Rewards To Those Who Wait!

With the big learning skill redistribution patch hitting the cluster tonight it would seem my carrier is closer then ever, but in the wise words of an alliance member if it was easy it wouldn't be EVE and right he was, with the servers down for patching i only have a measly 300 million in my wallet, a clean 2 billion off my goal.

Luckily I quit World of Warcraft when I started playing EVE and have had a rather nice inactive account sitting around for a few months till someone asked if they could have it! I parted with it happily and will be receiving a totally unrelated $500 for being awesome!

For those of you not capable of instantly figuring out your exchange rate to in game market ratio of that amount in PLEX it totals about 10 billion ISK, now i love EVE it's a cool game... but i'm not insane. The Majority of that money will be going to various real life items/events I have been looking forward too, but a small amount will be hitting the wallet of CCP to sate my lust of a carrier!

Hopefully this carrier will be able to fund much more exciting adventures for you to read about... hopefully none of them involving my carrier exploding.

Now for those of you hoping to obtain something other then my ramblings from my blog, I do have a present for you!

Seeing as though the Carrier will be my main source of income from now on... I hope! I should no longer need various other tools i keep relatively quiet as exposing them could cause myself financial distress, well not anymore so lets get to business!

First things first, Miners you probably have a resource for everything, for those who just want a fairly solid start point for referencing try this site http://eve.finkeworld.com/asteroid-value-chart/
It has helped me alot in the past, hopefully it will help you too!

Now you've probably seen this on every bio in the game, if you haven't you need to open your eyes to this info, it's fairly common knowledge but alas its useful to have on hand!
http://pli.kortham.net/info.html

If you don't already have EVEMON and EVE FITTING TOOL then those are 2 more almost necessary things to have on your computer!
EVEMON is a skill planning program with access to battleclinic fits and much more handy info.
EVE FITTING TOOL is exactly what its name describes, a program used to find the best way to fit your ship (imports skills from your API)

Now heres the big one, the one that got me started on this crazy journey!
A program I found to give me the best trading routes in any region this made me HEAPS of money but unfortunately I can no longer remember the website I downloaded it from, but i'm sure you tech savvy readers will have no problems!
It's Called NAVBOT, it's a program that when run allows you to open a grid in your browser showing all trade routes based off how much you're willing to spend, how much cargo space you have and most importantly your willingness to risk it all for the big money by running low sec trade routes!
There is 2 downsides to running this program though...

1; You have to export every item on the market for it to find the best deals, there is no auto export or update, so you not only have to do this when you start it, but whenever you feel the market has changed enough to warrant a re-scan, you do however get the hang of whats selling and can only update those items!

2; This program CANNOT search outside you're current region as this would violate the rules of the game, this problem can be overcome by those with an interest as great as mine to become rich through various options of alts and recording data among other things.

Fly Safe.

Square 1...

So after many hours spent on the character bazaar, I have bought myself a pilot that is able to fly a Chimera!!

Unfortunately this cost me everything... including my Rattlesnake which means I'm back at square 1 again, money is going to be difficult to acquire by myself but for once a downside has an upside!

With a set goal in mind I'll be giving it my all to get 2 billion ISK asap to get myself cruising null sec in what I consider the coolest looking carrier.

I've considered selling off my first character to be able to afford a carrier but I don't think I could stand seeing someone else flying around with my name, and it even though he isn't great he is still mine.

The new character I have would be able to fly all my ships better then my current null sec ratter, but if I were to take him out of the safety of high sec I would be putting 120mil of implants at risk and increasing my training time by 9 days which is something I would rather avoid.

So what do I do?

Do I take my new character out to make money a bit faster meaning i'll be able to afford a Chimera sooner...

Or do I leave him with his implants and fly it better when I can afford it?

Perhaps I should redo the steps it took to get me the 3.1 billion the new character cost...

Seems like i'm going to need alot of luck in the coming weeks, and if I can get that carrier by the 14th i'll be able to use the learning skills to put carriers at 4 and fighters at 4! Money will never be a problem again after that... one would hope.

Well, I better get back to ratting, that ship won't buy itself.

Fly Safe o7

Invested Learning?

Since our Rattlesnakes have been out in null with our Ammunition and Drone Assembly Array's we haven't found much reason to leave the system other then to refine our loot.

Making easily 150 million+ a day from bounties alone there is little else to do and other then finding ways to increase the cash flow life has become rather stale...

As newly appointed Director of my corp I figured i would turn my attention to bolstering our numbers, this idea was very short lived as within hours an alliance mail was received stating all recruitment to all corps was closed.

Having recently heard the news from the dev blog about the soon to be removed learning skills debate was sparked in corp chat as to the training of learning skills to 5 to use their increased training time to put the points into skills with lower SP per hour, investing if you will.

I myself only have about 700,000 SP to potentially spend when this is dropped and thinking about all the ways to turn SP to a perfect carrier pilot has become somewhat of an obsession of mine.

The Character Bazaar on the EVE forums is a very interesting place, for a price you can get any character you want delivered straight to your account, no assets, no money but still if you have the money to throw into a character that cost several billion ISK i'm sure you saved enough to fit them out in the ship you bought them for...

With the learning skills being a bank of SP i've been looking for characters with perfect learning skills close to carriers, and the price difference is amazing!

Roughly 7-12 billion for a cheap carrier pilot.

Roughly 3-5 billion for a pre cap pilot with 5 million SP in learning skills..

Seems someone with a bit of money could make a fair profit over the next few months buying an investment character turning them into a perfect capitol pilot and selling them off again...

Wish i had the money to do that!

As for news of the War between us and the NC, i bring positive news!

With NC on our doorstep... more like half way through the door but you know what i mean, they have had little defense over their other area's allowed I.T to attack from the other side and now Pandemic Legion have entered the fray! to whom their allegiance stands is a mystery to me, i believe they fight for themselves but in any case the damage they have cause to the NC is incredibly beneficial for us, though it hasn't stopped the roams coming though our home system forcing us to sit in our pos while we wait for reinforcements...

And finally we welcome back Tom to our corp, heres hoping he finds the riches we did!

A Short History.

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

*Requires Verification.

Bloodlust.

I'm not normally a pirate, but after losing a Bestower (and my pod!) in a low sec trade run i figured i would give it a shot.

8 million ISK later i had a decent enough cruiser to take out some newbies in a nearby 0.3 system.

Upon arrival at the system i immediately saw how flawed my plan was, in that every other player in the system had a good year or two on my alt.

"Well bugger" i thought, but i decided to go scout around in the hopes of finding a hauler or even a mining barge i could mess around with. Belt after belt i scoured looking for something until finally at the station i ran into a neut...

"let him hit me first" - i thought...

At least until i saw he was in a Tengu and docked instantly.

Waiting for him to dock, i was beginning to think this whole venture of mine was a massive waste of ISK and time.

When i saw him snugly in his hangar i undocked again with the intention of hauling ass back to high sec and getting on with my trading, fortunately i took the wrong gate and thought i might as well check the station in this system for something to scratch my revenge on the world itch.

To my disbelief outside the station was a Magnate attempting to open a cyno, what luck!

I clambered up next to it at a slow 460m/s, locked it down and popped it.

2010.08.17 18:24:00

Victim: Poisen Iv

Corp: Ministry of War

Alliance: Unknown

Faction: Unknown

Destroyed: Magnate

System: Saminer

Security: 0.3

Damage Taken: 82

Dropped items:

Cynosural Field Generator I

Expanded Cargohold I

As for my first solo pirating experience a figured i would find someone, attempt to attack them and get my ass handed to me, but instead i got a 2.5 million ISK Cynosural Field Generator.

At least until the station guns blew me up and i was forced to wait the 15 minute GCD in my pod while the rightful owner of the cyno generator undocked in a newb ship and looted both our wrecks before leaving on the cheery note of; [18:24:19] Poisen Iv > KANKER FAGOOT

whatever that means.

Alas i have learned from my ways (mainly to align to something before attacking outside a station) and my blood lust has been sated, at least for now, and i return to the blissful monotony of high sec trading.

Returning the Favour.

I used to be a carebear, i would mine for a few hours maybe go ratting here and there but the thought of losing a ship to a vastly more experienced player is something that didn't particularly appeal to me.

On the 5th of August our alliance was war decced.

7 hours later i lost my mining barge, to a vastly more experienced player, and it wasn't that bad at all. Of course i was still fairly carebearish at this point and waited till the hostiles disappeared from local before undocking my second mining barge and heading for the same belt to mine the same rocks..

As expected the swift return of the war targets resulted in the loss of my second barge, which lead me to think about alternate ways of making ISK.

I am a very "instant gratification" type of person, if i do something i want the result the be in my wallet upon completion, and like everyone i would like the result to be fat paycheck, so i hit up google about ways to make money and avoiding the rick rolls, account hacks and anything that would be a breach of CCP's rules, I kept seeing the same thing;

Trading.

Now the idea of putting out a bunch of buy and sell orders is not my idea of instant gratification, quite the opposite in fact, but there were heaps of people claiming it's how they got rich, so i thought i would give it a shot. In the time it took me to alt tab back into EVE i gave up on the idea realizing i would have to train up multiple trade skills to make it worth while.

So there i was, sitting in my only remaining ship (A Badger mk 2) having lost my raven and scorpion as results of the war. Then i thought I would check out the market just in case i saw something i could easily move for profit and that's where it all started, having 2 accounts meant i could move multiple cargo loads across different regions for what (to me at least) seemed like insane amounts of profit.

I know people in 0.0 with carriers doing 10/10's solo making billions a week would laugh out loud at the small time profit of a newbie in a Badger and Bestower but alas the instant gratification was there, and i was making infinitely more money then i was mining or missioning.

Unfortunately to those interested in taking up trading as a profession like i did i will not be telling you the best trade routes i know, or the easiest ways to find them as that would be crippling myself financially as well as leaving myself open to pirate attacks, though the answer is there if your willing to put the time into it.

Once you get the hang of it, there is potential for even the most newbie players to make 10's of millions of isk an hour.

Now at the start of this, i mentioned that i was a carebear in the past tense implying that i am no longer and a few of you out there are probably thinking "this is pretty carebearish there is very little risk if you trade in high sec" and yes that is true!

But the money i make trading goes into fitting all kinds of ships to "thank" the guys who got me into trading ;)

And hopefully in the next few days i'll be able to post the kill mails or tears of those i "thank" personally.