EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi guys and girls. New-ish player here, going on 10 months in the game today, with a little story, seeking vet wisdom:

I started out running missions and moved on to FW to fulfill my lust for pvp. Somewhere along the line I hit skint broke as I completely neglected to work isk-making into my routine. Bumming around on hand-outs for a while, I decided to put my exellent standings with the caldari and caldari navy to good use. I had both around 8.0-9.0 since I used to only missions for the navy and FW gave me a tremendous boost to my state standing. So I decided to drop out of FW for a week and ply the market a bit.

I put the standard trade skills in queue, bumped up to accounting and broker relations V, then went out hunting for that Jita wealth I'd read so much about. After futzing about with excel for a few days I started making scratch. My wallet went from a sickly 15mil to a healthy 300mil in the first week. After that, I had a taste for profit and nothing else could satisfy me. So I set myself to the task of getting the best possible margins. A month later, I finally had my 10/10 standing for Jita (don't ask how many missions it took... they were all Level 3 missions and I was flying a poorly skilled, meta fit, drake).

Now my glorious OCD was finally sated. I sat down and updated my spreadsheets with the lowest margin possible, 0.1875%. I went forth to the market tab to find those sweet volume low-margin items of my dreams, tearing up at the thought of having access to the best trades around... But after several hours of combing and sifting, I realize there wasn't much opening up to me that wasn't available before. Further, my entry into a few of those markets caused undercutting below even the lowest margin!

I realized that I was being strong-armed out of the market. Fair enough. This is a form of pvp, after all. So I returned to more familiar items. Weeks went by again. I continued to see decent enough returns. My overall wealth buoyed up into the billions for the first time and I was tickled pink. Then; however, I began to notice something horrifying. I was simply limited by orders. At this point, I had all my order-supplying skills trained except tycoon. It wasn't enough! Aghast at this, I set tycoon to training ASAP.

Convinced that I would be saved by tycoon training, I went on hiatus for a week while I picked up rank 4 of the skill. Turnover was getting slow and I was due to put some time in outside (the actual outside, without pixels). Returning the following week with fresh wind in my sails, I once again plied my spreadsheets. Business was getting better, but growth was still weak. I realized that my portfolio lacked in diversity. I had been specializing a bit too much in my favorite markets and they were dying down a bit.

Again; however, I ran into my order limit. Diversity helped, but I simply couldn't diversify enough. Now around 300 orders, I still came up short of being able to improve my cash flow significantly. In search of a solution, I hit several trading guides and wracked google's uber-brain. The results were helpful, but the repetition of one point was disconcerting: more alts.

Now, I am not against alts. I like other players to have alts. They all add to the game economy. Win-win. But, my personal take on alts for myself: I don't want them. I have my character and two empty slots open for *cough* forum posting and such. I just can't see myself enjoying logging into another account or logging out of my character to access another one. Furthermore, my OCD would demand me ginding another perfect standing character, and that would probably break my will to log in for a long time.

So, here I sit at this cross-road. On the one hand, I have come a long way in the couple months since I started trading. I'm just over 4bil isk in net worth and I could conceivably start paying for my account with PLEX soon (no real desire to do so, but the option is there). On the other hand, I feel as though there could be a serious plateau in terms of trading with just one active character/account. So I ask you, seasoned vets, where is the glass ceiling in terms of single-account station trading? Am I simply not taking full advantage of my trades/picks or can I reasonably expect that something less than 1b a month is going to be about as high as it goes without priming the pump with more characters?

If you read this far, congrats! You've made it to the end.

Thanks for your input!
-Cat

You might want to pose your question here in the MD forums section:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=253

Yeah, sort to wrong forum. But anyway, you are only limited by your risk. Risk more gain more, risk less gain less. But also risk more lose more, risk less lose less. There can be limits by volume, but quality can reach pretty high into the sky, along with profit, along with loss. Depends how you trade I guess, I'm more safe short-term volume trade as well, even hauling, when I bother for a little extra ISK that I can really make elsewhere.

Oddly enough, why don't you farm FW too? or rather. Or are you one of those sold out on it being a really ebil thing and needs to be nerfed? That's what it's there for, you know? So you can farm one day, then loose ships like mad the next day. Well at least balancing out when time to cash in... or cash out.

You don't really need another account or alt to make more ISK in marketing, just more risk. But if you play it safe, then yeah you set limits and would need more characters trained up in marketing and associated skills if you make use of those. I'm becoming rusty at it, hardly do it any longer. But plenty of go-getters in the other forum ready to tell you how to make billions overnight

Wow, you a perfectionist with those standings.

My understanding of the serious market traders is that they run into a cap at some point, at which time they move to more upscale items which keeps the income high while not having to do so much micro-management.

But maybe the better question is ... what else would you like to do in Eve? You know how to station trade now and can make plenty of money whenever you want to -- what about spending time blowing things up? Learn wormholes, train for incursions, join a low-sec group. Or if you don't want to do that, there are plenty of new skills to learn in manufacturing.

Thanks for the feedback! I think it's reasonable for me to stick with the one char. for now and see if I can't do better strategy wise. I don't plan on PLEXing my account (I do well for myself IRL, so no reason really) that was just sort of indicative of my income at that point.

In the vein of "what's all this isk for, anways?" An end itself. Value is subjective. I value making heaps of isk and I rather enjoy the process still. Afterward I'll probably use my wealth to fund glorious losses for The State against the Gallente menace. No telling in the long-run really. I have a 1-2 year skill plan on evemon that's changing with my whims.

Cheers everyone! I'll be sure to check up on the Market forum too!
-Cat

I read a guide on reading the market history tab at the eve university wiki. I was never a member of the game corp, but their wiki is public and pretty awesome. The rest was sort-of second nature to me. I'm an engineer for a small firm irl. I do a lot of book keeping for my projects, or rather I did until we hired a full-time accountant.



I trade completely different things now from months ago, but I got started with drones, different kinds of ammo, and a few other common items for fw frigates I was familiar with. As I said, I just worked with what I knew. I'm currently in the process of trying to learn what's good for other pvp activities for the same purpose.

I did make my own spreasheets in excel and no worries about thread-jacking. I like the interest.

No it's meant buy a plex and multi train on the same account. You don't really "need" another account in this case, but would just do good by training a second character on the same account. You can either stop training on your current main character to switch to the other to train (like the olden days how I trained Webvan before plex training), or you use a plex so you train them both at the same time, or even all three. Doesn't matter how much irl you make, it can only be done with a plex. Of course you can buy a plex with $$ or you can earn one through ISK, but just a formality, as the result is just getting a plex so you can train a market alt and free up your other character to do other things far from the cruddy major trade hubs that really-really suck eggs

And I agree their assessment, I have three characters on one account. One high SP that does everything I need, one specialist - medium SP, and one low alt I'm currently training, all primarily combat pilot oriented. But the one with marketing usually stays in reasonable distance from the trade hub, while my other two are able to go anywhere. Generally, life around the major trade hubs suck, especially Jita. So running your pimped-out ships around there with your main, well it's inevitable you will be losing it at some point around there along with your expensive implants. But if you have a marketing alt, it just sits in station all the time, as safe as a doubler

But that's all up to you of course, just one way people do it. I'm not that big into the market any longer, so I wouldn't waste the slot for just a marketing alt, myself. And the one I do that with has the SP to defend around hubs well enough, just a hassle to need to change ships for the trip and to do ten or twenty jumps when I feel like trading.

Then that leaves a third slot free to figure out later, which I guarantee you will train at some point as well. There are a lot of low-sp professions that are extremely helpful, even very fun to play.

If you're running out of orders with single-digit billions, you're trading the wrong items. If your profits rely entirely on shaving that extra half a percent off using standings, you're trading the wrong item.

There's not much up there, but check out the blog entries that "Market Pirate" has put up. There are other references through the Making ISK guide in the Arbitrage Trading section. If you find better references, make sure to add them into the guide!

The thing is, however, your trading actually does help your allies in combat.

Let's say you live in lowsec and are a corp that does PVE to pass the time until a juicy target comes along, then pounces and attacks.

It makes a big difference to your mate Bob in combat if you have thirty billion behind you, and have been able to lock up three billion of it in keeping fitted heavy interdictors in each of nine stations in your lowsec area. If Bob sees a Supercarrier somewhere, he can go to one of those stations, accept the 'only available to corp mates' contract for a fitted Phobos for 310m ISK (which is a 'bro deal' price but not so cheap it encourages Bob to steal the ship), and go and hero tackle straight away.

Your Accounting 5 and Broker Relations 5 helped make that supercarrier kill possible, every bit as much as Bob training Heavy Interdictors 5 did.


I certainly know that the New Order benefits from me being able to provide large amounts of ganking supplies at 'bro deal' prices, and my fellow gankers know that I am usually holding enough modules for at least 100 gank ships. This is a bigger contribution to our campaign of terror than the ganks I carry out personally.