Market Discussions

No longer viable as PLEX prices have risen with the effects of:

1. Increasing your costs.
2. Reducing people's desire to own many chars.

- Is it overall wise to create characters for profit?
- 20m skill points looks OK or should I head for a more skilled pilot? Or a lesser one? I'm patient, no worries.
- Does the race/gender/nickname/looks affect the sell-ability?
- What other kinds of pilot are popular apart from a Tengu missilemen?
- Is cross-training a good idea or should I just focus on a specialized toon?
- Should I stay on NPC all my training life, or joinining a corp would add some value to the character? As long as I don't smack talk and create myself a bad reputation that is.
- Any other tips for making a character more attractive for the potential buyer? Like, if I'm selling a Tengu pilot should I bring him with a well-fitted Tengu ready to fly?



-it can be if you also use that character to fund its own time. for example take a tengu out to null and farm sites till you sell.
-20 million really good focused characters can sell for 10 Billion plus so your looking at a small profit margin for the work put in.
-the name always factors into buying power. if its ****** or has numbers people can be put off. try to keep race to what your training
-cross training is up to you and dependent on what your training for
-some people like no corp, others dont mind it. it can go both ways
-ships dont count as assets and dont do anything for the sale. only implants and sp really matter.

if i was to do this i personally would make an incursion character for the year. it only takes a couple months to get into a good battleship and run them in hisec and you can end up making decent isk from them, enough to sub the toon each month and more which will mean you cut losses throughout the year. i would either make a mac or vindi toon. perc/will for the first 20 million getting both min and gal bs to V, then gunnery ( depending on what you choose) get the large gun/spec both to V aswell as the supports, then shields or armour and fitting skills up. these kind of characters at present day sell for quite a bit due to the isk/risk of hisec incursions but if it ends up changing, you could hold onto it and pour another 5 odd mill sp into spaceship command and get frog-bs all V in one race to help increase the awesomeness of the character, aswell as small/med guns to V.

at the end of the day, the days of making and selling for profit are gone as plex prices are far to placid right now, but there is still potential if you do it well enough and offset your costs by using it.

hope this helps, have a good one

But character prices have risen aswell, I would say proportionally.

In example I once sold a character back when PLEX prices were 300m (oh, those were the days!!). I sold a 18m sp toon for 3.5b. Nowadays you can find the same characters for 9-10b...




Thanks, indeed an incursion toon must sell well :)




Nice idea, although I have my own mining characters and use them already.

You all stress the idea of funding the own toon by itself, but I already make my iskies with my developed characters, that's the idea "I dont need" more skills on them so I use that training time for a new character and get profit from it. As I'm using the same account, the cost remains the same. I think it makes sense, the downside is the hassle of logging in the new toon, moving to stations to purchase books, the cost of these books, etc. and of course the fact that I don't train my main unless I pay a PLEX for dual toon training.

Translation: This is my market, I don't want any more competition.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "extremely" lucrative. It used to be that. Now it's just moderately lucrative.

For example my Tengu chars (which I've created about 60 of over the past 1.5 years) are made on Power of Two accounts and thus cost me 3 PLEX to make and a further two PLEX to sell. These sold very well last year at 7B per unit and a batch of ten would typically sell out within a month. PLEX was around 600M. I was making a profit of (7B-0.6B*5)/0.6B = 6.66 PLEX per character sold.

This year, the same characters will barely sell at 7B (a batch of ten has taken three months to sell normally), and when they do, my profit is (7B-0.86B*5)/0.86B = 3.14 PLEX per character sold.

This issue isn't just present with Tengu characters either - all types are more or less equally affected.

So in summary I am making less than half of the profit I made last year per character, with a third of the sales volume.

As PLEX prices rise further and faster, I would expect to see further reduction in demand and erosion of profits. As it is at the moment, character farming is still very profitable in comparison to most things, but it's absolutely not what it once was and is, in my opinion, very high risk due to the long time that it takes for the investment to mature.

Have you considered maybe it's time to stop making tengu characters?

People are not going to give away their secrets. But unless you discover a gold mine:

20M sp = 12B isk. That's being really, really optimistic. Without power of two you're talking 14 PLEX or 10B. So, after all that waiting, you're getting 2B profit on an average of 5B amortized over a whole year. That's an exceptional ROI, but with a non-zero risk of nerfs destroying character value -- for instance, what if the wheel of nerfs turns and renders missiles non-viable? Do you think a Tengu character will still command a premium, or will it sell at a discount to PLEX value?

Another risk is having to predict whether eve will grow or shrink. If there are fewer accounts there's a shrinking market for toon farmers. Think about datacore alts here when pondering the limitless downside of unforseen future nerfs. As the game keeps getting older margins on everything typically shrink, and it becomes harder and harder for alts to self-fund. At some point it becomes smarter to sell the alts and only run one account.

IMO you're probably better off accumulating and holding PLEX themselves. Yes, that 40% return looks sexy, but the risks are very much non-zero.

I won't make a value judgement about whether this is or is not a good idea.

However, what you do with this approach is convert real world money into isk..... transfer costs, subscription costs, plex costs etc.

This approach may not be altogether without merit but *IF* you are going to convert cash to isk then there are other very straightforward ways to do it that you should consider as well.

T-

That's pretty much it. The guy has probably 50 or 60 characters for sale at any given time.

Mr Epeen

This might be hard for some people to understand but some of us pay for our accounts with cash so we can play the game, period. This person wants to train up an alt and sell it, since the account will be active anyway and they don't need to train anything on their main. The profit calculation is really simple:

profit = amount character is sold for - transfer costs

That's it, don't over-complicate things by bringing in the "if you aren't profiting in real money from playing EVE you are doing it wrong" mentality. There seem to be a lot of smart people in this thread that could probably play EVE free forever and still make billions in game, and that's great. But once it was determined that this person has no actual costs for developing the character, the short answer is: "yes, you should be able to make several billion isk from selling a character in that fashion."