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Spring Cleaning

This year I am spring cleaning like never before. Some of it is a rearrangement of my house. We're giving the basement room to be my husbands computer workshop and server room. I've been gardening. Its warm enough that I can get to work on projects like repainting the bedroom. Etc.

While at work today I decided to close down two of my accounts. There is no dark or sinister reason for it. It is because I am not as active as I have been and I don't need them. I've been training them for a future date when I may want them to be able to do things. Only, I've almost never used them. What kept me going was that they had TCS alts on them.

It meant deleting an alt I only used a few times. It was back when I wanted to try selling boosters in a sustainable way. I created an alt to run the goods to the buyers. That was before I fully comprehended how much I put on the line and how little I received for it. I couldn't sell those boosters for trying. The people it was suggested that I sell to ignored my efforts to supply them. It was one of my earlier efforts and I did terribly at it. I wound up with a huge back log of boosters that took me forever to get rid of. I learned a lot then. I learned that selling things directly to people in this game of stuff is incredibly hard. I learned that even having what people need at the price they wanted did not mean they'd buy it from you.

The TCS alts I will move onto other accounts and I will be down to the ones that I use constantly and use all of the characters on.

This all came from a thought about ISK and the value of things. I don't PLEX my accounts. That means I'm just paying for accounts I really don't do anything on. That seems silly. I can reactivate them later, when I want to use them. I don't have an endless supply of ISK or PLEX. I don't buy PLEX for the game. And with the CSM I have little game time and less ISK making time.

I don't think I'm abnormal in that. The average wallet amount has always been fascinating. Its often been much lower then people think. It was under a billion the last time one of those amounts surfaced. Managing ISK has always been an essential part of Eve for me. Making ISK comes easier to some than others. I've always longed to roll in the hundreds of billions but I've never been able to keep myself over ten billion liquid for longer then a week or so.

But there is an interesting disconnect for some when ISK becomes easy or ISK is part of a greater support structure. Someone has to make it. Someone has to manage it. It is nice if you can just throw it around and if it feels endless. It isn't that way for everyone. It's not that way for me. Any time I hear something is only 25 billion "don't be poor", or how a hundred PLEX is reasonable I am like, "What?"

This stuff doesn't just rain from the sky. TCS does well but I still find myself struggling to select things that will not sit but turn over. I have large amounts tied up in capital production right now. It pays itself back but it isn't instant and sometimes I grow very tired of peddling to keep things moving. Tired enough that I debate finding new ways to make money or at least not spend it.

However, that may be me. Perhaps everyone else is reeling in ISK and can spend a hundred PLEX any time it is called for. Me? I've never been quiet good enough to PLEX my accounts and not make it feel like a job. I don't want Eve to be a job. So, I'm downsizing a little bit. Breaking a few habits I've sunk into over the last year. I've been admiring Kaeda's newbie start over project. I don't think I want to go down that particular rabbit hole but I have a whole lot of projects I've wanted to do and gotten distracted before I ever got there.

So maybe. We will see.


  1. If you'd run a donation drive for ISK, you'd be all set for the rest of your life.

    Don't be shy, you put awful lot of work into CSM, so you deserve to be paid.

    1. I volunteered for the CSM and knew the potential, so no worries. ISK making is a puzzle for me.

  2. Huh I thought CSMs would get free subs.

  3. Reading the sov threads on the official forums reminded me that people define "rich" as "having the costs of my expected lifestyle be relatively minimal." So if you make $250,000 a year, but spend most of it keeping up with the proverbial Joneses, then you don't feel rich. If you make $50,000 a year and live frugally, then you probably do. So looking at nullsec in the context of a lot of the assertions made in the thread, such as "of course you have a carrier," and "everyone has a jump freighter alt," and "you have X number of doctrine ships in X number of staging systems" and some of the doctrines are pricey... that sets a very high baseline for income. Whereas, as a pilot in a small alliance in a low-class wormhole, I felt extremely comfortable when my wallet hit 2 billion ISK because I flew mostly T1 ships, and the occasional frigate- or cruiser-sized T2s (including the obligatory covops). My blingiest ship was a T2-fit Vulture.

    I'd be surprised if the average high sec resident has half a billion in their wallet at any given time. There's no need for more unless you have an ambitious gleam in your eye, and I don't see that most of them do.

    I think that ISK-making is a combination of a sort of capitalist mindfulness, where you always have one eye open for an opportunity and you're long since used to spotting them, and in some cases a bloody-minded willingness to put up with tedium, such as the alliance mate who gritted his teeth orbiting buttons in FW until he had enough ISK to not ever have to worry about it again--and that amount would probably not impress a lot of the posters in the null sec threads.

    But I'm guessing, because I don't have much of a knack for ISK making, and part of that is because "you'll get ISK for this!" is an extremely weak motivator for me.

  4. It's all about the lifestyle. I used to goggle at oldbros in Genesis lowsec mumbling that they needed to get back to gas harvesting as they'd dropped below 2b liquid. At the time, losing my myrmidon in a failed gatecamp meant burning back to Dodixie for a couple days of L4 missioning.

    Now I'm in Wspace I make far more ISK, but it cycles through your wallet > hangar > wreck > someone else's wallet far quicker too.

    Low, even with all the resources added in the past couple years still doesn't cut it IMO unless you're diving into C3s to source ISK.

    1. I've done C3s and found it unfun and not very profitable for the group and a lot of work as well. Being unfamiliar with wormholes didn't help. My preCSM personal income was about a billion a month with little effort. I just used it to invest in things and people.

    2. Wormhole ISK-making is all about exploitation of all available resources that one can stand to exploit. Generally peaking, the statics are raided for sites (not the home hole). PI can be a huge income boost as well, because wormhole PI is -1.0 truesec. And then there's the ore and gas mining to supplement, not to mention the relic sites.

      And that's just the C1-C4.

      As for raiding wormholes from k-space, it all depends on how large your group is and can you roll exits relatively quickly. A single night with a group of 6-8 pilots can be quite profitable.

      And yes, it is rather discouraging to hear that something is "cheap" at 300 million (or even 600 or 700). All I can say is, must be nice to have that kind of cash on-hand :)


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