TCS: Keeping the Doors Open

When Eve Mentat loaded I was nervous. Very nervous. I stockpiled a bit the days before my little in game break. I knew that TCS would not be able to be fully sustainable for four days. I did figure that I could shore up the cracks and weak spots. I'm going to pet myself about this because I did a pretty good job. The list was long but it was not as terrible as it seemed. I had shored up a lot of orders by duplicating them. Instead of cancelling an order with a few left, having the available sell orders, I posted another up to catch the over lap. This happened with enough items that it made a significant dent in the list of items that I was out of stock on.

Being out of stock is good. It means everything sold. It is bad. It means people may not get items that they need or want. I'm not all powerful. I just try to do a good job. At some point the work aspect of Eve just has to give into other things. Eventually, TCS will be able to sit for a week, but it is not right there yet.

I last stocked the store on Tuesday evening and checked it Saturday morning. During that time I sold just over two billion ISK in stock. There looked to be a pull on battleship needs. I burned through Large Trimarks for instance. Sard holds the battleship hulls so I do not know how he did moving them. I went through drones. I went through Ruptures. I went through large ammo. Reading what sells gives me an idea of what it was being used for.

But future predictions are nearly impossible on a large scale of what will people decide to fleet into next week. On a smaller scale I know to buy 1mn afterburner II's and have some in stock because they go quickly. Until Arianne Stone asked me for T2 1mn afterburners it had never occurred to me to stock them because I don't use them. I hate afterburner fits and will only fly them when the fleet comp calls for it. Because everyone must feel the exact same way I feel about everything, imagine my surprise when the 1mn T2 afterburners sold out quickly.

My industrial experiment is going well. They sell quite steadily. I added some Ventures and mining equipment as well and that also sells. Why, I don't know. But I don't ask these things. On one side, the rational part of me says that I should wait and build stock instead of playing around. On the other side, I want to enjoy myself and it is fun seeing what moves through this market.

People buy in fits vs resupply. Sometimes someone comes in and wipes me out but in general people buy an entire fit or at least the pieces they need. Sometimes 10k units of missiles lasts for weeks and sometimes 10k units of missiles vanishes in two days.

The other thing I am seeing a lot of, post Odyssey, is market price fluctuation. I am a victim of it, being unable to predict what will move and what will not move to restock and not sit on a lot of static items while their prices go insane. Prices are still leaping all over the place and I am mitigating the damage to the store and the buyer by working through smaller stacks of items than I could be. I'll buy larger groups when the price seems to dip abnormally low and buy lightly when the prices shoot up. Otherwise I spend my time explaining to people why prices are what they are and why my prices are what they are. It grows exhausting.

I do need to start doing a few more local price checks vs Jita prices during the sudden up surges. The ripple effect of Jita being the center of the market world is that the ripples take some time to reach the edges and often fade before they get there. The problem is just that it is time intensive to add another check to what I am already doing. Time, some nights such as this one, is a hot commodity.