Ever since the destruction of my mighty Maller-Class cruiser, 'Obsolescence', some days ago, I've been bringing all the powers of anally-retentive spreadsheet analysis at my command to bear on the problem of Making ISK Quickly in EVE Online, and the results suprised me somewhat.

Income can be generated in several main ways, each with pros and cons:

  • Mining: Mining in EVE is a matter of shoving a mining laser on the front of any ship, pulling up to an asteroid, and sucking it dry, in a very Mosquito-like manner. Once full of ore, head back to a base and refine it to minerals, then sell the minerals. Easy. However, to earn the Big Money, it becomes a complex operation with extra people hauling the mined ore to a starbase for refineing, and possibly extra people taking the finished minerals to a base with the best price. Although it can make a lot of money, in general, most dedicated players use a second account, and spend significant amount of the time AFK, as it is rather boring.
  • Missions: Carrying out freelance missions for NPC Corporation Agents can form a steady income. This either involves moving cargo about, or combat, but it's fairly random which you get, so is really only for combat-ready people and ships. Increased payout entails increased difficulty, and getting beaten by an Agent Level 3 mission is why I'm down a ship in the first place. These missions can also be very time consuming too, and in a game like EVE, time is money. However, these missions are undeniably exciting, and for many players, the Main Game, so to speak.
  • Bounty/Loot: Mining by another name, there exist a huge number of static non-mission related spawns of NPC Pirate ships. While also a fun way to play, the kill bounties aren't that impressive. Loot can be lucrative, but then there is the added time-cost of turning that big pile of junk into money.
  • Piracy: I've no idea what this pays like, but would imagine it's more a thing people do for fun, rather than profit. Indeed, tweaking a ship for PvP, or even just ganking, is more something that costs money, rather than earns it. I can only imagine that the real money in piracy comes from controling access to the resources in a system or region, rather than simply plundering hapless passers-by. Again, the Pirate has to turn the plunder into cash, so there will be a significant time-cost to the associated haulage. Plus being is pirate isn't very nice!
  • Manufacture: This might have been a good one back in the day, but, like almost every 'trade skill' in an online game, players have this strange habit of never costing their own time, and having invested so heavily into being a 'Crafter', feel an almost sucicidal tendency to need to sell their goods, however low the price, just to justify their efforts. With these, and the much larger and more organised mass-producers, it's very difficult to get any real profits out of the Ship and Equipment market these days.

No, after a bit of research, it turned out that Trading was the real moneymaker. Loading a space-truck full of Widgets, and travelling to somewhere where they don't have any. Not terribly exciting, I thought, but a very good income. All you really need is an 'Industrial', (a frieghter), some cargo expander modules, all fairly cheap, and a chunk of operating capital. The game itself provides all the information and tools needed to work out what needs to go where, and the market is dynamic enough to mean the routes change a lot and need constant supervision.

So I set out, regarding the whole thing as a necessary evil, and a temporary burden before I can get back in 'Obsolesence II' and play the game 'properly' again. But the more I trade, the more compelling it gets, and now I wonder if I can actually stop! Already I've realised that I'm earning so much that instead of a replacement Cruiser, I can realistcally afford a Battleship, the pinacle of ship ownership in EVE, so I'm saving for that instead - about 10x the cost of a Cruiser.

But it's the actual activity of trading I'm starting to really enjoy. Essentially it's little more than working with spreadsheets, with a nice screensaver going on behind it, but I'm getting an inordinate amount of satisfaction from docking 1.2 million ISK up after only 3 jumps. It's all about the elegance involved in ecomony of effort, but mostly, it's all about Elite. Fancy electronic warfare, alliances, player-owned structures and deadspace complexes come and go, but at the end of the day, I'm doing now what I was doing in a game that came out in 1984, and still loving it...

Elite: The One That Started It All


(Fun Fact: The universe of EVE is only around twice as big as the universe of Elite. EVE totals about 5000 star systems, where as the original versions of Elite on the BBC had 8 galaxies of about 250 star systems each, 2000 systems. However, Elite managed to fit all that into 22kb of memory. EVE requires signficantly more, even if it is a bit more detailed...)