EVE New Citizens Q&A

1. Do not make yourself set the goal to PLEX your account. It makes EVE a second job instead of a game. Also its 15 dollars a month (or less if you go with longer subscribtion options).

2. No trader in EVE will tell you what to do to make money as they will have a competitor extra.

3. Trading = buy low, sell high. Read up on market trends and anticipate on changes to the game.

4. There is no guide. Because EVE market is player driven and changes every second based on supply and demand.

Subscription is not $25. It's $15 monthly if you pay month by month by credit card, less than that if you buy multiple months in one go. ($13 if you buy 3 months at a time, $12 if you buy 6 months).

PLEX was 620 million last time I looked (last week, for the previous person who asked this)

For what it's worth, I'm an industrialist and I still, after a year and a half, don't plex my account every month. I could, but then I'd be reducing the amount I can expand my business each month and I'd have to put in enough extra hours to take EVE from fun to work. I already have a full time job, don't need my game to become a part-time job too.

Also understand that the PLEX price itself is based on supply and demand.

If it were easy, fun & quick to make 620 millions ISK per month, everyone would be doing it, demand for PLEX would rise and with it its price, until it's no longer easy and fun to make that much ISK per month. You can definitely make enough ISK for PLEX by playing the market, but it requires either constant attention and a lot of .01 cent undercutting or a lot of research and knowledge of the game or both.

The undercutting option is to become the "instant sell" middleman - by having the highest buy order and lowest sell order, you provide the service of "instant sells" (and buys) and you pocket the difference between buy and sell orders. But even that requires some research to find items that are both sold and bought regularly, but where there isn't strong competition. And generally this requires a lot of micro-attention, as you have to adjust the offers regularly. And of course, if you were wrong and the item doesn't sell, you end up with an inventory of worthless crap, losing ISK.

Or you can play the long-term trends in the market. This requires much less attention every minute, but much more analysis and a deeper knowledge of the game economy to figure out what items will rise in value over the next weeks or months and then you buy those. Pretty much like a real world resource market. You can make billions that way, but if you are wrong and prices drop instead, you can just as easily lose billions.

The next step after that is to actively manipulate the market - especially with low-volume items, it takes surprisingly little, both in time and ISK, to completely crash a price. (OTOH, with low-volume items it can take a long time to actually profit from those manipulations.)

a thread on teaching newbies how to play the economy game the problem with this is that as soon as it is posted many people will jump on it and suck all the profit out those items or that technique.

I'm going to make a wild ass guess that your friend wouldn't like trading anyway. The reason being that if you are not trading because you like that sort of ganeplay you probably aren't going to stick with it for long.

FWIW, Eve has by far the largest single market and most advanced economy of any MMO I've played.