Crime & Punishment

It was time for some fleet action. I have discovered logistics. Not the ‘hauling stuff about’ variety, which I was already far too familiar with, but the ‘repairing other ships’ variety. I am still confused as to why CCP thought this was a good name for the class since the proper usage of the word is hardly rare. But regardless of the nomenclature, I have discovered the role and I quite like it.

The problem with large fleet fights is that they are boring. The FC does a huge amount of management (usually with a second account), the tackle and niche roles (command destroyers, webbers etc) do varying amounts (but these are by definition not numerous) and the DPS does absolutely bugger all. It is terrible. You wait for the target to appear in the fleet window, lock it and hit F1. Occasionally you might reload but that's about it.

I really do understand CCP Larrikin’s desire to change fleet mechanics to make individual members more involved.

And then, after hearing constant calls for logi (“we need more logi” is a most common refrain heard prior to unlocking), I finally trained Logistic Cruisers and Logistics Frigates to V and took my first Oneiros out for a fight. It was magnificent. I was locking things up left, right and centre, juggling targets and reps as the frantic demands for armour appeared. I was managing capacitor and heat (we were only just holding). I had to carefully manage my prop mod to keep range but not destroy my meagre cap reserve. I had to time the armour repper cycles correctly to ensure that the cycles ended in time. And, finally, I had to die when I was micro-jumped away from the fleet into an angry nest of interceptors. Oh well.

More recently, I took a Scalpel on a destroyer roam into Imperium space. This little ship has a tiny 5 m3 drone bay into which the conscientious pilot will slot an armor repair drone and the selfish pilot will slot a DPS drone. I fall into the latter category and thus took a Warrior II, solely for the purpose of recording my conquests on the killboard.

We left from Okagaiken and easily evaded a Caracal fleet in Saranen, the Imperium staging system. We were soon winging our way through Pure Blind and, eventually, into SMA space in Fade to torment the locals as they evacuated. There were freighters going everywhere. It was amazing. But we concentrated on the carriers and Hurricanes sitting upon the undock. Unfortunately, they refused to fight. We eventually got bored and, getting wind of a ruckus in Deklein, we quickly made our way up the map.

Allies had managed to bubble three Marauders 70 km from the station. They died so quickly that my promiscuous little drone barely had time to contribute damage! Flying logistics was a complete waste of time on this fleet because nobody needed reps.

Paladin #1: https://zkillboard.com/kill/53001504/

Paladin #2: https://zkillboard.com/kill/53001531/

Paladin #3: https://zkillboard.com/kill/53001536/

We successfully extricated ourselves from the system without any friendly fire incidents (not an easy feat with not-blue-blues and a bunch of noobs) and were soon heading back towards Okagaiken via Fade, happy with our shiny kills. For some reason, there was a lot of singing on comms.

P.S. CCPls give killmails for logi somehow now that I have started flying them.

Consider my fits suitably amended :)

I mourn the Gecko's.

I mourn them, I do.

Fixed that for ya.

Crush them, of course

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.

That is a very good question. Careful item selection is a major factor in success. The last thing you want is your isk tied up in items that aren't turning over.

I have never monitored the entire market but have rather focused on categories that I understand. Thus, I have never had much success with mining-related equipment but have had much better outcomes with PvP stuff.

I selected in a two stage process:

Work through the items in the market one category at a time, copying candidates into a shortlist.
Pull volumes from eve-central or eve-marketdata.com. This is critical - you will realistically only capture a percentage, say 5%, of daily trades in any one item. 5% of 1B traded is much more than 20% of 50m traded.

This should be a continual process. You want to monitor changes in the market and your profitability, similar to the post I made a few months ago about the importance of item selection.

You need to be careful, though. Damage Control II is traded at very high volumes in practically every hub or staging system. This, however, does not mean that your turnover of this item will be huge because everybody knows it. Search for the items which sell well but are not stocked as thoroughly. I ended up dropping some ‘common sense’ items (Mag Stabs, DCUII, Gyros, EANMs etc) when stocking alliance staging because they were so abundantly stocked. Medium Core Defence Field Extender IIs, however, earned more than all these combined.

So I would recommend putting effort into generating a short list of a fee hundred and then concentrating on data capture around those. Make it items that you understand and that are commonly destroyed in PvP.

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.

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.

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