Back to civilization

It's been over a couple a weeks since I left my cave a.k.a. isolated in wormholes and joined another cave, only this time full of people. In other words, I found a corp. I have joined Mass Collapse. In truth, I've been scouting recruitment forum and have been eyeing different wormhole corps for awhile. I was even considering if I should go to low-sec or should I, gasp, try null. But then I remembered that every time I was stationed in k-space, I was always scouting wormhole connections. It's who I am.

So why Mass Collapse? Well, surprisingly, out of many wormhole corps, they really fit the bill of what I was looking for. Here are some of the main points:

• Purely EU focused with no split timezones.
• Just the right size. Not too big and not too small (~80 members)
• Scouts get the gank loot (up to 500mil with the rest going to corp's SRP fund)
• C4 home system with c4/5 statics which results in great chains.

The C4 home system was one of deciding factors. In my previous corp I was living in a c5 and it was a real hassle to find action or gank targets. You would have never ending c5 chains. Now it's a perfect balance between rolling into active corps that live in higher classes and finding gank targets in lower classes. Not to mention ease of logistics, with high-sec often being 2-3 jumps out.

Of course within first day of joining, I managed to miss a dreadnought kill. Despite all points mentioned above, by far the most important are the people. The corp's culture is relaxed, no stress and is all about having fun. One thing I have noticed though, there's not much farming going on. Some folks have null-sec ratting alts and some earn ISK by finding targets and getting the gank loot. Of course, since we live in a c4, we have great opportunity to do solo farming for ones who are interested. I haven't shot a sleeper in many years. And now I hear drifters are there fuck you up without you engaging them. It's quite funny, after doing solo wormhole ganking for so long, there are so many new things to learn. I still fly my trusty Proteus and already managed to find my first target. I can't tell how it is relaxing to have a fleet do the killing rather than multiboxing 5 ships.

Trading

Speaking of earning ISK, I decided to brush the dust off of my trader accounts. Since I haven't lost that many ships, I didn't need much ISK. My main accounts are paid for. It's been more than 2 years since I last did any trading. I had quite a lot of savings (around 300 bil) and now it seems I'm left with half of that.

A lot has changed. Of course PLEX prices went up again. Soon we will think 1billion was a nice price to have. Anyway, one of biggest things to get used to was the citadels. I got very upset, when I found out that my standings, which have been grinded with pain and tears, mean shit. You start with 3% broker fee and best you can do is shave it off to 2%, which is still insanely high. My traded items are always low margin (I undercut hard). So while I spent a lot of hours doing COSMOS and other missions, some fresh trader can use the nearest citadel and have better rates than me. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but it's not like I could do anything about it.

I've setup my remote buy orders at the free trading citadels at 0% tax. I don't understand why so many people still use Jita. There's literally almost no reason not to use the citadels, apart from little inconvenience. I guess laziness is a powerful thing and it took me also a good time to get used to it. However, most of my items are in 2-3% profit margin neighborhood.

I consolidated my capital from 6 to 3 traders and setup around 160bil buy orders. Then updating once a day, I undercut aggressively to the point where some items went from 20% margin to 2-4%. Some people can critique me, but that's my strategy to fight bots and 0.01 ISKers. So far I have been very happy with my returns. I topped at 2.6 billion profit on Saturday. Of course I don't have possibility to update daily. If I can manage 500mil/day profit on average without investing too much time, I would be quite happy.