Expanding Your Empire

I have given a lot of thought lately as to why I experienced such amazing profits relative to my liquid capital when I first started trading and how poorly those profits scaled with an increase in capital.  The principal seems sound: what I can do with 100 mil, I should be able to do twice as well with 200 mil.  Why was this seemingly extremely simple concept not translating from a sound idea on paper into a working theory in EVE?  I began to look at exactly what I had been doing to increase my involvement in the market as I grew in wealth and how I could change that to increase my profits and I believe I have figured it out.

Previously, the way I had increased my stake in the market was to increase my investing in a blanket fashion.  Whereas before, I might have been investing 10 mil an item into 10 items, I was now investing 20 mil an item into 10 items.  This pattern continued with slight variations; although I did invest in more items, I continuously put more ISK into the amount I was investing per item as my wealth increased.

That is the reason my profits were increasing at a snail's pace: the correct way to grow as a trader is not to increase amount invested per item, but rather amount of items invested in.

Had I gone from investing 10 mil an item into 10 items to 10 mil an item into 20 items, my profits would have approached, if not achieved, a level twice as high as they previously had been.  The reasoning behind this is simple, once you think about it: if it takes an hour to move 10 units of X at a profit of 1 mil/unit, and I have invested enough ISK to purchase 10 units of X, I should make 10 mil ISK/hour off of X.  If I invest enough ISK to purchase 20 units of X, I should still make 10 mil ISK/hour, but this time for 2 hours.  However, if I invest in 10 units of X and 10 units of a near-identical item Y, I should make 20 mil ISK/hour, 10 from X and 10 from Y.

Though it seems as though investing in double the amount of an item and then going twice as long between updating orders is a sound idea, you have to consider that the real world is not the perfect example I included above, and in reality, there are other people like you, sitting in a station, spinning their ship, and updating their orders to stay on top.  When you invest in an item, you are much more likely to be undercut than you are to have your order completely filled.  Each order I place on the market is generally undercut at least 10 times before being fulfilled completely.  By investing in more items, in addition to having the chance to make more ISK per time, you also have the opportunity to avoid being undercut; if you are trading in item X and you are undercut, you immediately lose the ability to profit, whereas if you are trading in X, Y, and Z, and X is undercut, you continue to profit off of Y and Z.

I have been practicing this method of expansion very stringently the past few days, but today I kicked it into overdrive, and the results were very satisfying.  Today alone, I went from about 2.65 bil to 2.85 bil, a profit of about 200 million ISK.  That's a return of about 7.5%, which isn't bad for one day's investing.  However, this practice comes with a price: with my skills, I have a maximum of 113 orders on the market at any given time.  For the majority of my trading today, I did not have more than 20 remaining orders available to me.  This level of expansion means that in the near future, I may be required to train up my skills in order to be able to make more market orders (or make another market alt to put in a different hub, or both).

All I know is, since beginning to use this strategy, I've noticed definite increases in my profits, so unless something changes in the future or I discover a better method, this is the method I will continue to use as I grow my empire, and it is the method I will recommend to others in their expansion as well.  Good luck increasing the size of your empire and fly safe o7

Of Code and ISK Part II: I Just Wanna Tend the Coffers

After my last post, Of Code and ISK, I received some feedback indicating that although I accomplished what I had in mind, I could have done so much more.  For those of you who don't feel like reading my other post, I assembled a sequence of programs that would allow me to scan the entire market of a station, export all orders to a CSV file, read those orders, perform some analytics, and spit out a list of items that would be profitable to trade.  The downside to this method was that it would take a matter of hours to scan the entire market of a station.

Some of the comments I received led me to the EMDR, or EVE Market Data Relay.  I had been adverse to using this tool previously fearing many a spoofed order or inaccurate data, not to mention difficulty implementing it into my code.

I was so wrong.

I spent a few hours today tweaking my code and have managed to truncate my entire line of software to an HTML file and two Python files (one of which does nothing more than host a local HTTP server to make accessing the HTML file easier).  All I have to do is run both Python files, navigate to my server in the IGB, and refresh the view once in a while to see the latest data on my screen.

For the webpage, I took advantage of the fact that the IGB supports HTML5 by using a button that runs a XMLHttpRequest function to pull my file into a table I have in the page.  This table uses the jQuery Tablesorter to keep everything organized, allowing me to easily read and interpret the data.

I have to say, I am very impressed with how easy to use EMDR was and how much nicer this is compared to my previous method.  I will include some samples of my code to make life a little easier for those of you who wish to make something similar.  This is the Javascript code to parse a file (outputhtml.txt) which is stored in the same directory as index.html and set the contents of the div with id='main' to the contents of the file.

 function doStuff () {

            var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();

            oReq.onload = reqListener;

            oReq.open("get", "outputhtml.txt", true);

            oReq.send(); 

        };

        

function reqListener () {

            document.getElementById('main').innerHTML = this.responseText;

        };

If you wish to use EMDR in your Python program, check out the data format guide so you know what you're dealing with.  In case their example didn't make it clear, you're going to be dealing with a series of dictionaries.  In the case of orders, each dictionary will have a key ('rowsets') which contains an array of dictionaries, each of a different item or region.  Simply configure your calculations and have the program output your results to a text file.  Be sure to format them properly in HTML for easy importation into your webpage.  I will also include a method for outputting your data in HTML while linking the name of each item to its market details:

<a href='javascript:void(0)' onclick='CCPEVE.showMarketDetails("+str(itemid)+")'>"+ rec.name+ "</a>"

Finally, a screenshot of my site.  It's nice, clean, and simple, and can be sorted by any column.

And with that, feel free to ask any questions you may have and I will do my best to answer them.  Thanks for reading and fly safe o7 

Of Code and ISK

One of the great things about EVE Online is that a very large portion of the people who play it work in the field of IT.  This results in a huge amount of third party tools (EVEMon, EVE Mentat, Elinor, EVE-Central, most alliance's websites, and the list goes on and on...) as well as a great deal of support for developer's from CCP's end.  The possibilities are nigh endless in terms of the applications that can be developed with some code know-how, some hard work, plenty of Googling, and a vision.

It all starts with an idea.  As most of my readers will know, one of my favorite/main activities in EVE is station trading, which is where I make much of my ISK (and try to put in as little effort as possible).  However, when it comes to the things I've tried coding to make station trading more profitable, I've put in many hours of effort, but I dare say that sometimes, I've enjoyed them more than EVE (looking at you, siege fleets).  One of the most difficult parts of station trading is deciding which items you'll be trading to turn a profit.  A lot of factors must be considered when making the decision, such as the stability of the item, the volume traded, the profit margin, the cost, etc.  The end result is that although a profitable item is not hard to find, one that will give consistent and high returns can be.  Then it hit me: why don't I make a program that will tell me what items offer the highest margins and meet my criteria for items that I want to trade?

I'm no code genius, but I have limited experience in web design (HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript/jQuery), as well as software development (Python and some C#).  My original plan was to design my program in a way that allowed the entire thing to be operated from the IGB in EVE.  The program would first scan the market (every item) to put them in the cache, then scrape the cache, calculate the margin for each item, filter the items through some criteria, and finally output the results to a web page that would be readable in the IGB.  My hopes were dashed as I quickly found that such a system would be much more trouble than it is worth.

To begin with, I needed a webpage that I could load in the IGB that would scan the market to load every item into the cache.  Rather than start from scratch, I butchered my code from the order scanner page of masterpiece of EVE market software known as EVE Mentat.  Using that as a starting point, I now had an HTML page that would open the market details for every item in my list.  To make life easier, I set up a simple HTTP server with this script (courtesy of stackoverflow).  Simply save that as a .py file in the same directory as your HTML file (which you should name index.html) and run it.  You can access the file by going to 127.0.0.1:8000 in the IGB.

Now I found myself with a webpage capable of scanning the market, but no item IDs for which to scan.  I downloaded a data dump (which was from Incarna, so I'm probably missing some items but they shouldn't be too big of a deal) from the EVE forums here and through the magic of MySQL pulled out a list of every item in the database which exists on the market (some items can't be purchased on the market, but a quick Google search taught me how to select only those that can be).  This data was placed in the HTML page I had made earlier and when I ran it, it worked!  However, the import turned up over 6000 items, meaning that with a 3 second interval (the minimum I'd need to use to avoid going over the maximum number of market requests I could make, which would make the script continue to run without actually pulling more data), it would take hours upon hours to scan the market.  I solved this by just letting it run while I slept.

At this stage, I was left with the market data for (almost) every item on the market in my cache.  What to do from here?  I used the dumper tool from EVE-Central to scrape the cache and export the market orders for every item into one CSV file.  This process unsurprisingly took quite a while.  However, it also meant that much of the hard part was done, as Python was undoubtedly my strongest language of all those I had used so far, and all that remained was to use it to process the data into a user-friendly format.  Some quick code calculations yielded a script which analyzed the orders for every item, threw out those with no data or those with only one type (buy or sell) of order, calculated the % profit margin for each item (taking my skills into account), and threw away any item with less than 30 mil worth of potential profit currently on the market.  Entity's Reverence library provided me with the means to pull the names for the items from their item IDs.  The results were exported to another HTML file in the form of a table, which using some jQuery magic, gave me the ability to sort the data by column.  I included columns for volume and margin, so I could play with the data as I wished.  I also made each item's name into a link that would open the market data for that item, to make checking on/trading desirable items easier.

I am fairly happy with the end result, and it's not hard to see why; I now have an easy to use table that contains data on most of the items worth station trading.  I only actually went through the list for a few minutes, but in those few minutes I found at least two new items to invest in with profit margins in the thousands of percents that looked very promising.

For the time being, I do not think I will be releasing this file.  Though I love helping the community, which gives me indirect competition, I have never released any of the items I am trading in because I would like to avoid directly competing with my readers as much as possible.  Releasing this file to the masses would make my life absolute hell whenever I try to station trade.  However, I spent about two days making this program, and I did not have available to me (most of) a step by step guide on how to do so.  Anyone with a simple background in code or the ability to Google should be able to recreate a lot of what I've done here simply based on reading the above guide.  Though I probably shouldn't, I have a soft spot for helping people out, so if you have any questions, leave a comment or PM me on reddit (/u/toxicity959) and I will see if I can help you work through whatever problems you may have encountered.

Thanks for reading my blog and keep on developing!  Fly safe o7

Noob Friendly ISK Through Hauling

UPDATE:  It seems that some of my information was outdated; these inconsistencies have been fixed.

One of the hardest things for a new player to do is start making good ISK.  Generally, big income methods (level 4 missions, wormholes, nullsec, station trading etc.) require significant investment capital or skills.  However, new players are still left with a wide variety of options for instant gratification which require very little capital and skill training time before they can be put into action.  One such method is hauling, the process of bringing goods from one station to another where they will sell for a larger amount of ISK.  Specifically, this method involves finding sell orders for an item in one region that are lower than the highest buy order for the same item in another region.  It sounds easy on paper, but how does a new pilot go about doing this?

The Ship

Every new pilot starts out with their racial frigate skill already trained to level II (for example, a new Amarr pilot will have Amarr Frigate II).  The requirement to train the racial industrial skill is racial frigate level III, which is not a terribly long skill in the grand scheme of things (training can be complete in less than a day).  However, each race's industrials are different, and depending on the amount of time invested in hauling, it might be worth it to train for a different faction's industrial.  For the average pilot, training your race's industrial skill should suffice.  However, pilots that intend to pursue hauling as a career path should consider training Amarr Industrial for the Bestower, the largest cargo ship.  Remember that the higher you train the Amarr Industrial skill, the larger your cargo capacity and max velocity will be.  (Note: After training an industrial skill to level III, one can train for a race's freighter, which has a much larger cargo capacity than the T1 industrials.  However, other prerequisites take quite a while to train, and they are beyond the scope of this guide.)

Once a pilot has chosen their ship, it is a good idea to fit it.  If more cargo space is necessary, Cargo Expanders can be fit to increase the size of the ship's cargo bay.  You should not fit more cargo expanders than you need; once you have enough space to carry all of your cargo, Intertial Stabilizers should be fit to decrease the align time of your ship.

WARNING: Do not fly with too much ISK in your cargohold; there are people out there who are willing to sacrifice themselves to Concord to blow up your ship and steal your loot.  My general rule is to stay below 100 mil at a time when flying a T1 industrial.  You have been warned.

The Route

Figuring out the route you should take to make ISK sounds like it could be the hardest part of all this, but in fact, it turns out to be one of the easiest.  There are multiple tools available that enable you to find profitable routes by analyzing the markets in different regions.

If you don't mind doing it by hand, you could take a look at the Jitanomic website and try to find items that are being bought in one region at a higher price than they are being sold in another region.  This data is usually fairly accurate, but the process of figuring out profitable routes can be tedious due to the sheer amount of market data available to you.

An easier way would be to use EVE-Central's Trade Finder, which allows you to simply input two systems and will display all items that would turn a profit if bought in the starting system and sold in the destination system.  Keep in mind that there are a finite number of orders on the market, and this number can be greater in one system than another; if you see 5 entries for an item where each entry is for a quantity of only 1 item, it's likely that the orders available will limit you to making profit off of only 1 item.

There you have it!  Find your route, load up your ship, and take off!  Just remember that double checking the data can't hurt, as it'll help you avoid jumping on deals that have already been exploited by another player.  If you have requests for future guides, please leave me a comment or PM me on reddit! (/u/toxicity959) Fly safe o7

Getting Resituated

Damn, it's been a long time.  After taking quite the break, I'm pleased to be back to New Eden.  There is much to be done to get myself back in the game.  All of my orders have obviously run out, so I've got to choose and invest in maybe 50 items, preferably ones I haven't used before, to get the ISK flowing again.  Though that'll only take me an hour or two, I am put off by the prospect of such a menial task, and have been procrastinating it since resubbing.

I've got my two main pilots back in their nullsec corp, and it's high time I deploy my PVP pilot and get in some kickass fleets.  It's been too long since the last time I've been bored out of my mind jumping gate to gate looking for action.  It's also been too long since the last time I've taken part in a large fleet encounter, and I have to say I kind of miss it.  Though it doesn't provide the same adrenaline rush as solo PVP does, it's still a lot of fun melting targets in a fleet, probably mostly because of just how quickly they go down.  It helps that my PVP pilot has got a name that isn't too close to either end of the alphabet, so I'm not usually primaried in large engagements.

Soon enough I'll be spending all my ISK on shiny new doctrine ships, trading fire with reds, shooting some structures (woooo), running some more sanctums, and hopefully watching my wallet grow.

I also hope to be doing a lot more posting on this blog/making videos on my YouTube channel.  EVE is a place where you never really know everything there is to know, and my goal is to help new (and veteran) EVE players keep learning.  If there's anything you guys would like me to make a blog post or video about, leave me a comment here or shoot me a PM on reddit (/u/toxicity959).

I haven't had the time for some real adventures yet so for now, I'll keep this post short and free of fluff.  Thanks for reading, and fly safe o7

Noob's Guide to Success

Let me start this post off by reminding everyone that EVE is about what you want it to be.  ISK is meaningless if you don't have fun; it just so happens that I find my satisfaction in game in the form of an ever increasing number of space pixels in my wallet.  Granted, most of the fun stuff in EVE requires some ISK to do, but I encourage new players to focus more on what is fun for them than making ISK.

So you're totally new to EVE, fresh out of the clone vat in this endless sea of opportunity.  What do you do?  The answer: tutorial missions.  CCP has worked very hard on making the tutorial missions more fruitful for new players.  Try everything at least once, who knows where your niche will be.  In addition to teaching you the game, the tutorial missions will also provide you with the equipment you need to pursue certain careers.  For example, completing the mining tutorial missions will provide you with your very own Venture-class mining ship for blasting space rocks.  None of the rewards come close to the stuff you can get after a little training, but it's definitely enough to start you off, and there aren't many other uses for your time that compare to the rewards you get from the tutorials.

Once you've done the tutorials, you'll probably have more of an idea of what you'd like to do in the game.  The best way to pursue this career and continue to learn about the game is by joining a corporation.  EVE has an overwhelming variety of career paths, but there exists a corporation for almost any career you can think of.  Some people find mining mind-numbingly boring, others (Chribba) find it one of the most relaxing things in the world.  Mining ops with a corp can be a great way to take some of the edge off by relaxing with some friends while you melt rocks.  Some people like exploration, and some people don't have the patience.  If you feel like mining is your calling, consider skilling up for a mining barge, and then maybe even finding a nullsec industrial corp, where you might pay a monthly fee for the right to mine all the juicy rare ore you wish.  If exploration is your thing, maybe join a wormhole corp, where you can rake in billions of ISK a week and have some adrenaline-fueled adventures in the middle of nowhere.  Be warned, however, that moving your stuff out of a wormhole can be difficult at times; while it might not be a big deal to move in when you're new and have no assets, getting new equipment or getting your spoils out of a wormhole can be a challenge to even the most seasoned veterans.  PVP fiends might want to join a corp such as Brave Newbies, Inc. (my friends from reddit might be interested in the BNI subreddit), where you can crash your ships into a wall of enemies over and over, having much more fun than it sounds.

You can progress in EVE sans corporation, but if I'm completely honest, solo in EVE is one of the least entertaining things in the world.  All the fun stuff (fleet battles, taking sov, high-value rats, high-value ore, wormholes, etc) is difficult if not impossible for one person to do alone.  Besides, why play an MMO solo?  You can have much more fun doing almost anything you can do alone when you're surrounded by friends.

However, I must include a warning with this post, lest I lead you astray: be very wary of other pilots in EVE, because if your trust is misplaced, you can get burned.  Scamming, ganking, and many other unsavory activities are entirely legal in EVE, and it's not fun to be on the receiving end of a lot of these activities.

I'll end this post on a lighter note: once you find your niche, gain some skillpoints, and collect some ISK, you can start making more passive ISK and focus instead on burning it smashing ships.  Once you think you're ready to move on, check out my ISK/trade guides on this blog, or watch my station trading guide on YouTube.  Have fun and fly safe my friends o7

Solo? In My Eve?

So a lot of people seem to want a guide on the opportunities available to a solo pilot in EVE.  There are quite a few opportunities so for the sake of keeping this post readable, I'll write a little bit about each opportunity and hopefully expand on them in future posts.  Let me preface this by saying that almost all of the time, solo gameplay will not be as rewarding as group gameplay, be it in ISK or in fun.  In addition, many of these activities can be much more enjoyable for those who choose to multibox more than one account at once, eg. in mining or ratting.  However, not everyone can afford that.  Now, to the list:

• Mining - If I'm completely honest with you, the majority of players will find mining very boring.  It's not for everyone (read: sane people) but some people find it enjoyable.  For example, Chribba, one of the most famous EVE pilots, loves relaxing in roid belts in highsec mining Veldspar.  Mining solo isn't usually very profitable.  You might make a few million ISK an hour, but without additional support, it's kind of pointless.  However, it can be very lucrative if multiboxed.  One could make hundreds of millions of ISK every day running a few accounts with some Hulks and an Orca in nullsec.  It takes an initial time and capital investment, as well as iron willpower, but it can be done entirely by one person.
• Missioning - Missions, particularly level 4 missions, are another way to make decent money with almost no risk in Highsec.  Running missions for a corporation grants you ISK, loot, salvage, and loyalty points.  This is pretty straight forward really, just pick a corporation and start doing missions for them until level 4 agents are unlocked.  The easiest way to make ISK is to get a good ship (Tengus tend to work best) and find a level 4 security agent.  After accepting a mission, you can look it up here to find out the details of the mission and change your tank and damage type accordingly.  For more information on missioning, check out the relevant article on Grismar's EVE Wiki.
• Ratting - I wrote a (bad) guide about nullsec ratting.  Though it is riskier than the above activities, it can be more lucrative, certainly for someone with only one account.  There are two types of ratting: ratting in asteroid belts and in anomalies.  Ratting in asteroid belts produces less ISK per hour than anomalies, but it gives you the chance to kill a rare officer spawn, which can give you loot in the billions.  I have only ever killed one officer, but he dropped around 2 billion ISK in loot.  Belt ratting consists basically of warping from belt to belt killing rats and hoping for an officer spawn.  Ratting in anomalies is a little different.  Open up your scanner, go to the system scanner tab, and use your on-board scanner to scan the system for anomalies.  They range in difficulty and the more difficult they are, the more valuable they tend to be.  More information on specific anomalies can be found online.  Anomalies provide steady ISK per hour in the form of bounties, but they can provide additional revenue two other ways.  The first is through faction spawns, which are rare spawns similar to officers but not as valuable.  They drop loot such as Dread Guristas modules which can sell for hundreds of millions of ISK.  The second way is through escalations, which can turn an ordinary anomaly into a bookmark for a DED plex, such as a 10/10 Maze escalation which can be worth billions.  
• Daytripping Wormholes - Daytripping in a wormhole involves going into a wormhole alone, running some sites, and leaving in the same day.  It can be done entirely solo provided you have the capabilities of being self-sufficient (scanning, looting, salvaging, and killing on your own).  Rather than going in-depth on my own, I'll point you to a rather well written guide written by redditor paxNoctis.
• Solo PVP - Solo PVP isn't as much a way to make ISK as it is a way to have fun.  It's pretty easy but far too complex for the scope of this post.  The basics are to fit a nice solo-capable ship, find some targets, and pewpew.  A lot of fits are available at battleclinic.com.  Targets can be found everywhere, but for some quick fights try heading into Faction Warfare space in Lowsec.

If anyone has any more suggestions for additions to the list, feel free to drop a comment on this post or shoot me a PM on reddit (toxicity959) and I will update the list as your suggestions come in.  Fly safe everyone! o7