EVE New Citizens Q&A

I was leaning towards ratting since the corp i'm in focuses on pvp. Are all isk creating paths created equally, or are some more viable and domineering than others? How balanced are the many ways to make isk in this game? I want to make money fast!

Thanks for the reply. I am having fun making ISK and call me crazy but I do like the trading aspects of MMOs. I find zen moments in fishing in WoW and I assume I'd enjoy mining in EVE, too. I'm also loving eve-bet and doing all that gambling on sports. I am having a lot of fun with how open this game is.

So basically I want to know how to support my gambling habit! hahaha.

Also, what's the isk per hour for ratting vs mining?

There are a number of income streams that scale well and don't require a lot of time to manage. 3 characters on 1 account can harvest PI, research, manufacture and sell product on the market simultaneously while you are doing other things -you don't even need to be logged in. There is an initial investment in multiple character training and there is a learning curve while you figure out what to sell and where. Once established, the business will produce a substantial income with little effort.

It sounds to me like you would like exploration then.

IMHO if you are looking for the most isk per hour you are playing this game wrong. You can make isk doing anything in this game. You should be doing what you enjoy and making isk in the process.

If you are coming from WoW to this game I did that same thing back in 2009. As someone who has been where you are I would like to say that this game is very different. If you try to play this game like you have other MMOs you might have a rough time with this game. You have to open your mind to this game and let go of pre-programmed concepts of what an MMO is supposed to be like then you will be doing much better, again IMHO.

Some of the main points conceptually speaking that you need to understand:

There is no balanced and controlled gameplay in this game. In WoW you have 5 man dungeons and 25 man raids and 40 man BGs and 3 v 3 or 5 v 5 arenas etc... In Eve you can run a mission by yourself or you can run it with 200 of your closest friends. You can run a mission by yourself and then have an uninvited guest drop by to join you. You can roam around in low sec and pick a solo fight with another player only to have 20 of his friends jump through the wormhole that is in system that you had no idea was there or jump through the cyno that he lights and hot drop your ass or what ever. You also can be the one playing helpless in a mining barge only to have 35 or your buddies surprise your would be attacker.

The main point to take away is that ideas of gear progression or level progression or any type of linear progression don't exist in this game. Let go of ideas of maxing anything out for the sake of maxing it out or hyper focusing on stats or anything of the sort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de1hwoFYA_k

I regularly link the above video. It is of a vet playing on a very low skill point alt. He's running around in a cheap ship and winning in PvP engagements against characters that are years old in ships worth ten times his. This game is not about your skill points or how "blinged out" your ship is but about what you know.

Another point is that, with very few exception, pretty much everything on the market is made, bought and sold by other players. The player driven market in this game is very much what this game is about. The loot that drops in this game is for you or other players to use. There really isn't loot that drops just to be "vendored". In wormhole space there is blue loot to replace bounties but that is the exception to the rule. So when you loot items in this game you either use them yourself or you sell them to someone else that will use them or resell them or you melt them down into minerals to be used in building stuff that someone will use.

Someone just posted here a few weeks ago about CCP having payouts on various things somehow tied to a time frame. Meaning that the better drops are roughly figured to be a certain amount over a specific time frame.

The way that this plays out is that if more people are doing a specific thing in game your chances of getting a really good drop go down or maybe a better way to say it is that the average value of each drop ( or spawned container in this case ) goes down.

I am uncertain as to the specifics of how this works but it made a lot of sense to me and helped me understand some aspects of this game better so I am passing it along.

Regarding relic sites, the T2 salvage price is pretty stable for months, a bit up because of demand for Citadels. Would there be a change from CCP we would see a sharp drop or raise in the price, like you have seen with the AAR (drop chance for the BPC reduced).

It's better to do that with fake money than real money; but you should get that under control.

The EVE gambling site "I Want ISK" takes in enough ISK from suckers (gamblers) that one of its key figures was able to blow almost a trillion ISK buying more than a thousand Skill Injectors to cap out their skillpoints on stream. Yes, every skill in the game trained to 5.

Every cent funded by the useful idiots that bet on the site.

They still had enough ISK left over to spend *literally trillions* funding the events that started the present World War Bee.

As someone that scams a bit on the side in EVE, I have to tip my hat to IWI - despite their honesty, or perhaps because of it, they are much better at scamming than I have ever been.

It comes down to a lot on how many characters you have.

Mining scales very well with multiple characters. Especially in nullsec upgraded anomalies. I've spent hours on a single spod rock...
I have 5 accounts. When I do mine It's 1 booster, 3 full time miners and 1 miner/freighter who comes back and empties out enormous freight container.

Use skiffs/hulks and huddle around enormous freight containers. Mackinaws have no point, if you're chucking ore into a freight container. They can be popped but not many neuts will do so, unless they have superior numbers and are willing to stick around for the bored bloodthirsty ratters to come find them, because those containers have ~50k hp they don't die that fast. Plus they don't generate a kill mail, so people only pop one if they're feeling dickish.

I'd say 8/10 times, my containers were left alone even when they had several hundred million worth of ore in them.

As for money making I probably made ~30m p/hour selling ore at 10% of Jita's buy value per miner. You'd probably make close to 35m p/hour with hulks.

Ratting does not scale as well, since they require attention unless you use:
a) auto targeting missles. You still need to reactive the missiles when they reload.
b) afk carrier rat with heavy drones - soon to be RIP
c) Smartbomb rat.

I've only done smart bomb ratting but with 4 accounts plus 1 guy guarding my ESS, I made around 29-35m ticks liquid isk per combat account with a 10% corp tax(which comes to around 348m-420m p/hour with 4 combat chars, not counting selling escalations, faction loot, LP and the occasional newbro who salvages behind me then gives me a cut(according to him, he was making around 100m p/hour but hated life due to how much work it was).
3 Smart bombers, 1 person cleaning up the rats that make it out and then 1 person who sits on the ESS and guards it.

Once you've settled into a rhythm you clear rock havens in ~3 minutes. Spend another minute warping to the next one(I suggest picking a small system or atleast systems were the celestials aren't that far apart. Because anomalies spawn near one, if they're all close it cuts down on travel time which has a pretty big impact on your isk p/hour. I also suggest using Machariels since their warp speed is boss for traveling between sites). You'll want to use upgraded systems with atleast 3 rock havens, otherwise you'll have to do forsaken rally or some other static spawn.

Not to mention, once you have your smartbombing/mining crew all setup. You can then even further just rip SP out of their heads every month, plex their account and have some extra spending money...at current prices.

Mining atleast was easy, since I didn't have to pay too much attention using skiffs. Hulks though, you had to pay all sorts of attention to them since they filled their hold every 2 cycles.

Smartbomb ratting was mindnumblingly boring to do for extended periods of time.

So the most EFFICIENT way to make ISK is one that you can stand to do for long periods of time. Just mix it up once in awhile even if it's a isk p/hour loss. I burned myself out of nullsec because of this.

Feel free to send me a message. I can help you with fits, etc. I'm not on that often because of life stuff but once in awhile I log on to do some good ole high sec carebearing.