Changes.....again.

Yeah, I know. I’m perhaps the most wishy-washy person in Eve. Well, probably not the worst, but with current happenings, I could be trying to compete.

Basically, as those who read my writings know, my corp left Systematic Chaos and joined up with En Garde. I’ll say now that En Garde is basically a testing ground for eventual corp acceptance into Against All Authorities [-A-]. Although I was excited about the possibilities this represented, I did a lot of deep thinking this past weekend and realized, what’s the beauty of being in a corp whose becoming a part of -A- when your own corp probably doesn’t fully trust you. And why should they? I’m rarely on when most of them are (that being mostly weekends) and rarely available when CTAs are taking place. They have corp roams quite often as well, but again, it’s usually before I’m home from work. And with that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them just see me as a name on their roster, who appears to be rarely around. Thus I made the final decision to just pack my bags and find more fertile grounds for me to grow.

Ironically, in helping my roommate get his feet wet in Eve, as well as helping him decide whether Valor would be a good corp to join or not, it ended up helping me as well. My roommate has been telling me a lot of good things about the guys in his corp and working hard to persuade me to join them. And finally, after having a chat with both their industrial director as well as their CEO, I gave in and made the decision to put in my app and give them a go. I won’t have to miss out on my nullsec candy as they have ops constantly going on in 0.0 (for security reasons I won’t state where) as well as high sec operations. This will currently mean not being a part of the gigantic fleet battles I’m so affixiated with, but then hell, how many was I actually able to be a part of with my current corp? Also I think they would be a lot more helpful for me to nuture and fully develop my industrial associate.

So yeah. This past weekend was spent pulling my ships out of Catch and now all I have left to do is get my jump clones out as well. (and before someone suggests it, my jumpclones have some rather expensive implants in them that I’d really rather not lose)

Speaking of the associate, I have to say he’s actually doing really well. I mean already he’s made over a billion isk and with a little help from me, he was able to buy a freighter, the Providence, this past week without having to spend any of his own income. Reason for his success is that he found one of the little niche’s in the market that so many speak of and has really been taking flight with it. And the best part is, he doesn’t actually have to leave station in order to manage it all. However, to get the highest returns, he does undock quite regularly in order to move the goods to a more convenient location for the buyers. And this is where the freighter will come in handy as he’s now able to move more volume and thus expand to a larger scaled operation.

It really has amazed me how much isk a trader can generate just to provide convenience for consumers. I mean, I’m not going to deny it was difficult at first to allow myself to invest much isk into his operations, without the solid assurance that I could get a return on it, but in the end, it proved to be much better than I’d even imagined. There are still a few things I’m a bit hesitant about, but slowly I’m becoming more trusting in doing so. Currently, between myself and my associate, the total for our accounts is sitting at a cool 900 million in liquid isk, with about another 6 or 700 million in various trade investments. To the big industrialists, this isn’t much. But to me, given I went from my associate being mostly inactive since I first hired him and then actually making moves in like the past month, a billion isk in a month is not bad at all. And that is excluding getting the isk acquired for purchasing the freighter and thus the ability to really increase his operations. And soon, he will be able to begin production on his own stuff (after having collected hundreds of researched BPOs and BPCs from the contract market) I’m just waiting for him to get production efficiency to 5 before he begins actual production, in order to build things with the highest return rate after material investment.

This is something many new industrialists probably don’t grasp from the beginning. When building stuff, it is best to have production efficiency to at least lvl 4. I did the research and double checked the numbers and, at least from what I’m seeing, if you’re not mining your own materials, it appears you really can’t break even on manufactured items until you’ve reached lvl 3. To forgo getting lvl 5 in that skill simply because it takes so long to get is just wasting minerals as the difference is really quite significant. Eventually, I’ll also have my associate mining his own minerals so that I can decrease the up-front costs as well, but for now, getting that skill to 5 has become top priority. So current time standing: 19 days.

God I hate those long skills.