Progress Report - March 2013

Report on the status and progress of all my characters as of 01 March 2013. Mostly Trade oriented since making ISK is my main focus and trading is how I make ISK.

I buy and sell skill-books, faction/deadspace mods and implants covering all 5 main trade hubs (Jita, Amarr, Dodixie,  Hek and Rens) plus a few regions that don't have a major trade hub. I play fairly casually and update orders infrequently. Some characters get updated more often than others and I update sell orders more consistently than buy orders.

In February I slowed down my order posting/updating frequency again. I made another 13 billion, the same as in January.

Current net worth is 106 billion with around 3/4 of it in cash and market escrow. Most of the rest is in sell orders and recently acquired stock I haven't gotten around to posting for sale yet. Very little is in assets I don't intend to sell soon, a few ships and some mods I stock for my own use, maybe 2 billion in total.

That's my actual current total net worth, I don't pad the numbers by counting ISK I've earned but have since spent and no longer have. That'd be like calling myself a real life millionaire because I've earned over a million dollars during my life when the reality is I've never had anywhere near a million in total.

Account 1

My first account. This is the account my main started on. I've since transferred the main to his own account so he never has to share the training queue again and these two can train harder.

Couster Regional Trader, 269 buy orders, Tycoon IV, Wholesale V, Accounting IV, Broker Relations IV, Margin Trading V and all remote order skills at IV. Buys a bunch of different things, transports to Dodixie and contracts to the main trader there for resale.

Tash Murkon Regional Trader. 125 buy orders, Wholesale IV, Accounting IV, Broker Relations IV, Margin Trading V and all remote order skills at IV. Just started working this area, she'll probably wind up up mostly buying and transporting goods to Amarr for sale. Currently training Wholesale V.

Account 2

Amarr Station Trader. 305 orders (maxed), Tycoon V, Accounting V, Broker Relations V, Margin Trading V and all remote order skills at IV. Does nothing but station trade. Finished training trade skills.

Dodixie Station Trader 305 orders, Tycoon V, Accounting V, Broker Relations V, Margin Trading V and all remote order skills at IV. Does nothing but station trade. Finished training trade skills.

Rens Station Trader 273 orders, Tycoon IV, Accounting V, Broker Relations V, Margin Trading V, does nothing but station trade.  Currently training Tycoon V.

Account 3

Lonetrek Regional Trader. 305 orders, Tycoon V, Accounting V, Broker Relations V, Margin Trading V Daytrading V and the rest of the remote order skills at IV. Mainly a buyer, does sell a few things but mostly just buys, flies to Jita and contracts goods to my two traders there for resale. Finished training trade skills.

Jita Station Trader 269 orders, Tycoon IV, Accounting V, Broker Relations V, Margin Trading V, Marketing IV, Daytrading IV. Does nothing but station trade implants and mods. Currently training Tycoon V.

Moved the Hek trader to a new account so Lonetrek can hog the queue for a while without holding back Hek's training.

Account 4

Jita Station Trader, 269 orders, Tycoon IV, Accounting V, Broker Relations V, Margin Trading V and all remote order skills at IV. Does nothing but station trade skillbooks. Finished training trade skills for now.

Exploration / Scout / Scanning pilot, flies Covert Ops (Buzzards) and is training Int/Mem support/scanning/exploration skills. Has all Astrometric skills at IV, most shield, navigation, fitting and exploration skills at IV or V. I don't plan on doing any serious trading on this character. He has 29 order slots, more than enough to buy things he needs and that's about it. Currently training Energy Management V.

Account 5

My Main, all by himself on his own account now and concentrating mainly on Per/Wil combat skills. 125 orders, Wholesale IV, Accounting IV, Broker Relations IV, Margin Trading IV and all of the "remote order" trade skills at IV. He's not heavily involved in trade but does a little low maintenance ninja trading and lowball purchasing in various places. Currently training Energy Management V.

Account 6

Hek Station Trader 269 orders, Tycoon IV, Accounting V, Broker Relations V, Margin Trading V and all remote order skills at IV. Does nothing but station trade. Currently training Tycoon V.

Yet another trader. New character, trained Trade III, has Retail injected (but not trained yet) and already bought Broker Relations, Accounting and Margin Trading books to learn later. Won't train any further until Hek learns Tycoon V, Trade V and Daytrading V.

Future plans

Overall I've been slowly working Regional Trade back into my trading strategy. Less work and higher profits per item though total profits aren't as high. I've gotten all remote order skills to IV on all my traders and started placing a mix of both station and regional orders on several of them. I'll get Daytrading V on several characters and maybe Marketing V on a few too.

I might start a 3rd Jita trader to use as a price capper to stabilize prices on certain high volume, absurdly heavily camped items and hopefully chase some of the no-lifers and bots off those items. I could always use more traders to work a few more regions I'm not currently working too.

Get the Couster trader Broker Relations V, Accounting V, then the same for Tash Murkon. Then remap Int/Mem and work on flying support skills (mainly Navigation, Engineering and Electronics skills) for both characters. Will probably train both characters into Covert Ops too and might train one into Blockade Runners.

My main just got Shield Management V and will learn Energy Management V soon too but mostly he'll just keep working on getting more missile skills to V. I really don't care for flying big slow ships so battleships are rather low priority for me but I'll eventually get Caldari Battleships IV and Gallente Battleships 1 - IV so I can fly Rattlesnakes. The skills I need for ships I really do want to fly are Caldari Cruisers V, Strategic Cruisers (Tengu), Recon and maybe Black Ops. He'll probably stay in the Per/Wil remap for at least another 6 months and get basic Gunnery skills to at least IV too.

Get Tycoon V and Trade V on Rens. Get Daytrading V on all 3 characters and maybe Marketing V too. Train Covert Ops and remap Int/Mem for support skills training. Eventually I'll probably train something besides Trade (Industry maybe) on Amarr or Dodixie. Or I might transfer one of the "finished" characters to account 1 or 5 and start training up a new character on account 2.

Continue training Int/Mem support skills on the exploration/scout/scanning character. Long term this character will continue following the Covert Ops line into Recon cruisers and eventually Black Ops battleships. At some point I'll get Tycoon V and Trade V on the Jita skill-book trader too.

Remap Lonetrek to Int/Mem and start training for Covert Ops. Yes Cov Ops is Per/Wil, but the prereqs and support skills needed to fly Cov Ops well are Int/Mem. Weapon skills don't matter, he's a trader not a fighter. Eventually get Tycoon V and Trade V on the Jita implants and mods trader too.

Train Tycoon V and Trade V on the Hek trader. After that train Cov Ops on Hek and train up trade skills on the new character. The new trader will probably eventually take over the Rens business so I can send the old Rens character out to help expand into new regions.

Wizardry Online

A while back I heard about a new game Wizardry Online, supposedly a hardcore dungeons and dragons style MMO. I downloaded it last week and rolled a couple characters but haven't really played it other than for an hour or two.

Wizardry is free to play though it has pay options too. The game has 5 races, 4 classes, 3 alignments, soul levels (account wide) and character levels. There's a class change with the option to carry over a few skills (your choice which) from your former class (multi-class).

Permanent death (aka perma-death) - Sounds scary but it's not nearly as bad as it sounds. Really you almost have to want it for it to happen. Even then it's not as bad as it sounds, you have to start a new character but assuming your soul level went up too, the new character will level much faster.

Bonus points - When you roll a new character you get a stat bonus points roll. The maximum bonus point roll is 70. Up to 10 bonus points can be put into each stat and there are 7 stats. Most rolls fall between 6 and 12 with a very small chance of anything higher. I rolled a 58 (took about 12 hours) and a 38 (another 3-4 hours). Bonus points make a big difference at low levels but as you level up stats even out. By the time you hit level 40 you'll have about the same stats as a character that started with a normal bonus roll of 12 or less. Each class has a primary and secondary stat, any bonus role of 20 or more will allow you to max both of them.

Most players seem to use an AutoHotKey script to get good bonus rolls. It doesn't seem to be considered cheating either, neither by the players nor by the developer so I used it too.

Here's the AHK auto-roller script


^d::
Loop {
;MouseClick, left,  281, 615, 5 ;(Race Selection) - >Human (M)
;MouseClick, left,  286, 655, 5 ;(Race Selection) - >Human (F)
MouseClick, left,  437, 617, 5 ;(Race Selection) - >Elf (M)
;MouseClick, left,  438, 654, 5 ;(Race Selection) - >Elf (F)
;MouseClick, left,  584, 617, 5 ;(Race Selection) - >Dwarf (M)
;MouseClick, left,  587, 657, 5 ;(Race Selection) - >Gnome (F)
;MouseClick, left,  737, 622, 5 ;(Race Selection) - >Porkul (M)
;MouseClick, left,  738, 657, 5 ;(Race Selection) - >Porkul (F)
Sleep, 200
MouseClick, left,  447, 723, 5
Sleep, 2550
PixelSearch, colorX, colorY, 490, 378, 502, 391, 0xFFFFFF
if !ErrorLevel
  break
MouseClick, left,  513, 416, 5
Sleep, 200
MouseClick, left,  575, 726, 5
Sleep, 200
}
return

^s::
Pause
return


Copy the above, paste it into an editor and save as *.ahk where * is whatever you want to name the script, Wizardry-Autoroller.ahk for example.

To configure the script there are 8 Race Selection lines, 7 commented out (with ; at the start of the line) and 1 active. Make sure there's a ; at the start of 7 of those lines. All of them except the one you want to roll.

Install AutoHotKey and start the script. Then start the game in 1024x768 resolution, go to the character  creation screen and hit CTRL-D to start rolling. The script will stop on any roll of 20 or higher. Hit CTRL-S to pause the script at any time and hit CTRL-S again to resume rolling. It could take hours before you get a good roll, it took me approximately 12 hours to get a 58, then another 3 or 4 hours to get a 38.

I suspect the script doesn't detect rolls of 60-70  but anything much over 20 is pretty good anyhow so it really doesn't matter.

Note RESOLUTION IS IMPORTANT, you must be in 1024x768 resolution or the script will not work properly. Other versions of the script for different resolutions can be found in this thread.

Market Blunders

It never ceases to amaze me the silly mistakes people make playing the market. This is a screenshot of sell orders.

What's wrong with this picture?

I hope for his sake that was a rookie who hasn't figured out how the market works or what a school system is yet. Otherwise he's not paying nearly enough attention to what he's doing. If so maybe next time ADD strikes he'll sell me something expensive by mistyping his next sell order with a few significant digits missing.

This one's a very minor mistake that won't cost the poster much but I see very costly mistakes frequently too. The worst (yes I've done it myself more than once) is mistyping a price and either paying way too much for something or selling something for way too little.

My own personal worst blunder was entering a few hundred buy orders in a rush while experiencing input lag and paying 2.04 BILLION for a couple implants instead of the 204 million (102 mil each) I wanted to pay for them.

I'm going to make this a semi regular feature, tagged as Blunders and start posting some of the more costly blunders people make.

Character Transfer - 6 accounts now

Last night (actually very early this morning) I spent 1.5 billion setting up another new account (number 6) and transferring one of my traders to it.

My Lonetrek and Hek traders are important to my business but they were on the same account and both have fairly long skill plans. They were on my 3rd account and lagging a couple months behind the traders of Amarr, Dodixie and Rens on account 2. Training them both up to where I want them (Trade skills + Cov Ops) while sharing a training queue would have taken several months and I didn't want to wait that long.

I decided to get the Lonetrek and Hek traders training faster. Since they were on the same account the best way to do that was to move one of them to a new account so they don't have to share the training queue anymore. With a buddy invite to myself I got a 21 day free trial and made a new toon on the account. I transferred 550 million to the new account, bought a plex for 520 million and activated the account with it. Then I hopped on the Hek trader bought 2 more plex, transferred them into the redeeming system and used the plex to transfer the character to the new account.

The account that sent the trial invite also received 30 days free game time (plex is not a reward option when the trial account is activated with a plex).

I'm still waiting for the transfer to go through but it should be done sometime today.


On another note, here's a link to an excellent Trade Theory post I found while browsing through my blog's traffic sources and wondering why I was getting all these referrals from Reddit. The post is very well worth reading. The author implies he'd only been trading for a month when he wrote it. If that's the case, he's picked things up very quickly including a lot of subtleties many traders don't get even after years.

It's kind of funny but Reddit is now my number 2 traffic source (right behind Greedy Goblin and just ahead of Google). The Reddit referrals come from links in just 2 posts there.

100 Billion

I hit 100 billion tonight It took almost a year to do it but I play pretty casually. As long as I'm making enough to plex all my accounts plus another 10 billion or so extra I'm satisfied. Lately it's only been taking 4 or 5 days (at 1-2 hours a day) to make that.

I figure if I spent 2 hours a day every day I'd make over 40 billion a month and that number would keep going up as I have more and more to invest every month until I hit the saturation point. Lately though, I haven't been spending much more than about half an hour at a time working the market.

Really the problem is it's so easy making ISK I'm getting bored with it. On the other hand the whole game is boring, I probably would have quit playing a few months back if it wasn't basically free to play because making ISK is so easy.

Insane bomber

I found this crazy youtube video featuring solo PvP in faction/deadspace fit Manticore bombers and Cerebus assault ships. For the first half of the video the pilot is flying a Manticore with a fit based around an oversized Corelum C-Type 10MN Afterburner. With speed implants he gets over 2700 m/s overheated (1900+ without heat), a tiny 39 m signature radius and over 500 DPS from 4k+ torpedo volleys.

Video link: New Era of Manticores

There are some insane fights in there like him taking on 7 or 8 Battlecruisers at once and not only winning but making it look easy.

The fit is expensive (around 750 million at current Jita prices) but it looks like an awful lot of fun. I may have to try it sometime.


[Manticore - Solo PvP Faction Fit]

Caldari Navy Ballistic Control System

Navy Micro Auxiliary Power Core

Small Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 150

Republic Fleet Warp Disruptor

Corelum C-Type 10MN Afterburner

Pithi C-Type Small Shield Booster

Dread Guristas Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Scourge Torpedo

Dread Guristas Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Scourge Torpedo

Dread Guristas Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Scourge Torpedo

Covert Ops Cloaking Device II

Shadow Serpentis Small Plasma Smartbomb

Small Ancillary Current Router II

Small Ancillary Current Router II

Low-grade Snake Alpha

Low-grade Snake Beta

Low-grade Snake Gamma

Low-grade Snake Delta

Low-grade Snake Epsilon

Low-grade Snake Omega

Zor's Custom Navigation Link

Eifyr and Co. 'Rogue' Fuel Conservation FC-805

Zainou 'Deadeye' Rapid Launch RL-1005

Off Topic - UFC 156

I'm a big MMA fan. I've been watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) since UFC 1 when it was an unsanctioned tournament with the likes of Royce Gracie and Dan Severn.

UFC 156 was one of the better cards in a while. There were some good matchups on the card, Maia vs Fitch for example (Fitch got out-Fitched), but what really made the card great for me was watching 3 guys I can't stand lose to 3 guys I like.

1. Antonio (Bigfoot) Silva KOed Alistair (Overroid) Overreem.

This one could not have turned out better. It was great watching the overrated, overconfident, cheating substance abuser Overroid get his block knocked off. Especially after all of Overroid's trash talk before the fight.

I figured Overroid would win this one but I thought Bigfoot had a lot better chance than most were giving him and he pulled it off. Bigfoot's not the most skilled heavyweight and he's a nice guy (probably a little too nice) but he's still big, tough and has a heart to match. Nice guys do finish first sometimes, especially when the bad guy disrespects them. It was a huge mistake on Roid's part running his mouth like that, Bigfoot got mad and really wanted to hurt his opponent for a change.

I really liked how Silva's corner called it between the 2nd and 3rd rounds. They told Bigfoot, he's tired now, open up with your hands and knock him out. He went out and did exactly that.

2. Little Nog decisioned Rashad Evans.

I never expected Little Nog to win this one. It was a surprise and a big upset but it sure was nice to see. Rashad is one of the phoniest, most conceited shitheads in all of MMA. I just can't stand the guy. Little Nog made Evans eat the jab all night long, stopped the takedowns and cruised to an easy win. Good job!

0 for 2 for the "Blackzillians" on the night. Gotta love it!

3. Jose Aldo decisioned Frankie Edgar.

Awesome! I expected Aldo to win this one but I was worried we might see incompetent judges reward Frankie with yet another undeserved win for his dance routine. AFAIC Edgar's never been a true champion, he doesn't win many fights outright, he runs away and outpoints the other guy in the dance competition. Too bad for Frankie running away doesn't work so well when the other guy is as fast as you are.

Frankie's face was a mess by the end of the fight and he took a few nasty leg kicks too but Jose while maybe a little tired was unhurt. A clear win.

Jose's a class act, besides being one of the very best regardless of size he respects his opponents and always shows up to fight, not dance.