Thinking out Loud

One of the things I like about blogging is that it forces me to think. Many times, after reading a blog post or a forum post, I had an opinion on the topic. But while writing it out, as I thought about my arguments and building my position, I changed my mind, because clearly, my initial opinion was pulled out of my rear. 


The same applies for decisions, and I'm facing one right now. My trading business is good. Real good (see below). I know I'm not pulling in the same ISK as someone like Gevlon (that boy has a gift), but I'm pulling in more than enough ISK to pay for my accounts and pay for my ships and modules.

What's not going so well is Tori's climb to a T2 Drake. I am making progress, that's for sure. I pulled in another 10M or so yesterday, so with that plus the amount I have in escrow for buy orders, I'm at about 25M. At this rate, I should be in a my T2 Drake in a week and a half.


But I'm doing this through missioning, and holy hell, is it boring.You'd think blowing ships up would be a bit more interesting (it's pretty much the whole point of EVE). And to make that worse, the rewards for mission difficulty don't scale with the price of the ships required for those missions.


Missions are broken into levels (L1 to L5) and each level requires more powerful ships, For instance, Level 1 missions require frigates, L2s require cruisers, L3s require battlecruisers, etc. Rewards also scale with the mission level. For example, rewards for an L1 are in the 50k-200k ISK range (if you include the reward from the time bonus. Rewards for an L2 are in the 200k - 600k range, or roughly a 3x increase. To move from L1 to L2, you need to get a cruiser, which costs about 7M ISK equipped, so you need to run about 35 missions. But to move to L3, you need a battlecruiser which costs 70M, or 10 times more than a cruiser. Yet missions payout from one level to the next are only 3-4x times higher. That means you need to run a lot of missions to make that extra cash.


There are a few ways to increase mission income: you can train negotiations which give a boost to mission reward payout. You can buy items from the LP store and sell them (which I've been doing quite successfully). You can salvage mission wrecks. You can try your chance at L3s with a cruiser, if you have the skills. But even with those tactics, it's still quite the grind.


So that brings me to my initial topic, about decisions. When I initially started this experiment, my goal was too see how quickly could a player that had lost everything get back on his feet, working alone. The answer is, not too quickly. 


But the problem with my experiment is that it's not quite realistic. For one, there's no reason a player starting from scratch would limit himself to missioning. I could easily try exploration, do some hauling or trading, or any other number of activities that could be more profitable. For two, there's no reason I need to do this alone. I could get an alt involved in the missions, to provide logistical support to run L3s with a cruiser, or to follow Tori with a salvager. I could even give Tori a loan to buy the BattleCruiser, and he can repay my alt with the earnings from the higher level missions.


But then, that invalidates my experiment since the parameters have changed. Decisions, decisions.


In the end, I think I'll stick with my initial restrictions. Not every player has access to alts, so I'll leave an outside help out of it. As for using different sources of income, I'll leave those out as well, as I want to keep those for future experiments. One thing I will allow is Tori to do some trading, since I've already experimented with that. 

Nate & Nate Business Update


Assets
------
Cash                          19,517,620.09 ISK
Sell Orders                  304,234,637.00 ISK
Escrow                                 0.00 ISK
Contracts                              0.00 ISK
                              -----------------
Total Current Assets         323,752,257.09 ISK


Business grew by 60.9M ISK since my last update. I don't know what it is, but weekends are always slower for me. Most trade bloggers love weekend because it's where they make all their money, but I find there's a lot more competition. Maybe it's because I don't change how I do things from weekdays to weekends? I'll need to investigate.


Also, I don't know what happened, but the price collapsed on several items I've been trading. Is this limited to the items or the hubs I'm trading in? Or is this a trend in the broader market? I'll need to keep an eye on this, there's profits to be made from big movements like this.

Blog Changes

I just found out I need to check "New Window" if I want links to go to a new window. I'll start doing that, since it annoys the hell out of me when I lose my spot in a page I'm reading.