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EVE New Citizens Q&A

 
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Skilling up an alt to sell it off?

Author
Absinthe LaLouche
RabbitHole Run
#1 - 2012-08-17 20:23:15 UTC
I'm not understanding something--

Some people create alts specifically to sell... spend months skilling them up to make them attractive enough and then sell them off for Isk.

Why spend months and months paying for an account, skilling up an alt for sale? Would it not be much cheaper just to buy PLEX to sell ingame?

Buy two Plex for what is it, 35$ US, ie about ten weeks of subscription time, and in like an hour or so you sell them off and have hundreds of millions of Isk -- maybe over a billion.

Train up a character from scratch for those ten weeks I don't think you'd be able to sell it for anywhere near the same amount of isk.

I dunno, maybe my maths are wrong, I'm just a nowly lowly noob assuming wrong things....... but it's just not making economic sense.

Please explain. Question
Karl Planck
Perkone
Caldari State
#2 - 2012-08-17 20:29:33 UTC  |  Edited by: Karl Planck
because you have already achieved what you need from your main or alt account(s). Like, let say someone is a single account player with a 100m SP pvp main and a 10mil hualing alt. Everything they train on either account they feel is unnecessary. They still have an extra character slot so the best use of that SP is to put it into a new character that people want to buy. You still need to keep the account active, so why not utilize it to its fullest. Its like putting your money in the stock market instead of under the mattress so to speak.

There are sublties, like the character needs to be worth more than the transfer fee, but you if your happy with the skills you have it might be better to train something for a year or two and sell it for a boatload of isk.

Also, people trade characters as a profession. They have enough isk to cover the plex for the character transfer and fill remaining holes in the character and try to increase the value greatly in a short amount of time. Like flipping a house or selling a used car

I has all the eve inactivity

Zoe Athame
Don't Lose Your Way
#3 - 2012-08-17 21:17:07 UTC
Power of Two deals let you open an account with 6 months of gametime for 3 plex. 6 months of training is worth more than 3 plex.
Surfin's PlunderBunny
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#4 - 2012-08-17 22:06:45 UTC  |  Edited by: Surfin's PlunderBunny
I've sold an alt before, he displeased me so I sold him to another plantation owner

Also I don't think he plays anymore because "Surfin's Carebear" doesn't have a face anymore Blink

"Little ginger moron" ~David Hasselhoff 

Want to see what Surf is training or how little isk Surf has?  http://eveboard.com/pilot/Surfin%27s_PlunderBunny

Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#5 - 2012-08-17 23:36:44 UTC  |  Edited by: Akita T
Combine a power-of-2 offer for 49.95 USD with a 1-year sub for 131.40 USD and a 20 USD character transfer fee, and you have yourself 18 months of training for the price of 201.35 USD, which can only buy ~11.51 PLEX.

If you do some clever attribute reshuffling and also add maxed implants, you could be looking at a nearly 35 mil SP pilot in 18 months, probably less, but still a bit over 30 mil SP even with less heavy-duty optimization.
Sold directly to buy orders at low trade skills and current prices, those PLEX would be yield you about 5.67 bil ISK.
Add some for implants and skills, and you could be looking at something in the vicinity of a minimum of 6 bil ISK, probably noticeably higher.

So the question is, do you think you could sell a roughly 30+ mil SP pilot for significantly over 6 bil ISK or not ?
If yes, then training alts for sale does make financial sense, at least to some degree and in some cases, even if it's not really that profitable.
I see 20-25 mil SP pilots selling for 4-5 bil ISK easily, and 100 mil SP ones for as much as 30-35 bil, so it's not too far-fetched to be able to get even 7-8 bil ISK for a well-trained 33-34 mil SP pilot.
Radius Prime
Tax Evading Ass.
#6 - 2012-08-18 08:40:22 UTC
Akita T wrote:
Combine a power-of-2 offer for 49.95 USD with a 1-year sub for 131.40 USD and a 20 USD character transfer fee, and you have yourself 18 months of training for the price of 201.35 USD, which can only buy ~11.51 PLEX.

If you do some clever attribute reshuffling and also add maxed implants, you could be looking at a nearly 35 mil SP pilot in 18 months, probably less, but still a bit over 30 mil SP even with less heavy-duty optimization.
Sold directly to buy orders at low trade skills and current prices, those PLEX would be yield you about 5.67 bil ISK.
Add some for implants and skills, and you could be looking at something in the vicinity of a minimum of 6 bil ISK, probably noticeably higher.

So the question is, do you think you could sell a roughly 30+ mil SP pilot for significantly over 6 bil ISK or not ?
If yes, then training alts for sale does make financial sense, at least to some degree and in some cases, even if it's not really that profitable.
I see 20-25 mil SP pilots selling for 4-5 bil ISK easily, and 100 mil SP ones for as much as 30-35 bil, so it's not too far-fetched to be able to get even 7-8 bil ISK for a well-trained 33-34 mil SP pilot.


Hmm, think you do forget that you don't own the money while you train. Yes the alt would probably sell for more if skilled correctly. You can add cost of skill books for certain types as well to avoid making it loss operation. But even then, if you would have sold those plexes the money you make will start making you money if managed well. For trader Fe, more money to work with = more profit. On the other hand some people can actually use the alt while it is trained and get the profit there. Other would just pvp the money away if they would have sold the plexes.

So guess what I am trying to say is that whether or not you run profit is highly dependent on what type of player you are.

Reopen the EVE gate so we can invade Serenity. Goons can go first.

Vilnius Zar
SDC Multi Ten
#7 - 2012-08-18 11:07:38 UTC
Zoe Athame wrote:
Power of Two deals let you open an account with 6 months of gametime for 3 plex. 6 months of training is worth more than 3 plex.


Yup, it's simple math. If you pick a decent char with a decent name and you know what to train for then selling chars with power of 2 makes for great passive income.
Terraferma K10
Doomheim
#8 - 2012-08-18 11:21:08 UTC  |  Edited by: Terraferma K10
Absinthe LaLouche wrote:
I'm not understanding something--

Some people create alts specifically to sell... spend months skilling them up to make them attractive enough and then sell them off for Isk.

Why spend months and months paying for an account, skilling up an alt for sale? Would it not be much cheaper just to buy PLEX to sell ingame?


I've got an army of accounts (9) (also, not a recommended idea for new peeps) in which most of them (7) have perfect mining and a few other perfect things like PI, research, etc. I'm mostly a miner and my low-sec region is practically empty/peaceful. I don't have anything else for them to train, so I've been training alts there to sell off. I plex all the accounts 3-4 times over every month. Taking Time out of the equation, these accounts don't cost me anything and they easily fuel anything I want to do on my 2 main accounts. Taking an estimated rough number like what was posted earlier (6bisk for 18months of training, not unreasonable at all):

6bisk / 18 months = 333misk a month

333misk / ~30 days = 11misk per day

11misk * Number of Accounts (7 for me) = 77misk a day for idle skill training queues for me.

This obviously runs off huge assumptions like assuming your SP goal is something people will want in X amount of time and you being able to keep up with them (and other things I can't think off, sleepy :x). And again, the example number is a rough estimate going by what people are paying for now.

And I broke it down this way for practical comparison purposes, obviously you don't see any earnings until you sell the account.
Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#9 - 2012-08-18 11:29:15 UTC
Radius Prime wrote:
Hmm, think you do forget that you don't own the money while you train. [...] So guess what I am trying to say is that whether or not you run profit is highly dependent on what type of player you are.

The amount of care one needs to give to such an account after initial setup (which doesn't take very long at all, since you spawn in the station where most skills are sold, and you can probably find implants for sale within a couple of jumps) would hardly be more than a few minutes every day (to queue up low skill levels), and later on, probably just a few minutes a week (when longer skill levels arrive).
You can't expect to make any significant extra ISK from any ISK you already have with just that level of commitment and no thoroughly researched (and risky) plans, but you can run a myriad such accounts with minimal effort.

But yes, it's true, it highly depends on type of player.