Ugh yesterday was a bit of a shit show. Got off work late because not enough people showed up. Then the kids were being quite a chore, to be diplomatic. I had to go pick up a humidifier because we really need one. Then when I finally did get to sit down at my computer, it started whining at me.

The comp had been making a strange noise on and off but today it was on and it wasn't going away. I narrowed the sound down to the power supply fan so I needed to replace it. A quick trip to Staples later and everything is fixed!

By the time I got to sit down again it was already 2 hours away from my bedtime. Sooooo yeah, not much progress made yesterday. Mostly just cleared out my inventory again, which needed doing anyway, then tried to settle on which mobs I was going to grind to lvl 52. I think I've settled on Manshas for now, mostly because I have a few quests for them. Though maybe I should look at that Hexer Sanctuary place. Not sure what level it is exactly but I thought it was higher.

Anyway I hope tonight goes way more smoothly.

My Ninja has been progressing at a pretty crazy rate imo. He's lvl 50 now, I've mostly just been spamming the black spirit quests and it seems to be working pretty well. I'm looking forward to doing his awakening but that's not till lvl 56 which is probably going to take me a while despite the crazy amount of progress I've got leveling.

So life has resulted in me not having a whole lot of time to play but the time I have been playing seems to have been pretty fun and productive. My ninja is now level 37 and I'm on my way to Calpheon for Black Spirit quests.

I recently purchased a full set of Grunil armor for him. The shoes were the hardest part to get as they seemed to all be on the market in bids. I put in a pre order for it and was lucky enough to pick one up. I had enough stones saved up to get my weapons and armor to +6. I made the choice to get a lot of gear focused on AP and I'll just have crystals in the armor to get me the accuracy needed to be good in PVP.... I hope.

There's still al ot about this game that I'm trying to wrap my head around but everything seems to be going well so far.

So I switched to my Wizard after my last post. I've sunk so much time into him in the past that it seems hard to justify switching to my ninja full time just yet.

He's level 51 now, I'm plugging away at doing Black Spirit quests which it seems he was behind on. At one point I decided to get really into trading so the BS quests kind of took a back seat. I'm having tons of fun doing this though.

I did the BS quests for Catfishmen, Rumtums, and the other mobs in that area. Finished the evening off by doing the Shadow Knight quest. At first I thought it was going to take quite a while but it really didn't take too long. And for once I logged off for the evening feeling like I'd accomplished what I set out to do. I haven't had that feeling in quite some time. Such a great game.

The only thing that I don't like about my wizard is that there's sooo many of them around. I confess to enjoying the special snowflake syndrome of playing a class you don't see as often. I should know that such a thing is pointless since class distribution is probably pretty even so it doesn't matter what I play. I'll probably make a bunch of alts anyway. I already have quite a few.

So I decided to forget about fate and just make a new ninja anyway after work. I think THINK I got him where I want him. I only hope that when I get into game I don't realize that I forgot to change his voice or something. I know I didn't but what if I end up not liking it? I swear character creation is the most difficult and stressful part of this game.

I guess I'm going to have to go around and farm up some gear on this guy too. I'll have to remember to find the drop locations for the Agarian set. Although something told me there was a vendor that sold lots of named gear for cheap? Maybe I'm crazy.

Apparently Grunil is a good set for me meaning I need to kill enemies in Media... which doesn't make sense to me at all.

OH ok Media is the higher level zone to the east. I'll settle with whatever drops for me for now.

I guess maybe it was meant to be that I keep the ninja I currently have. I've been tooling around with my SO on it and he's a lot of fun, so much so that he's already level 20 so I would find it difficult to justify replacing him just because I'm not a huge fan of his appearance. I might just have to invest in an appearance change coupon at some point in the future.

I'm definitely going to have to take a look at his skills to see what they actually do. I can't just left click and spin around for the entire game. As much fun as that has been so far lol.

It looks like the last attack of my LMB chain does double damage. It also refunds WP/hit and does a down attack with forward and stiffness if the last hit of the forward succeeds.Don't really know what stiffness does though so unsure if that matters.

Shift + Q is a block jump. Holding forward makes you go behind the enemy, back is just backwards, left appears below the enemy and kicks, right appears above the enemy and does a smash kick. Cool. Also looks like it gives +6 melee attack for 10sec. So might be a good openener.

Back + Q is apparently +15% sprint speed for 10s and no stam consumption. Good for chasing people down (it IS called Target Chase afterall).

I guess that's all I'm going to do for this evening though as my eldest has reminded me, it's past my bedtime lol. She's not wrong either since I do work at 5am. Man I really REALLY need a new job. Though getting off work at 2:30 has it's benefits. The pay is shitty though anyway. Oh yeah, bedtime.

I'm Back

So after a long hiatus I have returned to Black Desert. A lot seems to have changed and I don't know what I'm planning on doing. I know the guild that I was with is gone (probably long gone) so I suppose finding a guild is going to be high on my priority list.

I'm interested in playing a ninja too because, I confess, one of my primary reasons for returning is that I recently re-watched Sword Art Online and I think a Ninja most closely represents the kind of character Kirito is. Not to mention the fact that the class seems hella fun to play.

Only problem is I kept having problems with creating my character. I'd finally get the face right only to find out that when you make someone taller it messes with their proportions to where the character just looks kind of lanky and weird. So I remade him, saved the face and made him shorter to compensate for the lanky weirdness, then when I tried to name the character I accidently typed the first 3 letters of the name twice because of a delay in the typing response when I was naming him. So now I have a 1 day cooldown on 2 ninjas that I had to get rid of for stupid reasons.

In the mean time I have a 3rd ninja who I made but I wasn't a big fan of because he basically has the default face which doesn't have much character, which is why I started messing with it in the first place.

So my adventures in BDO have thusfar been pretty unproductive. However on opening this blog I was excited to find that my Trading Guide seems to have enjoyed a pretty steady amount of traffic in my absence. I worked pretty hard on it but I confess I'm still really surprised to see how many views it has. I just hope the people who stumbled across it have found it helpful in some way.

Thanks for reading and we'll see what further adventures BDO will provide.

Trading Guide

A few people in the Steel Dragoons have expressed their interest in leveling their trading skill. I wanted to do a brief guide based on my experience in leveling trading. As I am currently Skilled 6, I think I have a few points that should help out others.

First off I have to point out that this guide is not going to be about the best way to make profit off trading, but the best way to level it. It's important to know that, especially in the beginning, you're not going to make much money at all off of this so keep that in mind so you aren't disappointed with your initial silver profits.

WAGONS
OK, on to the actual trading. The first step in your trading journey, in my opinion, is to pick up a wagon. There are 3 types that can be purchased from the stable master, Flimsy (6 Slots), Shabby (8 Slots), and Farm (14). These can also be purchased from the market but it's cheaper if you buy from the stable master so don't fall for that.

The other wagons are Strong (10), White (12), Trade (16), Merchant (18), and Noble (20). The major difference between wagons such as White and Farm is that the White has higher speed and maneuverability due to only having one horse, but it probably has lower carry weight (can't verify since I don't have one and it doesn't show in the tooltip)

Each wagon type has equipment that can be added to it to increase it's stats. Those parts are Wagon Wheel (Movement Speed), Cover (Stability), Badge (Carry Weight), Flag and Lamp. All parts except for the wheels increase the Wagon's DP and can be enhanced by enchanting it with Black Stone Armor.

As far as trading is concerned, your most important part is the Badge as it increases your carry weight by quite a bit, allowing you to trade even more. The trade cover is also good for increasing your stability. When you're moving your trade wagon around there's a chance that your goods will be damaged in transport, you'll see this as a system popup, this will result in you losing a certain number of the goods you purchased, stability reduces the chance of this happening. Currently the market isn't in a place where you're guaranteed to be able to pick up all of these mods so you may end up crafting some of them yourself.

When it comes to moving your wagon around, it's best to manually drive your wagon as your own path will be far better than that of the autopathing. However when you're initially starting to move with your wagon, it's best to use the auto path as the auto path is able to make 180 degree turns where you can't. With the larger wagons, cumbersome driving can waste a fair amount of time particularly when trying to drive past a gate. 

TRADE ROUTE
Now that you have your wagon you can start your trading. The main thing you have to keep in mind with trading is that the NPC trade merchants run out of supply on their items and it takes about 20 min for them to replenish their supply. The best way to ensure you aren't waiting on resupply is to  set up a trade route by investing contribution points in nodes with trade posts. Your objective is going to be setting up a trade route in such a way that by the time you've reached the end point, the supply of trade goods at the start of the route has been replenished.

What you're looking for when deciding on what nodes to pick is that blue wagon wheel. This indicates a trade manager exists at that node. The more nodes you can collect, the bigger the variety of trade goods you will have access to, which helps at higher skill levels.

So far it's been my experience that trade XP is based off of the amount of profit you make/item, which is affected by distance, and the skill level of the item you're trading. Meaning that if you have to choose between buying an apprentice 2 item, or a skilled 1, you should prioritize the skilled 1 item as it will give you more XP and usually much higher profit.

The biggest point of confusion for most people seems to be the idea that since you get more XP for more distance, you should trade as far as possible to level up quickly. But this is incorrect. The best way to level is to do lots of quick trades between nodes that are close to one another (which is another reason to have lots of different nodes, it allows you to do lots of small trades while the merchants replenish their goods). Think about it this way, if you're trading 10 items a long distance in order to get an extra 10% XP per item, you could have spent that time trading 50 items between nodes that are close together and made 5 times more XP.

Another point of confusion is that there seems to be an impression that the distance bonus is based on the number of connected nodes beteween the buy and sell locations. So people will connect nodes in the most indirect route possible in order to maximise the distance bonus. This is false. Distance bonus is calculated in a table based actual distance on the map. See image below.

Here is an example trade route around the city of Calpheon. This route hits 17 separate trade nodes in it's path around and avoids the Anti-Troll fortification which is a dangerous node as there are mobs surrounding the area making it a good one to avoid. As you trade you'll become familiar with the various nodes and their quirks, particularly which ways to turn your mount in order that you don't get stuck or drive it into the water. Which will immediately kill it.

Something to note about connecting nodes is that, unlike the picture above, you don't need to have the nodes connected in a circle for a trade route to be effective.

In this picture it looks as if Calpheon and Keplan are not connected, which is because they aren't. However my trade route from Calph to Olvia, to Velia to Hidel to Keplan means that even though the nodes directly between the two cities aren't connected, as long as the 2 cities are on the connected network, I'm still able to trade between them. Remembering this can save you from putting contrib points into nodes that are actually pointless. Just picture your trade route as more of a big "C" than a circle.

BUYING TRADE GOODS
So now that you have your trade route established, you can begin trading. Head to your first node and pick up whatever is available. Drive your wagon close to the trade manager so that items you purchase are deposited directly into the storage on the wagon rather than to your inventory. If the distance is too great you don't necessarily have to move your wagon as the distance is measured not between the trade manager and the wagon, but between you and the wagon. So in some cases you might just have to leave the conversation, move closer to the wagon, and talk to him/her again.

This is where you're going want to be looking when you're trading. The parts you're going to want to pay the closest attention to are the Mount Inventory, the Required Weight, and the Available Mount Weight. Each item has it's own weight and you can't purchase more than what your mount can carry. You can technically carry more than your Available Mount Weight by filling your mount, then buying goods and putting them in your inventory, then moving them manually to the wagon if it has enough open slots, but this will weigh down your wagon and you'll move slower so it's not really worth it.

SELLING TRADE GOODS
Once you've filled up your wagon, you are ready to move to the next

node and sell them. This image is an example of a trade I did between Keplan and the Marni Cave Path. A really short distance trade (as you can tell by the 3% distance bonus) but the important thing here is the silver icon with the + sign on it. This indicates your profit. Again since this guide is focusing on leveling, all you want to do here is check that you're making a profit on the goods you're trading. If this number is in the negative you're not going to make any profit therefore you're not going to make any XP.

Reasons for not making a profit are:
     - That the nodes may be a bit too close together. In which case just move another node down the line and sell it, but this has been very rare in my experience.
     - You might not have invested in the node or maybe you made changes to your nodes so that the node you're at isn't connected to the node you purchased from, in which case you're going to have to reconnect the nodes or take the item to a node that is connected.   
     - Or you purchased the item and held onto it for a long amount of time i.e. logging off for a long period of time, and when you returned the price bottomed out on the item you're selling .This is why it's always important to finish your trading day with an empty wagon. Any items left in the wagon could see you losing out on profit when you log back in.

Ignore the bargain button. I've tooled around with it a few times but I've found that the game is a waste of time and energy as the game its self makes no sense, and the benefit of actually succeeding is not noticeable at all.

TRADE QUESTS
Another aspect of trading is the trade quest. As long as you are tracking trade quests in your quest window, you'll get these from most of the traders.

The quest involves buying a specific item from the vendor that gives you the quest, selling that item anywhere in the world, and then speaking to someone else. For example a quest in Olvia could have you buy Olvia Jam, sell it anywhere, then talk to the trade vendor in Hidel.

As far as I've seen the benefit of doing these is fairly minimal. Each one gives you 10 contribution xp which is a very small amount, but they also tend to give you either tradeable goods like ancient coins or  "Trade Item Exchange Coupons" which can be exchanged with any trader for free trade goods. This is a good way to make a little extra money out of your trading. Just remember to cash these in after you sell everything but before you pick up new items for trading so you can tell how much space you'll have avaiable for purchasing.

All in all I'd say trade quests are worth doing since you're going to be trading anyways. They're a good way to suplement your income and can help you get contribution points, albeit slowly.

CONCLUSION

Once you have these steps down, all you need to do is continue trading from place to place and watch your level go up. I hope this guide will be of help to those of you who are excited to enter the dynamic world of reading the newspap.... I mean trading.


Edit (12 Mar 2017) I just came back to Black Desert Online again and I wanted to see how my old blog was doing and man did this ever surprise me. I have thousands of page views on this thing and I have no idea where all of the traffic is coming from. I hope I was able to help some people with this guide. If you feel like it, leave me a comment as to where you found this thing. Thanks XD

Time to get more ISK

So my time in Nullsec has been less that profitable. Needless to say it isn't safe to do much in the region and apparently Amarr ships are the worst to use against the rats in the region which, combined with real life commitments, means I haven't been able to make much isk. I went to the reach with almost 500 mil and I have none of it left. Granted most of that was because I bought some BPOs to bring down there that I haven't done much with yet. But my plan now is to make some isk in high sec for now until I have some cash again.

Currently my plan is to use eve region trading.com to trade around, however I have to refill my now empty coffers until I have the isk to fill my bestower's 39,202m3 hold. At present I have significantly less than is required to do so. To fill my hold with hydrogen isotopes will cost me 276 323 138 isk. I currently have 52k lol.

So in order to do that, I need to go back to mining until I have the isk needed to fill my hold. Maybe there's something cheaper I can find.

Cost to Fill Hold in Amarr
Tritanium  Units to fill:  3 920 200 = 23 403 594
Pyerite: 48 884 894
Mexallon: 213 219 678
Isogen: 478 264 400
Nocxium: 2 469 686 798
Zydrine: 5 990 065 600
Megacyte: 8 836 130 800
Helium Isotopes: 276 315 297
Hydrogen Isotopes: 258 329 419
Nitrogen Isotopes: 323 749 717
Oxygen Isotopes: 300 953 754

So obviously it's going to be a while before I can fill my hold with anything really. It's unlikely I'll make much of a profit on tritanium but it'd be the first one I'd be able to fill my hold with. Currently the profit margin on a run from Amarr to Jita for tritanium is only 2.05% which probably wouldn't even cover my taxes. I should find something other than minerals to run to Jita perhaps.

I should figure out my total mining yield on my barge:

Metric should be m3/Min:

Strip miners are 1420m3 / 169.2s =  8.39m3/s = 503.4 m3/min
Drones are 20m3 x 5 = 100m3/min
However I generally sit 13k off my asteroid so their travel time is 460m/s
So around 600m3/min, my hold is 25 300m3, so it takes 42 min to fill my hold, not counting travel time for droids, me resetting asteroids when they run out, and me moving if the asteroids are too far. And any pirate interdictions.

I'm thinking I've been doing this the possibly derpy way. What I should be doing with my ore is bringing it to station, refining, moving it to Amarr in my hauler and setting up sell orders to make more than selling it immediately. The only problems with this is I wouldn't get my cash right away, but I'd get more of it unless the prices started taking. 


It takes 3 920 200 units of minerals to fill my bestower's hold.

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It's been an exciting few days since I joined TEST, I've learned a lot about how to live in null sec. Things like insta docking, scouting tactics and how to not die. I've been in a few decent sized fleets and I got my first kill! We were massively overpowering the guy but still...

Got a bit of advice on belt ratting, apparently it's not a great idea to do in the staging system so I'm going to try EIH tomorrow. Zer0 System recommended I check in with deedeereddit before I try tomorrow with the arbitrator I was mentioning.

I'm In!

Well I finally got my invite and podjumped to the base. So much I don't know but one thing I know for sure is I have no idea what I'm doing. Thinking of setting up a salvage ship with scanners to track down wrecks in the area.

The pirates in null are huge and I've read you need either a frig group or a battlecruiser which is something I'd hate to lose on day 1 in the corp. For now I'm just going to read and listen until I figure out what I want to do. Maybe I'll see if the fleet finder has anything.

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Again in a fit of boredom, I set my clone to the Amarr school and self destructed my pod. I figure I'll run some SOE lvl 2s until my invite to TEST comes. Since it's Easter I can understand there being delays but I'm not just going to sit there waiting.

19250604.15

Well that was fun, I was bored so I took my executioner down to lowsec space to see how far I could get. I probably could've gone further if I hadn't docked at a station but it was pretty fun none the less. I haven't been blown up in a while and it was pretty cool to see a legion blow me up.

He locked me down just outside of the station and I'm pretty sure was toying with me a bit by letting me shoot at him before he fired. Good times had by all and only like 200k isk loss. I was a little annoyed at losing my implants after getting podded but they're really no big loss either.

Killmail.
Pod Killmail

So apparently I lost 45 mil in implants and boosters. I didn't pay that much for them, I got most of them from doing missions. Lesson learned though. If I didn't want to lose those implants, I should have warped off as soon as I was tackled then my pod at least would have gotten to safety.

Future of EVE? Warning: Tinfoil Hat

So I was watching the old EVE trailer for nostaliga sake, the one that goes over the origins of the game and someone in the comments said:

"I really want this to come full circle and we find the other end of the New Eden wormhole, going back to Earth....."

To which the replies were:

"20,000+ years later? I doubt anyone even lives on Earth anymore."
"Why not, dinosaurs lived there for 100's of millions of years"
"Because we would have killed each other off by then."

"And that's when the tinfoil hat began to fall upon my head, and this was my reply:

Or, perhaps since the races of New Eden survived and thrived we could assume that those in our galaxy did as well. And since the races of New Eden were still colonists when the gate collapsed, we could presume that those in our galaxy would have started off far more advanced than those on the other side of the gate who had to start fresh. And if we follow that train of thought, one could argue that those in our galaxy would use that technology to try to find their brothers and sisters. However, knowing that no human would be able to make the trip themselves without a stable wormhole, they may have created a race of machines and sent them to the various galaxies for the purpose of searching for the lost civilizations of New Eden.

Supposing all of that, one could say that it's a possibility that while the races of New Eden were sill planet bound, or when they had just started exploring the stars again, one of these advanced robots reached this galaxy and began replicating for the purpose of exploring the galaxy to find us. Once they found us, they would have sent a signal back to Earth explaining our status. However, on finding out that the galaxy was in a state of perpetual war, those back on Earth might not have wanted to make contact for fear of hostile response. So perhaps they instructed the robots to quarantine themselves in some zone of the galaxy and sleep until the conflicts had died down to the point where contact could be made again.

Now supposing all of that... one could say that when the galaxy reached a certain state of prosperity, the sleepers might wake up and contact Earth. During that time one could assume that civilization had advanced to the point they could open a stable Wormhole or use some other technology like a massive Stargate to bridge the void between the galaxies. Opening such a gate would probably result in a massive cosmic anomoly that could be visible light years away. With the new gate open, the sleeping robots might be activated and begin re-observing our races to see where we are at, sampling our technology in order to report accurately back to earth.

... or you know... something like that"

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I have been accepted into the glorious place of honor and victory that is Dreddit. I'm waiting on an in game corp join to go through then I can start hating my life in one of the biggest corps EVE.

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Nothing from test just yet. Last time it took exactly a day for them to get back to me so I'm in no hurry, it's also Easter and a period of high recruitment for them from what I've heard. They just had that move to the Wildlands.

I've just been ratting around but I'm going to go pick up a Magnate and try some scanning in the system just outside of the lowsec space before test's home base.

Don't Know O'Clock

I spent all evening flying all over the galaxy selling any assets I had. Then I fit a quick executioner tackle fit so now I have about 500mil isk, a tackle, an app to TEST, and my destination set for U-HVI. Tomorrow I'll make the journey in my soon to be destroyed ship to the closest high sec station I can reach to TEST space and wait....

15460404.15

Well that was a pain in the ass. I was all excited to get to lvl 2 SOE missions, only to find that the closest security missions are 15 jumps away from my home base. Nuts to that.

I applied to Dreddit, I really want to get involved in some of the big fleet roams and stuff that make this game so famous. I've been following the news on SOV changes a bit with Tallardar's Show.

02250304.15

Well, time to take the tractors off, pretty pointless.