EVE General Discussion

I make maybe 200M an hour with 3 characters.... i rat/mine in null

I once talked a drunken guy out of a billion ISK.
Half an hour worth of talking.

Went a bit unexpected though,
when I had to leave for work.

Came back, noticed something odd ...
... did he put that billion as bounty on my head.

Pre bounty changes.
-7.2 in dodixie.
I didn't make it out of the system alive.

That was hilarious! XD

If you have, say, 13 billion is lying around, you want to do something in game but you don't want to upset your delicate real life budget (that includes mutiple kids, one of whom starts college in the fall, and also invovles paying back the state employee pension fund you borrowed from to pay for your parent's surgery....), then 800 mil isn't a waste of isk.

Which is the entire point, everyone has different circumstances and that's totally ok. This issue comes up when the 'instant gratification' or 'cheap with imaginary money as they are with real money' types get all huffy about people using plex to pay a sub. Which of course is ironically short sighted because if it were not for people like me, those same people wouldn't have anyone to sell their cash bought plex too lol.

the problem here is you need lots of isk to have lots of fun. Having even a billion liquid can be gone very quickly if you want to be active. Grinding that takes a while. Thats why CCP im sure brought in plex as a RMT for ISK. Instead of making the game more profitable they know there is a need for more ISK, so they sell plex to gain more income. Otherwise why not make it easier to make a lot of money, which in turn allows people to buy and replace more ships to have more fun more requlary.

You had a specific question: "How many characters really make 200+ mil/hour?" My unprovable answer is "less than 1 percent". People have already mentioned that only CCP knows so my statement is as good as any. Other good points is that "isk/hour" is hard to define since your "hours" can be filled with non-isk making activity.

I don't have any inside numbers but I think the average Eve player engaging in an isk making activity is making 70 mil or less per hour per character. When I say average I am not sure I am talking about anyone reading Eve Forums. Most people do not Min/max their activity to a fine edged and honed degree. For example how many mission runners have really picked the best LP sources and rotate through 4 factions to push their standings to 5 in all races and then optimally do LP -> BPC -> item -> market to push to 100+ mil/hour range? Then run the level 4 epic arcs every 3 months on t he button? Well maybe the 500 people reading this post but probably not the thousands who get home from work and run missions for a couple of hours. What about station trading? Yes you *can* make money station trading and you also can lose money station trading. How many people have it down to well oiled science and then log the hours in market PvP to keep their orders on top? Industry: I have for example 10 lines running 24x7 and I make about 100mil profit every 3 days. Its really terrible profit but its largely passive and its something different to do. Yeah there are guys who take it to the next level building T2's and T3's and constantly juggle their products and really, really push to excel... who knows how much they make. Now consider ratting. The curve is not linear. Someone isktaring sanctums is going to make about 60 mil an hour. But if they use 4 smartbomb battleships, or rat in carriers or multiple 3 bil blinged rattlesnakes can push that to 120-150mil/character/hour. That still not 250mil/hour. Maybe they get some Mazes and run them to push it up even higher. Mazes are quite tough until you learn the tricks and have the right ship.. and really how many people do? Straight-up FW won't make loads of ISK, but a highly optimized FW level 4 mission using a covert bomber can make that 200+/hour. How many people really set up that 10 mission run through low sec with people hunting you and then not make a single transversal mistake and get popped and make it back to their agents to cash in their LP? I am guessing a very, very small number. How many people are really running incursions with their strict multi-billion bling doctrine fits and raking in the huge isk per hour? I am guessing not too many.

I think its like real life... most people don't have the drive or ambition to pay the price in time and effort to maximize their income.

Usually you only need to make enough isk to support the truism "don't fly what you can't afford to lose". If you like playing FW in frigates then you don't need much of an isk stream to pay for losing 5 ships a night. If you like exploration then you don't need much isk to pay for losing a Helios every once in a while. If you like taking a Proteus solo into nullsec to find fights then yeah, you might need a more substantial isk stream.

Anyway, thats my two cents.

I think I should have emphasized the "or less" part. I would not be surprised if it was substantially less. The main point is that it is no where near the 200+ range. I think you are in good company in your isk generation, and more-so because you have a lot of characters making isk but probably only 1-2 costing isk. (i.e. getting blown up,).

if you never get blown up then it hardly matters how much isk you make unless you are plexing your accounts. Those are the two main isk sinks in the game. The rest just go into illiquid assets that can always be converted back.

Do you mean afk?

Sometimes I just fly from trade hub to trade hub spending ISK, I don't count it to earning ISK. There is time in game I call fun, that conveniently overlaps with time spent for earning ISK, the rest is just, well, cost of living in EVE or fooling around.

This isn't a game about who has the most billions. You should do what you need to do to play the game the way you want to play. If you want to screw around in t1 frigates and cruisers mining away for isk will get you all you need and more. If you want to PvP in capitals you will need to do substantially more....unless you build them yourself.

Easiest isk/hr is in wspace. Riskiest isk/hr is also in wspace. On a normal day I won't leave the pos shield to PvE unless it's worth at least 150m/hr. Partly cause i"m lazy and part .... no... I'm just lazy.

I think the number is a lot lower than people think and I also don't think that the majority of people in Eve have that much money.

This post makes the most sense of all the replies here.

Short and to the point.

+1