Engagement Report 2 – Dual Hull Brutix

                             

One of these days I logged off both my Structure Brutix in Pandemic Horde Space. The previous day I had managed to kill a Vigilant, a Ferox, a Caracal and a Griffin, so I was wondering what I could snatch this day.

Upon Log In they had 40 in local and I immediately saw about 6 Navy Vexors ratting around. Not really that great, because with that many in local, they might form up too much for me. We would see…

First step was to try catch a couple ratters. Considering I’m in a BC, it isn’t exactly easy because I’m usually too slow, but worth trying. After scaring a couple of Vexor Navy Issues out from their ratting sites, but being unable to catch any, the locals  started to round up on station undock. Not long after they had about 10 guys with several ships, but the only one that really bothered me much was the Rattlesnake. A PVP Rattlesnake would be something I’d probably be unable to kill, even resorting to both Brutix, considering he had 9 more guys to give him backup. Also they locals became more aggressive, engaging me near the station.

I did not wanted to engage near the station. They could just undock backup too fast with 40+ in local, so I decided to change the location of the engagement. With a bit of luck, they Rattlesnake would not follow me, mostly because shiny ships hardly leave the undock, but would be a gamble.

In order to get myself rid of the guys Warp Disrupting me, I resorted to my MJD, and warped off to the only outgate. I knew the gate was bubbled, so anyone following me would land 0km away from me, in my scram range, being the ideal scenario for me. Also, my second Brutix was cloaked close by to that gate waiting to provide backup.

I landed on bubble and hit scan. My problem was indeed the Rattlesnake but he was nowhere to be seen, so I decided to stay for a bit. This was my first real mistake. I decided to hold in a dangerous position (even though that position suited my fighting style as stated above), WITHOUT my MJD being ready for another activation. Shortly after an Imperial Navy Slicer lands, neglects to make range on me and dies. Then suddenly many other stuff show on scan and start to land, but worse of all, the Rattlesnake is on scan…

In a tough situation, the primary target for a MJD Battlecruiser are Warp Scrambling ships. Using the notification bar on top of the HUD is real useful to quickly see who is scrambling you. Indeed I find it better than looking at the overview for small slightly more dark blue mini-icons that move up or down depending on their distance from you…

I find myself scrambled by 3 ships. A Slasher, a Thrasher and a Taranis. Fortunately the Rattlesnake is not scrambling me, so I have a chance to bail. Slasher being the only T1 frigate is the primary target and dies fast. Then I go for the Thrasher to also mitigate some incoming damage, and finally is time to deal with the Taranis. I could not kill it because it makes range away from me, but it suits me fine. Now I only have long points keeping from warping!

I activate my MJD and…. Nothing… Looking better to the module, it still has about 10 seconds left on its delay activation! Seriously?!?!?!?! My only other choice is to overload and pulse my MWD to try pull range, but DPS incoming is too much and I die.

At this point I could just blame the locals for outnumbering me and bringing faction battleships to the field and all that stuff like many wannabe solo players like to complain, but in reality, I attribute this loss to my own mistakes. So what could I have made different?

-        Not put myself in a dangerous situation without the MJD operational or close to being operation. I should have went to a celestial nearby the gate, so that locals saw me on scan and still went  to chase me around that area, but without putting myself in harm’s way so soon.

-        Upon landing on the bubble I could have burned 30km to the gate. This way I could chose to ships that tried to engage me, and once the hard stuff showed on scan or arrived nearby, I could have deagressed and jumped out into safety. Risky move because is hard to say if you can hold 1 minute tanking incoming damage, but at least would provide an escape alternative to not having the MJD ready.

-        Bring in my other Brutix and help it apply DPS into the scrambling ships. Again a risky move because locals can always bring in more backup, and quite honestly, the attention spawn to each toon becomes a lot scarcer and the whole situation gets a lot more confusing. My experience tells me that throwing a second ship to a nasty scenario, in hopes of turning the tide, is a good way to lose it also.

Whatever the better call I could have made, I didn’t the result is one less ship. This was not over!

I still had my other toon, also in a Brutix, cloaked nearby lurking. I wanted to make the best out of the situation, and score a kill. I noticed that generally the locals were disorganized, so I thought I could exploit that.

After I lost Pleniers, most locals warped out to station, 30AU away, and on scan there was only one Fleet Stabber and  a Maulus. I decided to warp to the bubbles, but this this time from a different angle. Backup incoming from the station would land away from me, giving me time to react better.

Upon my arrival on the bubbles, the Fleet Stabber that was moving at 700m/s, meaning  he was only using an Afterburner,  aggressed me. I overloaded MWD and at 1900m/s I managed to catch him fast enough and kill him. A Vexor Navy arrives close by and I start going at him, but as I catch him other stuff starts to land. Rattlesnake, Raven, Myrmidon, Prophecy, Sabre etc etc. It’s time to bail before I get scrammed, so once again, I use the MJD to get rid of long points and warp off into safety, scoring a Stabber Fleet Issue kill under their noses.

This time they were more organized, had shipped into bigger ships and therefore, it was time to bail. I leave system and weight my options.

Pleniers was back in Curse Region and Rtb is in Querious Region. I really want to get both toons together again, so I Jump Clone Pleniers to Amarr, buy a new Brutix, and starts heading for the nearest Thera entry in low sec. Rtb heads to Delve, also to the nearest Thera entry. Objective was to meet both toons in Thera and log off.

Pleniers arrives Thera without incident, but something odd happens to Rtb…

During Rtb’s travel I notice a Jackdaw in D-Scan near a Sov Node. He would probably be entosing the damn thing!

Now, before I move on with the remainder of the story, let me share you my experience with entosing ships. Even though entosing a node only requires 1 ship with a sov laser, there is usually a bunch of more people around. While entosing is potentially a solo activity, people only do it in fleets and gangs or while other people are on coms, in order to avoid boredom and have company. This pretty much meant that I had a very limited time to score that kill, because nearby active people would come to help is mate. He might look solo, but he really isn’t, and I knew that from start.

So anyway, I would not skip the opportunity for 1 more kill, and warp into the node. Jackdaw starts to pull range away from me at 2500m/s as I try to chase him at 1900m/s. I was not going to be able to catch him and was getting ready to bail when he pretty much stops! Not knowing if he was playing bait or not, I proceed to chase again and catch him. Not long after local rises and I see Caracal, Garmur, Stratios, Sabre, Deacon and 2 Confessors on scan. Fortunately Jackdaw dies as they start to land and I warp off.

All went according to plan, and they also behaved as I expected. Now I had more targets to engage, but did not wanted to do it solo, so I brought in Pleniers from Thera and tried to sort a plan.

-        I really really wanted to kill the Stratios;

-        I did not wanted to engage near a Sov Node;

-        I did not wanted to engage near the gate from where their backup came. If more came, I wanted time to react.

Once I sorted myself properly I warped back into a Sov Node where they all were, and warped to the gate where I wanted the engagement to happen. Ideally, they would follow, and most did.

Sabre bubbled me on both sides and was a bit afraid to engage initially, but once the rest of their fleet landed, he finally aggressed. Stratios, my main target, was nowhere to be seen, but right now I had no choice other than fight. I warped in my second Brutix and engaged. Primary target was the Sabre and the Deacon was close by. DPS got applied to the Sabre and Medium Neuts onto the Deacon, hoping to incapacitate it. Once the Sabre went down the Deacon followed, but the remainder targets were kitting me at 20km+ range, as I re-approached gate and deagress. 

In this scenario it pays out to have 2 toons. What usually happens is that kiters are too focused into applying DPS onto the main target, and are somewhat less attentive to other threats. Considering they were shooting at Pleniers, I make a quick overloaded burst of MWD with Rtb, trying to catch a Confessor that came a bit too close. When the 1^st Confessor dies, the second Confessor was close by and I managed to get him Scrammed, Webbed and Neuted, dying shortly after. I found really odd I could catch both of them, but looking at the killmails I had the confirmation of what I already suspected. They were using 10mn AB Confessors with no Cap Booster, meaning they are somewhat harder to fly and quite vulnerable to my Neut.

Stratios never came and it was time for me to move on. A Devoter showing up on scan meant this guys were ready to escalade the engagement, but having lost my surprise advantage and becoming late, I retreated to Thera and called it a day.

Trading – My hi-sec research POS got wardeced

So, I log in one day in my market toons and realize I’d been wardeced more than 24 hours ago. Also, my completely undefended small POS had already been attacked.

I went to check on my POS and it was all fine. The attackers had not reinforced it. I decided to play it safe and took all the unresearched and researched BPOS out to local station. Still I had some jobs running. Couple of T1 Cruiser BPOS researching from ME 18 to ME 20, a Bomb BPO that costed 80mil to submit the job and some other stuff that was still running. Should I abort those lengthy/expensive jobs or just risk it. I tried to gather a bit more intel to make my mind.

Hostile corp had 5 toons, 3 of them obviously belonging to same person due to name similarities. They had no kills for last 3 months. The toon that had attacked me was already out of the hostile corp. Only PVP record any toon had was like 6 month ago when they were in CFC and even then had a total of 30 kills or so. Checked their war history and they had achieved absolutely nothing in their 2 or 3 previous wardecs.

I got greedy and decided to keep the pending jobs running, meaning I had between 500-700mil worth of BPOs inside the POS. Also, decided keep my POS completely undefended. It’s a small POS anyway and all the advice I could find about small POS was “take it down and then back up later on!”, so did not put any guns on it at this point either.

Some days after, I get a fuckload of notifications… My POS got reinforced… Dang! It seems that one guy shot at it during 5 hour so achieve that… I laughed so hard! He was probably semi-afk using drones, but still funny. I did the math and figured out the POS would come out of reinforce at 12:30. That’s during my lunch hour, so I could give it a shot to defend and repair it, but I had to plan it…

I have 2 accounts. 1 of my trading toons has 90 mil SP and can fly a lot of PVP stuff decently. As backup toon I’d use Rtb from A4D.

1^st I needed some defence DPS. I sorted 1 Golem, 2 old school RR domis, cloaky prober, a couple of cap stable basilisks for POS repair and some POS repair Ospreys to give in case I got any mates to help out. Dodixie is close by, so if anything happened I’d just go there and buy something.

I had accepted a couple random allies to the wardec and talked to them into showing up to defend and repair. Sure, I looked my allies stats and they were even worse than my offenders. None of my allies had any kills in the last couple month, but oh well… I just needed warm bodies to press F1.

Plan set, conversations were made with allies, was time to wait for it.

Next day I turn on computer, and try to log into EVE….. Nothing… Can’t contact server… What…?

Is EVE down? I check reddit to see if EVE is down, and my browser acts weird… I cannot connect to google, youtube, and some other sites. My internet is all messed up, connecting o some sites, not connecting to others! W….. T……F……!!!

I contact my internet supplier for support and they are unable to help me out in short notice, postponing future support within 24 hours! In the meantime, my lunch break is getting shorter and shorter. I have bigger problems than my POS right now. Not having working internet is way more troubling!

I hijack my wife’s laptop to see if it can connect to EVE and other sites via Wireless. It can! Ok then time to log in and see what happening. Once I finaly log in, 1 hour after reinforce timer has ended, I have 3 war targets in local and my notifications tell me my POS is at 15% armor. I jump into a Dominix and warp to the POS. 

Talos, Vexor Navy Issue and Prophecy lie stopped near the shields. I rush out and engage them, killing the Talos and the Vexor Navy Issue. They were surprised I showed up to save the POS. Resistance was not expected, do they dock up! Now I have a sour taste in my mouth… I “won” the “fight”, but cannot save my POS because I have to work. The moment I log off, they going to jump right on top of my POS again… Ah well, seems I’ll just have to accept defeat and say goodbye to those 500-700mil BPOs inside.

Unless… unless I bluffed. They did not knew I was during my lunch break, so I went to grab my Ospreys and started to repair the POS. Chatted a bit in local to look active as much as possible. The war targets warp to the POS at range in a Pod and noticing I’m there repairing it, they decide to leave system. Bluff worked for now. I left my Ospreys AFK repairing the POS, went to work and hoped for the best, As for my allies, no sign of them…

I returned from work, checked the computer and both my toons were still there alive orbiting my POS! Awesome. I quickly took all the remaining BPOS out and re-stronted the POS. I wanted to put some guns in it, but at the time I didn’t had the opportunity as I had to take care of the kid and just do stuff around the house.

I also needed to fix my internet connectivity and ended up figuring out the problem was my computer clock. For some reason my computer was living in 2022 and it prevented it from connecting to EVE and some sites… go figure… I almost lost my POS due to a date problem… pfffff.

Later on that night I logged to put some guns into to POS, as well as update my market orders, kill something around with my PVP toons, etc, etc, and realized those guys had reinforced my POS AGAIN!!!

Sigh… 

It came out of reinforce at 7:40 in the morning, Saturday. PFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!! No freaking way I’m going to show up. At that time I’m sleeping and I love my sleep pretty much. Right now the only thing I had at the POS was an empty research lab and an empty corporate hangar.

Another decision… Should I let them kill my empty POS and then put another one up with some guns, after the wardec end or… or should I just hire some proper mercs to defend it and repair it. There is no way this would be remotely “isk efficient”. My setup costs less than 200 mil, but I’d prefer to deny those guys a kill.

I talked to 2 different mercs corps. They would wardec my targets, defend the POS, even though it was quite obvious my war targets would not poke their head out with any merc around, repair it up to 100% and stay around until 12:00 in order to give me time to wake up, have breakfast, watch some cartoons, play with my kid and then finally log in and Stront the POS. Hell, who knows, I’d even maybe put some guns to prevent it being reinforced by 1 solo AFK  guy. This cost me around 1.3 Bil… How logical is that?! It ain’t, but my Blueprint endeavour can pay for it and those guys would learn to not mess with me!!!… Or they would escalate it…

So, I did as planned and once I log in I noticed my mercs has already repaired my POS (both armor and shields up to 100%), and that my hostiles had ended the wardec. Fighting would be over in 24 hours. How cool is that! I re-stronted the POS, put in some guns to dissuade any solo AFK wardec and called it a day.

As a last analysis, what was the impact of this wardec into my day-to-day EVE Life?

-       -  Lost 2 nights doing defence preparations. Instead I could be roaming!;

-       - Spent around 1.5 bil in wardecs and accepting allies;

-       - Managed to score 2 kills from guys that did not expected resistance.

My hostiles ended up spending lots of time shooting the POS (even if semi-AFK) and dodging the mercs camping the main hi-sec trade hubs, losing  some isk in the form of wardec costs and ships lost, and probably more important, lots of their research time looking for an easy prey. Considering how much they feared any opposition, I bet it took them lots of time looking, thinking and planning this “attack” that came up as a loss to them, both isk and time wise. 

I’d say it was really not that bad in the end, especially because I did managed to get some kills, but it brought back memories on what I don’t like in EVE. Timers and idiotic feelings of virtual internet pixels property ownership and such… I hope no one decides mess with my POS again soon because this is NOT my kind of warfare…

Engagement Report 1 - Shield Myrm/Osprey

Since I got a new job for the reminder of my life (A.K.A . ”Daddy”), I had to change drastically my EVE style. I’m only able to log after kid goes to bed, I hardly do fleet coms because I’ll wake Mini-Plen while screaming for people to spread scrams, and I fit a cloak on my every ship, so that I can go afk in less than 10 seconds safely because Mini-Plen changed his status from “sleeping” to “raging like hell”. Yes, that means that I provide hilarious Killmails with cloaks in my Myrmidons, Vexors, Svipuls etc…

But I digress…

So, Wallymarts probes a new WH to Goon Space. Me, being a leech, took advantage of his work, logged on, took a shield Myrmidon and a backup Osprey, and went to take a peek.

There were lots of fellas around, I almost scrammed a ratting Ishtar, and 5 minutes later almost got a ratting Navy Vexor. As expected, I started to get the locals attention… I see a Scorpion warping to gate, a Legion warping to a POS near me, an Eos undocking and holding, some Interceptors warping to different gates (never know if those guys are just travelling or not, but still…). I was starting to get stalked upon.

Time to retreat a bit and see what develops. I jumped back to the system where I had my WH and noticed local to have an idea on how many follow.

Local rises by 14!

Crap… Too much for me, and being on a brawling ship , it means it’s pretty much game over. I can engage the occasional trigger happy guy before a home defence fleet is formed, but I cannot engage a decent target with a proper fleet behind him. As I try to warp off, a crow lands on me and long points me…

There are a couple reasons I use a Myrmidon instead of a Navy Vexor, and one of those reasons is called “Micro-Jump Drive” mod, or as I like to call it, “LEARN HOW TO FIT A SCRAM AND COME CLOSE TO ME OR SEE ME BAIL YOU WUSSY!” mod. So no worries, align to the WH, hit the MJD, spawn 100km away, warp to the WH and….

My ship starts to spin 180º instead of warping the the damn WH! W…..T….. F….. How did I messed up so bad!! For some reason I had aligned to a wrong spot, and now I have a crow coming at me at 5000m/s. You know how fast BC’s warp if they’re not aligned properly? Well, not faster than a Crow can burn 100km and point you again…

Now I’m in trouble! I hit scan and I see Legion on scan while local is rising. Even though I try to burn away, at 800m/s I’m not gonna lose that Crow. I have a MJD for a reason and I just managed to screw it. On top of all, Crows scrams me, and I become a sitting duck. Unfortunately I do NOT have a Neut on my Shield Myrms, but I scram it back and send my Hobgoblins. Before he dies, the legion lands 7km, long points me and webs me. Almost got out, but I’m not dead yet! I scram the legion back (don’t have a web on my shield fit) overload MWD and try to burn away from him. I also bring in my Osprey because he’s really killing my fast. I might have 1000dps in the Myrm, but with only 2 shield extenders for tank, I hardly have more EHP than a cruiser, and shields don’t tend to like lasers coming from a Legion all that well. I also had a set of ECM drones in my osprey, and put them onto the Legion, I could get lucky! As you might be expecting, stuff starts to land, about 30km from me, and either it was only an Afterburning Legion, or he forgot to hit on his MWD, because I managed to warp off as soon as I reached 25km! This also means that he was using a non-faction Warp Disruptor and had forgot to overload it! Thanks to both factors I managed to get safe and cloak up with both my ships.

Not long after, I start to see Combat Scanner Probes on scan. A quite predictable move from the locals... I must confess that having a cloak is quite handy in this situations. I can go AFK while aggressed and take a break!

So, what was so different? Me being chased outnumbered 10v1 and then running away like dog with his tail on fire? That happens to me pretty much every time I undock. The different part starts now!

I got so pissed I had targets, but could not really do anything about it solo, so I risked it… I joined comms and asked who was online. Zen and Incorr were alive so we started to think what we could do… Locals had Legion, Scorpion, Phobos, Eos as main ships, and then some dessys and tacklers, but it’s their home, so they could reship or get backup fast. So Zen suggested:

“Why don’t we go tripple geddons on those guys?!” Well…. Why not!? In the end we changed Setup a bit, cause we did not wanted to get jammed by the scorp and die a slow death, so we settled by 1 Geddon, 1 Anti-Scorpion Scorpion, 1 Mega and 1 Oneiros. I would dual tab the Scorp and the Oneiros.

There was yet and important factor. I wanted the engagement to happen near the WH and not on a gate. BS are SLOOOOOWWWWWW as hell, so we need to take the most of positioning advantages. Also I needed to come back and reship.

I brought only my Osprey back into the WH. Since the locals already had probes out, and alsoy had all gate exits covered and almost for sure added me to watchlist, I exited system with 1 ship, cloaked my Myrm near the WH and looked out for probes. Not long after I see probes quite near the WH and disappear a bit after! Terrific!!! Now they know where I came from! I’m pretty sure they have my WH bookmarked and that the prober is looking at it! I uncloak my Myrm, jump out hoping that the prober sees me go out.

Right now is a critical moment. Without any Neuts in local, my targets will probably disband, but at same time, I need to reship, so we do this as fast as possible. We need to get back into their space as fast as possible, before their FC (I’m gonna say it’s the Legion guy) goes AFK.

As I go back reship, we have 2 more mates login in! Blue Grass and Needle join us in 2 more Megas!

The Plan:

Connection to Goon space was quite linear and quite close: K-Q>>2AU in Sleeper Space>>Goon Space. We sit with main fleet in K-Q, send in bait Mega, wait near WH for enemy fleet to arrive, bring main fleet.

Unfortunately, when Incorr in our bait Mega gets into Goon space, there’s only 3 in local instead of 15. They had gone, DAMN! We would not just give up, so we adapted the plan. Main fleet got on the WH to Goon space and our bait Mega warped to a gate. My previous efforts payed out, because they started to fill local, even before our bait arrived the gate. Before he got tackled, he warped back to the WH! 

Once again, a new critical moment. It’s good to be near our bait, but then again, if we get scouted, our foes will easily evade us, so in order to prevent any foe from jumping into the WH and getting eyes into our main fleet, Incorr in his bait Mega, starts to MWD away from the WH some 20km. This way seeing the Battleship off the hole, and thus being unable to jump out or run away, the locals might not even think about checking the other side of the WH. It’s a gamble, but tends to work most of times.

The WH was indeed bookmarked by the locals, and the Legion (my old friend) tackles our mate. With more stuff landing Incorr calls in the main fleet and its time to engage! The Legion melts, the phobos jumps out, the Scorpion lands close to us and starts to melt, but he MJD away, and we kill a couple more frigs. From the 15 that got back into local again, only 5 or so warped to the WH…. A pitty.

We were looting and about to get back home with only the Legion kill, and the Phobos comes into us! Instead of warping off he re-approaches, but was probably not familiar with WH mechanics and gets polarized… Don’t have to say that he melted right?

No more action was going on, WH was End of Life and this was indeed the 1st time in more than 2 years that all of us used a battleship!

Oh, btw… I failed to jamm the Legion, failed to jamm the Scorpion and failed to jamm the Phobos in my Scorpion. I felt overall pretty useless….

Trading - December 2015 Report

Here goes the December 2015 Report

MARKET PROFITS

 This month was Christmas time and what a time it was for my market profit. I broke every kind of records I’d ever achieved. My previous maximum monthly profit was 10.8 billion  in November 2103, but this month I managed to get, not 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 or 17 but awesome an 18.5 billion profit! Almost twice my usual numbers, so what happened exactly to justify this huge leap?

Not quite sure, but I can speculate.

First of all, my profit was achieved with my usual tactic of resupplying market once per week, before the weekend, and updating order once per 2 days or so. My method did not really change, so it is not the cause of such a great boost on my profits.

The 1^st odd factor I realized while resupplying the market in the beginning of December, was that there were a LOT of shortages. Many items had been totally sold in Hek to the point of depletion. Even niches with lots of competition, like T3 subsystems, had depleted items. This was strange, but welcome. A depleted item on the market means that I can put it for sale at whatever price I want and make stupid amounts of profit. Even when the competition re-enters into play, they may want to milk the cow along with me, and just undercut me by a small value, instead of putting a “fair price”, preventing the price to go down to normal levels.

I took advantage of all the depleted items I could find in my usual item trade list, and put them up for exorbitant prices.

I’d sell 30mil Items for 150mil;

I’d sell 100mil Items for 250mil;

I’d sell 200 mill items for 400mil

…And so on , and so on…

I was really surprised that many many items sold really fast. It came to the point where some items would deplete 15 minutes after putting them in the market, 250mil overpriced!

My theory is that with Christmas came a whole lot of EVE-thirsty players, who were mainly in holidays or vacations, thus having limited time to play and looking at no expenses in order to buy the stuff they wanted. For those players, time, and not Isk, was their most valuable asset.

Still, I don’t believe that an increase of demand alone was responsible for the market shortages. I also believe that many regular everyday traders went AFK, also due to vacations. In fact, when I’m in vacations I play EVE a lot less because it messes up my usual routine, and I use the opportunity to do stuff I cannot do at home. This theory allows me to accept a bit better why many of these item shortages were not addressed by other Hek traders. They were simply not there. I truly don’t know how many guys trade on a daily basis in Hek, but maybe 25 traders going AFK and not doing their market stuff for 15 days is enough for the rest of the hub traders to notice, kinda like I did. Or maybe I’m being clueless here, I dunno…

Whatever it was, my wallet grew fat and I had pretty much the same work as I always do.

PLEX EXPENSES

I spent 2 PLEX to pay my 2 accounts, 1.1 billion each PLEX… All standard here.

BLUEPRINTS

I managed to make around 2 billion Isk profit. Most my profit came from selling researched BPOs and only 2% from selling BPCs. I sold 87 contracts and each contract nets me a profit of around 25 million Isk average.

I’ve continued to do some research on BPO or BPC Sales, and I’ve come to a final decision. In this whole process I truly hate putting stuff up in contracts, therefore, my aim is to get the most possible Isk/contract and avoid boredom. This means that I’ll prefer to sell 1 item per 20 mil instead of 10 items per 2 mil each.

Up until now, I still had the idea of researching some BPOs in a long term fashion, in order to use them to produce BPCs. I researched an Incursus, Vexor and Thorax BPO for that effect. Not only there’s lot of competition in this BPC market, but they sell really low. I can hardly make 1.5 million profit per BPC contract, unless I just put a huge number of BPCs together. Even then, the time and cost to research these BPOS in hi-sec is quite significant. In order to get my initial investment back I’ll have to wait definitely more than 1 year, while dealing with lots of annoying low value contracts over time.

I went to investigate in contract history how other “BPC sellers” fare, and I noticed that many will have pretty much the BPOs for all ships in the game, researched to the max. They will indeed make a good amount of Isk by selling around 5-10 BPCs per day, usually belonging to 2/3 different ships (usually the same buyer will want more than just 1 bpc). Also, the same ship will not be sold every day. They might be able to a couple Caracal BPCs 2 times per week or so, but usually, in order to make good isk, variety is mandatory. This also means that the initial investment is crazy high. A Battleship BPO takes ages to research, or about 2 billion to buy. I’d need to sell more than a thousand BPCs to just make the investment back… the hell with it! As a sidenote, I did purchased a Battleship BPO to resell. I still wondered if I should make some BPCs to try out, but decided against it. I just focused in selling the BPO at a higher value and managed to make 500 mil profit in less than 2 month. More than I’d definitely get trying to sell BPCs during the same period of time.

This being said, I’d like to find some sort of long term endeavor concerning BPOs and such, but something that has not a crazy high initial investment and such small returns. 

HAULING EXPENSES

I kept only using public contracts, advertising in in-game channel “Haulers Channel”, paying out 30 mil (no matter to what hub I haul to), but setting collateral to 2 billion and hauling around 1.8 billion. My hauling expenses were 1.5 billion, a bit higher than last month, mostly due to 2 Black Frog contracts to Curse.

As long as I don’t mess up the collateral value, I should be fine. Need double attention on that particular factor.

MISCELANEOUS INVESTMENTS

Got 27 mil profit in T2 BPCs bought from another ex-corp mate. Can’t get rid of those fast enough…

As for buying and reselling capital BPOs I managed to make 710 million profit. Right now I have no Capital nor Battleships BPOS, having sold even the ones that were getting me worried, due to the several times I had to put them on contracts and associated taxes. Putting a 2.5 Bil BPO for sale costs something like 25mil, so after 5 times it has a severe risk to eat away any potential profit.

I have not bought any more Capital and Battleship BPOs because I got lazy (was doing so much Isk with market anyway) and did not searched contracts for good deals. Will probably get back to it in January.

As a funny note, one of my public contracts got suicide ganked. It was hauling 3.8Bil, and I had the collateral set to 4Bil, so I got an instant profit of 200mil. This particular month was more annoying because I was making so much Isk with market stuff and that particular load had several items I could have put for sale at ridiculous prices, but still not terrible.

As a final note, and for those that might be reading this and hating me for making so much Isk this month (at least by my standards), here’s something for ya… I used the opportunity to stock up my ships in Curse. By pure coincidence I happened to mention it to a mate that makes some Jump Freighter runs to Curse, and ended up agreeing with him a cheaper value than Black Frog. Long story short, he messed up and managed to get me 8.5 bil lost… He offered up to pay the stuff over time, but for now, all the extra Isk I managed to make in this market madness kinda got washed away… Easy comes easy goes I guess…