Trading

I don't know if trading is the bane of my existence, or if it's the saviour of it. Time will tell, I'm sure. However, last night was just damned infuriating. It was my first adventure into trading. And let me tell you what I learnt.

1. I learnt what 'min volume' means, and how to look out for it. I bought 9,000 units of Quafe and shipped them to where I could sell them for a nice profit. Except they didn't want them at that price unless it was for a minimum of 39,000 units. So I sold all of them for less than what I paid for one of them, not realising until after the sale went ahead that the 216 ISK was actually for the total, rather than per unit. I lost a million ISK on the deal.

2. I learnt what 'quantity' means, and how to look out for it. I bought another 9,000 units of Mechanical Parts and shipped them to where I could sell them for a nice profit. Except they didn't want 9,000 units. They only wanted 12 units. Every time I sold 12 units, the price dropped. I did this 3 times before I could see this was just stupid, and I worked out what was happening. So I dumped them in the hangar, leaving them there to sell another time. You could probably say I was a little peeved by this point, having spent

3. With all my newfound knowledge about trading gained by the previous two attempts, I looked very closely at the market. I looked closely at the items available. I looked closely at the sale price and the buying price. I looked closely at the 'min volume' and the 'quantity'. Min volume was 1, and the quantity desired was 14,000. I purchased 9,000 and carefully made my way to the system. Upon arriving there, I discovered that the desired quantity had changed to 12. In fact, the desired quantity all throughout the region was 12. With a great scream of despair, and a lot of cursing and kicking of pod walls, I vowed never to come back to trading ever again, stating to anyone that was in comms range how much of a piece of crap trading was.

My score for the night's effort of trading was one million ISK LOST, and 7 million ISK spent but nothing to show for it. I logged out of my pod and went to sleep, dreaming about strangling whoever invented trading.

After waking up, I warily re-entered the Industrial, sitting there in the hangar. I warmed up the engines while checking the market. Finding that there was somewhere in 0.5 space that would buy 14,000 units of my mechanical parts, I made the 13 jumps there, hoping that they still wanted that many by the time I got there. They did, and I was happy to get rid of my load of 9,000 mechanical parts. Being mechanical, I knew they wouldn't mind if I gave them a decent kick on the way out the door. Damn, that felt so good.

So in the end, I made about 800k profit on that deal. Tonight I'll be returning to the hangar where I dumped the other load of mechanical parts, and I'll go sell that too.

Trading sucks. But damn, there's a lot of money to be made from it! When you can get past the annoying learning curve, that is....

I'm doing this for a goal. To get my Thorax Cruiser up and going, and then I'll be kicking arse and chewing bubble gum again! Yeah!

On the run...

I had such an interesting time last night. My first encounters with battlecruisers of all shapes and forms. First there were the Angel cartel's various battlecruisers, lurking amongst the asteroid belts of Mimiror. Unfortunately, my Tristan frigate was no match for them, and my volleys of railgun rounds and missiles were absolutely having no effect against their shields. And then I was getting a pounding from their own weapns, so that after close to a minute of that I could see it ending in only one result. The destruction of my ship. With Praetor's permission I withdrew from battle to lick my wounds and regenerate.

That was my theme of the night, which was a little annoying. I was just happy that I survived all the encounters, instead of being destroyed in only a few shots.

And then Nissith offered a duel, which I accepted. One shot from her battlecruiers and my armour tank had 50% armour. With a great sigh, I said, "Ok, you win."

I know I'm only a young'un, and that there's lots of growth ahead of me. I'm looking forward to getting the Thorax cruiser soon. I've finished training up for it now, but can't afford to buy it yet. In a few hours I'll be trained up for the Industrial I've bought, and I'll start trading. Hopefully the trading will give me some good profit to setup the Thorax, and then I'll be more of a match against those accursed Angel battlecruisers.

Bring 'em on! That's what I'll be saying...

Escort duty

We were engaged in a mining op a few days ago, which was rather interesting. It was my first time escorting another ship. This was an industrial ship to Mimimor, owned by Telekon, where it could engage in mining, He has since become a new member of Purify, thanks to his enjoyment and success during his Mimimor mining op.

After escorting him to Mimimor, Praetor Sarum took over escort duty while he mined, and I joined a few others on anti-pirate patrolling. NIssith and Gazanz were having some fun with a few pirate battlecruisers, so I joined the fray, adding my railguns and missiles to the projectiles and blasters lighting up the dark space between the asteroids. Gaza had to go for some repairs, so I accompanied Nissith and Evan around various asteroid belts, helping out with the good fight.

Eventually we destroyed all the pirates that were lurking amongst the asteroid belts, and Telekon finished his huge mining op, so everyone headed off to respective docks. Me too, and I had a great sleep, knowing that I'd had a great day of pirate killing.

My first experience with escort duty was quite interesting. I'd go into a system first, check for pirates, and then get Telekon to come in. Then I'd warp to the next gate, jump through into the next system, and check again. No pirates were encountered along the escort, so that was all good.

However, tonight was a very different story, and one which, happily, had a happy ending.

Telekon needed escorting through lowsec space again to transport 100 million ISK worth of goods. Since he had to go through lowsec space, it certainly made sense to get an escort. No one else was near or available, so I met him in Gelfiven and escorted him to his destination.

Illamur was where we almost came unstuck. I jumped in and checked for pirates, and lo and behold, there they were! Two of 'em, one had a sec rating of -9.9 and the other had a rating of -9.1. I told Telekon not to come in, and I headed back the 15km to the jump gate, ready to jump back to him at the first sign of them near the gate. I figured anyone with such an extremely low sec rating would be flying ships that I couldn't even hope to outclass with my Tristan Frigate.

Sitting there at the jump gate, I waited. My plan was to wait until they either left the system, in which case I'd get Telekon to come in and we'd go through to the next gate, or until they appeared and attacked, in which case I would jump back.

To my surprise, I was invited to join a channel that was called 'Ransom' somethng-or-other. I waited, wondering what they wanted to talk about. 'Ransom' seemed obvious enough, but I hadn't been captured yet....

"250k for safe passage," was the message that appeared. I relayed this information to Telekon, and he wasn't interested in paying pirates. Never had, never will. Good, I thought, and I told them, "Thanks for the offer." That's all, and then I jumped back to the system where Telekon was waiting.

I checked the map to find an alternate route, but it seemed that all routes went through Illamur. So I waited 5-10 minutes and then jumped back into Illamur to see if they had gone yet. They had! So Telekon jumped in, and with eyes glued to the local comm channel we quickly made our way to the next jump gate, and eventual safety.

I was so happy that my second escort had also been successful! So was Telekon, as he warped off to his destination and 100 million ISK....

Another great day.

Recruiting is going extremely well. I've recruited around 5 or so people in the past week, and I've received confirmation from someone tonight that they and 3 of their friends will also be joining Purify.

I love being Head of Recruitment!

Purification!

Last night was extremely interesting for me. I went on my very first solo patrol. Flying a tanked up Tristan has given me the confidence to go out patrolling by myself.

I started in a 0.5 system, looking for any pirates. I couldn't find any with the scanner, but I decided to patrol the asteroid belts anyway, just in case. I found a couple of Angel frigates in one belt, and quickly dispatched them. I then went to a nearby 0.4 system, seeing if things would improve there. Boy, did they ever!

There were Angel Cartel ships all over the place. Every asteroid belt I went to had a few of them lurking around. At first, finding that they were Cruisers was a little daunting, as I'd never gone up against Cruisers before. However, after easily taking out 3 Angel Cruisers who just failed to do anything significant against my armour, I continued my patrol of this sector.

There were about 8 or 9 asteroid belts, and every single one of them had small groups of Angel cruisers or frigates lurking amongst them. Every single one of them felt the deadly sting of my railguns and missiles.

Within an hour, I'd cleared the entire sector of pirates, and my cargo hold was full of loot. I returned home to sell my earnings, and noticed that I'd also earnt myself close to 300k of bounties. In total, it was a nice hour of earning about 500k.

I think I'll do this more often. Purification is coming to these heathens!

Head of Recruitment

want to thank Praetor Sarum for having such confidence and belief in me that he would give me the position of Head of Recruitment. Amazing. Thank you!

I think it was the fact that I was eager to be of assistance to Purify, as well as the fact that I've brought in two recruits in the past week and plan on soon introducing a few more. With the Recruitment position having been given to me, and with the responsibility that I now have, I intend to do a lot better than what I originally planned.

I've created a Recruitment 'blurb' on the Purify message boards, to give visitors a bit of information about the corporation and help enthuse them to join. I've used the same blurb on the recruitment forum for the entire galaxy. I'm hoping we'll get a few newcomers from this campaign, and I plan on doing it weekly.

As part of my new role, which is providing a bit of a public face to the galaxy, I created a signature file.

image removed

Do you like it? I do. I like it a lot. But hey, I should... I made it! Everyone has a signature file, and now I have one too. I'll have to change it as time goes by, to take into account various ships I fly along the way.

Anyway, that's all from me. I look forward to getting some new recruits into Purify, and I'm also going to see if I can encourage a training division, as well as introduce ranks and medals, to inspire people to go above and beyond the call of duty.

We'll see how all that goes. Have a great day!

My first patrol

Well, wasn't last night just a barrel of laughs. Or something like that. Ok, not really. In fact, when you get past the excitement of anticipation, it was pretty darned boring!

We patrolled for about an hour and a half, going from one system to the next, from one belt to another, from one planet to another. The anticipated built for the first half hour to an hour, but after that, it was just.... slow. We were going through low security systems, but there weren't any scumbags anywhere!

Was actually quite amazing to find no one around in so many lawless areas. Almost like going through a whole bunch of ghost towns, except they were ghost systems or something...

Not far into the patrol, Praetor - the squad leader - directed me to act as bait, jumping into systems first to see if anyone was there, and scanning for pirates. I was the new guy, so sure, it's only to be expected that I'd be the bait.

Luckily the onboard cleaning systems didn't have too much of a problem with cleaning up the pools of sweat that gathered on the floor below my chair. There was no enemy contacts, but still, it was the anticipation of danger and destruction that gets the adrenaline going! I know that life goes on with the clone, but being 'killed' has gotta hurt! I've not been killed yet, and I'm just not interested in finding out how painful the experience is...

Just before the patrol finished (at DT), we came upon three Angel Cartel ships, and we warped in and engaged them. It seemed they were too powerful for us though, as well as too fast! They moved away, with the squad following them, but it seemed that not a single one of our attacks were penetrating their shields.

With only 4 minutes to DT, I disengaged from the attack and docked at the closest station, just so that when I log back into the pod later on, I'm not surrounded by these Angel ships.

It was a great 'first patrol', and I'm looking forward to being involved in many more. I'm hoping I'll sweat less as i get more experienced.

The beginning

The beginning of what? Frack knows, but it's the beginning of something. We'll just have to work out what that something is as time goes by. I hope you enjoy the meanderings of me, Black Claw, as much as I'll enjoy writing them.

It's a pleasure to be part of Purify. I was born into Eve Online knowing that I was destined to be part of something great, and I feel very strongly that my destiny intersecting with Purify was something significant. How significant? I don't know. Read the first paragraph again for more information on that...

I've just passed the probation period, and am now a full-fledged member of Purify. It's exciting! But I'm a lowly Cadet, I believe. I feel like I'm going through the training academy again, but hey! That's ok! Training is good. You can't become great until you learn HOW to become great.

I met Praetor Sarum face to face for the first time yesterday. Yep, his ship and my ship, cockpit to cockpit, waving at each other through the windows. He has a nice ship! Very.... golden. Mine's small and insignificant in comparison. But my weapons are pretty good!

We had a mock fight, so that I can see how good I am. My Tristan Frigate missiles and railguns got through his Cruiser's shields in a matter of seconds, but then he showed me how much of an armour tank he is. No fair.... I gave up after a couple minutes. It gave me hope though, of adequately going up against other non-armour tanked cruisers.


Well, that's all from me for this meander. More meanderings coming later.