Faction Warfare - T5 Warzone Control and Earning For Loss

Since I joined faction warfare, I've lost 750M ISK in ships. I'm bad at PvP, but I still enjoy it, especially under the faction warfare umbrella. I'm really glad I joined.

Even though I have a few billion ISK in the bank, I can't sustain 750M ISK in ship losses per month forever. I need some manner of decent income.

Thankfully, Minmatar are a tight militia group. A number of the larger alliances work together closely. This weekend was no exception, as Late Night Alliance and Iron Oxide came up with a schedule of pushing us to T5 warzone control on Sunday, after the alliance tournament had ended. People were informed 34 hours in advance, so if you wanted to cash out, you knew when it was going to happen.

(I'm not going to feel bad for the Amarr here. They were giving up systems to us left and right this weekend. My guess is that it had nothing to do with malaise, and more to do with their Minmatar militia alts wanting to cash out as well. More power to them for having the alts. They need ISK for ships too. We can't very well blow them up if they don't have ships to fly.)

I was already stockpiling EMP S, EMP M, and EMP L in Abudban, so I was mostly ready. I spent a few hours buying more ammo, and then started calculating how many loyalty points Poetic was going to need to convert all the ammo to the Republic Fleet variants. I had 1,185,000 units of EMP S, 850,000 units of EMP M, and 960,000 units of EMP L. I was going to need 254,300 loyalty points. I was about 60,000 short, so spent some time on Saturday and Sunday topping up what I was going to require.

All told, before the big push for T5 control, I'd spent 546,983,500 ISK on ammo, which includes the 254,300,000 ISK I would be spending at the loyalty point store, converting it all, 5000 units at a time. I was going to be doing a lot of clicking.

I will say I felt a little guilty about potentially making over a billion ISK in profit off what was going to happen. I wasn't really contributing. To push systems to higher levels, one has to use LP, and I really had none to spare. A lot of other people were spending their LP to do this. Granted, not purely for the altruism, they were looking to make billions themselves. What they were aiming to make was an order of magnitude larger than what I was going to make. Nonetheless, I felt like I was mooching off a friend.

Next time we do this, I plan to have a lot of LP in reserve, so that I can properly contribute to the effort. It'll make me feel better about the ISK I do end up making.

So, at the designated time, the push came, and we did in fact reach T5 warzone control. Mad clicking ensued, because I did not know how long it would last. A couple hours? Fifteen minutes? I had no idea. So, 5000 units at a time, I converted 2,995,000 units of EMP ammo to Republic Fleet EMP ammo.

The next order of business was getting it all to Jita. Quickly. I knew a lot of other people were converting ammo as well, because just before the push, I checked the Heimatar markets for EMP ammo. The entire region was nearly cleared out. So if I wanted to get the prices I expected, I had to get it to Jita before anyone else.

I set a 25M ISK contract, Abudban to Jita. 39000m³ of cargo. I could have hauled it myself, but I didn't really feel comfortable hauling 2.1B ISK in ammo. If I was ganked, that would have really sucked. 25M ISK is double what I would have had to pay with Red Frog, but their site was listing heavy volume, which could mean waiting a day or two for the cargo to arrive. I wanted it there within six hours. My courier contract was snatched up in two minutes. I had it in Jita three hours later.

Now I hate market PvP. I hate the 0.01 ISK war. Having to reset market orders a few times a day, just so that some small portion of a total order can get sold. I just want to sell it immediately, and be done with it. Which is why I chose Jita as a location for my sales. One, they have huge volume. Two, the buy orders are priced very close to the sell orders, within 10%. I could sell all my stuff immediately for around 2B ISK, versus dealing with market PvP and eventually getting 2.2B ISK. A 200M ISK shortfall was worth it if it meant avoiding a giant headache.

I'm also really lazy, which is why I stuck with ammo. I knew it would make a half decent profit, which meant that I didn't have to analyze the profit potential of a few hundred loyalty point store items. I like to keep it easy and simple.

As it turned out, I got better prices than I was counting on. By about 2-5%, which covered the 1.05% sales tax.

In the end, I sold all the ammo for 2,144,205,000 ISK, coming away with a net profit of 1,572,221,500 ISK. A good day, and enough to keep me in ships for two months.

Next time, I'll probably just stick with EMP S. The rate of return on the small ammo is much much better than on the medium and large.