Doh. Sometimes you do things that really make you wonder if you forgot to turn on the brain in the morning.

Well at least I hope it’s not just me.

I just got podded for the first time since playing EVE. Lost a full set of +4 implants, plus another set of missile skill hardwiring implants that I put in for missioning a while back that cost about 320 million ISK.

Did I get ganked by an evil army of ninja salvagers in my awesome Rattlesnake? Unfortunately it’s not as dramatic as that…

It all started due to my new hobby of ship collecting. I am currently building up a collection of all T1 combat ships, from frigates all the way up to battleships. I’ve already got a fair number of them, but I’ll elaborate more in a future post.

Anyway I was looking through the list of frigates when I remembered, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of old Gallente ships back in Couster from doing the tutorials! Might as well haul them back to add to the collection instead of buying new hulls!” Plus I get to tidy up my assets tab, I’m a neat freak like that. Couster was 11 jumps away, which was why I had left them there instead of flying them with me way back when I moved over to Caldari space.

Each hull took about 2,500 m3 worth of space though, so I needed a big hauler. Fortunately as part of training up for my freighter, I had trained Gallente Industrial V so my Iteron V had a whopping 25,000 m3 cargohold with full cargo expanders (without cargohold rigs). Plenty of space… Hopped in, fitted 3 medium shield extenders, an invulnerability field and a medium shield booster just because they happened to be lying around.

And then I made the fateful mistake of all newbie pilots… autopilot. I figured I’d be pretty safe anyway since most pilots would scan their targets before suicide ganking, amirite??? I mean why gank an empty industrial just for kicks… plus I had some sort of tank right? So off I go, slowly trucking along, while I went downstairs for some breakfast and to play with my kid.

Came back and found myself in a station… looking at an Ibis. “Hmm, that’s weird, could have sworn I didn’t dock….” Then saw that I was in Jita…. wtf. Sinking feeling… damn I was podded!

At first I couldn’t believe that anybody would have bothered suicide ganking an empty Iteron V… until I remembered a tiny little detail. Like joining the Caldari Militia. Which made me enemies to the Gallente, and attackable by the Gallente Navy in Gallente high-security space…. such as Couster.

Geez. Those frenchies must have wondered wtf this Caldari noob was smoking, jumping into their turf in a little Iteron V and idling at the jump gate. NPCs don’t pod players though, so some Gallente pilot must have come across my pod spinning in space and gleefully crushed it. Blaaaaaargh.

So, just to pick up a bunch of ships worth less than 1 million in total, I jumped 11 systems to get my Iteron V destroyed (worth more than all the other ships combined), then lost half-a-billion ISK worth of implants. Sigh yai yai. I’ve replaced the +4 implants, but will probably wait until I’m really going missioning before replacing the skill hardwiring implants. In case I pull another dumb one…

Still training Minmatar Frigate V as of now, with about 6 days to go. Looking at my skill plan in EVEMon puts me at about 19 days to get most of the important gunnery skills up to 4, including T2 autocannons. Actually I could just go out right now and start blowing things up (most likely myself) but there’s no real rush.

I plan to do something similar to Nashh’s Project Rifter and put together a few Rifter packages to use up while hopefully learning something about low-sec PvP. My planned Rifter fit looks very similar to his, except with 150mm autocannons since I can’t fit the 200′s on without blowing the powergrid. Although one possibility is to mount a mix of 150s and 200s but I don’t think that’s a good idea. Another possibility is a powergrid implant, but I’m hesitant to use those since I foresee a lot of violent flaming clone death in my future.

I originally intended to get into Faction Warfare, but now I’m having second thoughts since Noork is my freighter pilot. I don’t want to have to worry about meeting a Gallente Militia blob somewhere when I’m piloting my huge defenceless Obelisk shipping valuable stuff around. Besides, it seems most of the fighting in faction warfare occurs in low-sec anyway so I can just hang around in those systems and try to find targets without being in the Caldari Militia. I plan on naming all my Rifters “Boo”, in honour of the miniature giant space hamster that accompanies the insane ranger Minsc in Baldur’s Gate 2. My battle cry shall be “Go for the eyes, Boo!!!” as I recklessly attack anything cruiser-sized and below.

On the trading side, I think I’m up to 10 billion ISK now in assets and orders but it’s hard to tell with a fair amount of ISK tied up in contracts. These can really be lucrative, it’s a shame I didn’t try it out sooner. Although it does take up additional time to check the market which can sometimes be a bit of a pain. I’ll probably be losing some ISK in the future with my Rifter shenanigans, and my 2x PLEXes per month will cost me 660 million ISK which is not to be sneezed at. But I think I’m still in the black so that’s not a problem.

Sometimes I wonder why people seem to have this disdain for the 0.01 bidding wars in Jita. When people comment about it on blog posts, I always seem to hear this undertone of “I’m above participating in such activity”. There’s no other way to explain why so many people like to change their bids by totally ridiculous amounts. Like… 5 ISK. Wow. Or 10 ISK. Really… that’s soooo different from 0.01 ISK. Do these people really feel happier about themselves? In practical terms it doesn’t really affect the market; while changing the price by 1 ISK instead of 0.01 ISK does represent a 100-fold increase in the rate of change of the price, in absolute terms it’s pretty negligible. However it just makes me shake my head and wonder why people have to do such silly pointless things just to feel like a special snowflake.

I also saw another trader put up 5 items for sale… in 5 batches of 1 item each, for the exact same price. I wonder if it’s someone who hasn’t figured out that you can post items in stacks, or someone who genuinely thinks it gives him some kind of advantage rather than just wasting their order slots.

News of the guy who lost 74 PLEX in a Kestrel in Jita has been making the rounds. Frankly I’m not altogether surprised, as I think many people expected something like this to occur ever since CCP allowed PLEX to be moved around. The exact means was a bit unexpected, but what I’m really surprised at is the number of people that seem to think that CCP has some sort of obligation to reimburse the PLEX destroyed.

Many people have already pointed out that it’s no different from a supercarrier or titan being destroyed, in terms of ISK value. Heck, I remember about a month ago some guy lost an entire collection of blueprints in an Iteron V which was worth something like 14 billion ISK as well. However, the fact that it’s PLEX and “Real Munnies!!!” involved seems to have made a lot of people think that there is something different in this.

Why? If I go to a Ferrari dealership and splurge on a shiny new Ferrari with all the extras, in perfect working condition, only to completely total it by running full-speed into a tree while pulling out of the dealership parking lot, is Ferrari somehow obligated to reimburse me?

If I buy a Sony 40″ plasma TV and 6 months later decide to sell it at a flea market, only to drop it on the floor while moving it to my car… Am I supposed to complain to Sony customer service that I did not receive the service which I paid for?

One of the commenters on Wilhelm’s post who thinks CCP is open to the possibility of a lawsuit even claims to be a lawyer… are people really so tolerant of incredible stupidity that this idea can even be raised for more than 2 seconds without being met by loud and unending laughter? Ok, granted that it is in the personal interest of lawyers to promote the filing of numerous spurious lawsuits so that they can grow fat on lawyer fees, but sadly he’s not the only one who thinks CCP has a responsibility to heal stupid.

Again, this is not even just some random suicide ganking. From what I’ve read (and in no way did I put in any effort to corroborate the facts, but what the heck):
1) The pilot chose to use a poorly tanked T1 frigate (looks like a cyno alt fit) to transport 22 billion ISK of goods
2) The attackers had an active war-declaration against the pilot’s alliance/corp
3) The attackers were in battleships, which take quite a while to lock small targets like the Kestrel, and the killmail shows that artillery weapons were used, meaning it wasn’t smartbombs that killed him
4) The guy was killed at a Jita gate, which means he was AUTOPILOTING WITH 74 PLEXES DURING A WARDEC and afked for so long that he lost his cloak after jumping in and then got locked and killed

This is not about some guy walking along the road and falling into a hole. This is a guy who looked on the map for the Pit Of Stupid, tied his shoelaces together and then jumped in headfirst while filming himself going “look Ma, see what I can dooooooooo”.

Even if the pilot obtained the PLEX through buying GTCs from CCP, the transaction was fully completed as he received the number of PLEX he bought. He did not need to transport the PLEX to utilise them, and he was fully aware that he ran the risk of losing them if he undocked with them. A lot of people speculate that he was trying to arbitrage on PLEX prices, which to me is another folly on itself since the return is miserable for that kind of investment. A 10 million return for a 300+ million investment? The sales tax alone would be 3 million out of the 10 milion. I don’t even bother trading in any market that doesn’t give a minimum of 10% return because it’s a waste of time, and that’s without even taking the risk from hauling into consideration.

Even if CCP added 20 warning pop-ups whenever someone tried to undock with PLEX, someone somewhere in the universe will still lose a cargohold of PLEX.

No wonder we have wonderful warning signs like these. Unfortunately the next generation of stupid will be unable to read, so they’ll have to have audio versions.

As plenty of people have already observed, Jita 4-4 is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Yet it’s pretty amusing sometimes to see what goes on in the biggest trading hub in the EVE universe. You can see lots of things that really make me go like this…

That is, if I were playing Star Trek: Online instead of EVE. Ahem.

One thing that I see pretty often is complete fail buy/sell orders. By this I mean orders that don’t make any sense whatsoever. One example is the market for Iteron IIIs. There are a couple of people there that are selling Iteron IIIs for 600 million ISK, when the going price is about 800,000. I mean, I can imagine someone trying to pull the old WoW Auctioneer trick of manipulating the average, but in EVE you get charged a broker fee based on the total value of the order, and this fee cannot be totally removed even with max skills. At the default 1%, this makes it 3 million ISK just to put up that order, which will never ever be filled because there’s a heck of a lot of zeros in 600 million.

Another kind of complete fail would be people who seem to forget whether they are buying or selling. At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with when I see orders such as the one in the screenshot below.

Note the buy order set up with a price that’s 0.01 ISK lower than the dominant sell order. I mean, wow, either this guy REALLY wanted to save that 0.01 ISK per implant, or he put up a buy order when he was intending to put up a sell order. Which is quite hard to do, given that you go through a completely different process for each (click “Place buy order” vs right-clicking on item and selecting “Sell this item”). One possibility is that he started making a buy order, got distracted by “ooo pizza is here” and came back and thought he was putting up a sell order. In either case, he made me very happy. His order was originally for 12 implants, I had 6 up for sale near that price so I just modified my order to match his and -CHACHING- instant sale for me.

There’s also been some pretty weird pricing strategies that certain people like to use. There’s a certain trader who likes to trade in some of the same items that I do. Initially I thought that he was just undercutting/overbidding by random amounts, compared to the more common 0.01/1/1000/nice round number folks. One day, however, it struck me in a flash.

This guy, known as Mr 1111 among me and my wife, likes to beat other orders by 111111.11 or some such. He always puts up orders for 10 items, and adds a 1 to every digit of the dominant order. Sometimes he doesn’t add to every digit, e.g. he only starts from the 3rd or 4th instead of the 1st. So if your buy order is 6,524,921.13 ISK, he will change his order to be 6,635,032.24 ISK.

Now this is pretty painstaking effort, especially when you have to do it for every single buy/sell order for many items. Granted it’s not exactly hard arithmetic, but it’s a hell of a lot harder than just changing the last digit. At first I thought he might be using a bot and didn’t want to look too obvious, but then I noticed that sometimes he made math errors >.<

Now, he has to somehow believe that he's at an advantage by doing this. There are only 2 possible advantages to undercutting/overbidding by more than 0.01 ISK.

First, they think it prevents other people from undercutting/overbidding your own order. I've previously mentioned how misguided this is, since obviously if a profit of X amount is acceptable to them it's likely that someone else out there will happily take X-0.01. This is going to hold true until the margins are so small that it's not worth the 100 ISK to modify the order. In any case, attempting to prevent people from undercutting is like attempting to stop aging by not breathing. Mr 1111 should know, since I and many others happily undercut him instantly whenever we happen to check our orders. You'd think he'd realise this by now, but nope he still happily continues 11111ing. "It works, I swear!"

The second part is that people often think that better price = larger volume. Often they cite Walmart's success. However, they don't quite seem to get that it doesn't work that way for everything. Consider a skillbook selling at 7,500,000 ISK. Now someone sets a sell order for 7,450,000 ISK. For this order to sell better than the original 7,500,000 ISK, that must mean that someone out there, who is looking for this skill book, will see the original price and go "Hmm I've been training up to get this skill for about 6 months, but I'm not going to buy it for 7.5M ISK. If it was 7.45M, I'd buy it like a shot. As it is, I'll go train Diplomacy V instead!" Yeah, I don't think so. Especially not for something like a skillbook, which is pretty much a one-time purchase. A good price isn't going to entice me to buy Large Autocannon Specialization if I have no intention to use battleship-class T2 autocannons.

Sadly, now I’m seeing a few other people try to use his 1111 strategy. Proof that idiocy is contagious.

There are also the people who put absolutely HUMONGOUS orders. Like for 200 of an item that has a daily region-wide volume of 50. This would be ok if they intend to just leave the order for a couple of weeks, but nope. These people check their order like once every hour. Here’s a tip: if you’re going to be checking your order all the time, you can make do with a smaller one. That way, you retain some flexibility in case the market changes drastically, without being tied to the broker fee for that humongous order. A gigantic order also tells everyone in the market “Hey guys, you better undercut me if you want your own orders to be filled anytime before Christmas”.

Spend any amount of time in Jita (as I do on my trading alt) and you can’t help but notice the massive amount of spam offers in the local channel. Every few seconds someone will link some contract for rare items, usually because you can’t sell them in the market. This goes for stuff like faction items, rigged ships or officer modules.

Unfortunately I would have to say that it seems that 90% of these offers are “scams”. I include the double inverted commas because they are, quite frankly, scams that would only work on a blind drunk chimpanzee. Even more unfortunately, it seems that half the population of the world, even in a relatively more mature (and therefore ideally smarter) game like EVE, makes a blind drunk chimpanzee look like Albert Einstein. Sigh.

Scam 1: WTB PLEX becos i r dum

This seems to be a very common scam in Jita. They will link an item exchange contract and say that they WTB PLEX for 340 million ISK. Click on the contract, and you get this:

Now first of all, that’s a hell of a lot of zeros missing from 340 million. Secondly, in no possible shape or form or state of inebriety can the word “thousand” ever look remotely like the word “million”. And lastly, this is in Jita local. Jita, where you can find hundreds of sell orders for PLEX for less than 310 million ISK.

Sadly, this must actually work once in a while or there would not be so many people trying this scam all the time. There is another variation of this with WTB contracts, where they say they want to buy a Caldari Navy Issue Raven for 500 million (usually around 450?), and the contract is for 500,000 ISK.

Scam 2: Faction items for cheap!

This scam basically revolves around saying they are selling some faction item, for example a Caldari Navy Issue Raven, for cheaper than usual and substituting the regular Raven battleship in the contract. The picture for the faction items is often identical, although the names are obviously different.

We can see that Drake Omar is a real winner here. This particular guy has been trying this scam for days, by having 2 contracts up. One is a genuine contract for a CN Raven, which has been bought out (probably by his alt). The second one is the contract shown in the screenshot, which is for a regular Raven at the same price. I didn’t think anyone would fall for it, but once again I am proven wrong.

There are many variations of this, with some story like they are moving to 0.0 space and need to get rid of their ships for cheap. Just be careful whenever you buy a faction item, i.e. make sure you are getting a Gallente Navy Vexor instead of a regular Vexor for 50 million ISK. Also always use a contract. If they want to trade at a station, just say no immediately. This is because they can sell you a regular Vexor renamed as “Gallente Navy Vexor” through the trade window. On a contract they cannot modify any item’s name, they can only modify the linked text in the chat window.

Scam 3: Why hello there Ponzi

It’s one of the oldest scams in the book, but people still fall for it. You can’t cure greed, apparently. In EVE, the textbook Ponzi scheme revolves around claiming that they will double whatever amount of ISK you send them. There will inevitably be a few dumb people who try their luck with small sums like a couple of million (because, hey, they’re rich big boys and a couple of million is chump change lol m i rite???). The scammer will pay out the money to these idiots (or the scammer can just use alts on other accounts) who will then proclaim that this is The Real Deal ™. Eventually some sucker (hopefully not you) sends a few hundred million or so. After which you know what happens.

Scam 4: Hulk with all the extras

This is something that’s pretty recent. Scammers offer a Hulk for sale, complete with T2 fittings, for about 130 million. I have no idea if this is cheap, because I don’t look at mining barge prices. You open the contract, and golly there does appear to be a lot of fittings. There are strip miners, mining crystals, mining drones, some combat drones, some expanded cargoholds…

Wait where’s the Hulk? >.< As scams go this is probably one of the harder to detect ones, but all I can say is "always check the receipt"?

In short, the best way to not be scammed is : Don’t be a greedy idiot. If it’s too good to be true, it is. If someone’s giving you free money, it’s not.