I've tried many different tactics to make money in EVE, none of them so far have said "stick to me! I'll make you the most!" but I think it's this jumping that makes EVE such an enjoyable game. Well played I say to you CCP, you have made the game balanced enough so that those of us greedy enough to pursue wealth in the universe have so many options that picking one and sticking to it is an almost impossible task as at one point we all go "well i could give that a shot I suppose"
Todays post is a short history of my plans to get rich quick and how they resulted.
Number 1: Mining.
When I first started this seemed like a great way to make ISK with little to no risk and very little commitment. This was true I did make ISK in decent amounts with little risk but as time dredged onwards it seemed that although this appealed to some, the option of "higher risk higher ISK" seemed to be more for me.
2-12 Million ISK an hour (high sec)
Number 2: Missioning.
This tickled my fancy a little more, the steady increase in difficulty and reward coupled with a healthy influx of death to those I came up against meant an interesting time spent whenever i logged on...
At least for a while...
It seems with the universe expanding, downtime getting shorter and the hundreds of thousands of players keeping the many worlds turning, not one person is capable of writing perhaps 20 new back stories for the missions! Yes they did a good job making it so every mission is not just kill X of Y at Z and letting us choose our own style of missioning was another good move by our beloved CCP but even if we are killing X of Y at Z I personally would appreciate the story to change a little bit... how many times have I killed my agents mother in law? enough to make me question his love life...
Varies Greatly with skills (I made about 8 million ISK an hour on level 3's)
Number 3: Wormholing.
This was an interesting journey and a short one for those who have read my other posts you would know this, the money in everything you do is amazing. The problem these days is finding an unoccupied worm hole that you can occupy, this doesn't sound too hard with over 2000 active wormholes currently in EVE* but let me assure you it is. The risk is relatively low unless you happened to pick a static high sec wormhole and you are in a corp with less then 40 active members. The main problem i found with living in a worm hole is that any money you make sits in its raw form (those of sleeper parts or ore) for days or weeks until you ship it out to sell, this doesn't sound too bad either except you then run the risk of 2 things; first you have all your hard works ISK in one place thats a god send to anyone who happens to stumble across whatever your using to move it. Secondly you run the risk of leaving yourself stranded on the other side after your worm hole collapses from too much traffic (this isn't too bad if you have corp mates with probes inside).
15-25 million ISK an hour. (sorry no pics)
Number 4: Ratting, Belt and Anomalies.
This so far has been my favourite past time to make money with, the Sanctums in my home system provide much in the way of ISK to those who clear them and the drops and salvage are more then enough to fit any ships you want (up to meta 4's) the main problem with this style of profiteering is that your eyes are pinned to local and every time a threat enters system your finger hovers over the warp to POS button. The only other problem i've had in this method is that it takes a decent amount of SP and newer pilots would have incredible trouble with even the easiest of anomalies, however this does come back to my theory of method jumping.
Number 5: Planetary Interaction.
This is not a full time devoted way to make ISK but it is a method none the less and I have given it a shot and it seems to work out ok. The problems with PI are simple, Its not user friendly. Once you get the hang of it, it proves to be no problem at all. I've met people in my time in EVE that are absolute masters of PI making hundreds of millions of ISK a week from their planets, and I by no means am one of these masters, I set up a new planet today in the system over from my home and it took me a good while (with some much appreciated help) to get it up and running. The plus sides to this venture seems to outweigh that of the negatives though. The whole PI operation requires very little SP, meaning you can start this very early on in the game, and it also takes little in the way of ISK to set up. The other advantage to running your own planetary setups is that it only requires you to be on (at most) once every 4 days!! And only for about 15 minutes at that, this also means you can run this in the background of every other venture you try to make ISK.
Number 6: Trading.
This was a great area for me when i begun, high profit with little SP needed and little risk if your knew what you were doing. In fact trading was the whole reason i started this blog!
Trading is a very fine art that requires lots of attention and patience, you sit in a fairly slow ship all the time moving from 1 location to another most of the time manually to keep your ship from getting high sec ganked...
It is a wonderful way to get on your feet though if you're just starting out, reading guides online and finding the routes will take you about an hour and after that its a steady stream of money to get that ship you've always wanted (within reason).
Varies too much for estimated income.
I have yet to try my hand at many other forms of making ISK and I would love to hear your stories about any form of profiteering you can think of! leave a comment below or email me at evepurelybusiness@gmail.com
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