EVE New Citizens Q&A

I don't PvP, but I fund my adventures through exploration, trading, and a little mining and industry. Exploration is fastest (try WH's in starter systems) I've seen, and a decent Caldi ship for it is only 3mil (going overkill on the ammo and guns)

I tried missions and exploration - both can pay the bills for basic PvP but are a very slow way to build wealth.

I found factional warfare (FW) worked better: gain loyalty points (LP) for a faction (preferably one at Tier 3, 4 or 5), trade the LP for goods and sell. You need a station trade alt to handle the orders and you need to research what goods to sell (fuzzworks website)

As a bonus FW means you get plenty of PvP.

My FW alt made ~1B worth of LP in just over a week (faction was at tier 4 and 5), and around 3B total. My station trade alt converted that seed money to ~10B and growing: I now live off the proceeds of station trading alone.

It's obviously possible for players with plenty of SP and personal connections to make a lot of ISK by Alpha standards - the in-game demand for PLEX proves that.

On the other hand the income from PvE activities at Alpha-level SP is badly out of balance at the moment IMO.

What defines EVE is

• "Ownable" territory and POS's to defend and/or improve it
• Permanent loss of equipment when PvPing

The second means that you have to "pay in-game resources to PvP". This can be viewed as either "hardcore PvP" or a paradoxical disincentive for rookies to participate wholeheartedly in PvP. Either way, Alphas are definitely vulnerable to being forced to grind too much (i.e. spend too much low-gaming-value time) to pay for PvP.

The EVE economy is interesting, but much less so for PvP-interested players at approx 5 mill SP. Excluding scamming or participating in a large group that e.g. blackmails or steals from other players, there's a big SP gap. There's no room in 5 mill both for skills that support combat and for even the basics for participation in the economy that doesn't involve theft, deception, or banditry.

As this thread shows, there aren't all that many options to pay for disposable ships larger than standard T1 destroyers. Since it's easy to show that mining, missions, combat sites etc pay too little, the usual answer is "Wormholes", but the actual average income per hour from wormholes (especially if you can't cloak your ship) isn't enough.

Neither high-SP players nor CCP care about providing enough cash flow to low-SP players to pay for PvP. I don't think this is smart for CCP, but in the (approx) ten years I've been away from EVE all they did in that regard was add Ventures (which are (just) enough to pay for disposable T1/T1 Destroyers). At a guess I'd say CCP would prefer to let the economy self-balance, and won't do any other targeted economic tuning without input from the player council. Which, since it's somewhat democratic, has enough "fun-vampires" to block anything constructive. Fun-vampires want to get more tears (and player time wasted) per rookie ship ganked, and hence prefer rookies to be too poor to fly disposable ships any larger than a (conveniently fragile) Destroyer.

On the plus side, this leaves players who aren't happy with the time it takes to fund their PvP with easy choices:

• Try to find a Corp that will solve the income shortfall for you. This requires patience (it could be just a few days, but it could as easily take months), but sooner or later you'll find one that suits your needs
• Try scamming (solo activity, scammers claim it pays well), begging, or perhaps even honest trading
• Buy a PLEX every now and then, as a time-saving income substitute. Note that a PLEX will cover e.g. 30 to 50 combat cruisers for an Alpha, but it probably won't cover a month's worth of BC's (Gnosis for an Alpha): if you use up a PLEX every two weeks you'd be better off subscribing

BTW - Faction Warfare isn't there because I don't have any data. OTOH the earlier post has figures that don't add up. If a PLEX costs 1 billion ISK, and you can make that much reliably in a week via FW, every Alpha looking to fund a PLEX per month (and there are plenty of those) would be doing this. This kind of dissonance is usually caused by something like mistaking "best ever income / time unit" for "average income per time unit" - or by deliberate "forum PvP". Asking for clarification never leads anywhere though, so I'd suggest "pretend to trust but verify very carefully".

Last point: there have been posts lately (in General Discussion I think) that "Red vs Blue" is becoming active again. Worth checking out - for example as a complement to looking for a nullsec corp. Remember two Alphas costs no more than one.

You know I rarely agree that much with you on the solid claims you make here. I feel I'm looking at the same facts from a different perspective, but I'm not saying you'rs isn't valid, or even uncommon.

Fact is that one needs a solid economy to field solid ships. There is two sides of that equation. The "in" side, as in income, and the "out" side - as in your need of ships to do what you want to do. The better developed you are on the "in" part, the more cost-inefficient and careless you can be on the "out" side.

Now if you set your "out" goal to be able to field the blingiest ships you can fly at a rate you are able to lose them, you'll need a very reliable income - the easiest being rich of course and buying as many PLEXes as you can pump into things you want. Who can blame CCP for allowing that option for the interested parties?

One can also lower his needs and ambitions to fit their wallet. My 1.2 mil rifters may not be as good scouts and tacklers or even haulers as more expensive and specialized ships, but they get the job done. And as a wise man pointed it in a thread lately: you learn about the same from losing an 1mil ship as from losing a 100mil one. And the experience the -player- gets from losing ships translates into ISK on the long run.


But I admit, both the above examples are pretty extreme ones of the spectrum, and I admit that a reasonable middle point between the two would be next to impossible to sustain by mining with alpha ventrues. For the most. I know some alpha gas huffers who make pretty rad isk by knowing what they 're doing.. and by doing it a lot.

For me, it all comes down to the above factor. CCP allows people to establish their economy by rl cash, but also by people skills (counting both scamming and making friends here), dedication or knowledge. A solid income does not come served on a plate in a safe environment, one has to work for it one way or another.


Dang, I love this game. Thanks CCP for lettin' us F2P bums in!

EDIT: only forgot to answer the OP: I explore for the thrill of being hunted, and sometimes I return home with funds that I can fit -really- blingy Alpha Rifters with.

Exploration is very viable even without the ability to cloak. I'd even go as far as to claim Alphas can turn the lack of cloak into an advantage by fitting weapons and defensive mods on their 'easy to kill' T1-exploration frigates and then give some of their competitors (like myself) a nasty surprise when they tear my 'properly fit' exploration frigate into little pieces.

Sure an alpha won´t have the power to stand up to a PvP-fitted ship by neither can I as an Omega so I don´t think not having a cloak should stop Alphas from trying exploration.

I run L4's most of the time, go exploring if a wormhole opens nearby, then run frigates and BC's around on the weekends using that isk.

I am not a PvPer and I know the title of the OP specicially states that you are looking from response from those types of people however PvPing and isk earning don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. I mean you can make isk PvPing like in FW but the whole frame of your OP is about making isk to fund PvP. The way that you phrase it this can be broken up into seperate questions.

How to make isk in a quick and efficient manner is one topic.

How to make PvP losses "affordable" is another separate question.


I used to run missions in null sec. Pirate faction LP is pretty good isk. I am not sure if you are taking LP into consideration with the above comment, but LP is the whole reason that you mission not the bounties or mission payouts. To that end if you want to make good isk running pirate missions in null sec you need to complete missions quickly i.e. speed run them to complete as many missions as possible in as short of a time frame as possible.

As far as the comments about alpha isk earning potential I just want to point out that the whole alpha versus omega thing is more of an unlimited trial than it is an actual F2P. Eve is a subscription based game. Subscription based games are the ONLY kind that I will play. If eve ever went truly F2P I'd stop playing it. Just like the rest of us game devs have to earn a living and I'd rather that they earn it by charing me for a service that they provide than by trying to sell me virtual stuff. That's just my personal opinion but I wanted to more point out that Eve isn't really an F2P game in what I would consider the "true sense" of the genre.

Yes you can play eve forever as an alpha and never sub. I am sure there are players that will be happy to do so. However I think if you look at it more like an unlimited trial that you will get a better understand for the game and a better appreciation of it as well.


With belt rats as you seem to have noticed it is more about the faction spawns than the actual bounty ticks. On average 1 out of every 20 belt rat spawns will be a faction or hauler spawn. The faction spawns do despawn as far as I understand it so you need to clear the belts to force respawns before you even get a chance of that happening.

Officer spawns are extremely rare and can only happen in NPC null sec or -1.0 truesec null ( which is only about 7 systems in game ). If you have seen an officer spawn then you've done something that most people who have played this game for years have never seen.

With regards to making PvP more affordable...

Like other's have said flying cheap is the key. Beyond that there are corps / alliances that have SRPs ( Ship Replacement Policies ) as well as ones that will give free ships to new players. IMHO the key to making PvP affordable for new players is in not trying to go it alone.

I realize that the answers that I have given above are not exactly what you asked for but I am hoping that it's helpful information.

If you can get into a ship that can use a Covert Ops claoking device and t2 relic/data analyzers, exploration in nulls sec and the null sec sites in wormholes pay verry well. But i make enough (irl) to buy a few plex.

not in any particular order

selling PLEX
FW LP
PI

I do Project Discovery to fund my Alpha.

Last week I earned over 100m this way (over 1m per tick).