Friday 11 September 2009

Eve Online: Market Day

For me Friday is market day in Eve and today promises to be something of a marathon.

I've been experimenting with using Buy Orders to increase the amount of junk my mission runner accumulates at his mission hub. That's a good policy I think and certainly the large amounts of cheap rig parts I picked up for re-sale at Jita were well worth the investment.

However I got greedy and put out orders for minerals. They were cheap after all. I had however forgotten how bulky minerals are. I'll be making about 0.4 isk per Trit and I've ended up with millions of the stuff. I've done about 5 runs already (beginning to lose count) and in the process have rigged my Mammoth with cargo rigs so it now holds 27,129.3 cubic meters. That's 2.7 million trit per full load. And the end is still nowhere in sight.

A full load of trit takes about half an hour to haul and is making me a million isk. That's not really worth the time.

On the plus side it is very lazy play and I'm enjoying reading Frank Herbert's Children of Dune. I also have a second copy of the client running with my second account dragging stuff around. In a bit I can mission run on the second account while the first one hauls.

Because not only have I been buying all the minerals within 2 jumps of my mission hubs on my main I've been buying ammo within 2 jumps of Jita on my ammo dealer alt. Haven't even started his hauling round yet.

Here's a summary of who my alts are and what they are doing for the next week after all that hauling:

Modules salesman: 10.8 mill balance, 45 orders. 340 different types of modules including 26 Medium Shield Booster Is and 23 250mm Railgun Is. He clears about 20 orders a day if I play him once a day so I'll need to be busy on him to shift all this. Standard 1 isk undercut twice a day should shift most of it.

20.1 million if all of this current round of orders sell. A week of selling this junk should bring in about 200 million.

Ammo/salvage/stackables seller. 71.8 million balance, 41 orders. He has a huge amount of stock because this week I tried a 2 station range out on his buy orders. It took a long time to round up because there are a lot of systems within 2 hops of Jita. Plus Cap Booster charges are bulky and his unrigged Badger doesn't hold much.

On the plus side between his own buy orders, buy orders at the mission hub, and mission loot he has a lot of stock. For instance 1171 Fried interface circuits (a rig component), 200 600 Nuclear S bullets, 25 000 Devastator Cruise Missiles.

144 million worth of sell orders up with plenty more stacks of things to list if they all go.

Ships/drones/skills/implants seller. 190.6m balance. Sell orders worth 197.7m. Comparitively little more to list. Will either help my module seller or will station trade later in the week. Might buy a Plex this week to pay for this account.

Mission runner. 57.6 million balance, 41 orders. I actually didn't bother to set his orders today. He usually buys loot at my mission hub.

So that's market day over, with a lot more hauling than I usually plan for. Next week I'll avoid the 2 station range buy orders unless it's for something very light!

Just to give non/new Eve players an idea you can buy a month's game time for about 280 million and you can buy a 20 million skill point character for about 4 billion. I started playing in June so you can be earning a fair amount of money pretty quickly in Eve.

6 comments:

  1. Please stop making me want to play EVE. I don't want to double my MMO expenses.

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  2. Ha ha. Well Eve won't go anywhere and the essence of it won't change. Just keep it in mind in case you get bored of everything else.

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  3. Love this market update. I learned a lot from it. I still have one toon doing most everything, my alts aren't pulling as much weight as yours are.

    Regarding moving large amounts of minerals, have you thought about just keeping those minerals where you bought them and filling later buy orders? I have placed region wide orders for minerals and just let it stack up for a few weeks. Then came back to that region, checked my asset list and tried to sell each stack. In a lot of cases someone did put up a buy order for higher. Not much higher, but if you are dealing with a .4 isk margin, maybe accepting .3 without doing any hauling would work.

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  4. I think my main reason for not doing that Alex is a sense of tidiness.

    At one point I had accumulated random junk in about 25 stations. I spent an afternoon collecting it and hauling it to Jita.

    I just don't like having a few things here, a few things there.

    If I did the leave it there then check in a few days if there's a buy order that's a lot of micromanagement because a lot of the trit stockpiles would sit there for months. Over the months all the checking on whether I can shift some trit would add up to a lot of time.

    Another issue if I were using sell orders on trit stored at random places (which I probably would, I want it shifted) is it ties up some orders which would make me more money used in other ways.

    Another issue is that trit hauled to Jita and sold is isk to re-invest and grow whereas trit left in hangars around the region is isk tied up not making money.

    Lastly the trie price is crashing. When I started in June I could sell trit for 4.15. Now I get 3.01. It may well drop further. I paid 2.6 for this trit if it drops below that I'd be selling at a loss. I don't think trit stockpiles are a good investment at the moment although of course I could be wrong. The market might have bottomed out and be about to rise.

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  5. I totally understand the tidiness thing. After I got back playing, I found I had stuff all over the place. After getting sick of hauling it around, I just remote sold several regions worth of stuff. Felt better and my Assets come up a lot faster now.

    I am seeing the # of orders thing happen myself. I have over 50, but they are running out fast.

    I hadn't noticed the trit crash until you mentioned it. I need to pay more attention to that. As for stockpiles, I usually only keep a couple of million trit and pyerite around just in case I want to build something. I might have 50 million isk in minerals sitting around at any time. I know it isn't financially prudent. But I like having them!

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  6. This all sounds like so much fun. I'm new to Eve but I'm planning on getting in on some the market action soon.

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