And I’m an idiot

I just got ripped off by the bloody SCC. Sigh. For 53 million ISK. Note to fingers: Stop being so fat. No more potato chips allowed.

It seems that the broker fee in EVE is non-refundable. Which makes sense, given that the fee is ostensibly used to set up any order. The default rate is about 1%, which normally isn’t a big deal.

Unless you miss out on a decimal place… I was putting up an order for 6 items selling for 8.6 million apiece. I was pretty damn sure that I had pressed the decimal key, but sometimes I type too fast for my own good and I hit enter before I checked what I had typed. I also thought that the market interface normally warns you if the price you enter is way different from the regional average. But somehow, I didn’t get any warning and I managed to put up an order for 6 items at 860 million apiece. Sigh. Which cost me 53 million ISK in broker fees…

I tried to amend the order after the 5 minute timer, but no luck: no refund for me. That’s one day’s profits down the drain for no reason at all. Guess I’ll pretend that I lost a battleship or something. Bah. However, now I’m pretty sure that I can use the reverse to set up big buy orders for practically no broker fee, simply by first setting up the order with a purchase price of 0.01 ISK. I then wait 5 minutes, and amend the price to the true buy price that I wish to set up. This obviously doesn’t work for sell orders though since a sell order for 0.01 ISK will be instantly filled. Edit: Nope, this doesn’t work. I get charged the higher broker fee anyway. WTF. Where’s my refund!!!!

No more Level 4s

I’ve also decided not to do any more level 4 missions during the weekdays. They simply take way too long. I reached this conclusion after a marathon session lasting well over 3 hours to clear Angel Extravaganza.

I had a slightly early gaming session since our son had fallen asleep a bit earlier than his normal 9 pm bedtime, so I was feeling good that I could knock out a level 4. A bit worried that it was Angel Extravaganza, since I remembered reading that it was one of the more difficult ones, but hey no worries I can do this.

About an hour later, I was starting to feel a bit worried because I was still in the first room of 5. Tanking wasn’t a problem, it was the DPS needed to kill multiple fat bloody battleships that was taking forever. Luckily I carry around a set of Vespa IIs, which deal kinetic damage which is good against Angel Cartel ships, otherwise I’d probably still be in the mission now. As it was, even with skipping 3-4 spawns in the 3rd room by knocking out the silo and space telescope, it was waaaaaay past my bedtime by the time I killed the last battleship and finished salvaging. My journal shows almost 4 hours between receiving the first bounties and the last bounties for the mission, all of which totaled about 17 million.

And I just threw 53 million away. Sigh.

Anyways, will be sticking to level 3s for the time being. I can burn through them much faster, even though the ISK rewards are much lower.

Planetary Interaction Noob

So yeah, I was totally unprepared for PI. I had only trained most of the skills to level 1, only to find that I was restricted to only using basic command centers. I hadn’t really looked around for suitable planets either, so I just randomly picked a temperate planet that was nearby that seemed to have decent deposits of aqueous liquids. A basic command center doesn’t have much cpu and powergrid, which restricted me to placing only 2 extractors, 1 basic processor and 1 storage facility. I’m just trying it out now, but it seems pretty fun. I’m definitely not recouping costs (88k for the command center + 1 million for the other structures) since the water that I’m making sells for only 40+ isk per unit, but I guess that’s to be expected for someone who wasn’t really prepared and just randomly plonked down stuff. I’m training up a bit more of the PI skills now to be able to use better command centers, but it’s a pain since they have charisma as the prime attribute.