EVE New Citizens Q&A

Removed an off topic post.

That. Is. Awesome. Props to that guy, takes some ingenuity to come up with that.

You can go the "normal" MMOG route and grind.
- If you mine Highsec asteroids, you can make maybe 20-ish million isk per hour spent.
- If you run Level 4 Missions or Nullsec Anomalies, you can get a steady 100-ish million ISK per hour doing that.
- If you find a nice wormhole corp, you can make maybe 500-ish Million ISK per hour running sites with your corpmates.
- ...

However - none of that you will be able to do efficiently as a newbie, so don't try that right away. It will just leave you bored and/or discouraged.

You can also go the not quite as "normal" route as far as MMOGs go, and play the economy.
- Trading: Set up low buy orders and high sell orders
- Speculation: Anticipate changes in supply and demand, and stock up accordingly, to sell at a high profit later
- Manipulation: Strategically Buy and Sell huge amounts of certain goods to actively manipulate the price of the wares you are trading.

The ISK/h ratio on those has no limit. The more you invest, the more profit you make, the more you can invest. However, you will need a certain knack for business, and a good amount of game-knowledge. It's not a good idea to blindly trade without the faintest idea of what it is you are trading.

Or you can go the one route that makes Eve different from so many other games and be a cheating, thieving, lying, scamming bastard. People are still falling for the good old ISK doubling scam, but almost anything goes. People have in the past acted as escrow agents for titan sales, and then kept both the titan and the money. People have set up financial services, just to run away with all the money after a while. People have run and are still running gambling services. The possibilities are endless and limited only by your imagination. I have seen newbies pull off scams within their first few days.

All that said, though - as others have stated before: I wouldn't recommend trying to play Eve "for free". Just play Eve, and if you make enough on the side to PLEX your account - great!

I'd like to know how to do the latter two on a trial account. If I can skill up and ship up fast enough to do level 4 missions or run sites at 500 Mil Isk per hour, I have totally missed where I should be researching!


Can't see much fun for the action or not stock market interested person on this route. It also doesn't help your toon with the ship/space aspect of the game, you're a desk jockey for the most part. It's like being a stock broker every day not that it can't be exciting, but...


Hmmm.... this might say something about the core ethics of a portion of the EVE player base...


This I agree with entirely.

Let's not go there. There are personal situations and parts of the world where getting dollars or euros is difficult, and we don't need to discuss them or belittle anyone to get a job or whatever.

The options have been presented:

- you have the steady low-income grinds that are available, more profitable in lower security space (high-sec is crowded and really crappy): mining, PI, agent missions or killing NPCs in asteroid belts, FW battlegrounds PVP, exploration, incursions, character-building-for-sale, courier contracts.

- you have percentage-based activities, where the profit is a % of what you put in, so you have to have several millions to make more millions (basically, trading or manufacturing).

- and you have the crazy schemes that depend on luck or guile to make off with a lot of money, if you're in the right place at the right time or shooting the correct moron (scamming, running banks, running lotteries, corp theft, piracy of juicy targets, begging, war declaration extortion schemes).

- or you can give RL money to CCP and buy PLEX or Aur and convert them to in-game cash, pretty effortless and very efficient (because CCP likes your RL money) - and you can pay with a variety of methods that are acceptable to CCP.

The various activities have their own sub-forums, with specific guides posted by the veterans, and with people willing to answer more specific questions (such as, 'what items should I trade'), and willing to give you more specific details to get you started.

The game, however, requires a lot of homework to make the big bucks; you need to learn the game details and which ships are popular, you need to watch the news and devblogs and check the test servers to figure out what CCP is changing, you need to figure out what items are used to manufacture which ships (there are price dependencies, and the market fluctuates), and you need to "get" people and how they'll behave and react, to be able to tell if someone is going to fall for your lies and scams or not.

So, as it's been said already by a number of people, pay your first month and start with "learn the game details" by playing the game and asking the questions. It's a good starting point.

This is my problem - I don't even have the $20 for the single PLEX, but I do have $20 steambux I got as a gift, which is why I asked about Steam

You can get another trial right after the first one expires right? I've spent the first two weeks of this one loafing around.

Do you mind if I add you as a contact in game. Seems like I have a lot to learn from you. And I agree with most of your pointers.

You can get trial as many times as you want, but each time you have to create a new (trial) account (with no characters), and then start a new character which you can play for 2 weeks or whatever the time is.

When i take a break from eve it is not to go play another space game. Its becuase i want to stop playing space games for a while and miss playing games like neverwinter nights and elder scrolls...with magic and had held weapons.

But i find myself comparing these games to eve. The content becomes a boring grind doing the same thing over and over for very little gain only to finally get it and the devs raise the bar so its obsolete after all the work i did to get it. Then you have games like wow, where the first gear set from the xpack is 2 or 3 times stronger than the best gear of the last. Their is no smooth transition.

Again like Wow the games seem really dumb down. You have a skill rotation that is the standard practice and you just keep pushing the same buttons over and over... occasionally at certain times you have to move a few feet so you dont get hit by some AOE damage. PVP is nearly nonexistent and when it happens the players are so unbalanced in gear that its not a fight its a slaughter.

I came to eve originally from a game called shadowbane. It was sort of like wow but the pvp was a lot more balanced as was the gear. It lacked the content of wow in world size and the graphics werent quite as good as wows so it died with unchecked gold farmers.

Freemium games are the worse. I learned quickly free is not really free. free means " we will let you play but only as an active farm for those that give us money". The money sink to compete became enough that i could be a trillionaire in eve without ever leaving dock. Most require an investment of $100 a month to stay even remotely competitive and the content is even more lacking that games like wow.

Its not even eve itself that makes me want to take a break. Its some of the players and their egos. Such as a certain unnamed alliance that for quite a while would just constantly invade various space with their ridiculous amounts of supers for no reason other than have something to do. That kind of gameplay bores me( i cant stand egomaniacs anyway)

Im glad to see that ccp is working on and has worked on various solutions since i left to fix that problem as it was starting to have the same pvp problem wow does.

And im always glad to see Eve is not only still going strong but has many improvements since i left. I know its going to be around for awhile. I believe CCP has committed to a goal of keeping it around "forever" which is good for players who feel the game, because of its age may be ready to die out and ccp might be ready to move on to something else. While most game companies are like that...they rather make a new game then invest in their current one. CCP seems to of found ways to make the entire game better as we progress and they dont seem to be limited by technology of when the game was originally made. Makes me wonder why other companies cannot do that.

Hilmar said somewhere in a Fanfest that the original concept for Eve was actually TCG not MMO. In a lot of ways, if you keep that in mind, a lot of the game makes sense from that perspective.