Eve Noob Question: Tips to Boost your Income

[SurfD]

Was chatting with someone in my corp yesterday, when he mentioned getting some outrageous amount of cash out of particular mission.  Rather stunned at the amount he was making, I asked him how he did it.  He told me that when he gets a few particular missions (i think they were level 3) he keeps them for a number of days, letting them refresh after each daily downtime so he can mine the fairly large amounts of somewhat rare ore that spawn in the mission deadzones.  He basicly keeps the mission for an extended period of time, forefits the bonus reward, and in exchange gets 4 or 5 x the number of bounties, salvage, and loot, in addition to a huge sum of mined ore that he doesn't have to fight belt campers for.

The idea of doing this had never really occurred to me, but it sounds pretty logical once you think about it.

So I wanted to ask: do any of you long timers have similar tips, or other tricks you use to increase your overall income?

Also, mass trade: How the heck do you do it?  whenever i check the market, i can never seem to find items that are selling low enough, in high enough quantity, with enough return per unit to make it worth while trying to buy them out, making 10 or 15  jumps to collect them all, and then jumping god knows where to sell them, just to make an amount equal to what the same amount of time spent running missions would net me.  So far I have managed to find a single item in my region that i can reliably make half a mil profit off of every day or two, if i catch the low sales first, and that is only because the profit margain is usually fairly high per unit.

[Endie]

Re mission-mining.  I only ever get veld roids in my missions these days, except for one newbie mission which was filled with jaspet and ark and the like, and had me running there with my covetor only to find that it was gimped, unminable "flawed" jaspet etc.  Is your mate mining omber, and running in space that normally spawns omber?  I might give that a try, if so.

Re mass trade: you don't have to shift anything.  One way to do it is to buy stuff in hubs and shift it to jita to sell.  But another way is just to play the margin.  If you have the right trade skills, brokerage and transaction costs are only 1.25% so buying, say, 100 million worth of foozle-pipes then selling them over the next 24 hours in the same location for 105 million is still going to net you almost 4 million in profit.  That may not seem huge, but there are reliable 15% margin products that will turn over 120-150 million per item type per day in under-utilised hubs with a single buy or sell order and very little order maintenance, so you log out, log in on your trading alt, set up your orders, log back in on Mr Pewpew and play the game properly.

Zydrine made me a lot of money when it bubbled before the drone-nerfing patch.  In Jita, i had 600 million ISK orders filling, then selling for 670 million within a few hours.  That margin has now closed right up.

[ajax34i]

I never paid enough attention to the roids that spawned in any of my missions (also, I've only done L2's and one or two L3's, and it was a while ago), but I've seen one or two Kernite roids appear in a 0.8 sec mission, among veldspar roids.

The way you make money off missions is if you get a rare loot drop or two, and via salvage, really.   Or, the roids if they're good, but you'll probably have to go to an agent that's in a system with lower security...  preferrably 0.5 or 0.6 (if you're sticking to high sec only), to maximize the chance of good ore happening.  Then I guess look for "rescue the miners" missions.

For trading, I used to move pyerite around (and left-over tritanium); I think it has the best volume/profit ratio, but then I mined it so I wasn't a reseller.  You can also try to move skillbooks to close to the 0.0 bottlenecks, or rare weapons/modules from the outskirts into Jita.  NPC tradegoods, I tried for robotics, plutonium, HCl, batteries, antibiotics, silicate glass, and consumer electronics, but there was always someone outbuying and outselling me, so I gave up.

The way I was figuring it (again, long ago), I could make like 1.5 mil / hr mining scordite, and the average profit on a trade run was about 5%, so in order for that 5% to beat my 1.5 mil / hr mining output, I'd have needed to invest / move around 30 mil / hr, or, since trading is a daily thing not an hourly thing, 180 mil or so for an evening of work.  In any case, whatever figures this guy is quoting you as his profit, multiply by 10 to get what he needed to invest in order to get that profit.  Although I must say, anything above 10% profit is a good thing.

Edit:  Oh yeah, for mass trading, often there are inter-regional runs that are short and have good price differentials.  If you're in a region, you can see the prices everywhere inside the region, so any good short runs are glaringly obvious to hundreds of players just like you, so they'll get gobbled up fast.  However, if you have an alt in one region and another in an adjacent one, there may be a good run from a border system 3 jumps into the next region, total 4 jumps, but because the source and destination are in different regions, it's not as obvious to everyone.  I used to park alts in shuttles in a border system; log in, check prices, then hop across into the next region (one jump) then check prices again.

[Morat20]

My trading stuff is pretty simple -- I put out a large number of buy orders on drops where either no one else is buying, or has an absurdly low buy price, or has a limited buy range. As long as you don't mind tying up a lot of money in escrow and waiting two or three months, you can end up buying stacks of named T1 stuff at something like 1% of the cost.

It's not the T2 market, but I can't afford that yet.

As it is, I invest about 2 million for two months, and sell what I bought for 20+ million. Since I'm not running anywhere near my limit on buy orders, it's better than nothing. I don't even bother hauling to Jita all that often.

[Kamen]

Part two of the Downing the Slavers mission has omber you can mine every day for a week.  There is another one, the name of which I cannot recall, that cannot be farmed but can be done once.  That one has a massive amount of omber and kernite that takes six hulks and two haulers about 3 hours to do.  If you have no intention of mining these ore rich missions sell them to somebody who does.

A few other noob money making tips:

* Always do your storyline missions.

* Some storyline agents always ask for ore to complete their mission.  Buy ore at a fair price and resell it at the storyline agent station.

* Always look over the player created courier missions and NPC trade goods before traveling or going to market.  If you are going somewhere in an industrial you should ALWAYS try to avoid running empty.

* As a noob, try to avoid being a generalist and skill up to be a very, very good at whatever you enjoy most: mission runner, miner, trader, etc.  Branch out into other skills after you have become very proficient at your primary money making methodology.

* R&D agents are nice passive income with datacores when you feel like cashing in the RP's.

* If you are wanting to do some high sec trading go to a system heavy with mission runners and run a ton of missions in order to determine the types of loot drops worth 50k and better - set up buy orders for said loot type - haul purchased loot to regional market hub and resell it.  I also know people with good reprocessing skills and standing that have a "perfect" melt that made tons of money by buying rubbish mission loot for pennies and reprocessing it into minerals.  Mission runners also buy a lot of ammo of course.

* Cross regional implant trading.  Cross regional trading of many things TBH.

* Become friends with some pirates.  Like Vegas, Eve is filled with plenty of nobody's who want to be a big shots.  They often love tossing money around like candy to try and impress people.  Haul for them, run some errands, buy their loot, etc.  Feed their ego and they will feed your wallet.

* If you develop a network of friends, build trust, and then come up with a solid business plan people WILL indeed loan you money to get you started.  There is plenty of lazy money out there looking to be put to work, if you can convince them you are not a scammer and know what you are talking about you can get seed money for your project.

* As soon as you feel comfortable about it (if ever) consider joining an alliance that actually controls the 0.0 space they claim and move.  The ratting and mining is great, and it's actually much safer than low sec for carebearing.

There are tons more, but half the fun is figuring them out yourself.

[Krakrok]

You can play the spread on battleships. Some examples would be the Dominix which sells for anywhere between 50 mil and 65 mil. Prices (demand) go up on weekends. So if you buy a Dominix at say 54 mil on Tuesday or so you can probably sell it for 58 or 60 on Sunday. You can usually buy Dominix in Oursulaert, fly them to Jita, and sell for a profit. Use the daily sales chart to see the spreads.

Doing level 3s in a BC w/ a BS AB for completing missions faster works too. Can get risky though.

[Morat20]

* If you are wanting to do some high sec trading go to a system heavy with mission runners and run a ton of missions in order to determine the types of loot drops worth 50k and better - set up buy orders for said loot type - haul purchased loot to regional market hub and resell it. 

That's pretty much what I do. Every month or so I collect up all that I've gotten and haul it to a central location. I generally make between 5 times my investment and 50 times, depending on how lucky I was with the buy orders and loot drops.

[dwindlehop]

I never haul anything, as it takes up too much time and is too risky. I set multi-jump buy orders and sell the junk remotely. I have also never made a billion isk, but at least I don't have to rat or mission.

I keep meaning to get into faction/deadspace reselling, but I never seem to find the time.

[JoeTF]

Where to start, I guess I'll just post some random comments:

-trading in market hubs is actually extremly time consuming, if you really want to sell anything in say Jita, you have to sit there and adjust your prices every single minute. Otherwise you'll realize that you can keep your 2M order up for month and it won't sell because every single transaction will be for 1.98M. It's not some miraculous way to make moneyz, but a grind like npcing or mission running.
-I fail to see why would need to collect cash from your friends - even most ambitious projects I can think of close at around 3B - if you make them bigger, you will simply ran out of time to either manage your orders or sleep and eat.
-hauling stuff in Jita is most dangerous  pvp experience in the whole of EVE. Sez guy who got 800M of cargo blown from his alt. By a corpmate's alt (but I doubt you will be that lucky). Hauling stuff in a market hubs is dangerous and will cause you loses you have to account it. Hauling stuff between market hubs (yay 0.4, yay!) is simply suicidal in longer run(you either go through 0.4 and local pirates can kill a bloody pod before it warps out, your faction transport ship won't stand a chance, or you afk through longer, empire route - in which case it's a matter of time till someone afk kills you). 

[ajax34i]

Yeah, the thing with hauling is, if whatever cargo you have is worth more than someone's T1 ship that they can kill you in, the will suicide-kill you for the cargo.  Not sure where the balance is, how many cruisers it takes to suicide-kill an industrial, but pretty much if you're hauling more than 100mil (so that you can make your 5mil profit), you're in danger.  In high sec.

[Endie]

-trading in market hubs is actually extremly time consuming, if you really want to sell anything in say Jita, you have to sit there and adjust your prices every single minute. Otherwise you'll realize that you can keep your 2M order up for month and it won't sell because every single transaction will be for 1.98M. It's not some miraculous way to make moneyz, but a grind like npcing or mission running.

Actually, that's not true.  I have alts in several market hubs, and I have a couple of items that satisfy certain criteria that mean that I can happily log in twice a day for a couple of minutes, adjust my trades, and set up sell orders for what I've bought.  You just have to know the right criteria.  Out of hubs, however, I just use trading to get ultra-cheap minerals on 90-day orders.

I don't have the application to do it steadily, so I'm nowhere near rich - I've probably got less than 3.5 billion total including assets (partly thanks to being crap in fleet battles and merrily losing too many ships  :-D ) - but I can do it when I need extra cash. 

Edit: And yeah, the bit about the most dangerous pvp experience in the game?  Not so much.  I've never even been targetted in Jita, whether in industrial or blockade runner.

[Kamen]

-trading in market hubs is actually extremly time consuming, if you really want to sell anything in say Jita, you have to sit there and adjust your prices every single minute. Otherwise you'll realize that you can keep your 2M order up for month and it won't sell because every single transaction will be for 1.98M. It's not some miraculous way to make moneyz, but a grind like npcing or mission running.

There is no law saying you need to camp your orders.  Indeed, I would strongly advise not wasting your time playing the "I'll outbid you by .01 isk" game at all and set your buy order price at what you are willing to pay.  I check mine twice a day for 15 min's.  Once in a while I will raise or lower my price, but when I do so I do it in large chunks, not 1 isk bullshit.  Playing that game is a test of who is willing to log on and update most often - a game I refuse to play.

Outside of Jita setting reasonable buy prices and waiting for them to fill isn't that difficult at all.  Furthermore, if you extend the range of your orders beyond just the station it gets even easier.  Most of mine are regional.  I have many orders for modules that have nobody bidding against me at all.

-I fail to see why would need to collect cash from your friends - even most ambitious projects I can think of close at around 3B - if you make them bigger, you will simply ran out of time to either manage your orders or sleep and eat.

Then your projects aren't very ambitious.  I'm involved in one that required 100 billion and another that has over 500 billion in capital.

-hauling stuff in Jita is most dangerous  pvp experience in the whole of EVE. Sez guy who got 800M of cargo blown from his alt. By a corpmate's alt (but I doubt you will be that lucky). Hauling stuff in a market hubs is dangerous and will cause you loses you have to account it. Hauling stuff between market hubs (yay 0.4, yay!) is simply suicidal in longer run(you either go through 0.4 and local pirates can kill a bloody pod before it warps out, your faction transport ship won't stand a chance, or you afk through longer, empire route - in which case it's a matter of time till someone afk kills you).

After two years of flying daily through Jita, low sec and gate camps I have yet to lose an industrial, transport ship, or freighter.  I fly through Aunenen at least four times a day.  Stabs, scouts, cloaks, good fittings, and some common sense will go a long way.

[Morat20]

Crap. Lost a post. Why can't I delete posts anymore?

[SurfD]

Outside of Jita setting reasonable buy prices and waiting for them to fill isn't that difficult at all.  Furthermore, if you extend the range of your orders beyond just the station it gets even easier.  Most of mine are regional.  I have many orders for modules that have nobody bidding against me at all.

Wanted to ask, if you place buy order for something in a station, and set it to regional, where does the stuff that people sell to you get dumped? in the station they are selling AT, or the station you placed the order in?  If the former, wouldnt that suck rather mightily, since you could end up needing to travel over half the region picking up small quantities of items?

[dwindlehop]

Wanted to ask, if you place buy order for something in a station, and set it to regional, where does the stuff that people sell to you get dumped? in the station they are selling AT, or the station you placed the order in?  If the former, wouldnt that suck rather mightily, since you could end up needing to travel over half the region picking up small quantities of items?

It shows up in the station. There is no insta-transport. Don't try flying all over the region for low value items. Either fly for high value items only, or don't fly.

[Morat20]

Outside of Jita setting reasonable buy prices and waiting for them to fill isn't that difficult at all.  Furthermore, if you extend the range of your orders beyond just the station it gets even easier.  Most of mine are regional.  I have many orders for modules that have nobody bidding against me at all.

Wanted to ask, if you place buy order for something in a station, and set it to regional, where does the stuff that people sell to you get dumped? in the station they are selling AT, or the station you placed the order in?  If the former, wouldnt that suck rather mightily, since you could end up needing to travel over half the region picking up small quantities of items?

At the station they sold it at. That's why I generally have multiple regional buy orders up at once, and every month or so I'll spend a few hours collecting the goods. Generally, each station in every system of the region has several items I bought. It's just best to wait and make the trips all at once.

[ajax34i]

If you set a buy order to regional, they can right-click->sell from any station in the region, and it will get dumped wherever they're at.  Yes, in theory it sucks; in practice it's not that bad.

First of all, this is the only way to set up a default sale price, or a floor.  Without one of these region-wide buy orders, whenever random-noob1 rightclicks and tries to sell anything, he'll get "no can do!".  With this, he'll get an offer and might click ok, even if the order is for 0.01 ISK.  Typically, if you have a somewhat reasonable offer, even if it is 1/10th the real value of the item, you'll get sales, and the profit is pretty big to justify the hauling, if you get enough.

Second, you won't get stuff all over the place, you'll get a few piles of stuff in a few stations.  That's because that's how people operate: they don't recycle or sell after each mission, they recycle/sell at the end of the week.  They don't recycle or sell at random stations, they haul the stuff back to the base where the agent is, and sell it there later.  So out of the whole region, you get 5-7 hotspots where the good agents are, and maybe 1-4 where someone's set up their base for their mining op.

Finally, you can set up a buy order to specify a minimum quantity, say 100,000 units, and they can't sell to you unless they have at least that many.

[JoeTF]

Ok, please, please tell what is that 500B ISK project. Honestly, I find the sum so mind blowing, just...please tell me (I'm not going to become competitionin that market anytime soon  ).


Setting orders to a whole region has flaw of having to eventually haul stuff from pretty much every station in that region (unless you're dealing in ultra high value or large minimal quantities) and that takes some epic amounts of time. Yes there are sub-regional mission whoring hubs, but my experience tells me that at least 30% of total order value will be spread everybloodywhere. Setting minimal quantities works with minerals only in my experience.

 
Problem with checking your orders twice a day is that, unless there is significant global price drop your order will remain buried. Besides, prices fluctate and after few weeks when your order finally fills you might end up with a ton junk that you currently cannot sell, in the effect freezing your capital for a very very long time.


Regarding the hauling, I have seen how those pirates work. Sure I can haul valuable stuff in small hauls and highly specced ship (I guess if main survived 100+ gatecamps,  it wodn't die to low sec pie-rats), but small hauls take time and hi-end setups aren't exactly available for newbies.

[hal]

Don't ya figure That it is implants?

[Polysorbate80]

Setting orders to a whole region has flaw of having to eventually haul stuff from pretty much every station in that region (unless you're dealing in ultra high value or large minimal quantities) and that takes some epic amounts of time. Yes there are sub-regional mission whoring hubs, but my experience tells me that at least 30% of total order value will be spread everybloodywhere. Setting minimal quantities works with minerals only in my experience.

You don't need to haul everything.  When I did this, at pick-up time I'd find a majority of the stations outside the regional hubs would have just 1 or 2 modules.  In those cases, I often just trashed the items (we're talking very low individual value on items here, and just a few percent out of all items purchased.)

For the stations with a few more modules, I'd pull out the interceptor and bounce around from station to station recycling the modules and selling the minerals on-site.  My buy orders were giving me at least 500% profit margin, so even if I was getting ripped off on local mineral prices, I'd still come out ahead.

It reduced my overall profit slightly, but it made the whole process bearable.  I'd just log in once a day to adjust orders, and haul whenever I damn well felt like it.

[Yegolev]

My time-consuming-but-easy "job" in EVE is ice mining.  The hard part is scraping up the money to buy and fit the Mackinaw in the first place, but after that it's basically free money.  I do wish I was still playing because of the war and new soverignty mechanics, the demand for POS fuel must be astounding.