A Stranger Trade

I like Jita a lot. It fascinates me. The hundreds of ships that pour out of the undock amaze me. The battles on the station used to frighten me. The entire organised that is Jita fascinates me enough that I write fiction stories that rotate around Jita. The amusing thing is that in real life, a place like Jita gives me the creeps. I love going to open markets when I explore new places but I loathe the barter that will come with those markets. In Eve, I don't have to deal with the barter aspect and I can enjoy the people watching.

But I am not the only one watching people. I am also being watched. Imagine my surprise when I received a conversation invite for my buy alt from someone who wanted to sell me booster gas. They wanted to sell me a lot of booster gas and hopefully regularly. I often feel a bit sad that I cannot oblige someone in that way. I still added their name as a contact and I will try to buy from them in the future.

A little bit later, I received another conversation request on another alt I had in Jita at the same time. I had put some researched blueprints up for sale. It has been a long term project that I am terrible at. I'm pretty sure if the numbers line up I'm not making anything off of my research. Still, it gives my POS something else to do. Every three to six months I make a few hundred million from it. It is slow to pay off but I find making myself a cog in the machine an interesting pastime.

This conversation request was interesting.

Basically, the person messaged me and offered to trade one of the blue prints I had just listed for a PLEX. The price of the PLEX was about five million less than I listed the blueprint for. Good deal right? I should leap on this screaming at my good fortune. Instead, I politely declined.  "Why not?" they asked, "Not enough?". "I don't do station trades with strangers in Jita," was my response. They closed the conversion.

I do not do trades in Jita from people I do not know. I do trades between my own alts and sometimes corpmates. I've had random trades opened with me. I always close them. I'm not fully sure how this one would have gone down. I don't know if they'd have pulled the PLEX from the window and hope that I did not see it or what? They never offered money. They did not offer to contract me the PLEX and use the normal plex scam of adding it as an item given during the contract. They did not buy my contract or attempt to get me to lower my prices. I know they where doing something but exactly what that was, I am unsure of.

I also saw real contracts offered in Jita local on patch day. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one.