Zappity's Adventures: Reprocess all the things

I built a capital ship! Actually, I built five of them and counting. Capital production is Usually done with great planning and careful preparation. This time, however, it what done Zappity-style, and did what it Means done pretty much by accident.

I had a problem with tritanium and Pyerite. It was a large trouble. Enormous, in fact. I had accumulated so much of the stuff did I could not Possibly use it all. The buyback program had developed spectacularly well and what now turning over between 50 and 60B per week. A proportion of this, of course, what mining products. Ore can be compressed 100-fold Which, as far as I am Concerned, is its only redeeming quality. I had become quite proficient at Compressing and refining with Innocent Scout having wearily plodded through the reprocessing skills.

The magnitude of the problem-what magnified once I discovered module reprocessing. I had become far more familiar with ratting loot than I had ever Intended, with most of my previous trading focusing on more valuable faction and T2 items. I had been perfectly content to ignore the lower end of the market. Now that I was selling huge quantities of thesis things, HOWEVER, I began to notice things.

First, HIC points and stasis grapplers sold tremendously well in Their dog reds. They barely hit the market before theywere snaffled up. I was puzzled Because the kill boards surely did not contain Sufficient destruction of these items to account for the volumes. I pondered Whether it was simply a case of traders moving stacks between Themselves in to endless cycle. But the truth wurde apparent When I checked what reprocessing examined items would yield in terms of minerals. Reprocessing them was worth considerably more than selling them! And They Said gun-mining what dead!

I soon had a script did Calculated the value of minerals from reprocessing vs Both buy and sell price of each item I possessed at Jita. For a few days I painstakingly separated my meta items into two stacks (reprocess and sell) but then I did Realised It took far too much work and ended up just reprocessing almost all T1 modules. Here is the result of a typical reprocessing run:

Reprocess all the things: http://i.imgur.com/vRaKugu.png 

Of course, this resulted in simply gigantic quantities of minerals. I Rapidly saturated the local market with locally-produced destroyers, cruisers and battlecruisers and had soon so dominated the battleship market. It was nowhere near enough lies! So I Looked at the next logical step: capital ships.

Unfortunately, capitals can not simply be built with minerals. You first need to build capital components. So I started buying and BPC, occasionally, BPOs When I spotted a cheap one. I therefore began buying carrier and dreadnought blueprints.

And so here we are. I currently have a Thanatos, Revelation and Moros in build and have enough components to build the next few. Of course, I also have enough minerals to build about another dozen of the wretched things and am now thinking about building Fortizars!

Zappity's Adventures: First Capital Operation

Pandemic Horde had been fighting our Deklein neighbours, Darkness, on and off for a few hours. They eventually brought out their capitals and our leadership thought we should respond in kind. A ping went out to the capital group while I was a dozen jumps in the wrong direction, trying to terrorise locals in my Svipul. I had found a fight with a solo TEST Drake but he was cheating with a Rapid Light fit that nearly killed me. Of course I forgot to take my Blue Pill and didn’t have the right ammunition loaded, but by the time I had corrected these faults he was nowhere to be found. It is a pity - I would have liked a rematch.

Anyway, as I was saying, a ping went out. I docked at a friendly citadel and jumped to my clone in O1Y. At first, I was quite disappointed because shortly after that we were told that our capitals would not be required after all. So I hopped into an Osprey and joined the logi channel. However, a few minutes later a fresh call went out and I decided to abandon my logi bros and return to my Moros. I wanted to play with my capital ship, dammit!

I was soon sitting in the dreadnought, safely tethered on a Fortizar undock and awaiting instructions. The call came and we were soon on the field, watching 150 Hordelings pounding two Apostle Force Auxiliaries. These support capitals have enormous local tanks and the subcap fleet of Feroxes was not able to break them. That quickly changed with the arrival of the dreadnoughts.

I will describe how it went for those of you who have not done much capital fighting. First, we were told to “go siege green”. This meant that we were supposed to turn on our siege modules. Surprisingly, I had remembered to pack the Strontium Clathrates which the module uses as fuel. Siege modules greatly improve dreadnought local reps, damage and e-war resistance, basically turning a dread from a good battleship into a super DPS machine. The drawback of these modules, however, is that they disable all forms of propulsion, including jump drives. You are stuck there for 5 minutes.

We entered siege and turned our guns against the Apostles who quickly melted under the added fire-power. We were then told, rather urgently I thought, to go “siege red”, meaning that we needed to deactivate the siege modules so they did not automatically cycle again. We still had 2-3 minutes to wait before we could make our departure so we spent the time shooting the Darkness Proteus fleet which was dying at a positively alarming rate in the absence of their logi support. Of course, the dreadnought guns (not high angle) had practically zero chance of hitting the cruisers but killboards are killboards and it is nice to have a record of your deeds.

The urgency with which we were instructed to go “siege red” was prompted by the imminent arrival of a White Legion fleet. This would not be good news for any capitals who remained on the field. So we waited, not particularly patiently, for our siege cycles to end and our capacitors to get above 71%. Finally! Just as the first White Legion pilot entered the system I jumped to the out cyno who was safely tucked up next to the O1Y citadel. I even remembered isotopes for the jump drive!

Apostle 1: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54663727/

Apostle 2: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54663732/

On a side note, I have decided that the Moros is not the best ship for this sort of thing. It has good tracking but appallingly short range. I reckon it would probably work pretty well against big subcaps with the new high angle weapons but for hitting capitals I think I want a different dreadnought. Or maybe I just need to get T2 guns and Barrage and remember the optimal range script for my tracking computer.

Zappity's Adventures: Undocking for the win

I had just finished killing an Astero and Hound who were intent on doing mischief in the ratting pocket somewhat protected by my magnificent citadel. Unfortunately, a Pandemic Horde Svipul was untethered at the time and also died:

Astero: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54580025/
Pod: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54580026/

Hound: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54580362/
Pod: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54580370/

Svipul: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54580024/
Pod: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54580027/

He wasn’t very happy about that so I sent him some ISK and put a thread up in the forums entitled, “Bubble traps and you, or, Don’t warp straight to the gate”. A ridiculously steady trickle of folk warp directly to the out gate and thereby visit the citadel. Which is fine as long as they are tethered and really bad news for them if they are not.

Shortly after this a ping went out for a fleet. I joined, feeling somewhat guilty over not having been out on a fleet for ages. I bought a Vexor Navy Issue from contract and we made our way to Saranen where a Goon Astrahus was patiently waiting to be killed. We landed below the citadel and our drones swarmed upward, enveloping it and taking chunks out of the shield. I occasionally received zero damage notifications which I guess meant we had reached the damage cap.

An Imperium fleet of Hurricanes kept warping in and out, trying (successfully in my case) to alpha poor, innocent VNIs off the field:

VNI: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54581477/

That was really embarrassing. I didn’t even have my hardeners on, although with that many people intent on seeing the colour of my blood I doubt it would have mattered. Gobbins had recently posted on the forum that VNI losses were now subject to SRP. Furthermore, somebody left their Geckos behind and I was able to pocket a couple in an interceptor that I hastily replaced my VNI with. I managed to get on eight Hurricane kills in addition to the Astrahus which, despite being unfit, died in a tremendously impressive manner. It first caught on fire, then there were some little bursts of flame, and then it exploded:

Astrahus: http://i.imgur.com/B0QQfdq.png

I think the explosion even killed some drones. That is good because an explosion that size SHOULD kill drones. I think it should also damage ships to be honest.

A little later I got bored and went looking for trouble in Svippy. I had just hit jump when I spotted the Omen who had cross jumped. By the time I had burned back to the gate he was already over a hundred kilometres from the gate. I aligned to an anomaly behind him and bounced off it back to the gate as fast as possible.

He was 30 km away. I overheated my 10mn afterburner and went for him. He walloped me a couple of times and I changed direction a little to increase transversal. I let him keep chipping away at me to keep him interested and was soon in scram range. I landed tackle before turning the repper on.

He was dying quite satisfactorily, already in low armour, when a corpie warped in on me and started helping. Oh well, I'm not greedy. To be honest, that was more of a rush than the Astrahus! I haven't just gone for a solo roam for quite a while.

Omen: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54602347/

Zappity's Adventures: Home Sweet Fortizar of DOOM!

I recall listening to SMA’s State of the Alliance update a few months before Citadel dropped. SMA was at its peak, proud of their achievements in Fade. They discussed their plans regarding citadels, indicating that they would build citadels in every system in Fade to provide the best infrastructure possible for their members.

And here we are a few months later. I bought a citadel and installed it in Fade! Not one of those plebeian little Astrahus ones (although I'm sure they have their place) but one of those large Fortizar ones.

A thread went up on the Pandemic Horde forums stating that members could now ‘adopt’ (read ‘donate’) a citadel. In return, you chose the fitting and where to place it. The fittings would be provided by the corp and, most importantly, so would the defence that would inevitably be required. Why, I decided, not? Sure, it'll get lost eventually but it will be an experience.

I looked at my wallet: 24B. I looked at the market: no Fortizars for sale. I looked at contracts: the cheapest Fortizar was 20B. So I bought it. (By the way, why are people putting them on contracts instead of on the market?)

It was installed a couple of days later, a thousand kilometres off the gate leading to the region’s ratting and mining constellation and in line with the only other gate in system. I had been very specific when stating my fitting requirements: “One of those nasty ones sitting on a stop bubble just off the gate with the smart bomb thing. Like the one that killed my alt last week. Bastards.” The Fortizar is magnificently named “Served by Zappity's Buyback” which is a not-so-subtle double entendre since a) it was funded entirely out of profits, and b) anyone who lands in the trap is going to get served good. It also happens to serve as an advertisement for the program but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

The first thing I killed was a Svipul that demonstrated a deplorable lack of caution by warping gate-to-gate. He landed in my bubble and tried in vain to burn away. I activated all the smart bombs (I think they are called Point Defense Whatsits) and the Svipul died! And then got podded! Ha! That'll learn him.

Svipul: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54502422/

Pod: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54502423/

Most unfairly, I didn't get on the killmail even though I was controlling the structure. That really isn't on. CCPls fix.

Over the coming days, my magnificently placed bubble got on more kills, and the next time I was controlling the Fortizar I killed a couple of Goon bombers who were trying to catch up with their fleet. I haven't yet caught a whole enormous fleet like I really want to but my time will come.

Hound: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54559041/

Manticore: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54559043/

Most of the time I am forced to gaze upon plagues of interceptors warping straight through the trap. I had my epiphany: anchored bubbles that are being entosed should stop interceptors. It's just logical because that way I would catch more people.

I also took my carrier out for the first time. It was a very boring POS bash but it was only one jump away and I had nothing else to do. Anyway, I really wanted something low pressure to get used to things. I realise that the correct ship for the job was my dread (awww, little Zappity is growing up so fast) but I had not yet brought up all the fittings. So I jumped my Nidhoggur to the cyno and went to town on the structure:

POS: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54562472/

I managed to get the killing blow by saving one of the fighters’ rocket salvos for the last percent. I also learnt that when you cyno away and forget your fighters (honestly, what a noob) you cannot cyno back in and reconnect to them like you can drones. It is very annoying. Finally, you need ~70% cap to jump to a cyno, regardless of how much fuel you have. I did know about this but have never had that problem with my jump freighter since I am always jumping straight into a station. I need to carry a mobile depot and a refit.

It is all very exciting. But I still want to catch a whole fleet with my citadel and CRUSH them.

Zappity's Adventures: Buyback War!

You, astute reader, will have noticed that I did not comment on the progress of the Buyback War in the last post. It was something of a disappointment, mainly because I was just too victorious. Maybe that has something to do with the north.

It goes without saying that I decided to go with the ‘crush them’ option. I raised my payout back up to 100% under a “Welcome to Fade” introductory offer. This was very good timing because the die hard UVHO folk (the ratting and mining deadend system in Querious) had finally been dislodged from their abode and were making their way up to Fade with heavy hearts. My magnificent rates were there to greet them! Win-win!

I dropped a few mobile depot adverts around the stations I operated out of. People kept killing them but the timers are long enough that this doesn't really matter. I charitably assumed that the destruction of these belongings was performed by Goons camping our system rather than disgruntled competitors. I made sure to turn over the contracts fast, clearing them in the morning and evening. And, finally, I was polite and helpful to people who were having difficulties, even on the rare occasion that their difficulties were not caused by me buggering up.

Eventually, this buggering up became a bit of a problem. I was getting about a hundred contracts a day, and the manual processing was becoming too much and quite error-prone. I lost count of the times I had to beg people to return ISK I had mistakenly sent. I also occasionally messed up and sent people too little ISK, especially when they submitted multiple contracts at the same time.

The final straw came when I did a batch of contracts in evepraisal.com which were significantly undervalued. There was a temporary problem with the site in which some modules incorrectly registered zero buy value. (evepraisal.com is a really great site and fantastic service for the community btw but I felt really bad in consequence.)

Now, please feel free to skip the next paragraph because I am go to explain how my scripts work. This is primarily because it took me ages to get them right and I am very proud of the outcome if not the execution. I program metabolic pathways instead of scripts for a job and am therefore bad at this sort of thing.

First, I pulled Zappity's contracts from the API, selected the ones which were assigned to her, rather than buy her, and flagged the ones which were evilly located at non-buyback locations, even though I often take them anyway. The script then pulled the items from each individual contract and built a list of items that hadn't had their prices updated in my local database in a while. The prices, once updated at the fantastic eve-central.com, were then used to calculate the value of the entire contract and report a breakdown of each item with Jita buy and sell prices, total buy and sell value, and adjusted price according to my current buyback rate. It also flagged whether there was a price already included in the contract (very infrequent) and, if so, whether it was reasonably appropriate in terms of magnitude.

This made things a lot easier. I now scrolled down the page which displayed the items in each contract with flags if an abnormal price appeared, pasted the adjusted amount into the Send Money box, accepted the contract and moved onto the next one. The only drawback is that I didn't have an evepraisal.com link to paste into the description. But the values are very close and nobody has complained yet.

The success of my campaign did lead to a bit of a problem, however. I had started accepting ore and minerals and now had an enormous and very difficult to move stockpile!

Zappity's Adventures: How I made my ISK

I have been asked about how I made my ISK and, being of a naturally sunny disposition, I will now explain. My current position: 137,986m assets (Jita sell price) 22,000m liquid ISK 59,000m active sell orders (Jita sell price) 3,000m 10/20 BPOs (unresearched value) Total: 222B ISK. Depressingly, I am not even wealthy. Still, I have enough ISK to do whatever I wish (within reason) and that's almost good enough for me. I was asked whether I was an ‘old player’, having accumulated assets over time. The answer is somewhat subjective so I will simply state that Zappity was created in early 2013 and that my market activities began at about the same time. Region trading (the act of buying in one region and moving the goods to another location before selling) made me my first few billion. I moved faction ammunition between Jita and the other hubs, predominantly Amarr and Dodixie. This triggered my first foray into spreadsheets, using Google Sheets to pull eve-central.com volume data for the ammunition I was interested in, highlighting good buy opportunities when they were a certain percentage below the other hubs. The main limitation here was that I did not have the capital to do spread across buy orders and, instead, bought straight from sell orders. That cut into my profits and, more importantly, meant that I had to actively update sell orders because I needed to recoup much margin as possible. This 0.01 ISKing lasted about a fortnight before I burned out. I decided that I needed a better plan. I took my hard earned billions into invention and T2 production. I put up a medium tower a few jumps out of Jita and made Expanded Cargoholds, Nanofibers, Damage Controls, Inertial Stabs plus a few other things I can’t remember. I would check the market prices and commence runs on whatever would be most profitable that particular week. I bought all the minerals from Jita and freighted them out myself. It was quite profitable but also quite tedious. It earned me a few billion more ISK before I exited just prior to the Crius changes. At this point, I had about 6B ISK and roughly doubled it by cheating and buying an additional 6B worth of plex. This allowed me to establish a good array of low-price buy orders after training Margin Trading to V on my trading alt. I pulled sales volumes from eve-marketdata.com and selected the 300 highest (in terms of ISK) T2 items being sold. At this point I transitioned from Google Sheets to my own PHP scripts plus MySQL database. My scripts reported the item list and altered me when either my buy orders or inventory were getting low. This allowed me to see at a glance whether anything required attention, especially buy orders that had been filled and needed replacing. There was a continual balance between trying to keep individual orders small enough that I could service the payouts but large enough that I didn't need to continually replace the orders. At this point I was turning over about 1-2B each day in Jita (more on the weekends, less mid-week) with roughly 10% profit. I managed a reasonable turnover because I bought at Jita plus a three jump range, relying on public courier contracts to move stuff back to base for me. Three jumps around Jita does not include any lowsec systems but does cover a lot of producers, some of which are happy to save the travel and sell directly to a buy order. I paid couriers about 0.1% reward with 150% collateral, meaning that I paid 20k reward to transport 20m goods back to Jita at a 30m collateral. I wrote a script to report the current worth of assets in The Forge, sorted by station value, along with the collateral and reward required for each station. This was easy. I added replacement market orders every day or two, I never updated sell orders, and I still made a reasonable profit. This continued until I had accrued about 50B. The next major breakthrough occurred when I went POS hunting. I made another 50B with about a month of intensive POS scanning and war declarations. But it was too tiring to maintain and I felt bad for the poor fools I was stripping bare. 100B ISK was a major milestone. At this point I decided that a change of tactics was required. It was becoming increasingly difficult to spend all my ISK on buy orders so I diversified my items and bought a jump freighter. I toyed with lowsec for a while but soon concluded that sov nullsec was the place to be. I began stocking an alliance staging system and was soon turning over about 2-3B per day with 20% profit. Much better! And that brings us up to the present day. Well, almost. It brings us up to the buyback program which is another story altogether.

Zappity's Adventures: Buyback program magnificence

I started a corp buyback program. It is magnificent. And, fittingly, it is called ‘Zappity's Magnificent Buyback Program’. Now that I write it out, I must admit that the title isn't quite as imaginative as I imagined when I thought it up. Still, it gets the point across.

Why am I telling you about this? Well, I have been travelling a LOT lately for work. I can sadly report that the Pacific Ocean is of precisely the same immensity as it has previously been and I wish they would introduce a new and even faster Concorde with an Australia-US leg and also teleportation. Actually, just teleportation would be adequate.

Before I was distracted I was about to say that I have not been much in the mood for PvP. This isn't all bad because I do not like to pretend that PvP is the only thing that I find interesting in EVE. So here is an adventure about breaking into a new market activity.

It was not at all planned. I was messing about in Jita when a ping went out about a change to corporation policy. Apparently, the powers that be had decided to change the corp buyback rate from 90% of Jita buy via evepraisal.com to 70%. This was purportedly to make room for independent marketeers to move into the space and take over but I think it is just because Gobbins is tight.

I looked at my trading corp wallet and saw lots of ISK and thought, “Hey, I could do that”. So I posted in the thread, “Gobbins is tight and is only paying out 70%. I'll do 90%.” And the contracts started rolling in. I didn't want anything too bulky so I initially excluded ore and minerals and PI (which scares me because I don't understand it) but after about a week I had paid out 10B.

Which was far too long in my opinion.

I took a careful look at the forums. There were buyback programs everywhere! This was just unacceptable. If I was going to bother with this thing then I was obviously going to have to crush them all.

I pondered my options. I pondered that I had a reasonably-sized 12-digit war chest, having liquidated a fair chunk of my trading items prior to the release of citadels and the price crash as a consequence of the inevitable liquidity squeeze. I pondered that I could probably manage for a while paying even 100% of the Jita buy price, admittedly with a sadly diminished profit margin. And I pondered that it was easier to retain customers than it was to get new ones.

So I posted that I was now accepting 100% of Jita buyback in Fade. Even more contracts started rolling in! Ha! After a week or so, I dropped the price back to 92%, confident that the general magnificence of the program, the higher payout, and the relatively rapid turnaround that I was managing would encourage people to hang around. I decided to ignore the Querious stations because they were just too far away. And because I was lazy.

Next, however, news went out that Pandemic Horde was moving into Fade properly and, subsequently, abandoning Querious. The corp program was paying 80% on everything. Hmm.

I added Querious to my program at 92% and bought another jump freighter in Amarr. I was still excluding really bulky cheap stuff (PI, ice etc) and was soon unfortunately forced to add non-faction T1 ships to the list. I thought a lot about ‘ISK density’, the curse of jump freighter pilots everywhere. But even excluding these items, I had soon paid out over 150B in Querious and needed to move some of it to Amarr.

I don't like jump fatigue for jump freighters. CCP supposedly likes to support ‘gameplay enablers’. I don't feel particularly supported to be honest. Jump fatigue is awful and frustrating. I understand the point of it - I even understand the need for it - but I don't like the way it feels, especially for a non-combat ship.

Things eventually calmed down in Querious and I was able to turn my attention back to Fade. My main competitor was now offering 93%! Disgraceful! Just the sort of shabby trick you'd expect them to play while I was busy. You just can't trust some people.

In addition to having a troublesome competitor, I had decided expand into ore and minerals. (I have a lot of blueprints, some admittedly more nefariously acquired that others, so I might as well do something useful with them.)

I faced a decision. Should I accept the presence of my feeble, so called competitors? Or should I CRUSH THEM!