Grinding for Jita

Not that kind of grinding, this is a continuation of trying to get standings for my Jita alt to the highest possible in order to benefit from a lowering of my brokering fees.

Lower Broker Fees

At the moment my Jita alt has standings of 4.05 with Caldari Navy which allows him to have a 0.10% reduction in Broker fees (0.65% vs. 0.75%). I do a large proportion of my buying/selling in Jita so the lower I can make this the better. At least I think it is.

I haven't done much with about this since I got the standings to 4.05 via a combat alt running missions for Caldari Navy. I won't bore you with the details (which I recorded) but it took about three days of missioning in a Vexor Navy Issue and a lot of patience with Level 3 missions.

My friend Althanear pointed me TSCA and their "standing correction service" and I was considering using it but reading Merchant Monarchy on Tuesday I was pleasantly surprised to see MoxNix do a fantastic post on how he was thinking of doing the same and he even went as far as mention Caldari Data Agents.

Data Centers

"This is a standard Data Center, built-in with a long range scanner to search for interesting phenomenon in the solar-system. They are usually packed with tourists and holiday-goers but have also been known to attract agents looking to hire freelancers for various tasks. These Data Centers were first produced by the Gallente corporation The Scope, but have since been mimicked by corporations in other nations due to their popularity."

There are Data Centres for each of the major empires that give a significant boost to faction standings for turning in a quantity of specific tags. No mission to run, you just turn up with tags convo the agent and accept the mission to provide the tags.

Standings get an immediate boost for a modest ISK investment, because you'll need to buy enough from the market, and whilst you can only do it once the boost you get is worth the cost of any tags. If you use buy orders you can save money but I just bought straight off the market (all tags I would need cost me just over 250m ISK) and it was easily worth it based on the long term savings.

One thing to note, if you want to get standings for use in Jita use only the Caldari Navy agents and not the Home Guard ones. Positive standings are good but you'll only benefit in Jita 4-4 from the standings to Caldari Navy.

*UPDATE* A comment from MoxNix shows I was wrong in what I was sayingwhen I believed that it was Station Owner standings that were more important than faction for altering the broker fee. Turns out the Faction has more weight than the station owner.

So I'm off back to Data Centers with more tags for more standings :)

Should I Do It

If you're going ot be using a trading alt in a major trade hub I'd say its worth getting their standings up to at least 6 with the owner of the station. The better the standings the the better the bottom line will be.

If you can spare a little ISK and some time (less than an hour) to do Data Centers then I don't see any reason why not to do it. If you have a PvE character who can run missions for the owner of the station you can do that and share any bounties and standings increases with your trading alt as well.

In time you'll save a lot more ISK than you spend.

Lowering Broker Fees

I've previously mentioned that I was looking to see if I could save more ISK by lowering further the 0.75% broker fee incurred when setting up Sell Orders on my Trading Alt.

 

I'm happy to report that I've managed to lower this to 0.70% as of today but I don't believe I will get this to what I thought was the lowest level of 0.1875%.

 

0.7% Broker's fee and dropping

Standings were increased by being in fleet with an Alt missioning for Caldari Navy and then sharing the rewards when completing the mission. For Level 1/2 missions this was frustratingly slow, but training Connections to IV and Social to IV on my Trading Alt improved the rate at which I gained standings.

 

A little extra training to make the standings increase faster

The 0.05% reduction in my Broker Fees seems to correlate with a 2.00 standing that I have with the Caldari Navy. Based on this I believe I should see a maximum reduction of 0.05% per 2.00 standings, meaning a total reduction of 0.25% or a final figure for Broker Fees of 0.50%.

 

Current standings after a weekend of grinding

It's not a huge amount but over trades I do a month this will add up to be several tens of million ISK and that's no longer being removed from my wallet.

 

 

The Trading Alt

marketsforISK is a blog that I do enjoy reading, I'm jealous of their ability and patience for dealing with the market. If only I had 1% of that I'd be space richer...

A post that caught my eye was this one, where croda provides some ideas for people wanting to get into trading along with some real world examples. Props to croda for doing this but his suggestion for making a trading alt is something I cannot +1 enough.

About six months ago I decided I needed a trading alt in order handle my buying and selling. This way I could minimise taxation along with having a single character who had my ISK and goods for sale.

About

Six months, three PLEX (for dual character training) and three hundred million ISK for skill books later ZGG Business Associate is active and trading.

• 5.5m SP, with 95% of that in Trade and 0.025% in Neural Enhancement (for jump clones).
• 3 jump clones, one in Jita, one in Providence and one in Curse.
• Wealth, including that in the Corporation wallet he controls, of over 70 billion ISK and slowly rising

He is responsible for all my buying and selling in the systems he is in and uses Red Frog Freight to do all moving. I don't think he's left any station since June last year when I created all his jump clones via a Rorqual.

Is it worth it

Yes, definitely. The ability to login to a dedicated character for all my market activities has been so worth the investment. The amount I've saved in taxes over this time has meant he's paid for all his skills and the three PLEX used for training already and it's just gravy now.