EVE New Citizens Q&A

Well... there are three ways of begging in EVE:

1. Contemporary begging. You will get laughed at by most, but maybe there is a bleeding heart or two out there who will give you a few million here or there.
Be cautious though... if you do this too much and people catch on, they will find some way to explode your stuff.

2. Sugar Baby. Basically, you offer your services to a wealthier player and "do stuff" for him/her.
Sometimes this works out and you will be given a dozen or so cheapo ships that you can use to chase down targets... be a "sacrificial lamb" and/or "meatshield" of sorts.
Other times it can end up with you singing on comms for the enjoyment of others... with mascara-filled tears streaming down your face and the thong riding just a little too high for you to ignore.

3. Begging to WIN. Simply put; add a "payback" scheme to people's donations. Or some kind of tease that makes people think they will get something back from you in return. Something like, "If you give me 1 million ISK I will double it!"
For some reason, there is always someone out there who falls for ponzi schemes like this.
Bonus points if you can get them to think that THEY are the ones scamming you.

♫ Beg, beg, beg some more... keep on going til ya score!! ♪

OP, consider that, while 'space wealth' varies wildly, most EVE vets will have a net worth anywhere from 10 Billion ISK to several 100 B or even trillions, in some cases.

So giving 10 mil or even 100 mil to a likeable newbie is really nothing to them.

To provide you a little perspective. Yesterday, I emptied out my planets and shot some NPCs in highsec. I made 1.6B ISK in about 8h, that includes shipping stuff to market and I started to write another article for the Perl 6 advent blog while there was nothing to click on my screen.

You don't need ISK to make ISK. You need SP that can't be acquired with a reasonable amount of injectors. Ohh, and put those mining lasers down. Thanks to alpha fools in mining frigs lowmin prices are dropping fast.

I, too, have a rule to never give ISK to people who directly ask for it, but a newbie asking cute questions can often get me to hand out 10m ISK or so.

Most MMO's have 2 grinds: gold, and XP/levels. EVE gives you the XP / skillpoints without a grind, they just train slowly. So that leaves one grind, the ISK, but you can avoid it. EVE is a game where a few smart players exploit the majority lemmings.

So, moneymaking activities can be classed as:

- Slow and steady: mining, missions, exploration in high-sec, FW, Planetary Industry, Incursions. You put time in, you get ISK, proportionally. If you train up and have the better ships (mining barges, L4 missions in battleships), you can top out (in high-sec) at 20-40 million ISK per hour, 80-100 for Incursions (they're 40-person organized raids). Outside of high-sec, in null or wormhole space, you're looking at 100+ million / hr but run very high risk of being hunted. Still, the point of 0.0 alliances is to own some space, make it safe by defending it with roaming defense fleets, and otherwise let your alliance members PVE the crap out of the rich resources in the space you have.

- Percent invested: trading (market manipulation). At about 100 million it may be worth it to switch to this, buy low sell high in Jita. You can't just do it blind, you have to know what's popular, and you have to know how any particular change announced by the devs may affect how desirable things are. People bought up the materials required to make these newly-introduced citadels as soon as CCP announced it as maybe a possibility, to give an example.

- Iffy: scams, theft, begging, suicide ganking, this is where you start to exploit the lemmings, by gaining their confidence and then striking. Doesn't always work, most of the time they see through it, because we've been playing for 10 years after all. Still, if you come up with a new scheme, it'll work. Just like mail spam, all you need is 0.01% of the marks to give you a billion by mistake. In some cases the scam is hidden: you actually give out discounted ships in the 3-ship scam, so people flock to game your scam and win the discounted ships, with the scam being that they risk losing 5000% for the chance to gain a 30% discount.

- RL money: PLEX costs 20 euro and be worth 1 billion ISK. You can "grind" 20 euro in RL, or you can try to grind 1 billion ISK in-game. Clearly, what's easier changes as you gain access to better space, better ships, and better methods.

You also need to realize that this is a game, and eventually you'll lose interest so all the effort will just idle in some wallet until CCP closes the game and wipes the pixels out of existence. In reality, the fun of this game is PVP and blowing up ships, and you only need enough ISK to fund that. Flying cheap ships is possible, taking advantage of your corp's or alliance's SRP (ship-replacement program) where they reimburse you all the ships you lose while participating in their organized fights, that's also possible, actually it's the norm. The ISK grind is a grind, it'll take your focus away from getting fun out of this game.

If you decide on begging as an income stream there are two things to remember.

1. Don't beg in help channels. Devs will not take kindly.
2. Expect to be blocked. Scamming of any type will get your character blocked by many players. It would be embar

And probably plastered on YouTube for others to laugh at. Running DED sites can be extremely lucrative though and can be done with T1 or meta gear, but there is a great deal of luck involved too. Researching each site before you run them is also a must.