Wallets and Wishes

I’ve been working on several ‘projects’ lately, mostly of the business kind.

The alliance shop has been expanded somewhat to include several new ship types. Some of these came from suggestions and requests, and others came from a look at some killboard stats. A few of the new ships seemed to be a big hit. Some of the others haven’t seen a lot of movement, so I probably won’t restock. I want to focus my efforts on stuff people are going to actually use, and if something turns out to be a dud, I find something new and move on.

I’m toying with the idea of having some kind of fluctuating stock. Perhaps a ‘ship of the week’ or different ship types that are only offered once in a while.

I’m starting to hit hard limits on contract numbers. Unfortunately, while you can setup 500 contracts to your corporation with no skills, you can only set up around 60 to your alliance from your corporation with maxed out skills. Oddly, setting up a contract to your alliance essentially counts as setting up a public contract, and counts against the limits you have for setting up public contracts.

When you’re supplying an alliance, 60 contracts isn’t very much. It seems like there should be more available, especially if you’re operating as a corporation supplying an alliance –a common scenario.



I’ve run into some other problems also. Right now, I keep all the inventory in the different divisions within the corporation hanger I’m using. There is no other way in the inventory system to sort, or divide ships. And, I had to be able to keep my ‘shield thrashers’ separated from the ‘armor thrashers’ without individually renaming each and every ship each time.

It seems like someone wanting to provide such a service to their alliance shouldn’t have to create an entire corporation just to sort inventory, and have enough contracts slots.



The contract system is an entirely other story. I never thought about it much before, but now that I set up dozens (if not hundreds over the course of a month) of contracts, the ‘wizard’ process seems very tedious. There’s no shortcuts, or ways to select defaults so that I don’t have to select the same options over and over again. And you have to go through all the pages of the setup for each and every contract.

I wish I could just click a quick link or hot key, and have a one page item exchange popup where I could simply drag and drop stuff from my inventory if I wish. It would be easier for the alliance shop, and for simply giving loot to people by dragging it directly out of my ship’s hanger and not worrying about it getting mixed up in all my other assets. A sort of trade-contract cross over.



Also, looking through the records of what has been sold is interesting. I have to hover over each and every record to see what it was, since all I see is [multiple items] for each and every one. There’s no column for how much the contract sold for, and no column for the Description. And, even though it acts like it might let you sort by a certain column, it still only sorts by date. You can’t sort by client to see all the contracts a certain person has bought, or by description to see all contracts you’ve tagged a certain way….etc.


Hopefully, the contract system is something CCP is planning to visit at some point because it could definitely use some TLC.  I’ll probably be writing a more thorough post about contracts at some point.



Other projects I’m working on are trade projects, the details of which I will keep to myself since I don’t want anyone stealing my ideas. The one trade project is netting me a sizeable amount of ISK per unit. My biggest concern was being able to move the stock –and not just accumulate a ton, but that hasn’t been a problem at all. I move quite a bit of it over the weekend and probably made a quarter of a billion ISK. When the entire project dries up I’m hoping to have made a good 2-3 billion from the one project alone. Not bad for something that just takes a few minutes once in a while of adjusting various orders, and a freighter trip once in a blue moon.

I’m dabbling, and testing the waters in a few other things. I’ve found some interesting opportunities with trading across regions –especially with meta items. The Jita – Amarr connection is interesting to watch. You can make a lot of ISK buying in Jita and selling in Amarr on some things. And then for others, it’s better to buy in Amarr and take to Jita. However, in most of those scenarios you need to move a significant amount of the item before you start making the kind of profits that tempt me, and I’ve found I don’t really like dealing with high volume stuff. You have to babysit it way too much.

I’ve also learned to play off other people’s manipulation. It’s hard to identify when the price of a certain item is being ‘controlled’ if you haven’t been paying close attention to it for a while. But occasionally I find something that obviously is being manipulated. Sometimes, I can find it significantly cheaper in another region that hasn’t gotten ‘hit’ yet, or simply buy the materials and build it myself. This is really easy to do for things like rigs…

Also, buy orders are my friend! People sell all sorts of things to interesting prices on buy orders, I’ve found. Even in remote places. 100K Damage Control IIs? Yes, thank you. Come again with some more please!

Anyway, I guess all of this makes me a bit of a carebear at heart. I’ve never been interested in mining, or major, full-scale manufacturing operations. But I do like the business and trade side of EVE.

And, it gives me something to do when there's nothing to shoot.