Anyone that does market transactions or industry in EVE has probably been in the position I was yesterday. You are going through your process, building this, buying that, delivering jobs, putting items up for sale when you hit the OK button and a horrible sinking feeling descends into your bowels.
A market typo!
Those Entosis Link I up there... Yeah, those are worth more like 36.9M, not the 3.69M that I sold them for. For a casual industrialist, that typo was a 332M ISK error that represented a huge chunk of my working capital and profit.
Huge chunk? But you're a wormhole CEO swimming in Sleeper ISK!
Truth is, I keep my characters in EVE very separate, maybe too much so. My main is the CEO of the wormhole corporation and does his wormholey things which oddly enough, doesn't consist of as much ISK making activity as it used to. My second account is an ice miner and takes advantage of a lot of keyboard time that I have where I can nom nom on ice and make enough from the noming to PLEX that account. Having a second account in wormhole space is a huge benefit and my wormhole alt on that account is one I've trained for boosting as well as some combat, but most of all he serves as a scout when we need one. He is invaluable in that role. My third account is actually from my first attempt at EVE back in 2007. He didn't take back then and much to my amazement when I did latch onto EVE the second time, he was still there sitting in some kind of gaming cryo-stasis waiting to be reactivated. When I did, I turned him into a second ice miner but he has now morphed into a high-sec anomaly scavenger and industrialist. When the Entosis Link came on the scene, I decided to try my hand at some industry mostly because it felt like it was a unique time in EVE. There was a new module being introduced that was likely to be widely used (and destroyed), no one in the game had an advantage in terms of BPOs or even time, and it was relatively inexpensive to get into and build. All of these things sent me down the road of doing industry in EVE for the first time in a real way. The work that he does though, isn't funded by my wormhole activities. He has to make it on his own. Of course, I managed to mess that up too!
But this isn't a post about mistakes, it is in fact, one of how people in EVE can sometimes surprise you with their kindness.
Immediately after I made my mistake, I recalled some posts on other EVE market blogs I read that spoke of market mistakes. In those cases, people had reached out for mercy from those who had benefited from their errors. Some responded with laughter, some didn't respond at all, but a few responded with generosity. So, I took to email and contacted the three buyers of my ten units and asked if they would have mercy on me. I wasn't asking for my intended price, but just the market buy price. It was a middle ground and likely the price they had intended to buy at in the first place, just not the price I intended to sell at.
What happened next will astound you!
I received back a total of 172M ISK of the 332M ISK mistake I made. That 172M plus the 36.9M that I originally got for the sale means that in the end I received a little bit more ISK than the buy price of the items I bought. Sure, I lost the "profit" difference between that buy price and the sell price and that buy price was, in fact, lower than the build cost of the items, but it was nearly all of my invested ISK. Three random EVE players had responded with complete generosity towards me and eliminated much of the mistake that I had made.
I truly, truly am grateful to those players who responded. It is situations like this that reinforce your belief in the kindness of strangers and the good that lies beneath the surface of EVE's dark exterior.
A market typo!
Those Entosis Link I up there... Yeah, those are worth more like 36.9M, not the 3.69M that I sold them for. For a casual industrialist, that typo was a 332M ISK error that represented a huge chunk of my working capital and profit.
Huge chunk? But you're a wormhole CEO swimming in Sleeper ISK!
Truth is, I keep my characters in EVE very separate, maybe too much so. My main is the CEO of the wormhole corporation and does his wormholey things which oddly enough, doesn't consist of as much ISK making activity as it used to. My second account is an ice miner and takes advantage of a lot of keyboard time that I have where I can nom nom on ice and make enough from the noming to PLEX that account. Having a second account in wormhole space is a huge benefit and my wormhole alt on that account is one I've trained for boosting as well as some combat, but most of all he serves as a scout when we need one. He is invaluable in that role. My third account is actually from my first attempt at EVE back in 2007. He didn't take back then and much to my amazement when I did latch onto EVE the second time, he was still there sitting in some kind of gaming cryo-stasis waiting to be reactivated. When I did, I turned him into a second ice miner but he has now morphed into a high-sec anomaly scavenger and industrialist. When the Entosis Link came on the scene, I decided to try my hand at some industry mostly because it felt like it was a unique time in EVE. There was a new module being introduced that was likely to be widely used (and destroyed), no one in the game had an advantage in terms of BPOs or even time, and it was relatively inexpensive to get into and build. All of these things sent me down the road of doing industry in EVE for the first time in a real way. The work that he does though, isn't funded by my wormhole activities. He has to make it on his own. Of course, I managed to mess that up too!
But this isn't a post about mistakes, it is in fact, one of how people in EVE can sometimes surprise you with their kindness.
Immediately after I made my mistake, I recalled some posts on other EVE market blogs I read that spoke of market mistakes. In those cases, people had reached out for mercy from those who had benefited from their errors. Some responded with laughter, some didn't respond at all, but a few responded with generosity. So, I took to email and contacted the three buyers of my ten units and asked if they would have mercy on me. I wasn't asking for my intended price, but just the market buy price. It was a middle ground and likely the price they had intended to buy at in the first place, just not the price I intended to sell at.
What happened next will astound you!
I received back a total of 172M ISK of the 332M ISK mistake I made. That 172M plus the 36.9M that I originally got for the sale means that in the end I received a little bit more ISK than the buy price of the items I bought. Sure, I lost the "profit" difference between that buy price and the sell price and that buy price was, in fact, lower than the build cost of the items, but it was nearly all of my invested ISK. Three random EVE players had responded with complete generosity towards me and eliminated much of the mistake that I had made.
I truly, truly am grateful to those players who responded. It is situations like this that reinforce your belief in the kindness of strangers and the good that lies beneath the surface of EVE's dark exterior.