Making Money ...

[Der Helm]

... I seem to have a big problem doing just that.

I am still stuck in my little frigates, for some reason I am not able to scrape together enough money for a cruiser and the jump to level II missions.

I am pretty good skillwise (someone please remember me to upgrade my clone when I log in next time *grins*), I have all the skills for assault ships (apart from the "assault ship skill") plus the skills for flying cruisers and medium turrets.

Any advice on some quick money makers ?

Anyone ratting in lowsec where I could tag along ?

Help please ...

 :-D

[Viin]

Are you doing missions or what?

We can build a cruiser for a couple/few million, so it shouldn't take much to actually get into one. Once you do that you will be fine doing L2 missions. Heck, if you think you are up for it, try doing L2's in your frigate. Its a little bit harder but still do-able and the cash money is much higher.

[Der Helm]

Heck, if you think you are up for it, try doing L2's in your frigate. Its a little bit harder but still do-able and the cash money is much higher.

I will try that, my breacher was not that expensive to begin with :-D

[squirrel]

Personally I found that once i moved from .5 space (Neesh) to .1 space (Arzi) the cashflow increase was immense. I'm not doing missions but if i do a mining/ratting run (i run 2 clients) in my Osprey/Caracal team i make about 3-4 million an hour. Rat bounties are 25k - 195k per in Arzi. So if you can, that's an option.

[TripleDES]

Try escrow scamming. I made like 1.2bn casually over two months in selling fake instas back in the days. The only thing I have to figure out now is why my account is hovering around 150m without a hangar full with HACs. :S

[Sparky]

Assault friggies should be able to solo level 3's if you have decent skills - T2 guns, good cap, tanking, fitting skills and whatnot are a must there.  Much less boring than level 3 BS overkill because you have to pay attention too.

There's always mining.  See if a couple of corp mates fancy an op and get stuck in.  Mining ops don't scale up very well for a whole variety of reasons so keep it intimate if you're worried about isk/hour.  Few tips:

• Don't quicksell your minerals - find the best price at least regionally, ship it there and make a sell order (as opposed to selling to buy orders).  You should get maybe another 20% that way for basically nothing.
 

• Due to ore distribution patterns there're regional fluctuations between markets.  Isogen (the most valuable high-sec mineral) isn't found in any Caldari space ores so the price is relatively sky high there most of the time.  Go to Gallante space (for Kernite) or Minmatar space (for Omber) and fill your boots.
 

• Just remember, if you mine loads, ship the minerals back in something stronger than a T1 hauler as a big, fat space cow full of Iso would be worth a punt for suicide gankers.

If you're a big horrible cunt you could make an alt, infiltrate a corp and rip them off.  (I'm a big softie and could never do this - but know plenty of lazy bastards who got themselves set up this way).

[Der Helm]

If you're a big horrible cunt you could make an alt, infiltrate a corp and rip them off.  (I'm a big softie and could never do this - but know plenty of lazy bastards who got themselves set up this way).

Now that you mention it, I HAVE an alt training up industry skills, is Bat Country still open for new members ? 

:-D

[Yegolev]

Might work better if you pick a corp with something worth stealing?

[Der Helm]

Might work better if you pick a corp with something worth stealing?

Thanks for the heads-up :-D

[Vedi]

I found trading to be a decent money-maker, as long as you use an industrial. If you are a new character, the stepwise guide would be something like this:

• Make sure your new character gets Frigates IV of whatever race you are.
• Do the tutorial and story missions, gain implant. Sell for close to a million credits.
• Train Industrial I for whatever race you are, and Hull Upgrades I.
• With money from implant, buy an industrial ship, an Afterburner I and as many Cargo Expanders as you have lowslots on the industrial.
• Download Evetrader (see Darniaq's links), install.
• Use ingame browser to set the cargo capacity and max capital you have available in the options of evetrader (set the browser to go to http://localhost).
• Go to someplace central and safe, like Citadel. Open Market. Go to trade goods, go through all trade goods on the details screen and press the "Export XML" button. This will be picked up by evetrader.
• Run the routes identified as paying most for your cargo and capital. Evetrader can be set up to only identify safe space routes
• Earn money. Earned me about 10-15 million the first week of not so intensive work. You can earn 30-50% return on investment when you have less than half a million, and as your capital increases, the ROI goes down to 10% or so. If you get 5-6 million capital, you can usually find routes paying 4-500k per trip. For me, this pays about 2-3 times as much per hour as mining in a mining cruiser with three Miner IIs in safe space.

I'm sure this is peanuts compared to what more experienced players earn, but I haven't found anything that pays better at my level (so far).

[Nija]

Expanding a bit on trading, here's a good tip I think.

Jita. There's a reason it's so popular. When you bring up the market you can search by station, solar system, or region.

Jita is in The Forge, so if you search there, you only pull up stuff in The Forge.

Now, take a look at this.



So you're in 1 region when you're chilling in Jita. If you take ONE JUMP, you could be in TWO different regions, Citadel or Lonetrek. TWO jumps, just two, and you can see a 4th region - Sinq Laison.

Most I've seen made was 9 million for taking one jump, but I'm sure if you put some effort into it (I don't really) you can beat that easily.

[dwindlehop]

You can rat solo in .4 sec in a frig, no problem. I haven't tried .3. If you're quite skilled, I bet .3 will be no problem.

[TheDreamr]

It's possible to rat in 0.2 with a frigate, you just need to ensure you're not taking on more than you can handle.  The small cargo capacity of the better frigates can be a problem if you're the sort of person who likes to bring all the loot back though.


What really makes or breaks a ratting session is the locals - the more time you can spend hunting NPCs the more profit you make from bounties and named loot, but if you have a lot of problems with player-pirates/PvPers then that'll cut into your profits one way or another.

[5150]

You can rat solo in .4 sec in a frig, no problem. I haven't tried .3. If you're quite skilled, I bet .3 will be no problem.

I've seen dual Moa spawns in 0.4 (or a Cruiser and up to 4 Frigate escorts) I'm not saying its not possible to solo in a Frigate but if certainly not newbie territory. I guess it depends how far away you are when you warp in, the further away you start the more chance the cruiser has to turn you into goo before you get under the guns and into orbit to mess up the traversal.

0.5 I've only see 4x Frigate spawn so while the bounties are lower ('normal' frigates in 0.5 tend to go up to max 15k bounty each (more likely ~10k)  whereas your 0.4 cruiser is probably worth ~50k plus better loot)

[Der Helm]

Most I've seen made was 9 million for taking one jump, but I'm sure if you put some effort into it (I don't really) you can beat that easily.

Since I never really tried trading, could you give me some advice, how this works ?

Do I just compare the different prices on the whole market and look for something with a nice profit margin ? (Captain Obvious to the rescue and whatnot)

Or is there an easier way to compare prices ? Or does one just look at trade goods ?

[Endie]

I added a second account a couple of days ago, and have both cooking up skills in the "right" order.  Rather than take them out with a heap of learning skills but nothing useful, I then added a new character to each, skewed to will and per, and ran the tutorial missions on them  500k for the mission rewards, and 1.5 million for the memory implant reward at the end.

Is there anything to stop me running this (it takes less than 2 hours) a couple more times with two more disposable characters?  Does it detect when you've done the tutorial on an account and stop you there?  Eight mill starting capital for about 7 hours' work seems rather nice, after all.  Since the 8 missions only once dip below .5 space I can even do most of it while reading the sinij/WUA wars on F13.

[Der Helm]

I added a second account a couple of days ago, and have both cooking up skills in the "right" order.  Rather than take them out with a heap of learning skills but nothing useful, I then added a new character to each, skewed to will and per, and ran the tutorial missions on them  500k for the mission rewards, and 1.5 million for the memory implant reward at the end.

Is there anything to stop me running this (it takes less than 2 hours) a couple more times with two more disposable characters?  Does it detect when you've done the tutorial on an account and stop you there?  Eight mill starting capital for about 7 hours' work seems rather nice, after all.  Since the 8 missions only once dip below .5 space I can even do most of it while reading the sinij/WUA wars on F13.

I think you can only transfer money from a character after you activated his account, and deleting a character takes about 1 Day if I recall right.

[Endie]

I think you can only transfer money from a character after you activated his account...

Is this something to do with trial accounts?  Both mine are real, paid-for ones, and I'ev been transferring money back and forth already, so hopefully not a problem.

...deleting a character takes about 1 Day if I recall right.

Well, once I've run the tutorial missions four times, once for each spare character slot, I'll have plenty'o'cash for now anyway.  Sounds like it is possible, though.  Maks me less worried about getting podded with my +1 Memory imlpant in if it's so easy to replace, too...

[Der Helm]

Is this something to do with trial accounts? 

Thats what I was trying to say, yes ... :-D

[Sparky]

If you have two accounts you could do your own little mining ops.  With Kernite or Omber you should get in the region of 3 mil an hour without much difficulty in a mining cruiser (scythe or osprey) with T2 lasers - not including whatever your hauling guy contributes.

[Endie]

If you have two accounts you could do your own little mining ops.  With Kernite or Omber you should get in the region of 3 mil an hour without much difficulty in a mining cruiser (scythe or osprey) with T2 lasers - not including whatever your hauling guy contributes.

Colour me interested.  Is that something like mining omber in Gallante space, dumping it in secure cans and then the other character hauling it to a Caldari station?  Or have I got the wrong mineral there?

[Vedi]

Since I never really tried trading, could you give me some advice, how this works ?

Do I just compare the different prices on the whole market and look for something with a nice profit margin ? (Captain Obvious to the rescue and whatnot)

Or is there an easier way to compare prices ? Or does one just look at trade goods ?

You don't only want a good margin, but also something that will allow you to invest your available capital. A margin of 30% on an investment on 10k ISK is only 3K profit, while a margin on 8% on a 4 million investment is 320k profit. In order to do this, you need to identify the goods that have profit margins and also allows you to invest as much of your capital as possible. This is determined by the price of the good, the capacity required per unit and the size of the cargo hold in your industrial. This is not really hard to calculate, but it's very tedious to do for 60 different goods to find the optimal route, and this is what the evetrader program helps you with. For each possible route, it calculates the margin (%) as well as absolute profits and sorts them according to profits. This will help you find the most profitable routes for your capacity/capital.

Generally, I only look at trade goods. Industrial/Consumer/Passengers, mostly.

The tip about Jita is good - I also base my trade from there.

[Der Helm]

That is really helping a lot, Vedi.

Now all I need is some time to actually put all that information to use.

[Sparky]

If you have two accounts you could do your own little mining ops.  With Kernite or Omber you should get in the region of 3 mil an hour without much difficulty in a mining cruiser (scythe or osprey) with T2 lasers - not including whatever your hauling guy contributes.

Colour me interested.  Is that something like mining omber in Gallante space, dumping it in secure cans and then the other character hauling it to a Caldari station?  Or have I got the wrong mineral there?

You'd find Kernite in Gallante space.  But I'd go for kernite anyway.  Omber rocks tend to be small and pop annoyingly often.

If you've got two accounts you'd have them both running in windowed mode (with sound disabled on one of them).  One guy in the mining cruiser would grief rocks while jettisoning into a normal can while the other guy would sit right next to him scooping up the minerals and dropping off a load when full.  

If you're in a quiet system you could have both characters mining until you've got a hauler full, sending one guy back to base to swap ships then coming back to scoop up.  That way is a lot faster obviously but with more risk as anyone could come along and swipe your ore.  It's how I mine though - the occasional lost load will more than be made up with faster mining assuming you're not in Jita or something. :)

If you've got just one account a similar principle could be applied:  mine into a can, when you've got a load dock and swap ships, collect load and repeat.  That's "jet mining" in the lingo.

Don't bother with secure cans unless you absolutely can't stand the thought of losing a load.  They too small, have annoying restrictions on placement and will just slow you down.

[Venkman]

Since I never really tried trading, could you give me some advice, how this works ?

Vedi provided some great insights. I also spent the majority of last week messing around with Trading. Since Eve and life have dropped me down to blogging about once a week, that become the subject of last week's entry (not a plug. I'd not have mentioned it if it wasn't specifically about this). It's good, quick and relatively safe money as a newbie trader. I did start as Frigate IV with my character though, but regardless, you're never more than a day or two away from being able to trade.

Now, there's trading and then there's trading. The latter is the serious buck, but a few days of the former will definitely net you enough millions to get into Cruiser range, and therefore an easier time at L2 missions if you'd rather do combat and missions than watching your slow-ass hauler travel between jumps.

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