Wednesday 25 July 2012

Day 36 : The Taxman Cometh

It’s a Saturday and it has been a long week. I’m going to sit here and win at Internet Spaceships 101. The cricket will be on the radio and I shall only move to procure alcohol or at the whim of basic bodily functions. Most of the latter being brought on later by too much of the former.

I start out by mining. Mining has two purposes. Firstly it provides an easy source of income. Secondly it is possible to educate yourself and research stuff while doing it. Having developed some kind of sense of “space morals” I no longer AFK mine. I don’t do real life stuff while mining, I research EVE based stuff. Skills and the skill queue debate, trade possibilities, things I haven’t looked into yet like Corporation management or Planetary Interaction, advanced mining techniques, fittings, scanning tips. The list goes on. I tend to include blogs and blogging in this list but it is a bit too hit and miss with the mining lasers needing watching every three minutes.

As  a source of income mining fills several purposes. I’m still so new that earning cash seems like a bit of a score. Yey! I have more internet points! It also provides me with a buffer against knockbacks. Should someone decide to suicide gank my mining ship for a laugh I’ll need at least ten million credits to safely buy a new one, replace the whole fitting and re-insure. Insurance won’t cover the fittings and I have a fear of being ganked back to day one. The cash is also intended to be a source of collateral. My pool of trading cash. Since I haven’t got trading off the ground yet this pool of cash is doing nothing.

After an hour mining, refining and running to market I decide to investigate trading a little more. I start investigating EVE Central (http://eve-central.com/home/), after reading http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Using_EVE-Central_to_haul_profitably

EVE central is a site which works out trade routes and provides pricing information based on what EVE players upload via their cache file scanning application. Presumably this means nefarious users can poison data in EVE Central to their benefit. I don’t know if they do or not, it is just that paranoia is a healthy lifestyle in EVE. In addition to the threat of scams there is also the chance that the data may be out of date and just plain wrong. I may be heading across space to fill an order that was completed hours ago. Despite these drawbacks it is a fine tool. It is clever at planning routes and doing the math, saving me from making my third EVE based spreadsheet.

Remarkably it seems like my best bet as a starting trader are low priced commodities that appear to have little impact on the game. Who, for example, is using Frozen Foods? Can they be swapped in for ammo when you are in a pinch? That would see the gankers off, a cannon launched barrage of frozen chickens smashing up the shields of their Tier II tear harvesting monster ship.

Do do a few of these runs, shipping odd things like Carbon, Frozen Foods, Frozen seeds, and even Garbage and Tobacco. The returns aren’t great. Either I am doing it wrong or trading is harder than mining.

I’ve avoided the mining connection when trading until I realise that once again the volume of the goods is one of the most important factors in success. Minerals are small. I’ve been selling them and now I’m buying them. I make one run, carting a load across a fair distance in my slow hauler. I think I’ll make around 550-600K on this. I make something nearer 500K with a quick scan of my balance. Why? Broker fees at around 0.9%, Sales Tax at around 1.5% where has it gone? Somehow I’ve overlooked a whopping great 10% Corporation Tax on some earlier bounties and a mission or two. I need to have a look at this. I need to make sure it isn’t applied to trade. I mean, Corporation Tax! What is this? Real life? It’s not even a real corporation! The Federal Naval Academy is the default corporation for any new Gallente pilot. In EVE everyone is in a corporation. Some are run by the game (the naval academy, a news and media conglomerate) which provide flavour text, and some by other players. The default tax rate for the game corporations is, I think, 11% without skilling into reducing it.

Thinking time is needed and it is getting quite late. I go for my usual wander around, making sure I pass through a few low sec systems. Making sure I’m hardened to surprises from them and resistant to such surprises in future. Right now they seem less threatening than a huge tax bill.

1 comment:

  1. To answer your question about Eve-Central, yes it's been known for people to upload poisoned data. Want to sell something quick? Make somebody believe there's an over-priced buy-order somewhere else in the game.

    However the quantity of uploads these days means that, at least in the regions containing the major trade hubs, poisoned prices are more quickly replaced with up-to-date accurate prices.

    ReplyDelete