Skip to main content

Gotta Check the Commas

I basically flushed 500 mil down the toilet with a market mistake and went, "Huh. Ah well," and moved on with my life. I had typoed an order a few days ago and someone got a heavily discounted hull or two. It is a reminder to slow down. I'm sometimes surprised that I manage to do well with my markets considering the constant mistakes that I make. It is my own fault. The window looks correct but a few (as in three) zeros are missing sometimes.

I often discuss how fun and satisfying the market is. Sometimes, it is just a lot of work. When I have everything running along, nicely balanced, it is mostly effortless. When that balance tips and the market derails, getting it moving again is a lot of work that is not so much fun.

For instance. Three months seems like a long time. It really does. Only, it is not. Not with market orders like I put up. Three months is a change in the meta. It is the summer. It is a time when everyone armor tanks instead of shield tanks. It is the collapse of the autocannon market. It is jump fuel changes. It is many things and everything. Three months is not a lot of time and when managing hundreds of orders, sometimes it vanishes in a blink.

It is human error and I am far from exempt from it. I like it, even as I do not enjoy the effects of it.  I may make more then other people. I somewhat feel that way. But, well it is the price of doing business for me. At the very least one can still do fine even when making a steady stream of mistakes as you go along.

There is an interesting flood of positive and negative emotion of late. "I don't mean to be a downer but..." happens a lot as people crash into a wave of positivity coming from the recent influx of new people trying Eve. We won't retain all of them. We may not retain most of them, but I do not think that showing them what people like about the game is a bad thing. I play because I enjoy it. I do not enjoy every single moment in a wild burst of adrenaline filled action. Every second of the game is not success and triumph. That's why the game is incredible. For those moments where it is.

They start out small. When I first started TCS, I hovered over my market app and refreshed it constantly from my phone while at work to watch things sell. Everything that sold was a success. Every bit of ammo, every rig and module. I celebrated them. Not because each thing was a huge wave of ISK coming into the game. I celebrated it because I was making those sales happen.

Even as I lose things I can still know that I tried. I have failed at so many things. And one might say that failure is an unpleasant sensation and makes Eve unfun. But I watch the new players celebrate figuring something out after a series of mistakes. I know that losing the ISK I lost will not harm me and it will teach me not to make that mistake again and make the game better.

Sure, Eve is not only positive and productive game play. I thought we all knew that. I thought that the simple fact that we can lose our ships, not come out of the other side of a battle, and have everything we have built burn down is what drives us to play. There isn't success without failure. Otherwise we'd be playing Eve Online: Bacon Button.

There isn't anything wrong in sharing the joy of playing. The thrill of success. The end product of a long project. Sure, people won't get that tomorrow and the ones looking for Eve Online: Bacon Button won't stay.  But some will and that is the entire point of these things.

I'll probably keep being positive. I'll share the good things and the bad. I'm amused that my bitterest moments in this game have all been produced by other players. That may be some of the problems in Eve as well. Losing five hundred mill sucks, but its part of the game that I try to play. It will happen again. It has happened before.

Mistakes were made...
Games were played,
And I kept walking on.

Comments

  1. Pesky zeros!!!

    When I short myself (and we all do occasionally) it’s not so much the amount of the loss that annoys me as it is that I made the error in the first place. Accordingly, I find myself equally peeved if I lose 300 thousand or 300 million. Layered over that annoyance remains the still empty slot that cries to be filled meaning I’ve not only lost some ISK, I’ve also wasted some time. On top of those two annoyances, I find myself forlornly wishing the pilot who benefitted from my error would show a little decency and send me a quick “Hah, hah! Sucks to be you!” message thereby allowing me to nurture some small comfort in the knowledge that at least someone took a little pleasure in the error but nooooo, nary a word from any of my unintentional beneficiaries.

    “No it isn’t very pretty what a town without pity can.. do..”

    ReplyDelete
  2. Started the session with a battleship. internet pause...

    Keep Calm and pour more coffee. Have a lengthy word to a large dog why he can not lounge on the bed when my back is turned.

    Hmm no module icons.

    It's another day in paradise as a dock my pod.

    Hmm mighty fine cup of Columbian roast, drip filter.

    It's a not a loss, it's just a change and that leads to opportunity.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The good part about mistakes is everyone makes them (except the damn bots who never mistake 10k for 10 mil). Sometimes you lose because you made a mistake but sometimes you win because someone else made a mistake.

    IMO, the more you play the market the less likely (percentage wise that is) you are to make a mistake. So those of us who enter a lot of orders tend to get burned by our mistakes less often than we profit from other's mistakes.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If you get the opportunity, please suggest that CCP add a market sell order warning if the sell order price is greatly "Above" the regional average.

    With the new market window I was trying to make a sell order for some minerals when I accidentally appended my sale price to the existing default price -- instead of replacing it. Because the quantity was so high it resulted in a 1.2 Billion brokerage fee instead of what should have been 1.6M. Ouch!!

    I found that people have been asking for a high price warning since 2008.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe one day!

 [15:32:10] Trig Vaulter > Sugar Kyle Nice bio - so carebear sweet - oh you have a 50m ISK bounty - so someday more grizzly  [15:32:38 ] Sugar Kyle > /emote raises an eyebrow to Trig  [15:32:40 ] Sugar Kyle > okay :)  [15:32:52 ] Sugar Kyle > maybe one day I will try PvP out When I logged in one of the first things I did was answer a question in Eve Uni Public Help. It was a random question that I knew the answer of. I have 'Sugar' as a keyword so it highlights green and catches my attention. This made me chuckle. Maybe I'll have to go and see what it is like to shoot a ship one day? I could not help but smile. Basi suggested that I put my Titan killmail in my bio and assert my badassery. I figure, naw. It was a roll of the dice that landed me that kill mail. It doesn't define me as a person. Bios are interesting. The idea of a biography is a way to personalize your account. You can learn a lot about a person by what they choose to put in their bio

Taboo Questions

Let us talk contentious things. What about high sec? When will CCP pay attention to high sec and those that cannot spend their time in dangerous space?  This is somewhat how the day started, sparked by a question from an anonymous poster. Speaking about high sec, in general, is one of the hardest things to do. The amount of emotion wrapped around the topic is staggering. There are people who want to stay in high sec and nothing will make them leave. There are people who want no one to stay in high sec and wish to cripple everything about it. There are people in between, but the two extremes are large and emotional in discussion. My belief is simple. If a player wishes to live in high sec, I do not believe that anything will make them leave that is not their own curiosity. I do not believe that we can beat people out of high sec or destroy it until they go to other areas of space. Sometimes, I think we forget that every player has the option to not log back in. We want them to log

And back again

My very slow wormhole adventure continues almost as slowly as I am terminating my island in Animal Crossing.  My class 3 wormhole was not where I wanted to be. I was looking for a class 1 or 2 wormhole. I dropped my probes and with much less confusion scanned another wormhole. I remembered to dscan and collect my probes as I warped to the wormhole. I even remembered to drop a bookmark, wormholes being such good bookmark locations later. My wormhole told me it was a route into low sec. I tilted my head. How circular do our adventures go. Today might be the day to die and that too is okay. That mantra dances in the back of my head these days. Even if someone mocks me, what does that matter? Fattening someone's killboard is their issue not mine. So I jumped through and found myself in Efa in Khanid, tucked on the edge of high sec and null sec. What an interesting little system.  Several connections to high sec. A connection to null sec. This must be quite the traffic system.    I am f