My time in Eve Online recently has been largely focused on trading. I’ve been around some wormholes, my alt is gearing up for PvP. But the bulk of my time is spent sitting in Amarr buying and selling things. If there’s anyone out there that’s just getting into the game and wants to know how to play the market like a wizard — look elsewhere! I am but a simple trader that focuses on the number one rule: buy low, sell high.

To get started with some basic trading you’ll need to get some basic skills: Trade, Retail, and Broker Relations.  Once those are up you can get Accounting, then Margin Trading and some of the others as your business grows. Making sure you can lower the costs of trading as much as possible is key to getting the most profit. The other key is knowing the trade hubs.

Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Rens… there’s several trade hubs in Eve and all are worth sitting in buying and selling. To make the most out of your profits, however, will require some movement. Buying in the lowest buy order system and selling in the highest sell order system. These will vary with time and with goods so it is important to keep track of what is going on. This can be done with trial alts. (alternativley you can use eve-central)

You’ll need to set your market window up to view the information you need most. Typically this will have your buy orders sorted by the lowest prices to highest and your sell orders sorted by the highest price to lowest.

So, you’ve got a couple mill from mining/missioning and are looking at starting a trade business, what do you buy? Starting out might not be very easy, especially without some capital to get rolling. In the beginning I’d say go for modules, T2 if possible. Check out the various trade hubs and find some items that have a decent profit margin — the difference between your buying price and the selling price. (remember to calculate any extra fees or taxes into it) Once you’ve found something, place a buy order that’s just above the highest for the station. If the items you are buying can easily be transported around, and you have the skills to do so, you may want to increase the buy order range out a system or two — this will help speed things a long. (also, be sure to check that there are no low/null sec systems in the range — unless you don’t care) Once the items are bought and sitting in your hangar, it’s time to sell. You have some options here. You can sell them back in the same station or look at some other trade hubs and sell them there. Often this could include a long 15-20 jump trip but the profits may be worth it. Once sold, profit gained, it’s time to begin the process anew. 

For more market fun check out Eve’s Market Discussion sub-forum: Market Discussion.

It hit servers yesterday and I’ve gotten to spend some time with it now, in it’s (mostly) finished state. I have an iMac at home so I was able to finally get a premium client running on Tranquility — the graphics are quite beautiful. The first thing I really wanted to try out was the new exploration, I’ve tried it on the test server and couldn’t get it to work for various reasons and now I wanted to find a wormhole. Grabbing a cheap Probe, probe launcher and probes — I headed out into Amarr high sec.

The first thing I did whenever I entered a system was to warp to the first planet and scan 32 AU to see if anything was in the system. With the new changes, scanning no longer takes forever — ten seconds is the base time — this makes finding out if anything is around quick and easy. The first few systems I had nothing, then the next few each had one cosmic signature. The next step I take when I find something is in the system is to drop the range on the probe till I just lose it. Afterwards I pop out two more probes and start setting them up in a rough circle and go about moving them around the first probe till I find the signature again. Once found, I check which probe has found it, shrink the scan range again and move the other two around it till it’s found. This is generally repeated till I can bring up some visual display of the signature’s location — either the red/yellow dots or the red circle. Once a visual is obtained I pop out the fourth probe and set it on top of the other three, getting them all in as close as possible and lowering the scan ranges further till I get an accurate result that I can warp to.

It took a few hours — three and a half to four — to find a wormhole, but I only have the most basic of exploration skills and a cheap T1 exploration frigate. It is completely possible for newbies to find these places, but finding them is the easy part. I had nothing to lose on this character — no implants, a cheap T1 friagte with just a launcher and some probes, so I decided to head into the unknown and see how it was. In one word? Awesome. I took several screenshots of my wormhole adventure — even though it was pretty short lived. The new wormhole systems are 0.0 space, with nothing discovered — no local, no stations, nothing. This particular system did not seem to have any belts in it — the typical place to find rats in known space — instead a quick 32 AU probe throws up all the sleeper spots in system, and there were several spots floating around. A quick note, since there is no local — EDIT: There is a local, but it is delayed, no clue on how long but I was there for a bit and none of the others in the system showed up — you do need to use your directional scanner to pick up any nearby probes or enemies that might be coming after you — it is 0.0 space and you’re not safe, from sleepers or players. Speaking of the sleepers — I warped in on a checkpoint of theirs. (I saw checkpoints and hangars on the map, warp to em directly, no gates or jumps) It took about two hits to destroy my untanked probe ship, they didn’t go after the pod. I wasn’t bothered — I had the wormhole I entered bookmarked — you must do this! — and I just wanted screenshots. At this particular checkpoint there were about 3 frigates, 3-4 cruisers and a few towers — given their strength I’d say a few pilots in cruisers or battlecruisers would probably be needed to take them out. These arn’t your pappy’s NPCs. The checkpoint also had some debris that might’ve been some asteroids, or just giant floating rocks, and a sort of small station like you see in missions — surrounded by some bright cosmic energy or something.

The wormhole system was different from the known space, it seems they have upgraded art for the back drops as well as some cool new effects — I saw what looked like another star in the distance, and it seems the environment had a harmful effect to shields — mine wouldn’t go above a certain, think it was around 75?, percent.

So, that was last night’s adventure — I’ll see about getting some corp group going to really give the sleepers a test sometime soon.

EVE Online’s next expansion, Apocrypha, has been on Singularity (SiSi, their testing server) for a couple weeks and, for the most part, has been pretty unplayable. I sunk some time in yesterday downloading the new patches for it and getting started on putting my T3 Amarr ship (Legion) together, ending the evening with an attempt at the new scanning system.

The first thing I noticed was the skill queue was working now, and wonderfully. They gave the SiSi characters an injection of the subsystem skills needed to pilot the T3 strategic cruiser, so all I had to do was queue up the Amarr one and wait (roughly 43 minutes) for them to finish. There has been some complaints over the limited time span of the skill queue — you can only queue within a 24 hour period, but I’ve found it a very welcome and useful feature. The addition of the queue has also seen the addition of a couple extra options when using skill books — you can inject them (add them to your character sheet, but not begin training), train them to the first level, or add them to the end of your current queue.

In addition to the new skill queue UI window, the fitting window also got an upgrade, and some changes since its earlier incarnation. Before on SiSi the fitting screen was a large circle, clear in the center to show your ship in dock, with two collapsable windows on the sides that displayed modules in station on the left (along with drones, and a few other module/item related drop down menus) and ship stats on the right. (including effective HP, cap recharge, passive shield HP gain, etc — good stuff) The same features are still retained, but it’s more of a fusion of the old and new fitting windows. Gone is the hole in the circle (the circle is still there, it has your highs, mids and lows, rigs and subsystems) replaced with a seperate graphic depicting your ship in space — fully rotatable. The current fitting window is smaller than the previous new one, and can be minimized or closed like the old. I rather like the current desingn, I like the previous new one the best though.

Tech III (T3) ships are one of the major additions this expansion, and something I’ve been eagerly awaiting. My PvP alt character is spec’d specifically for cruiser class ships and customizing my own is just awesome. The one I set up first had 5 high slots, 2 medium and 8 lows, fitted with the heaviest tank I could for giggles and I got a buffer over 50k effective — not bad for just messing around with a little cruiser. (no, I couldn’t do much else with it after that, but it’d make a good bait ship!) The second and final setup for the night saw 5 highs, 3 meds and 7 lows — not a massive change from the previous, and the tank was still good (couldn’t tell the effective with armor hardners on, but it should’ve been roughly 35-40k effective) and I grabbed one of the new core launchers and some probes and headed out scanning.

My scanning skills on this character suck, in fact I have none — I had to train astrometrics to 1 before I could start my scanning adventure. I’m not sure on all the rules of the new scanning system, but I’m quite sure I didn’t have the skills to do any of it apart from practice. It seems to actually get a warpable location you have to pick up the objects signature with 4 different probes, from my weak skills I could only really use one on the map. Which brings up another new feature to scanning — at least I think it’s new, I don’t remember it in the bit of exploration I did long ago — the probes can warp by themselves and you can control them from the solar system map. Each probe shows on the map and has a X Y Z box and arrows to move it around the map to where you want it to go. You can also change the scan radius (between about 0.5 AU to 32 AU) to help track down locations further. It seems the initial search to see if there’s anything in a system will be fast — launch one probe and scan 32 AU, move on or explore further, with the actual probing taking a little bit longer — having probes moveable anywhere in the system is cool, adding a bit of depth to exploration. Also with the moveable probes comes recalling them. A simple button on the scanning interface causes all active probes to warp back to you so you can collect them — awesome feature. (though I havn’t gotten the pick up to work yet, either I’m doing it wrong or it’s still not in/bugged) I nearly tracked one cosmic anamoly down, but the map kept bugging, which then bugged the rest of the game, forcing me to either leave the system or restart the game. So, I havn’t been able to get the scanning to fully work yet.

If I can get  the scanning to work, or get a corpmate to handle it, I’ll try checking out wormholes this weekend. (if they’re even up and working) I want to test out the T3 ships and the sleeper NPCs.