Eve Evolved: Analysing Eve's New Economic Reports

PLEX becomes worth it if you run a corporation/alliance, run a reaction chain, live in a wormhole, or are multiboxing a 16 rorqual mining setup in delve (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE).

At those levels of play, you might be making anywhere from 5 billion ISK to 50 billion ISK per month for only a few hours of time invested, so PLEX makes sense.

The people who go ratting in null as he described are the people with no imagination, who go into a sandbox game and decide to spend their time doing the one thing in Eve that's most like other mmos: smacking mobs for money. Like he said, that's about 50-100m/hr ranging from "basic setup" to "reasonably pimping" (without the use of capitals). It's minimum wage. (Non-multibox mining is sweatshop wage.)

Other people have mentioned wormholes. Currently it's quite straightforward to get 150m/hr by smacking mobs in there (with a sort-of expensive ship you can afford just fine because you live in a wormhole), and it scales with a few accounts so it just takes four-ish months of training 2 alts to triple that figure. If you are a poor (ingame and irl) newish player and you can pay for one account but not three, then there's a trick involving trial account referral bonuses where if you have an account you are paying for, every time you buy a month of time for it you can make another account that lasts 51 days and has no trial restrictions. This is enough time to train into a specific, fairly cheap ship that is able to survive wormhole mobs in pairs but not alone - so you have a 2-3 day period at the end when both accounts are able to fly those pair ships and together pull 300m/hr. If you make a plex in that period (reasonable) you're home free and continue daisy chaining more such trials as desired.

But wormholes also have planets to extract valuable resources from. Because of the interaction between the mechanics of this activity and the mechanics of wormholes, it turns out that you can make more money doing this in wormholes than anywhere else in the game. Also because of mechanics (resources accumulate passively and the player "fixes up" the setup on a regular basis that he establishes - anywhere from 1h to 3 weeks), the income scales perfectly with number of characters more or less indefinitely. An account (one subscription) can have up to three characters, only one of which can train at a time. It takes a week to get acceptable planetary interaction skills on one character. When all three characters are set up with dead-simple layouts (I'm pretty sure finding optimal PI layouts is NP-complete), they produce the price of a plex + a few hundred mil every 30 days, give or take. About 2.5 characters are enough for a plex per month. I have five characters doing this, which is enough to plex my two accounts right there. I timed my "fix-ups" a few times and estimated that my gross income was about 350m per hour of my active labor. It's about 30 minutes every three days, meaning that I'm plexing two accounts on 5 hours of labor a month (compare to the 1 plex that the above null ratter was making - plus my activity is not risking nearly as much as his). I work slowly and don't have fancy setups; I know other people making more than I do at this and doing less work. The smarter you are, the more money you make with this.

Skill extractors came out last spring, allowing buying and selling of the skillpoints accumulated by subscribed accounts. Turns out that if you optimize a character for this, you can train and sell enough sp in 30 days to buy a plex to keep them subbed and have money left over. Looking at the tool I wrote a while ago to track this[0], a skill farm character currently pays for itself and still has a net profit of 387m at the end of the month with, oh, 2 hours of interaction to buy and sell - so assuming plex are 1b, that's what, 690m/h (gross)?. I have one such skillfarm character - but that character is also one of those five planetary interaction characters, and one of those alts that can get 150m/h smacking mobs from my first wormhole paragraph. Now that it has those skills, I don't need to improve it any more. Extracting all the sp it produces is just fine by me.

So with two accounts, I'm capable of producing around three plex + 400m in about 7 hours a month. (In reality, the safety net of the skillfarm means I just take it a little easier with the PI lol). But I haven't even mentioned trading.

I put about two weeks of training on a sales character and a week on an acquisition character. I had about a 600m or so saved up to use as capital (this was when I only had one account). Put the acquisition character in the main trade hub and the sales character in the third largest hub. Used Excel to pull down a page from a community site comparing the prices in both locations[1]. Did some basic sorting and filtering to find items with good margins, did a sanity check on their daily sale volumes to make sure they would move, and set up a shortlist of ~30 things to stock. I bought 500m worth in the big hub and contracted a player corporation that does hauling to move the stock over to the small hub. Ain't nobody got time to fly their own stock around. I paid their expedited rate, so my sales character got the stock shipment the same day. I posted everything for sale, and logged off. The next evening at the same time I logged into salesguy, updated the prices of the remaining undercut stock to remain competitive, wired all the day's income to acquisitionguy, and repeated. In about a month, maybe two of feeding profits back into stock, I was regularly pulling a profit of 250m a day and shipping 1-2 billion in stock every couple of days. My effort was about 30 min daily, so 500m/hr and 7.5b/month. 15 hours of work per month for 7.5 plexes. But remember, this only needs one account subbed to do. And this wasn't some next level stock market speculation jazz, this is brain-dead arbitrage trading (after you figure out your strategy). In fact, it's kind of mind-boggling when you think about it: with three weeks of prep, $15 of seed capital, some careful thought and a couple of months of busywork I was making aaaaalmost as much per hour as pre-nerf high-class wormhole capital pilots (year of training for each one a least) smacking mobs for money in groups of at least four 3b-value ships. Those guys were pulling 700-800m/hr, I think?

"Well why did you stop trading then?" I couldn't figure out how to duplicate the spreadsheet to expand my operation because Excel xml frame import black magic didn't work the second time, and it made me so mad I decided to write my own tool, and then school and work and other things happened instead. I'm still coasting on the bank account I made during those five months or so for my "spending money" (as opposed to plex money).

All this to say: you usually make bad money in Eve if you do something that lots and lots of other people are doing. It's economics. Newbie exploration in null was hilariously profitable for a long time because most newbies are scared of null and most vets have better things to do with their time - so prices for the stuff that could only be found that way were high. Then everyone (including me) wrote guides for their new recruits about the "one neat trick to making money as a new player" and the prices have been steadily falling since.

Missions are mentioned in the welcome email so a lot of people make it their goal to get up to Level 4 missions in hisec and do that for money. But they don't think to check if anyone has written a blog or guide or anything, and so they end up puttering on with 50m/hr when they could be doubling that with better technique or getting up to 300m/hr by upgrading their equipment and being selective about which missions to accept. And apparently none of them ever find out that there are actually Level 5 missions - in lowsec - and with the proper setup (and that is far from easy to get, I'll admit) you can crank out 1b/hr with a carrier pilot and a few super low investment mission pulling alts. One of my corpmates has done this and screenshotted it for me. It's pretty gross.

TL;DR: the two fundamentals to being rich in Eve are being smart about spotting opportunity and having capital to invest (in stock, in ships, in characters, whatever). What I'm doing isn't even clever - PI, skill extraction, a bit of wormhole pve now and then, trading - but I'm quite satisfied with the return for now. For the more ambitious - everything I do can be done more profitably/efficiently, and I know this because I either know people personally who do or I read their blogs. But that's also why I know this stuff exists in the first place. A good network is a huge asset.

Wew, there I went on an rant about Eve again. rip.

[0]: https://mosbasik.github.io/skillfarming/

[1]: https://eve-central.com/tradetool/

Eve would be a data point supporting this. I had some adrenaline rushes playing Eve, but I also could use it as a sleep aid, depending on precisely what I was doing.

I think that one of the problems is a poor conception of what it means for players to create content. The most compelling content for me in Eve was simply the most exciting stuff that happened during nullsec alliance PvP.

In the end it's different largely because they are not trying to be a 'successful' company, instead of kind of a profitable hobby.

This also fits with my current goals.

Imagine a sufficiently large alliance in your idealized game that by hook and crook "surrounds" your central bank. All new money in the economy passes through them. Sure you can finely control inflation, but without helicopter money you have no knobs you can twist to control wealth inequality in such a situation. Even if you do use helicopter money tactics, you'll be in a constant arms race with the big alliances to try and distribute the money as far away from them as possible.

Long term players having big piles of cash really causes a lot of price dysfunction in my mmo experience. Eventually all the goods and materials that aren't required for end game play approaches a price of zero, where everything else gets more and more and more expensive as money loses value for the people who have it in abundance.

As for the arbitrage thing -- price in nullsec for capital goods was 10-20% higher than it was in empire. Having an operation that hauls replacement ships, mods etc out to nullsec, and nullsec resources back to empire was an easy way to make billions if you were set up to move enough volume. I could easily make more money moving goods in my carrier than using the carrier for combat.

Eve's combat system is a piece of design brilliance in and of itself. Battleships struggle under most circumstances to destroy frigates. Each ship size tier is loosely isolated from the other tiers by tracking constraints. Drones blur this a bit, but even though that guy spent 100m on that battleship and you spent 250k on your rifter -- he's probably not going to instapop you. Chances are he can't hit you. Your mobility makes you generally more of a threat to him than he is to you if you're tracking and tackling and people are backing you up!

In terms of other mmo's, FFXIV made some good decisions but suffers from inflationary currency problems because the lack of gil sinks. High level crafting uses tons of low level materials, so new crafters can still make a profit off turning iron into screws or whatever. They do it really broadly so there's a whole lot of goods and materials that still churn on their auction house for non 1,inf prices.

I haven't played WoW in a while, but low level ores and used to be pointless to the endgame players, so the prices on them zoomed towards zero.

I think eve is a pretty boring game, but I have never seen an mmo that did a synthetic economy better. If you manage it I'll be the first to carry your banner to future mmo economic discussions ;)

The beauty of the economy is that most lucrative assets do not generate ISK, and are highly temporary. The moon mining materials go into ships and modules, which explode permanently. On their way to exploding permanently, they sink ISK out of the economy via tax on selling (if sold) and money required to actually manufacture something.

This is probably why the price of stuff stays relatively even. If the price of a ship has gone up, it's likely largely due to supply/demand rather than purely inflation, as last time I played (this year) the price of minerals had stayed approximately the same. There might have been a little inflation, but no hyperinflation that I could see.

EDIT: Thought of a fourth faucet: buying commodities for cheap and selling them for more at an NPC-run station. Because those commodities are generated and bought purely out of thin air by the game systems.