:
• Hisec (with high taxes; poorer extraction; low risk of pirates); 
• Losec (potentially lower taxes; higher extraction; high risk of pirate); and/or 
• Nullsec (??)
• Wormhole (??)
• Are you going to specialize your planets to one item or try to build a manufacturing chain.

I have chosen Hisec PI largely because I want to avoid pirates, and a 0.5 system to maximise resources from them.

I started off with the 'jump in and get a nasty surprise' approach.   My surprise was in Hisec PI taxes.  By simply taking my goods off planet - I had to pay 50% of my expected sales in up front taxes.  Uggh.  Most of the articles I read neglect to mention this trivial item.

Hisec taxec for PI per unit (Assuming I have read it correctly; and it fits with what I paid in taxes on my first haul of raw mats)

Item level	export tax	import tax
Raw	0.5	0.25
P1	50	25
P2	900	450
P3	7,000	3,500
P4	135,000	67,500

(If this table is wrong for hisec; please let me know and I will fix it)

This means those micro-organism and noble gas buy orders I see at 0.4 ISK are below the cost to lift it from the surface.

So far I am trying a couple of planets to see what works.  But if you have plans on selling hisec raw PI stuff, mine the mats that sells for more than tax.



Links:

• https://www.google.com.au/search?q=eve+pi+guide : Google eve pi guide
• http://www.tetrr.com/pi/ : View a simple PI-Tree for any planetary construction.
• http://www.eveplanets.com/ : Planet finder
• http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/w/index.php?title=Planetary_Interaction
• http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Planetary_interaction

Losec to tank or not.

What is a brave person?  Someone who lacks sufficient intelligence or knowledge to be afraid.

At the moment - I am a brave person.  I've been flying around in low security systems in an entirely untanked Industry ship - with a few cargo extenders for extra speed penalties.

I had the philosophy of "If I am caught I am dead.  I am my own scout flying out empty, flying back full."

I have picked up losec cargo from my region wide buy orders; making millions simply by being prepared to go where others are not prepared to.

From a rough straw poll; losec distribution missions pay twice as much as hisec ones.  The losec L4 distribution mission on I was doing when writing this post payed about 700,000k ISK (mission + agent reward); double that of many of my hisec missions.

A week ago; I had never been ganked; in the last 3 weeks it has happened 3 times; all in losec.

Once when I was asleep at the keyboard.  It was a little more expensive than I thought it would be - I had not priced in the cost of replacing my medical clone.  The ganking cost me just about 3 million ISK for the ship, 3 million for implants and clone, and the standing loss of 1 mission.

The second time I was at my keyboard, paying attention.  I was ganked on the way out of the system by someone waiting for me:

• Have nothing of value as cargo: Just a mission item, my ship and it's fittings.
• Enter losec system (from another losec system)
• Select next stargate and select 'jump'
• Warp to next stargate
• Leave warp - just a few seconds till I jump.
• Sheilds scream that they are failing.  Oh dear.
• Armor failing.  JUMP please.  No?  I think this ship is going to break, hope anyway.  Select a warp destination - any destination.
• No hope.  Hull Fails : warp to previous location via hotkey.
• Lost ship, but kept my implants and clone intact.

Collect my bearings.  Where do I want to jump to?  The local station has destroyers - slightly expensive but cheaper than replacing implants.  Dock at the station.

The ganker initiates conversation with an emoticon o/ (or something similar); I didn't respond with expected tears but with questions.  (I read that some like tears; I can understand ganking for profit, or ganking for revenge; but I don't think I will ever understand ganking just to make a random stranger just to have someone who may as well be an NPC cry.)  Anyway my questions were:

• "As I didn't lose my pod; was I quick enough or don't you pod?".  Apparently (A) I was fast enough and (B) his ship was too slow to target my pod.
• "How did you catch me between coming out of warp and my jumping?  I thought a manual jump would have been too quick."  He was waiting for me.
• "Did you see me jumping earlier or did you have a spotter?"  He said that would be telling.
• "How much would it take for you to tell?".  He claimed to be loaded.  (Sitting in a two bit system off in the middle of losec nowhere solo ganking empty industrial ships - sure if I was loaded that's what I would be doing too.  Believe that and I have a contract for you.)

I kept him chatting for a while longer until he said "Uhh sorry - gotta go".  He apologies - not for ganking me but for terminating the conversation.  There are different forms of trolling. I suspect that being 'reasonable', asking newbie questions, and generally engaging was distracting the ganker from his hunt for tears. I genuinely wanted to know the answers but I was well aware that I was not giving the desired response.


The third time I put a tank on my ship;

• rig : 3 x medium core defense field extender I; 
• mid: 
• 2 medium shield extender 1, 
• 1 medium shield booster 1 (lasts about 5 seconds with my current capacitors), and 
• 1 adaptive invulnerability field 1
• Low : 
• 1 Nanofiber internal structure II
• 1 Expanded cargohold 2
• 1 empty slot (I am swapping in and out cargohold expander modules depending on loads)

These defenses turn a 1.6M ISK ship with 3K EHP into a 10M ISK ship with 7.1K EHP (those rigs were the most expensive part of the ship).  I had a 8k m3 load of minerals - also worth about 10M ISK; taking them to losec.

Because it was a system I had not traveled to before well inside losec; I purchased a newbie frigate to scout with; and did an empty run and return unmolested; I saw some wrecks but no hostile ships (or maybe I am just not looking properly)

When I took my cargo; I was tackled by 2 ships just entering the system (first time for me): one with a warp destabiliser.  The plan was to survive the time required to dock, jump or enter warp.  I couldn't do any of the above - having jumped too far into the system to immediately jump back.  I was tackled before realising the danger I was in and didn't know I couldn't warp until it was too late to do anything about it.

I tried to warp away with my pod and could not do that either; However I could run back to the jump gate before being podkilled.  I have no idea how - the pod was down to 1/2 armour and I was missed several times by the attackers before I managed to make it back to the gate and jump.

I don't feel sorry for myself though: part of what I am doing is seeing what works and what doesn't.  In the last 7 days I have doubled my ISK from trading even after paying for ships, equipment and in one instance : implants.


I still expect to lose a ship during a gank attempt and will consider myself lucky for getting away; though I now have an expectation that I should keep my pod.  I am considering whether 8.5M Isk for tanking will keep me alive enough to justify it's cost (and loss), or whether I just go untanked.

My current fit is at http://eve.battleclinic.com/loadout/61033-Iteron-Mark-IV-losec-hauler.html ; worth putting up - got some bruising comments but I would rather that than a destroyed ship.

Deferred Gratification

TL:DR;

If you struggle with deferred gratification; have a distraction ready to go.  When a windfall occurs, use your distraction.




In WoW, it had been a long time since I needed to work at deferred gratification, having a routine that provides enough gold to buy a shiny I want.

In Eve, not having enough ISK, I become explicitly aware of it again,  I can have either of two wanted upgrades now, spending most of my ISK; or I can wait a week, and be able to afford both with ISK left over.  Of course by then I am likely to have found a new shiny

An example of deferred gratification in Eve?  

• You have just finished a storyline mission and you get a new implant.  
• Using it will improve one of your better stats by 1 (say from 24 to 25 or about 4%).  
• You are cash poor at the moment, and need 3 times your current ISK for that shiny ship/book/upgrade, that will make you 10% better off at your preferred activity.  
• Selling the implant will double your current cash balance.

Do you:

1. Satisfy the craving for the instant reward (use the implant)?
2. Sell the implant to a buy order for 1/2 its value?
3. Place a sell order for (close to) its full value?

I have left the exact numbers of ISK and balance out; the same example applies if you are a newbie working on your first L1 implant (40k ISK) or an older hand working on your L5 (120M ISK) implants.

I have known lots of MMO players who would always go for  (1) : Use the implant.  They were always poor.  Unfortunately very few of them would read this (or any other gold/ISK making) blog.

Most of the wealthier players I know would do (3) : Place a sell order for it's full value.  There is discussion (often flame wars) about whether the full value is average value, 1 ISK undercut or somewhere between the current buy and sell orders; but that is largely irrelevant.  Instinctively wealthy players sell windfalls for 'full value.

The experiment

The trick is deferred gratification, and comes easily to some and seems impossible to others.  I was reading a study about kids and marshmallows; A child is asked:

• to sit down in front of a variety of food treats, and asked what one they like best
• The child will be left in a room with the preferred treat (in the example marshmallows)
• The child is told that if the marshmallow is there when the researcher comes back - then the child will be given two marshmallows.

A follow up on these kids showed that for the few that could successfully wait 15 minutes for the second marshmallow, had higher SAT scores, and generally were more successful than kids that only waited 30 seconds.

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? ... the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow ... the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” ... “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.” 

Summary

If you struggle with deferred gratification; have a goal (or even distraction) ready. 
When a windfall (eg implant a little better than you have) occurs use this to get the better prize.

For me, while I am still farming standing: I will allow myself to equip the second of any give implant I get, using sell orders for the first.  My distraction is 'get more ISK for trading'.  I want the implant, but by doing this I get the benefit of the additional ISK for market trades when I need it, and will still have an implant 'soon'.

80/20 rule - or why I have many skills at level 4

In Eve, skills take longer to get the higher your skill level.  The game is designed so that even with 'perfect' allocations it still will take years to get all the skills you want; I have been playing for months.

From http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Skill_training, we get the following list of how many skill points it takes to get a skill level:

• level 1 - 250
• level 2 - 1415
• level 3 - 8000
• level 4 - 45255
• level 5 - 256000

There is a multiplier to this for skill difficulty, and the number of skill points you get per time unit is set by your attributes (adjusted by remapping and implants).

You get something like (Primary attribute + Secondary Attribute/2) points per minute.  As an example - take a standard '1x' difficulty skill, with 20 attribute points in it's primary and secondary abilities, and you get 30 points/minute; turning the above table into (very rounded):

• level 1 ~ 10 minutes
• level 2 ~ 1 hour
• level 3 ~ 5 hours
• level 4 ~ 1 day
• level 5 ~ 1 week

In essence the 80/20 rule is that the you get 80% of effects from 20% of causes.  For most Eve skills, Level 4 is generally 80% of the benefit of Level 5, but only take 20% of the time.


Now some skills have pre-requisites; for example Wholesale needs Retail 5.  If I want to have Wholesale at any level I must spend the time to get retail 5; but then the decision happens again - huge benefit/training time for (eg Wholesale) Level 1 skills, and marginal benefit/training time for level 5.

I can tweak the values of attributes moderately; getting anywhere between mid 20's points/minute up to mid 40's points per minute. Doubling my training by choosing where to allocate my attributes is useful; Choosing what to (not) train has an nearly an order of magnitude of difference.  For the time to take a single Level 5 skill, starting toons have a choice of:

• 20 different Level 3 skills OR
• 5 different Level 4 skills OR
• a single Level 5 skill.

I have chosen Trade, Social and Science as areas to work on my skills.  I am currently working on skills to get research missions as I think they will be important for me in the future.  In the meantime I have a lot of skills at Level 4.

Low level missions and standing

I occasionally run an L1 or L2 mission.

Low level missions (L1 and L2) are awful in what they pay - ISK, standing gains and Loyalty points.  I understand that if you have been 'bad' then L1 missions are 'better' than nothing, but they still are undesirable.

I currently have access to L4 missions and for distribution missions these are very easy; My ship has enough cargo for 2-3 of these concurrently (Iteron IV with cargo extenders).  The ISK is not as good as trading from buy orders; but even with Margin Trading 4, I am running out of ISK for buy orders before running out of buy slots.  As I want standing with lots of corporations (at least for buying and refining ore), Mission running L4's is a good fallback activity.

L4 distribution missions pay - lets call it 200,000 ISK + the same in bonus.  L2 missions pay - lets call it 20,000 ISK + the same in bonus.  Similar order of magnitude differences occur on both Loyalty points and Standing gain.  So why bother with poor rewards? 

Connections 4.  This skill raises a 0.01 standing to roughly 1.6.  It has absolutely no effect on a corporation that has a standing of 0 or lower.   This is enough standing to make a difference for refining (my current 'preferred' activity) of roughly 1.3%.  On a 10 Million ISK refining of Veldspar, that is roughly 130,000 ISK. 

A single L1 or L2 mission of any kind successfully completed gives me the difference between a zero raw standing and a non-zero raw standing, allowing the Connections  to do it's 'magic'.

I expect to be refining well into the future at a lot of different systems.  If I am at a system collecting ore and I don't yet have any standing with them - I look to see if I can do any missions for them.  I might not get a full 'L4' mission bonus out of them this time, but the chances are that if I bought ore here once, I am likely to be back here later buying ore from the same miners.

Server maintenance part 3 : pried from your cold dead fingers

You can have my downtime when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. 

Your proposal is acceptable. 
(misquoting Men In Black).


TL:DR; Instead of a uniform shutdown determined by CCP; PVP actions determine when any given game area is shutdown.

Sales pitch

For most players in Europe or the America's, the current downtime suits you.  You don't want the downtime to change.

To the EU and US pirates online around downtime : How many juicy targets do you have around downtime?  Are the few online targets scattered all over the place?  Would you like all those mission runners and traders to be concentrated in just a few regions at the most quiet times?

For Australian carebears : Are you tired of completing missions around downtime and just miss out on handing them in.  How much of a pain do you find it to have to lodge a help request to reset the mission - or simply abandon it?

Help Desk: How would you like those calls to go away (Ok I admit - I probably will make different problems for you at least at first).

CCP: Would you like to improve the participation by Australians?

Possible currencies

I am using the term 'vote' below, whether it is gained by a soap box, ballot box or ammo box; and the more ammo expended the greater the acceptability in an Eve universe.

• Faction war has Occupancy.  Rewards for victory could include a 'vote' to shift a region to a new timezone.
• Null sec has Sovereignty Mechanics.  A vote for these could be a majority of controlled systems.
• Territorial control units even in low or highsec could be counted as a vote. You could even make it so that anyone placing one of these becomes gankable without concord interference, and vulnerable/target-able similar to when placing Cynosural fields.
• Loyalty Points (I'm important to my NPC), ISK (NPC bribes) and Plex (CCP bribes) (or any mix) could also be counted as votes.

My personal preference is the currency easiest for me to accumulate (ISK).  That said, I PVP currency (probably in the form of control units) would be more acceptable to the wider population.

When downtime starts should not change easily.  It is currently outside of a player's ability to influence.  I want the ability for newbies, carebears and gankers alike to fight to play when they want.   

Downtime change

In my musings I have considered that a region would have the same downtime.  However, the minimum size of the area 'contained' within a downtime could be a system, constellation, region or all faction dominated regions.  To change a system's downtime would be much easier than changing a faction's downtime.


Lets say for arguments sake - you need 75% of votes with a minimum quorum to change downtime for a region.  There should be visibility to at any time where there is an attempt to change, and possibly a 'local chat' message of the day when the vote exceeds certain thresholds.  There could also be a (1 week?) timer initiated when a vote is cast allowing those that disagree to fight to maintain the status quo.


Ideally there would be a carebear driven starter system (and surrounds) with an alternative downtime; and possibly the character selection screen could provide a recommendation of race and faction based on character creation time.  I expect that there would be sufficient carebears in our timezone that would devote time to obtaining votes.

Similarly, I expect that there would be timezone based corporations prepared to carve out a losec region.

Those that want a different downtime are likely to band together;  Those that maintain the current uniform downtime are likely to be too apathetic to worry about it, especially if the 'different downtime' group avoid high population areas like Jita.

CCP could give slight guidance by providing a small (say 5% of votes) bonus from NPC's in regions with a lesser population to shift to an alternative downtime.

Meta Gaming

There was a comment to a previous post "Your enemy lives in region X and has a roaming party or mining fleet out of that region? Hit them when their home region is down so they can't call for reinforcements."

My initial thoughts are 'so what?'.  So are my subsequent ones.  Having a home ground advantage and away from home disadvantage seems to me to be a good thing.  Of course the same applies in reverse: If I am away from home doing some mining and the locals decide to gank me; if I don't have support pre-organised, then I either run away or lose my ships.  This occurs regardless of timezones.  If no-one wants to gank me then I don't have a problem.

Assumptions

• Sever restarts are required
• It is technically possible to have some servers down and other servers up
• In game 'integrity' will be maintained (i.e. not allow account theft or in game duplication)
• Some players are inconvenienced by current state of uniform shutdowns.
• Different players will be inconvenienced by a non-uniform shutdowns.
• Chat servers will have high availability - though not necessarily 100%