Even without going on Sisi I knew it was going to be absurd. Faction War missions already gave 20k lp each and could be over 100m an hour, and CCP decided that if a faction hits tier 5 its lp store prices get reduced to something like 1/16th of normal. There was no way anyone would be stupid enough to let a change like that go through, but CCP either didn't understand that a single cycle of missions would be about 1.6b worth of lp if cashed out at tier 5 or they just didn't care.
It took a week before we figured out how to run afk merlins and I had alreay crashed a large section of the datacore market. After that kwark fiddled with a navy caracal fit that could blitz lvl 4 fw missions. It was reasonable to get 1.2-1.6 billion isk per cycle and the decline feature meant you never had to worry about getting a mission you didn't want. The best part was that because most of the actual time taken was moving around the warzone or hitting orbit and f1, you could easily multibox navy caracals. Average total income among the ~10 or so people that we had in our little cartel doing this was 4-5bil an hour. Everyone was multiboxing at least 3 caracals most of the time.
The average cashout when minmitar hit t5 was 80-120billion isk. A picture of one of Karahs cashouts was shown on TMC. I believe mynnna called us the 'worst offenders'. And while all this was going on, what were the forums complaining about? Stabbed or afk merlins. It was shocking at just how much the public seemed not to care about the actual broken part (lpstore cost reduction) and instead on something that was easily handled by dual scrams.
This continued on for some time, I wasn't farming with enough caracals to compete with the likes of kwark an karah, whose computers could easily run more than the measly 4 accounts my old laptop sputtered with. Instead I closed most of the gap with proper usage of merlins and egg timers. Yes it got to the point where I had 3 egg timers each set to the timer of a complex on an afk merlin while I ran missions on a caracal or two with rather terrible delay because of my lack of up to date hardware.
By appropriately running plexs for amarr while nulli attempted to bring it to t5 for geddons I was able to make a reasonably large cashout out of grails, some datacores, and a couple other things when they failed miserably and only managed t4. The primary way of closing the income gap between myself an everyone else was basic marketing. I would cashout in +4 and +5 implants, then use that liquidity to buy a large amount of +3 implants when the prices for those dropped like a rock during t5. This gave me around 30-40% or so additional wealth in assets.
I was hedging my bets on waiting until CCP finally realized the massive amount of isk we were acquiring an fixing the issue eventually. It was really the only way I would ever be able to see any real profit from my hundreds of bil in +3s. The market would eventually settle back to pre fw levels and I could either slowly attempt to liquidate or leave them on one of my accounts and just open it again with hours for plex to pull the implants out if I ever needed the money. It was going to be a long wait.
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