Market Discussions

How do others feel? For me, tradings seems to be the best isk making venture in terms of time invested and returns. There are some other things that can be done that will make more isk but as far as I know, they all require more time invested and more of a grind. Trading requires a low sp investment and you don't need to work with anyone else. The only barrier to entry is initial isk investment and a little bit of knowledge which is basically buy low and sell high.

Scamming.

Send me 2 billion ISK and if I don't send you back 4 you will have your answer

I find it relaxing.

Its good to know you can count on some extra ISK at the end of the day, knowing that it took skill to acquire, almost every day you learn something new, that makes you just a little tiny bit better makes you feel a little bit more confident to pull that stunt off you have bin contemplating for weeks while your busy with daily life.

Sometimes, after a long roam, a battle, or just running combat against NPC's perhaps with other people, you log into your merchant, or merchants, go over your orders, chat a little, its a good profession to get into.

That would depend on a lot of things...

It depends on how good you are at trading compared to the alternative isk making ventures.


You have to consider how much time you want to invest and how often.


You have to consider how much isk you can invest in it and for how long.


You imply by this that your criteria aren't restricted to time and returns. You also care about how interesting, enjoyable or challenging the venture may be.


You also consider low SP investment and independence a benefit.

So really, the question is quite complex and can only really be answered by looking at all the alternatives. Of course, if you haven't tried the alternatives it can be difficult to make a good analysis.

Let's deal with another obvious one...


Time Investment?

Considerable. Higher than trading.

Each time you want to do this you need to get to an incursion with your ship(s), find and join a suitable group and then work plexes for as long as care to. It also helps if you do it frequently and spend time networking with other incursion runners so that you can get into better and more profitable groups quickly and easily. As far as PvE activities goes this isn't one of the better ones for minimising time investment.

Isk Investment?

Moderate. It has a higher starting bar than trading but a much lower cap.

You need to be able to field a ship that will get accepted into fleets, that will cost you more than starting up as a trader. However there is a cap to how much isk you can effectively invest in an incursion running ship and that the return on additional investment in often questionable.

Returns?

Moderate. Starts out fairly well but doesn't scale like trading does.

100m isk per hour as a rough guide, if you are competent and with a competent fleet. You can exceed that, but not by much without multi-boxing, micro-managing your LP exchange (i.e. trading) or taking an unorthadox approach.

Low-sec and 0.0 fleets are more profitable, for a marginal increase in risk if you are competent and with a competent fleet. 200m isk per hour as a rough guide.

Interesting? Fun? Challenging?

At first perhaps, but it soon becomes repetitive as is the case with most PvE.

SP requirement? Independence?

It requires more SP than trading and a lot more SP if you want to maximise returns.

Scores badly on independence... you are going to have to play with other people unless you adopt a highly unorthadox approach.

So how about FW Missions?

Time Investment?

Fairly low. Better than incursions and wormholing, probably higher than trading.

In my experience you should set aside 2 hours for a session of FW missioning, less would be inefficient.

Isk Investment?

Fairly low. The starting point is a cheaply fit stealth bomber, the cap can be quite high depending on your approach.

Returns?

In the 100m/hour ballpark for an entry level player with an unoptimised approach.

200m/hour once you've got you know what you are doing (without pimped ships).

Higher can be achieved with multi-boxing and various pimped setups. Unorthadox approaches can increase the rewards considerably to the point that this becomes the highest paying PvE you can do without a supercapital. However, it is worth noting that any significantly advanced method of making isk from FW is barely distinguishable from trading.

Interesting? Fun? Challenging?

Can be. The PvE element becomes fairly repetitive but mercifully it doesn't take long.

SP requirement? Independence?

More SP than trading, particularly as trading is part of it. You can put a lot of SP into it, but you don't have to.

Can be solo, can be done with others, you can take your pick there.

Indeed.

Pretty much every way to make isk involves trading somewhere.

I disagree, although you might be taking a very wide definition of trading that includes all the other things I can think of (investments for example).


There isn't a hard cap to any of those, it's a soft cap like with trading. You can push your earnings higher and higher and it gets harder and harder to progress them further and eventually you will hit the limit imposed by your ability, method and resources.

I think what you actually mean is that for the average person you'll reach that cap at a much lower isk/hour from these PvE activities than you will with trading.

Yea you're right I was thinking for the average player.

Investing/loans are a whole different ball game, as is moving to things like cap production, moongoo or serious T2 BPO's.

For PvE going from a T2 fit to a faction fit faction BS will be a big improvement. Will going officer/deadspace really make that much more isk in an hour or two of L4's to have good ROI? Same with incursions, shiny ships are all good but to really clear sites super fast you need a good gang too.