After talking with more than a dozen pilots that have been in W-space for 3 months or more, it is interesting to see a trend developing, whereby more than half of them are either out of W-space already or plan to exit W-space within the next 2 weeks.
Most cite the fact that their previously juicy recurring static exits are simply populated and farmed out, which means they find themselves going for days (or in some cases weeks) without much to do, having farmed out their local system.
The others simply fall into my own line of experience, where the constant commitment to maintaining the W-space POS, even with a good small team, becomes a little too demanding of their time and they find themselves in need of scaling back.
Regardless, it can certainly be said that W-Space remains lucrative, if not demanding. And, choice of system is by far the most important element of longer-term colonization.
Also noteworthy is that the bulk of this feedback is coming from C1 - C3 dwellers. The handful of C4 - C6 dwellers I know are quite happy and content with their operations, which I attribute to (a) larger corp presence with less demands on time, e.g. sharing the load and (b) less populated adjoining statics, which means a good consistent supply of sites.
Anyone else have some thoughts?
(edit: Additions below based on comments):
It appears that a key driver for many that are primarily mining as their key source of income have the added downside of the mineral price issues, with typically high-end ores yielding less than low-end ores. Mining always was a tough way to earn a buck...
A great post by Kename Fin at Our EVE, and I have added this blog to the list - glad you posted Kename, nice blog! (And I saw your Dark Star reference - one of my long-time cult favorites. Can you say "Bomb, this is Lt. Doolittle. You are *not* to detonate in the bomb bay. I repeat, you are NOT to detonate in the bomb bay!")
And here Minuit adds some reflection on Time Demands in WH Space. Good post!
Fly Safe!
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Star Defender's WTB List
OK, per the recent post, I will be maintaining this page to identify what I need in terms of production inventory, in case there are fellow pilots out there looking to earn a slightly better yield than Jita prices at more convenient drop points.
Updated: February 28, 2010
WTB:
Eve-Mail me @ Star Defender to contract.
Fly Safe
Updated: February 28, 2010
WTB:
- 0 Melted Nanoribbons (minimum contract 30)
- 0 Carbon-86 Epoxy Resin (minimum contract 100)
- 0 Scandium Metallofullerene (minimum contract 100)
Eve-Mail me @ Star Defender to contract.
Fly Safe
I want your Melted Nanoribbons
OK, In less than 24 hours I have burned through my stock of 400 MNRs.
That means that I am ready to extend the offer I previously convo'd to many of my fellow W-Space dwellers that I am prepared to offer a premium over daily Jita prices for materials, such as MNR's.
Why? Well, I hate waiting for (and managing) market buy orders to fill and think that there is a mutually-beneficial solution here for trusted partners. I get to maintain an inventory with direct suppliers and the suppliers get two things: (1) a premium over standing buy orders in Jita and (2) option to drop the loot at convenient (to both of us) system locations, meaning not necessarily the growingly treacherous Jita run.
For example, as I type, the current standing Jita buy order for MNR's is 5,110,408. If you contacted me for an MNR offload today, I would offer 5,300,000. I will probably settle on a fixed premium over Jita buy orders somewhere between 3-5%. If your current exit is 20 jumps from Jita, we will mutually agree upon a good system for you to put up a personal contract for the loot.
Obviously this does not apply to those of you with the patience and cashflow to post Sell Orders at higher yields, but in my experience it was never worth it to invest the time in constant market order manipulation to eek out an extra 2% margin and as a result I would always take the quick and easy market sell.
As my other stocks diminish, I will maintain this page that will specifically identify what I need, when, and how much.
Hope you are all having a good time in W-Space and may your spawns be frequent and lucrative!
Fly Safe!
That means that I am ready to extend the offer I previously convo'd to many of my fellow W-Space dwellers that I am prepared to offer a premium over daily Jita prices for materials, such as MNR's.
Why? Well, I hate waiting for (and managing) market buy orders to fill and think that there is a mutually-beneficial solution here for trusted partners. I get to maintain an inventory with direct suppliers and the suppliers get two things: (1) a premium over standing buy orders in Jita and (2) option to drop the loot at convenient (to both of us) system locations, meaning not necessarily the growingly treacherous Jita run.
For example, as I type, the current standing Jita buy order for MNR's is 5,110,408. If you contacted me for an MNR offload today, I would offer 5,300,000. I will probably settle on a fixed premium over Jita buy orders somewhere between 3-5%. If your current exit is 20 jumps from Jita, we will mutually agree upon a good system for you to put up a personal contract for the loot.
Obviously this does not apply to those of you with the patience and cashflow to post Sell Orders at higher yields, but in my experience it was never worth it to invest the time in constant market order manipulation to eek out an extra 2% margin and as a result I would always take the quick and easy market sell.
As my other stocks diminish, I will maintain this page that will specifically identify what I need, when, and how much.
Hope you are all having a good time in W-Space and may your spawns be frequent and lucrative!
Fly Safe!
Thursday, February 25, 2010
T3 Production Resumes! (In High-Sec)
Huh?
OK, I am back in the proverbial saddle!
The interesting angle here is that I am continuing with T3 production, but NOT in W-space. I have setup a Large hardened POS in HighSec for Reverse Engineering, Component and Subsystem construction.
Why?
Well because it is easier to run my productions from a HighSec POS than a C1 W-Space first off, and with my only real concern being an expensive (on their part) war-dec, I would not lose all that much if it were to fall - I will only be maintaining the bare essentials in the POS, and with my standings and skills with a nearby faction starbase, I do not even have to move my BPOs into the POS for any other Research or Manufacturing.
Comparatively, if I was managing my complete T3 production chain in W-space, literally everything is at risk and W-space POS maintenance is a hassle. That is, of course if you have sufficient standings to put up a HighSec POS, which based on my prior missioning was not a problem.
I will continue to make trips into W-Space, including the occasional Medium POS deployment if I stumble upon a packed system and want to camp there for a while, but essentially my experience has netted a decision to no longer maintain a persistent POS home in W-space.
The only thing I cannot do from my HighSec POS in terms of T3 production is the Hybrid Reactions. However, I reacted enough materials whilst in W-space to last about 10 years - the only market runs I need now are for the Carbon-86 and C3-FTM Acid elements, which I never reacted previously because those source gases do no occur in C3 or less W-space.
So, the story continues, albeit not consisting solely of W-Space!
Fly Safe!
OK, I am back in the proverbial saddle!
The interesting angle here is that I am continuing with T3 production, but NOT in W-space. I have setup a Large hardened POS in HighSec for Reverse Engineering, Component and Subsystem construction.
Why?
Well because it is easier to run my productions from a HighSec POS than a C1 W-Space first off, and with my only real concern being an expensive (on their part) war-dec, I would not lose all that much if it were to fall - I will only be maintaining the bare essentials in the POS, and with my standings and skills with a nearby faction starbase, I do not even have to move my BPOs into the POS for any other Research or Manufacturing.
Comparatively, if I was managing my complete T3 production chain in W-space, literally everything is at risk and W-space POS maintenance is a hassle. That is, of course if you have sufficient standings to put up a HighSec POS, which based on my prior missioning was not a problem.
I will continue to make trips into W-Space, including the occasional Medium POS deployment if I stumble upon a packed system and want to camp there for a while, but essentially my experience has netted a decision to no longer maintain a persistent POS home in W-space.
The only thing I cannot do from my HighSec POS in terms of T3 production is the Hybrid Reactions. However, I reacted enough materials whilst in W-space to last about 10 years - the only market runs I need now are for the Carbon-86 and C3-FTM Acid elements, which I never reacted previously because those source gases do no occur in C3 or less W-space.
So, the story continues, albeit not consisting solely of W-Space!
Fly Safe!
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Red Frog Freight Service
I had heard of Red Frog Freight Service nearly a year ago from another pilot that was using the service for POS refueling and consolidation of their corp hangars. So, since I had recently pulled out of Wspace and my entire POS portfolio was (albeit in a single location) far away from my desired base of operations, I decided to look up Red Frog and get a better idea of how it worked and what the freight services would cost.
Much to my surprise, it was dirt-cheap and nearly instantaneous. I had more than 3 Billion ISK worth of POS fittings, ships, fuel, supplies, and loot that I wanted to relocate 26 jumps to my "permanent" base in Lonetrek.
With a max m3 of 860,000 m3 per contract and a max collateral of 1B ISK, this actually worked out perfectly divided into 3 separate contracts. The process was pretty simple - divide up the ships and cargo to no more than 860,000 m3 per batch and then create a courier contract for each batch.
I had a couple of "comfort" questions I posted to their channel in terms of how the process worked, but within 36 hours, all 3 contracts were completed and the total cost to move this immense amount of equipment was....wait for it...less than 29M ISK. Yes, for under 30M ISK, I saved myself roughly 47 52-jump round-trip efforts in max-rigged Iteron V. That spells more than 2,400 total jumps that I did not have to grind, nor sweat out the prospect of HighSec ganking considering the cargo value.
To say that I found this service invaluable would be a gross understatement. I actually ended up tipping the three pilots that completed the contracts an additional 10M ISK per pilot just because I though the value was so high and the cost was so low.
As I mentioned above, they also offer HighSec POS Refueling contracts - something I will be considering heavily in the coming weeks.
Hats-off to Red Frog Freight Service, their great service, and impeccable results (success rate at 99.9%).
Fly Safe!♦
Much to my surprise, it was dirt-cheap and nearly instantaneous. I had more than 3 Billion ISK worth of POS fittings, ships, fuel, supplies, and loot that I wanted to relocate 26 jumps to my "permanent" base in Lonetrek.
With a max m3 of 860,000 m3 per contract and a max collateral of 1B ISK, this actually worked out perfectly divided into 3 separate contracts. The process was pretty simple - divide up the ships and cargo to no more than 860,000 m3 per batch and then create a courier contract for each batch.
I had a couple of "comfort" questions I posted to their channel in terms of how the process worked, but within 36 hours, all 3 contracts were completed and the total cost to move this immense amount of equipment was....wait for it...less than 29M ISK. Yes, for under 30M ISK, I saved myself roughly 47 52-jump round-trip efforts in max-rigged Iteron V. That spells more than 2,400 total jumps that I did not have to grind, nor sweat out the prospect of HighSec ganking considering the cargo value.
To say that I found this service invaluable would be a gross understatement. I actually ended up tipping the three pilots that completed the contracts an additional 10M ISK per pilot just because I though the value was so high and the cost was so low.
As I mentioned above, they also offer HighSec POS Refueling contracts - something I will be considering heavily in the coming weeks.
Hats-off to Red Frog Freight Service, their great service, and impeccable results (success rate at 99.9%).
Fly Safe!♦
Monday, February 1, 2010
More love bestowed on my Viator
OK, so the last station to clear out was in Dal, which is a LowSec system next door to the border system of Anamake - a notoriously rough place to be in an industrial...
With some heavy tonnage worth of goods (all sorts of POS fittings, most each in excess of 4,000m3), this was not a job for the Helios. However, my base was nearly 16 jumps away, and I did not want to run 11 full round-trips. So, I devised a plan whereby I parked my two Itty 5's in HighSec just outside of the border to LowSec, then sent my Viator in for the relatively short 4 trips each way to essentially ferry out the expensive goods.
So, although there were camps in both Anamake and Dal, I made 11 round trips, through both camps coming and going each trip, and got all of the goods out to HighSec. Once there, I simply loaded it all up in the Itty's and the main and alt transported it all back to my staging system.
FYI - I had scouted the 2 gate camps and was relatively confident that they were not fitting smart bombs, which essentially allowed me to go ahead and proceed with the Viator plan.
Like I said in an earlier post - I am beginning to enjoy my Viator - all the benefits of a Covops, but with an actual cargohold.
Fly Safe!
With some heavy tonnage worth of goods (all sorts of POS fittings, most each in excess of 4,000m3), this was not a job for the Helios. However, my base was nearly 16 jumps away, and I did not want to run 11 full round-trips. So, I devised a plan whereby I parked my two Itty 5's in HighSec just outside of the border to LowSec, then sent my Viator in for the relatively short 4 trips each way to essentially ferry out the expensive goods.
So, although there were camps in both Anamake and Dal, I made 11 round trips, through both camps coming and going each trip, and got all of the goods out to HighSec. Once there, I simply loaded it all up in the Itty's and the main and alt transported it all back to my staging system.
FYI - I had scouted the 2 gate camps and was relatively confident that they were not fitting smart bombs, which essentially allowed me to go ahead and proceed with the Viator plan.
Like I said in an earlier post - I am beginning to enjoy my Viator - all the benefits of a Covops, but with an actual cargohold.
Fly Safe!
Google Analytics Stats
Wensley at Rifter Drifter recently posted his Google Stats, which drove me to check my stats for the first time in over a year! Very interesting to see your traffic distribution, sources of traffic, etc. As such, here is a quick recap and at the bottom, my thoughts...
January GA Stats:
General:
Thoughts:
January GA Stats:
General:
- 49,486 Views on 21,247 Unique Visitors
- 40.82% new visitors in January
- Avg Time on site is 2:51
- 40% US
- 11% UK
- 9% Canada
- 6% Germany
- 5% Aussies
- 2.7% Netherlands
- 2% each for Sweden, Denmark, France, Poland
- ...then 77 other countries under 1%
- Iceland (CCP!) at 0.33%
- 65% Search Engines - Nearly all Google, where are Yahoo! (.03%) and Bing! (0%)?
- Top keywords were all about "eve wormhole" and close variants combined at 17% of searches, the rest being names of sleeper sites
- 19% Direct Traffic
- 16% Referring Sites - Facebook (6%), scrapheap-challenge.com (2.65%), crazykinux (1.96%), Mynxee/lifeinlowsec.blogspot.com (1%), long list of others at under 1%.
- Root/Home Page (25.59%)
- The demands of W-Space Colonization (4%)
- EVE Grids and WH Exit management (2.38%)
- Hybrid Polymer Reactions (1.66%)
- Root/Home Page (27.91%)
- Wormhole System Daily Ritual (2.24%)
- Living in WH Space (My very first post still sees the most traffic!) (2.18%)
Thoughts:
- Interesting to see that the traffic is so dispersed across all posts - a lot of visitors appear to read through all the posts - nearly as many views of prior months posts as current-month posts.
- Hardly any referring traffic. I have not jumped on the EVE Tweet bandwagon, nor have I campaigned for any kind of premium links from others - just interesting to note that other than Kinux, not a ton of referring traffic.
- Shocks me that my first-ever post on this blog, from June 25th 2009, still gets some of the highest pageviews of all of my (currently 121) posts.
- The most-read post ever? The first-ever post, but excluding that, it is the post on EVE Grids and WH Exit management. I suppose that is not too surprising, considering it generated a whopping 22 comments, all of which were good posts instead of one-liners...
- Most commented post? A recent one: Blockade Runner Transports == WIN with 23 comments.
Consolidation
Similar to the last time I stepped out of WSpace for a short stint, it provides an opportunity to go round-up salvage and other materials that were dropped off at K-space exit points over the course of the last several months.
Typically, these drops take place because I have always maintained the belief that you should never store billions of ISK worth of loot in your W-space POS. In cases where there was not a convenient path to market or simply did not have the time, I had about a dozen locations that needed to be consolidated.
So, I spent some time over the weekend while reading up on global news to fly my Viator and Itty 5 around EVE to get everything back to my new staging base. Mission accomplished - amazing to see what you end up stockpiling. I have over 300 Melted Nano's and datacores in the thousands. Plenty of goods for reverse engineering and T3 production.
I had also amassed an amazing amount of W-space gases that there was frankly no need to react into component materials - I have enough component materials to last to the next ice age and will likely be selling off my hybrid reactions setup. That leaves a LOT of C-70/72/60/84 gas that I will likely take directly to market.
I have been enjoying the reports from the D-GTMI front - I especially enjoyed Manasi's posts and pictures.
Fly Safe!
Typically, these drops take place because I have always maintained the belief that you should never store billions of ISK worth of loot in your W-space POS. In cases where there was not a convenient path to market or simply did not have the time, I had about a dozen locations that needed to be consolidated.
So, I spent some time over the weekend while reading up on global news to fly my Viator and Itty 5 around EVE to get everything back to my new staging base. Mission accomplished - amazing to see what you end up stockpiling. I have over 300 Melted Nano's and datacores in the thousands. Plenty of goods for reverse engineering and T3 production.
I had also amassed an amazing amount of W-space gases that there was frankly no need to react into component materials - I have enough component materials to last to the next ice age and will likely be selling off my hybrid reactions setup. That leaves a LOT of C-70/72/60/84 gas that I will likely take directly to market.
I have been enjoying the reports from the D-GTMI front - I especially enjoyed Manasi's posts and pictures.
Fly Safe!
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