Wasting Time

Last night I watched Ashterothi continue streaming his adventures learning about industry, this time with his partner from the Hydrostatic Podcast, Lockefox, giving advice and explaining how things work. During one exchange, Lockefox pointed out that for industrialists, or at least the serious ones, the loss of time is a bigger danger than the loss of ISK.  Players can never regain time.

That's one of the reasons I'm a casual manufacturer.  Some days all I do is click on the icon to start the launcher so I can make sure I've downloaded the latest patch.  Other days, like yesterday, I'll grind standings while watching someone stream on Twitch or listen to the latest podcast or Eve Radio.

I have a bad habit of not switching tasks to do everything I need to in EVE.  I should have stopped my standings grind to get Amarrian datacores once I hit 4.00 with the corp, but I was watching the stream so I kept going and wound up with a corp standing of 4.22 and standings with Amarr of 3.99.  The Amarr are the only major faction I don't have access to level 4 research agents and I want to fill that hole.  But that meant I let a lot of my research slots¹ go unused.

For a serious industrialist, that's horrible.  Of course, a serious industrialist is probably also working out of a POS, and not using all the jobs available to a player on all his characters is a waste of POS fuel.  But I don't have a POS because that would mean moving to high sec.  I want to stick it out in low.

Another reason for not wasting time is the low margins that the industrialist typically works with.  From listening to Lockefox², I gather those margins are particularly thin for tech 1 items.  The industrialist can make up for small margins by selling lots of items.  That's one reason that so many people watch the concurrent user counts.  The more people playing, the more stuff that is used and destroyed.  Or, in other words, the more people shopping, buying what the industrialist is selling.

Of course, because the serious industrialist needs to sell in volume, they will gravitate toward the major trade hubs.  That knowledge makes me feel better.  I'm out selling in a low sec station with low volumes.  Actually, if I ramped up my current production, I'd have a lot of unsold products.  What I'm looking at doing now is diversifying my product line to make some more ISK.  Due to the way I play I'm pretty comfortable now, but making new stuff is just more interesting.

That's probably why I'll always fall on the casual end of the industrialist spectrum.  I do industrial stuff because I find it interesting.  I try to do as many steps in the process as possible because I find industry in EVE fascinating.  Yes, that includes mining in low sec.  The serious people have everything figured out and a plan.  I'm just doing a little tinkering, nosing around the process trying to understand more of the universe.

NOTES:

1.  Yes, I know that technically CCP got rid of all slots.  But I still think of the jobs I run as taking up slots.

2.  Any factual errors linked to Lockefox in this post are due to my lack of listening skills, not his knowledge of industry in EVE.