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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Location Crunch

It is a truism that you can only be in one place at a time. And yep I'm finding this to be mighty true. Here is the dilemma: In EVE one of the things I do is run a store for most of my income. I've described how I do this in other posts. It's a great way to make non-flashy isk in a relatively steady way and it's pretty self regulating. The only problem is that it's also constant. Once you have your wares up, there's always SOMETHING running out. Now it doesn't take a lot of time to do the following:

Deliver the most recent production and move it to the warehouse. Check the orders to see which ones are no longer there. Grab stuff from the warehouse to put up on sale. Grab minerals and BPOs of stuff that just got put up on sale and manufacture them. Check mineral bank to see if buy orders are indicated. If so put that up too. Move on to the rest of the stuff I do in EVE.

Here's the problem: When I spend a day or three in wormhole space it effectively slows down my semi-passive revenue stream. Since the more popular stuff goes out of stock fastest, I run out of the popular stuff first. Since by definition the rest of the stuff is less popular it sells more slowly and provides much less income over the same amount of time. So the longer I'm away the slower the income stream.

This is not to say that what I end up doing in wormhole space is either immediately or eventually profitable. A lot of it is, but when you run an alliance or a corporation a certain portion of your time online is spent in what could be called "politics". Whether corp internal, alliance internal or external, its part of the game. But while doing these activities, one is not usually making isk. This is why I kind of depend on the more passive income mechanisms. The market will sell my stuff whether I'm active or not, online or not. Whether I sell the datacores I collect twice a month or using them for my own T2 manufacturing, same thing. Except for the little trip to pick em up, nice passive income.

My problem is that as lucrative as the store is, it's not realy passive enough for long term revenue. I'm going to have to think about long term changes (either with alts or without) and figure out how I want to proceed. In order to truely exploit wormhole space I need to think of a way to get my K-space income to be self sustaining without the constant presence of my main.

Ah, EVE, After every lesson leanred you provide a new challenge. After every cliff assended, a new vista.

1 comment:

Benoit CozmikR5 Gauthier said...

Man do I hear ya... I may not have a store the way you do, but imagine what it's like when I leave the game for an entire week. Unless i get sponsors I'll never fly big/T2/T3 ships... :(