Market Discussions

Hey all, budding industrialist here. I've been planning my EVE career and experimenting with a few things, and I have some questions to ask you uber-industrialists that I always see mentioning their wallet sizes and huge manufacturing operations.

1. What keeps EVE exciting for you when you're docked in a station with Excel spreadsheets open?
- I experimented with in-station trading in a trade hub and it became kind of a chore after a few days. I locked down most of a market and just logged in every day to update orders and input the new numbers into Excel. It was very uncreative, I started by intently studying price histories but found that just getting into as many markets as possible and updating lots was the most efficient thing to do. It was just a steady trickle of ISK. I don't know, I guess I was expecting it to be more engaging and rewarding. What makes it satisfying?

2. Do you usually play solo?
- By solo I mean largely out of contact with "friends" and corpmates, mainly just lone-wolfing your operations and contacting people for business purposes. I don't see the benefit to traders herding together in a corporation, other than some chat and perhaps some reserved comments about good opportunities that are worth looking into.

3. Do you ever get an itch to PvP?
- I agonized over the decision to enter industry over PvP, I wanted to commit to just one, and while mining in my Retriever can be quite peaceful (indeed even Zen-like) my thoughts sometimes wander to matching wits against other players in PvP. The trouble is, it feels like PvP is this nebulous "thing" that can happen after a lot of skilling, waiting, warping around, and more waiting.

4. How many accounts do you run, and do you think they are needed to be competitive?
- I dislike the idea of running multiple clients, I know having 2 Hulks in a belt vs 1 is obviously more ISK, and having an Orca means even more ISK, but I don't want to have trained alts unless absolutely necessary. I do get the feeling that I'm gimping myself though, especially since I'm really looking into learning this game and really getting into it.

5. Do you suggest getting into a player corp ASAP?
- I'm leaning towards the pure miner route, and the idea of joining a corp dedicated to mining in W-Space is exciting to say the least. The 30 days to Hulk is going to be soul-draining on my own, but I'm not sure I have much to offer a serious mining corp.

Thoughts, opinions, ideas, rants?

1) As long as it is a challenge, it keeps me interested. With time, the challenges may change. I have always goals I try to achieve. Talking about spreadsheets, try to rule them and not become a slave of your own spreadsheet .

2) Being docked into a station, I - Chwarisma Sarum - favor to be left alone to concentrate and scheme. And as you already have mentioned, there is no need for most traders to be in a big corp.
Other members of my virtual family are not this solitude. Sometimes I feel even embarassed about them - especially when their adventures include blowing up other ships... or being blown up. Normally, it's me who pays the paycheck for the latter.

3) No, I never do ship-pvp with my trade character, unless you call being ganked pvp...

4) 1 account and 1 character, that's all I need for trading. Sometimes, my other two characters park in Jita, Amarr, or anywhere that's near their own area of activity to intel me about market movements. But they only do this if they are not engaged in one of their own campaigns. Personally, I dislike the idea of running more than one account at the same time. With more accounts, one looses focus.

5) As a mining trader, you can keep yourself busy during mining. Starting a career as a pure miner, I actually WOULD join a player corp ASAP. Not so much for mining operations but for chatting and and learning other aspects of EVE.

Each to their own, I wouldn't be suprised if there exists a higher than usual proportion of ASD and OCD within market / industrial folks. Personally it's acquisition of knowledge - a pvper knows when to orbit, when to tangent, likely fits of opposing ship, likely range of their webber and why they're playing like that. A marketeer knows how that webber is made, what the ingredients are, what is likely to happen with the price of those ingredients and why. Both are ultimately pointless endeavours in the grand scheme of human existence but if pleasure is derived from both what's the problem?



By your definition, no, definitely not. There's the market chat channels, there's my old corp, there's odd contacts and freinds made over the years and the game would not hold any enjoyment without them. However, I don't really do anything with these people other than chat and hatch the occasional diabolical plan, most of my operations are solo - as you say on the trade and industry side the corporation structure brings little to the table that a chat channel can't whilst introducing a whole lot of security holes and headaches.



Good god no, never. Personally can't stand the combat model in EvE which too often boils down to "press orbit, activate modules, wait for explosion". Now there's definitely skill involved, but the majority of it is in knowledge of timer mechanics, station and gate games, preperadness of scouting and intel - in a typical group environment that's all strategy and tactics concentrated with the FC, the application of regular pilot skill strikes as largely one of "how quickly can you press the buttons the FC is telling you to press". If EvE had a twitchier flight model, even something as basic as the Freelancer flight model I doubt I would ever dock.



Just the one. Serves me just fine. Sure mining kinda appreciates more, and it's useful to have a few concurrent market watchers, and sometimes you just need more manufacturing or reasearch slots but personally one is all I currently have and all I currently need. Did have two at one stage when I, for some reason, mined stuff - the moment I trained up the second account I realised I couldn't stand mining any more.



Yes. Whilst, as noted above, I don't particularly involve in player operations much any more, the social aspect is vital to me at least. And you'll always have something to offer a corp - corps are far more interested in social, active players of 2m SP than grumpy non-participatory 100m SP pilots.

EDIT: I'm just a trader, buying low and selling high. I havn't tried manufacturing yet.

1. What keeps EVE exciting for you when you're docked in a station with Excel spreadsheets open?

I like math/numbers. It's nice seeing wealth-graph in LibreOffice going up steadily. I also like programming and creating my own trading tools to help in trading. (That is major thing for me. Without being able to include programming here, I might not be trading at all. Doing all analysis manually is such a chore.)

Also having billions to use for whatever I want is really nice. Since I like helping others it often ends up being given away in some way and thank you evemails are allways nice to get

Sometimes trading does get boring. Recently I spent few weeks playing Skyrim more than EVE, only switching to EVE occasionally to manage orders and courier contracts. Profit did drop significantly but being able to make billions per month by only updating orders few times per day was still really nice.

Most of the trading for me is just updating orders regularly. But there are opportunities for being creative also: Competitor is selling product 30 mil less than what I like. Do I compete with that price or buy his items and relist with much higher price? Or when certain item is selling really cheap in Jita, how much storage I want to buy?

If I someday find myself getting really bored about trading, I would probably try how much I can reduce time spent in trading while still being able to pay for my monthly PLEX with ISK. And then I would find something else to do with all the ISK I have.

2. Do you usually play solo?

Yes.

3. Do you ever get an itch to PvP?

I havn't tried PvP yet, but I might someday. At least I now have enough ISK to fund it.

4. How many accounts do you run, and do you think they are needed to be competitive?

Until recently I used single account and was making upto 9 bil per month (down to 5 bil when I was playing Skyrim also). I was very competitive with just one account.

During last week I started new char in second account and I'm now testing trading with characters located in 2 trade hubs.

5. Do you suggest getting into a player corp ASAP?

I don't really know. I've never been in player corp, mostly because I don't want to agree to e.g. being available regularly since I prefer being able to stop playing whenever i want.

What you describe here is novice to intermediate level PvP, primarily as a grunt within a large group of limited potential. There is so much more to PvP than this.

1. What keeps EVE exciting for you when you're docked in a station with Excel spreadsheets open?
BSing with corp mates, checking out weapons and fittings, and reading the forums of course.

2. Do you usually play solo?
See above. I tried running my own mining and PI op in a solo corp, but it's damn near cabin fever. Also, opening yourself up to contact with different minds in an industrial corp can give you a great sounding board for ideas and a source of some really great advice. I learned more in two weeks with my current corp than I ever did in 5 months of playing on my own.

3. Do you ever get an itch to PvP?
Yes, and I can do that now thanks to a stable source of income from indy/PI/trade. I don't feel quite as bad putting 100mil into a ship, because I know I've got the resources and ability to make that back. I think you're on the right track starting off indy - it provides a stable platform for you to grow from, and occasionally fall back on when things don't go your way in other areas.

4. How many accounts do you run, and do you think they are needed to be competitive?
One currently. Planning on creating another account to utilize a second skill queue for a more combat-oriented character.

Are they needed to be competitive? Eh, no. Given the brains, intuition and luck (yes, luck factors in) anyone can be ridiculously successful only playing one character at a time. Could it be helpful? Depends on what you want to do. Mining/hauling, absolutely. Trading and manufacturing, I don't really see a big advantage, unless you really need to be in two places at once.

5. Do you suggest getting into a player corp ASAP?
See above. There are literally tens of thousands of people who traveled the same path you're taking, and a good number of them have made mistakes that they've learned valuable lessons from. The best thing you can do is track those people down and learn from them. Otherwise you're just wasting time and money replicating others' failures.

Implying that most players ever get past primary-grunt?

Trading IS PvP.

You outwit, outplay or out-pocket others. They get damage.
A guy may lose a 150M fitted battleship, a trader may lose 5B because he fell into a manipulation.

I'd guess that most players that take that route never get past it.

But you don't have to take that route. You never have to be that person, unless you want to be.

I've only had the slightest whiff of that in my PvP career and that only in recent months as I've been flying mostly with larger groups than previously. Still, a large group that is well organised is never what Tekota described. There are dozens of roles to play within a large fleet and so many things that need doing. If a fleet operates as a blob of drones following FC direction it will never achieve what a good fleet can.

However, my first love in PvP is the small gang. That is where the real joy of EVE can be found and that is so far away from Tekota's description as to make it something of a joke.

Yes and I think it's a crying shame.

Being a beginner is something everyone has to go through, regardless of what you do in EVE, and being a beginner is hard. It's made much easier if you have skilled, experienced and knowledgable people to guide you through it. That's not to say you can't go it completely alone and learn everything by yourself, indeed that is exactly how I learned EVE for my first year or so, but that's an extremely hard road to travel. The big problem is that many people are guided through their beginner period by people who are not skilled, experienced or knowledgable (whether they claim to be so or not). They do not follow a hard road, instead they go completely off the fairway and end up burried deep in the rough. These poor chaps only ever see the part of eve that is populated by incompetents, wastrels, fools, sheep and other people duped out of achieving their potential. This is not really a fault with the game, it's a fault with people and something that is brought directly from the real world.

I suppose that in my time I've helped save quite a few people from mediocrity, but there are still a vast number of people who are stuck in a world where the minerals they mine themselves are free, where small gang PvP is dead, where grind is an inescapable part of the game, where low-sec is evil, barren and frightening, where a 20 man fleet cannot defeat 100, where 0.0 is just about blobs and structure shooting... etc... etc...

I just wanted to say that if that is the world you live in, just be aware that it's not the only world and you are free to choose something else.