Friday 18 October 2013

Mailbag - Regional Pickup Question

The Question

Re: Re: Trade
From: Tubrav Sadarts
Sent: 2013.10.18 02:19
To: Moxnix Induli,

I had another quick question too; how do you deal with all the pickups? I have a large amount of 10-system buy orders in a few regions, and when I go to pick up all the accumulated items every few days, it's on the order of 70 jumps per region. Do you do this constantly?

My Reply

I only do pickups when there's stuff worth enough to make picking it up worth my time. Just how much it takes to be "worth my time" keeps getting higher as I get richer too.

Trying to pick everything up all the time would be so time consuming it'd drive me nuts!

In the very beginning 1 million was more than enough to travel across the entire region and 100k was enough to travel several jumps.

A few months later I wouldn't even undock unless I was looking at picking up at least close to 100 mil in total and I wouldn't bother picking up from any station unless it either had at least a few million worth of stuff to pickup or I was already in the system anyhow.

Now I don't usually bother undocking until a character has at least 500 million or so to pickup without having to make much more than 5 or 10 jumps. I won't do very many more jumps unless there's a billion or two that needs picking up.

I'll often use public courier contracts to help cut down on the travel time too. Anything worth much over 500 mil is usually worth couriering.

I rarely bother picking up from stations that don't have very much of value on them unless I'm already in the system either picking up from another station in system or passing through on the way to somewhere else.

Sometimes I'll spend half a day afk autopiloting to clean up a bunch of little stuff on one character. But that's mostly afk flight time with maybe 10 minutes or so in total where I'm actually at the keyboard.

Flying blockade runners helps a lot too. They're much faster than any other cargo ships, quite safe on autopilot (in high sec anyhow) and carry quite a lot more cargo than any combat ship with speed anywhere near the same ballpark.

7 comments:

  1. Another thing that helps keep the number of stations with things to pickup from getting too crazy is how I handle my lower value items.

    My low end keeps going up too so I'm frequently dropping some of the lowest value items from my buying list and lowering the range I buy others at. And of course, replacing those items with far more valuable items.

    If, for example, I drop a T2 mod worth 500k or even a faction mod that goes for 20 million and replace it with a deadspace mod worth over a billion I'm not going to have nearly as many items to pickup.

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  2. Do you solely use the quickbar? I have just decided to seriously devote time and isk to trading. I crafted a series of spreadsheets for the main trade hubs and then a set working off the other hubs by region.

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    Replies
    1. No, sometimes I use the quickbar, sometimes I use search, sometimes I just go through existing orders from the wallet. All three have their uses.

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  3. Neat. I feel I'll have to rearrange my workflow as I go. Although, I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing yet but I'll get there soon enough. Appreciate the reply! ^_^

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    Replies
    1. Yeah you have to mix it up and make radical changes on the fly sometimes. Otherwise the bots and no-lifers figure out your strategy, pricing, timing and whatnot and 0.01 ISK you out of business.

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  4. Not to mention the gankers. :-/ Hazard of business I imagine. 92M cargo loss. Blargh!

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  5. For pickups that are worth it from buyorders, consider consolidating your stacks with PushX. Its cheap to give them a few contracts to collect all your stuff in 1 system in the region, then jump it out.

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