Good Guy CCP

EVE is experiencing some issues with stability at the moment, one of my characters keeps getting booted from the game saying "socket was closed". None of the others have issues but this one can't remain logged in for more than 10 minutes at a time.

It's a pain in the backside as I have things I want to do with this character. I was planning to use a quiet afternoon to get some mining done but I have to reschedule that I guess.

Grrr...

That said one thing that I have found out is that something is happening with towers and their use of fuel. I went to do my weekly fuel top up and found that I had more fuel in the towers than I was expecting. 

Even my out-of-game monitoring application was reporting the fuel to be far more than it should have been given normal usage. So I asked in the Help channel:

Grymwulf > they also most likely set it not to use fuel during the 'issues' to avoid people filing tickets due to offline poses that they couldn't refuel due to server issues

And there is the probable reason. It's nice to see CCP being proactive, I'm sure they've done this before but I hadn't even considered this myself and was assuming my towers would continue normally. 

Of course, database offline nothing can update, fuel can't be used.

Thanks CCP. It might be virtual fuel, but at least I don't have to worry about it for a few days extra now.

I Knew I Forgot Something

Periodically I change the force-field password on my Towers and I did this just the other day I notified the people I knew used my towers to idle in when in space.

Except I missed one person and a couple of days later I received an evemail from my CEO with a link to a kill mail.

Ah Fudge

It was only a couple of hundred million ISK and I had totally forgotten this person friend was using it as a staging post as he ratted up his security status.

I could blame my memory, lack of notification from the pilot that he still used this tower but that's not right. I fucked up and changed the password without checking with everyone whom I knew had used the tower.

Restitution

I'm sure we'll laugh about this in a week or two but right now I'm embarrassed about this screw up on my part.

I haven't spoken to the person, I think time-zones are very much against us at the moment, but I have already purchased a new ship and fittings and it should be in his hands in the next 24 hours.

Lost and Found

When my PC died in July I was able to get back up and running very quickly thanks to maintaining my data on a server rather than the PC. One thing that wasn't stored remotely was the data for jEVEAssets that I'd been using for nearly two years to track assets over all my characters.

 

It wasn't a major loss as until this week I haven't had the need to locate assets out of game (either due to being offline or not able to find something via the in-game asset system) but the last couple of days I have found myself wishing I had reinstalled it.

 

One Not Four

 

I was doing high sec to null sec courier contracts for friends the past two nights, nothing major but with Bagodan being a ganking hotspot, I no longer autopilot and have exit cyno's online the whole trip now, I tend to remain watching the overview window and using zKillboard and the in-game map to see possible issues ahead.

 

One stop last night was to collect a contract but it was in one of my former base stations and I haven't visited it for several months. On docking I accepted the contract and then went to move it into my cargo bay.

 

Except I stopped, instead of one item (the courier contract) I had four items and a total value of around six billion ISK.

Wait. What is this.

 

Looking at the three assets I wasn't expecting it appears that, at some point, previously I've docked and unloaded a full JF of materials from my towers and then promptly forgotten about them. It's possible I intended to further "value add" by making something from the materials but I've obviously forgotten about them until today.

 

So I contracted the items to my trading alt and then used a freight service to move them for sale in a market hub.

 

Six billion ISK is not to be sneezed at, it's not a huge amount to a trader but that's actually come at a good time as I'm trying to get start-up funds for a new venture and this will be a nice float for that.

 

Hold Up, You Missed More

 

As a result of finding these I went through the assets of my characters and found more "unaccounted" assets spread around New Eden. Some notable finds included:

• one character with full set (one of each race) of unfit Command/Fleet Ships with fittings
• one character having 21 fighters/fighter bombers yet this character could not fly capitals
• over 200 blueprint copies in a station in a system I don't ever remember visiting before
• two Providence freighters that I did not know I owned

When I get home tonight I will be installing jEVEAssets and spending some time running though the results of all assets on all my characters and I'm sure that I'll have to send a pilot out to collect all that I find.

 

I am thank that I haven't had any regional buy orders for minerals for a few weeks otherwise I'd be really screwed with picking up all that in Market Deliveries.

Moving In

The WH Alliance has a new home, the tower and POCOs from the Russians have been removed (or are in the process of being finished off as I type this).

 

Our Dear Leader has been having much fun setting up the POSes we'll be using, fiddling with roles and creating new art in space using star base modules. He's very good at pictures, he's no Picasso but that's fine with me as Picasso's pictures give me headaches to look at.

 

I haven't been able to help much this weekend, aside from RL things I've had to take care of I've had three characters moving assets around high sec as it was the end of my financial year and I needed to move what I could sell to Jita and Amarr.

 

I, Slightly, Dislike Freighters

 

I hate their lack of manoeuvrability and speed but I love their ability to move large amounts of material. I've moved nearly twelve million cubic metres of stuff since Friday night, fortunately most of it was no more than six jumps in length but there were a lot of trips not to mention the 100 jump one I had to do on one character.

 

It has been worth it, I've listed nearly fifteen billion ISK worth of items for sale with another six or so being ready for listing in a week. Of course this tied in nicely with my need to buy more raw materials and pay my alliance taxes for the towers I run.

So what was a great profit will only yield a billion or two after I've paid my dues.

 

It comes in slowly but leaves too quickly... the race for ISK.

 

Adding Value

 

A few weeks ago my null-sec CEO made me aware of the possibility of improving income on the carbides/sylramic fibres I was producing by combining them into Armour plates. I had previously not thought of doing this because it would add extra costs to production and, at the time, the difference between raw/processed was less than 7% increase in profit

 

He made a good case to have another look at the setup and see if it was more profitable. So I did and it appears that it is indeed more profitable, averaging 20% over the four armour plate types. I produce the sylramics myself and purchase (from an alliance friend) Fernite Carbides and thanks to my CEO moving into reactions I also now have a good source of Titanium Carbides.

 

So I've now started using sylramics and the two carbide types to produce Armour plates and it's been very good. It is a pain to have to wait nearly a week extra to get my armour plates but with two sets of BPO's I've got a nice production line going. Researching the BPO's (I've had for years it seems) has increased efficiency in materials and time to produce a product that sells well in Jita and Amarr.

 

What raw materials I don't use I either stockpile, for later use, or sell directly on the market so I'm not really losing any ISK, especially with volatility the market currently sees.

 

Profits are up, generally, which is excellent and if I had shareholders they'd be very happy I'd imagine and thanks to my CEO I'm already looking for the next processed material to get my teeth into to increase my profits but to make use of the BPO's I've got.

The Climb

I've had rather a mixed week in real life and of course this has effect to influence my EVE Online game play but I have done some logging in as well as giving some serious consideration to where I am and what I'm doing.

Preparing for Travel

A rare business trip took me  to the city of Melbourne this week. It was a nice break and really helped sort out a number of work related issues but the biggest benefit I got was physically being unable to login to EVE for four and a half days.

This meant I needed to either organise help with my towers or leave them knowing that they'd be filled before I returned and I'd have a period where I'd have no reactions being made. Unfortunately I left it far too late for option 1 and had to go with option 2.

In the end it wasn't that much of an issue, a little production time lost but all has remained functioning.

The night I got back I sorted my towers and we're back to normality.

A Skill Queue Finishes

In 25 days my carrier pilot will finish Advanced Drone Interfacing V at which point (aside from a post on that) it will mark the end of Drone skills for him and I will need something new to train. To this end I've spent my week pondering what I could and what I should train.

I've decided to return to a Int/Mem attribute setup so that I can finish a multitude of support skills that are either at Level III or Level IV. The fact I never did them to Level V irks me and its time to clean house, so to speak.

EVEMon has been so useful for this planning as I can set filters to only show Int/Mem skills and then I just work through them adding them to Level V. Then I use the Priority attribute to make all the Level V skills appear at the end of the Plan and then its just a matter of changing the order I need skills to be done in.

Level V is Steep

The plan comes out at 12 hours shy of 700 days and that includes a remap to Int/Mem. I could remove the Navigation skills (~ 75 days) but its high time I finished them off and its only a drop of 120 SP/hour from the Int/Mem remap.

On closer examination I noticed that its the completion of the Level V skills that takes up the most time. I have a mix of Rank 3 through 10 skills that will be done and these range from 9 days up to 32 days each to get from Level IV to V.

If I removed all the Level V skills my queue would be a much nicer length of 118 days but its the Level V's I need to get. On the bright side at least I know what my carrier pilot will be training for the next two years...

War!

Well one of my towers in NPC Null has been reinforced and looks like I'll be losing not just that but the pair of towers that was part of.

They used capitals to RF the tower AND previously killed a tower elsewhere with dreads and carriers. 

It's a pain and very unlikely I can do anything about it, I can't repel fire of that magnitude!

That said, I have a couple of ideas to disrupt any fleet that comes to kill the tower after the RF period is over and I know that my Alliance will be trying to do something to harass and stop the tower being killed. 

RF Timing isn't great for me (I think its ~3am in the morning my time) but I've already come up with a few ideas on how to piss off the attackers when they return.

All Quiet On The South-South-East Front

It's quiet.

Possibly too quiet.

But then again I'm happy that it's like this, it's allowed me to concentrate on grinding standings with one of the NPC corporations in a fairly fast time frame. Zero to 8.34 personal standings with the corporation in a little over a week has meant that I now have access to all the Level 4 agents in the area. 

Mining PvE 

I've found the mining missions not as boring or repetitive as Security ones and much faster to finish. Mining missions seem to comprise one of three types, mining ore, gas or ice. I was told only to do the gas mining missions for best reward vs. risk but I've found that the ice ones (mine 20 blocks of ice) are quick to do with a Skiff or Procurer and are worth doing with Gas. I do decline all the ore missions as they take far too long and usually require two or three trips back to station to drop off what I've mined.

I invested some of my liquid ISK in buying six Ventures and fittings so I could get three characters running missions in the future, the LP rewards (between 7,500 and 12,500 LP per mission with Mining Connections IV) are excellent and I have some good items (Vindicator/Daredevil/Snake Implants) to choose from when I do cash out. 

One really good thing about the mining missions are that they take place in the system with the agent or at most 1 jump away so I don't have to worry much about being caught on a gate. 

Last night I was fortunate enough to get three gas mining missions in a row and not just the "rat free" 7,500 LP reward ones. I got the 12,500 LP mining missions with "drone rats" (which are very easy to tank in a shield boosting Venture) and an hour later I'm 36,000 LP better off and a few million ISK richer.

Towers

My towers are good, we haven't had any siphons since Brave Newbies Inc. moved out and whilst we get a lot of traffic this doesn't interfere with my towers or reactions I have running. 

I did make a mistake last weekend, I bought in new raw materials from Jita about three weeks earlier than I should have so. This caused my liquid ISK reserves to be depleted (read: I spent all my wallet ISK) and now I don't have to buy anything for six/seven weeks apart from fuel.

ISK Today, Gone Tomorrow

The lack of ISK isn't a problem, aside from Ventures I'm not in need of buying anything at the moment outside of tower materials or trading opportunities. I have nearly 20 billion in buy and sell orders active so I'm not really in any trouble it's just depressing to see my wallet balance so low.

The reason I'm so low is I finally bought, and injected into his skills, the Amarr Titan book for one of my characters, not that he has the titan nor do I have the need or ISK for one yet. 

Not. Happy. Jan.

The title comes from a series of adverts in Australia for Yellow Pages and you can read about it here, if you want to. It's quite amusing I write this as just recently Lorna wrote a post on this subject herself.

Anyway, to the point.

Sunday night is my night for tower maintenance, time to dust off the freighter and visit all my towers and refuel and resupply them. It's not glamorous but it pays the bills and is quite relaxing.

When I'm in space, even if I'm alone in a system, I will fire off d-scan periodically on my travels in case anything shows up. Until this evening nothing interesting ever has but tonight I saw a mobile siphon unit appear on d-scan.

Wait.. what did I just see. Yes, a dreaded siphon unit was active and very possibly on one of my moons. I continued my maintenance tasks and logged in another character who had some combat ships available and got him to a tower location where I thought any siphon may be.

Good guess by me, exiting warp there on my overview was the siphon unit. I right click and select Look At to get a better look at this interloper.

Interloper found

There was a small progress bar underneath the name of the unit which indicates how full it is, it around a quarter full so I warped to the unit, took back my product and destroyed the siphon.

It took two full reloads of my Purifier to kill the siphon, they are quite resistant to attack and I sent a mail to my corporation to let them know what had happened and to make sure we keep eyes open for more in the future.

And yes, I did note the name of the pilot who dropped the unit and they've already been added to watch list and so was another member of his corporation/alliance who was in Local when I logged in tonight. 

Reaction Towers and Silos

One of the most frustrating things running towers is making sure they are adequately protected. I'm lucky I can call on a number of corporations/alliances nearby that will help me defend my towers but ideally I want to be able to add 'teeth' to my towers to ward off opportunist attacks but also that will cause a bloody nose to someone who does attack.

 

Guns don't need CPU but do need Powergrid however other defensive modules such as Warp Disruptors and ECM Batteries do use CPU and understandably. As a result I can put guns on my towers but the support modules I really need to go with them I cannot.

 

In an ideal universe we'd like more CPU generated by our towers but this, I believe, is a major and would have to be properly analysed and vetted.

 

Solution

 

However something that could change now is to lower the CPU requirements of one module, the silo. The silo has a CPU requirement of 500 tf and I really cannot see why, the Silo doesn't need to react things, it doesn't need to process anything so why does it need so much CPU.

 

Even after the 'mentioned' POS revamp in the future changing the Silo now should not impact that, so lets get the CPU requirement of the Silo reduced from 500 to 100 or better still 50.

 

This would free up a lot of CPU so we can properly defend our towers (which we invest a lot of ISK into, upfront too) and give those that do want to try to take them a bloody nose before we drop our friends on them.

On the way to Profit

Moved

 

Well I've moved into my new null sec home, previously I'd just visited but now I live here. Bookmarks have been created around gates and the docking range of the systems only station has been well and truly plotted (it's not a bad station, better than those I use in low sec).

 

I have a few deep space safes that I was able to get off friends who have been in system longer and a couple are off d-scan to all celestials.

 

Local Politics

 

It's been interesting watching Alliance and local intel channels and getting a feel for the politics around the constellation. Former neutral/reds are now light blue but don't have access to our intel channels but we have access to another shared channel with them and we fleet with them a lot for defence or localised roams.

 

I've gotten to recognise quite a few by name and no longer flee when I see them enter system, of course I don't fully trust them yet but that will change as I join their fleets.

 

Towers

 

Towers are going nicely, although the "over 1000 ISK" drop in the price of Metamaterials over the past week has not been good. It's cut into my margins rather sharply but to counter this I've added two new towers producing Sylramic Fibres, I could have gone back to Fullerides but I've found the market to be more populated and harder to sell into than Sylramic Fibres.

 

Market

 

I've started to populate the local market with a lot of modules and ships, there is competition within station but also from one jump away on a lot of items but aggressive pricing (under cutting by 5%/10%) should see me win business. I've put 1.5billion ISK's worth of modules on the market to see how they go, most are in quantities around 8 to 10 but a few items I know are in demand I've put on in quantities between 20 and 50.

 

Buy orders aren't good, I've not had a single one filled as of yet and this seems to be the way as most modules have zero buy orders.

 

Implants

 

I've finally finished my PvE grind in Minmatar space and I cashed in getting six Omega's and two full sets implants of the Low-Grade Nomad implants. These provide a boost to agility so Freighter and Supercarrier pilots do like them. Provisionally profit looks good, the Omega's alone should be nearly 5 billion ISK in profit, add in the full sets and I'm conservatively estimate I'll walk away with 7 billion ISK profit.

 

This is a nice boost to the wallet and will mean my towers can be fuelled and have all materials needed for the next two months from these monies alone.

 

Nearby in Curse is a Level 4 Mining agent that I'll be investigating once my standings for them are fixed.  Apparently a single low standing Gas Mining mission will result in over 7000 LP which can be used to purchase some very nice blueprints in the LP Store. 7000 LP is more than I got in high sec on a fully skilled character and instead of spending 45 minutes per mission its only a fraction of that.

 

Momentum

Status

 

The past few days have been productive, wares sold in Jita fattening the wallet and then some of the money spent on fuel and inputs. I even got permission to defer tower taxes for a month to purchased a new Jump Freighter to help out with logistics, still debating whether to go for a Nomad (fuel is more easily available where it will be used) or an Ark (which I'm already fully skilled for).

 

Training

 

The PI character in null sec finished Electronics Upgrades V and as I type this Cynosural Theory III will have completed and Command Centre Upgrades V is in the queue. When that finishes I'll make sure Cyno Theory V is added and he'll run out this before I switch the queue back to my 'main' on this account.

 

My new Jump Freighter character is finishing Armour skills but will be changing to Jump Fuel Conservation V in a week, based on research in a previous post, it makes financial sense to get this skill complete as the savings in fuel usage will add up over time considering he'll be making at least two JF runs per week.

 

Industry

 

I'm not quite as blueprint copy rich as Lorna but I've managed to collect nearly two thousand blueprint copies of various modules and ships. I'm currently in the process of tracking my mineral and component needs in order to use these up, not going to be cheap but fortunately the profit margin looks to be between 30 and 40% so it's a worthy investment.

 

I'm both disappointed and happy to see that the price of Faction Battleships has dropped, disappointed because I have four nightmare BPC's and two of those I've had for nearly seven months and cost me more than the ship now sells for but it's good because I'm able to market trade them quite well. Seven over the past week I've made at least 30m on each one.

 

My favourite current item are Hammerhead I drones, I had a few BPC's that allowed me to make 20,000 of them and they sold like hot cakes  within hours of being posted at around the 25,000 ISK each price point in Jita. I have a couple more BPC's left to use and I've invested in BPO that I'll research so I can continue to make them as they, for their mineral need, are a good source of reasonably passive income.

 

Towers

 

My towers are running nicely, fuel and input is added and the outputs exported to High sec ready for sale on a fortnightly cycle. It just works.

 

I'm going to add two more towers making Sylramic Fibres to diversify somewhat, I used to make these in Providence and they were a good choice but I'm not going to both with Fullerides anymore as the margin is small and the market saturated with sellers.

 

Mentoring

 

I've had someone in my new Alliance ask me about setting up towers and I will be working with this person to teach them how to do basic reactions and getting them up to speed with running towers and researching.

 

I've discovered that I know a lot about running towers but I need to find a way to communicate this to someone who is in a different time zone that doesn't really overlap with mine. This limits communication to EVE mails and chat messages rather than voice comms. Going to be interesting to see what we can do.

 

I am looking forward to the challenge though.

The Tower Caper

For the past two months I've been monitoring activity in one of the systems I have towers in trying to find out who may have taken, without my permissions, material inputs/outputs and POS fuel from my towers.

 

I haven't had any luck in finding out but since nothing else had happened until overnight Sunday/Monday of this week. Sometime between going to bed and waking up again (about 9 hours) I found lost all the output (about 36 hours worth) from my towers.

 

 

 

I had mentioned it to a couple of people when it first happened and was recommended to remove access rights to my towers, I did but I reset them when someone else (not alliance) asked for access so they could boost in peace).

 

I've now reported it to my corporation leadership and found out that I wasn't the only one that had suffered a loss. It seems a few people had and even more intriguing was the fact that the people who had POS access was a very small group of no more than six to eight people.

 

I'm not really bothered by the loss, ISK can be replaced and it wasn't a huge amount anyway, but more so I'm bothered by the fact someone whom I count as a friend has done this. If they needed ISK they could have asked, I have very favourable rates for friends and I'll only break legs once...

 

The corp leadership is going to put out a mail about this, not much else that can be done, the list of people who have access is small but there is no evidence or indication of who might have done this.

Jump Clone Mistakes

I was stupid on Saturday, I jump cloned my only tower capable pilot to a clone in Curse without checking that he didn't need to empty silos. I jumped and last night realised that I still had 8 hours to go on the JC timer and tower silos that would be full in less than an hour.

 

Dammit.

 

He did need to JC to help setup a new cyno toon in Curse but I should have emptied the towers first. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I lost about 7 hours of production of sylramic fibres. A corp mate wasn't able to help so whilst I slept my income was static.

 

Fortunately the Fullerides continued being produced and I was able to login this morning with the overflow silo full and the primary silo 96% full.

 

It's not a major loss but it's one that was totally avoidable and all because I didn't follow my usual routine of emptying towers before jump cloning.