Day 76 : Windfall

I wake up groggy, tea is required before complete consciousness. I boot the PC without getting out of bed and try to remember how my legs work. I fire up Chrome and EVEMon on the way to the kitchen. I tend to start EVEMon in the morning because otherwise I’ll log on properly and never make it out of the flat.

Back with tea, I scan the headlines on the BBC and bring up Google Reader to check EVE blog feeds, alt tabbing to EVEMon before I can get too fixated by what everyone else is writing about in EVE. Something catches my eye in EVEMon and a newly developed survival mechanism kicks in. I put the hot tea down, no more tea burns for me. I am staring at the Balance figure. It isn’t what it is supposed to be. I click into market sales. Yep. I am definitely 260 million ISK richer than last night.

The stolen POS sold, sold in the same system I stole it out of too. I’ve doubled my wealth. I have now woken up properly.

Unfortunately this distracts me all day. What am I going to do with this windfall?

Here is what I end up thinking about.

1) Ships. It has been a while since I bought a new ship, I could buy quite a few with this cash. Ever since I got the POS (http://diaries-of-a-space-noob.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/day-65-sting.html) I have mentally labelled it as a Battlecruiser fund. I can’t fly or fit them that well but strangely I like flying around in different ships just for the sake of the ship itself. I don’t know why. It is a game and it is a good thing that every action I take doesn’t boil back down to its effect on the balance sheet. Additionally it won’t be long before I can fly T2 frigates and this cash will make buying the first couple a little easier. It is also tempting to splurge on a Navy Comet. Not because they are particularly good but because they look good in a Buck Rodgers kind of way. Apart from the Comet the ships do have practical plans assigned to them. The Comet would just be a hot rod. I shop around looking at the Brutix and Myrmidon hull prices for a while. Quite a while.

2) Mods. I could stack up our stock of T2 gear a little more. Jax brought in a metric ton of the stuff that he’d been saving but I don’t like taking from that pool, just as I don’t want to accept gifts of anything other than advice. My Northern upbringing is at the root of this and part of me wants to abandon it for EVE but I get too much out of the self reliant sense of achievement to do so.

3) Trade. I could use a sizable chunk of this cash to boost profit margins by dealing in more expensive kit. I’ll have a look at the markets at the tail end of the weekend when people have spent two days desperately outbidding each other until the price is rock bottom.

4) Manufacturing. I could invest in BPO’s and push them into material research queues somewhere. Later I can either sell or build with them. It’ll need some research but manufacturing has been on the back burner for a while. I am quite looking forward to getting back to it and this cash might help me diversify and experiment some more.

5) POS. Perhaps I could use money from a large stolen POS to fund a small POS just for research capabilities? I might be able to support it completely out of selling researched BPO’s. A friend made through the blog was telling me about moon mining with a small POS in low sec. This might prove difficult to set up and keep at the moment but now I can afford for the experiment to fail. There is a lot involved in this, even beyond reading up and finding out how its all done. I decide just to keep my eye out for suitable sites for now, reminding myself that zooming from moon to moon in low sec is going to get me in a hell of a lot more trouble than it did in hi sec.

6) Planetary Interaction (PI) - I quite want to investigate this and the cash would allow me a few failed experiments without damaging me much. I’m under the usual skill queue constraints here, more than any of the other ideas, so it might be some time before I can try it. The good news is that it looks like there is a CCP tutorial video, just like there was for exploring. This time I’ll watch it first before attempting anything.


It’s all very well getting carried away about what to do with the cash but what should I do about the original owner. I could keep quiet but that doesn’t sound much fun. If you were the boss of an alliance and found out that one of the pilots of a member corporation owned an entire corporation of their own, composed of billions worth of purchased or suspiciously alt like characters, what would you do? Is it normal EVE practice, like some alt utility and research corp? Did I get the research wrong and miss or invent something? Either is possible, I am a Noob after all. Should I leave a message for the alliance in question telling them they need to look into it? I’ll think about it for a while longer.
  
To take my mind off it once back in EVE I go out and get on with some more scanning practice. I’m getting a lot better at this now. I find my first Magnetometric site which has a poor yield but still feels good because I found it. I carry on scanning and come up with a Serpentis site.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Serpentis_Phi-Outpost

It looks too tough for me to tackle alone but Rob has just logged on. He decides to come along in a Myrmidon. His damage isn’t that high but these things can soak up damage and stay intact like a sponge soaks up water. I take the Vendetta, my old Vexor mining cruiser. This time it is fitted out as a drone boat with some long range guns.

Running through the first room of the site isn’t that bad and we hone a tactic that is familiar to me from Warcraft. Rob annoys the hell out of the enemy and they all attack him, leaving me to flank them and wipe them out. Old style Tanking.Things get a little tougher in the second part of the site. The main ship involved looks like a Gallente battleship but it appears to be packing some missiles and they have quite a kick. The ship is also very, very angry at us for some reason, we only came here to loot its corpse. I’m not sure what his beef is. He comes steaming out of the cloud of attendant ships like there is a rocket strapped to his arse, which I suppose there is really. This speed and anger makes it easier to kite the ship away from its support but even so the attack begins to take its toll on Rob who is out of ammo and dangerously into low armour. He has to warp out as we get through the shields. This leaves me on my own for a couple of minutes with an angry battleship nearby and a bunch of cruisers headed my way. I’m close enough that even the Vexor can speed tank this thing using an afterburner and I begin to grind away at it, it has become a race between my DPS and the speed of the incoming support. I’m watching the range of the support drop down as much as the ships armour. I ignore the occasional hit and tank it, firing up the repairer and dropping to normal speed when the capacitor begins to get dangerously low. Just as the incoming cruisers reach uncomfortably close range I manage to pop the battlecruiser. I drop the armor repairer, fire the afterburner and loot the corpse on the way out, fire from incoming ships screaming around me.

I get out at about half armour and in the cooler space around the local station I inspect the loot. It looks like we scored about 75 million here in advanced mods. The second windfall of the day! I’ll be scanning more of these sites down. The great shame is that it is now quite late and we don’t have the time to go back and finish off the rest of the ships and salvage the area. I think we’ve probably left a lot of cash in there. There will be other times though and I’m more than happy with what we’ve bagged here using team work.