EvE online: HAL Industries is recruiting!
- Thread starter Necronic
- Start date
- Status
A
Andromache
yeah. i just dont feel like partitioning the mac pro right now. for just eve mon. I'm that lazy
A
Andromache
did you get podded? did you lose anything uninsured?
R
Rubicon
EvE online, you don't have the stuff
WTF!?!? Tell me thats not the skill tree..holy shit on a cracker.. Big ass skill tree crits you for over 9000 damage, your party is dead O_O
Necronic
Staff member
Someone did a rundown on how long it would take to train all the skills in the game. Think its something like 15 years. Basically you just can't train all of the skills. its impossible. At some point you simply have to focus your development in 1 path or another. If you purely focus on 1 goal you can get there really fast. REALLY fast.
@Crone: No, he did not pod me and my ship was insured. I lost some money but i'll get over that and build a cheaper fit for missions.
What pisses me off is i acted like a total noob. I was hunting in low sec and was not even paying attention to the overview. i let the guy get close to me. i let the guy blow me up without a decent fight.
What pisses me off is i acted like a total noob. I was hunting in low sec and was not even paying attention to the overview. i let the guy get close to me. i let the guy blow me up without a decent fight.
A
Andromache
Math: well, consider the money lost the wake up fee to keep your eyes open in low sec? 
Stay safe out there.
Stay safe out there.
Necronic
Staff member
Well, that's how you learn. By the way, yall will notice that while I said my activity would go down a bit, I'm still on a lot. I guess a better thing to have said would have been "My activity as CEO will be going down a bit." I haven't planned any corp events, and probably won't for the next couple of weeks. I've been selfishly spending my time in EvE making oodles of isk, and I'm probably going to focus on that for a while.
What I would like is for some of you older new players to step up and come up with some ideas of stuff to do with the newer new players. Take them out mining, or do some 1v1 deuls with them, or take them on a roam through low sec. Or whatever, play with them (sounds dirty.) Straker or Rick, possibly you could come up with a large scale op for this weekend? I'll be at a wedding, so won't be around.
Anyways, just want some more activity for the new guys, don't want them to get bored because they are just running missions or whatever. Also, I should have some free cruisers up for people in the near future. May make them be rewards, or just give everyone one. I don't know yet. So far I am building Vexors and Ruptures.
What I would like is for some of you older new players to step up and come up with some ideas of stuff to do with the newer new players. Take them out mining, or do some 1v1 deuls with them, or take them on a roam through low sec. Or whatever, play with them (sounds dirty.) Straker or Rick, possibly you could come up with a large scale op for this weekend? I'll be at a wedding, so won't be around.
Anyways, just want some more activity for the new guys, don't want them to get bored because they are just running missions or whatever. Also, I should have some free cruisers up for people in the near future. May make them be rewards, or just give everyone one. I don't know yet. So far I am building Vexors and Ruptures.
A
Andromache
i figured getting skilled and fitted for ECM and then mining isk for the corp would be my role, unless you'd prefer something else?
A
Andromache
Ive never done ecm before, but it sounds like lots of fun. I'm just hoping the Comcastshitastic internet can handle a sustained heavy scale battle
Necronic
Staff member
Also, I want us all to get into the habit of using Halforum's ventrillo server whenever we are online. Well, maybe not everytime, but it should be used more than it is right now. Generally speaking if I am playing I am on vent, even if no one else is. It will be useful for when we start doing more advanced stuff.
ok. you guys are driving me nuts with talk about this game. I'm giving it a shot.
I think I may be to drunk tonight to figure this game out. I've been working through the tutorials but now I'm just warping around mining things.... in the background right now as I type this I think I'm being attacked....
S
Straker
There wont be any organized operations on my part this weekend. Its Easter Sunday. As always though, feel free to take part in/organize your own ad-hoc activities with your fellow corpies. We will be doing more organized fun stuff soon though. Corp Tournament 2 came up in vent tonight, I think we all had fun with that event. Might do cruisers this time. Hmmm.... View attachment 448
Attachments
just right off the bat i can tell this game has such a high learning curve that with my work it's going to be impossible to figure out what the hell i'm doing. It's entertaining now while I've been drinking at least.
-edit-
ok, I can add my own music to listen to while playing. I love it. I don't care what else happens. I love it.
-edit-
ok, I can add my own music to listen to while playing. I love it. I don't care what else happens. I love it.
Necronic
Staff member
Saw a notification about a stress test on the Singularity server. The Singularity server is a mirrored server where CCP tests the strength of the server. Here's why you guys should get into it. The singularity server allows you to do anything you want, with no reppercusions to the main game. Moreover, all item prices are set to 100 isk. This means that it is the perfect place to practice pvp. Go into it, go kill people, or be killed, and it doesn't cost you a cent.
Also, I have written a couple of guides recently. I'm going to put them up on my webpage, but until then I would like to hear some feedback from yall. Expect to see them (or their rough rough drafts) later tonight.
Also, I have written a couple of guides recently. I'm going to put them up on my webpage, but until then I would like to hear some feedback from yall. Expect to see them (or their rough rough drafts) later tonight.
Necronic
Staff member
New Player Guide.
Trading guide. Still lacks an intro and outro to tie the whole thing together.
New Player Guide
This guide is intended to provide a new player a broad set of advice on ways to make your initial play time more enjoyable and more profitable. The fact is that EvE is one of the most complicated games around, and many players /quit before the end of the 2 week trial because they simply can’t figure out the basics.
This leads to a lot of the comments you may see like “I already have a job” or “not interested in playing Excel the Game”. Fact is that EvE can be a far more casual game than your standard MMO (WoW), if it is approached from the right perspective.
Due to the overwhelming quantity and quality of guides out there focusing on teaching new players all the details of how things like sec status, the skill trees, and fitting your ship work, this guide is written on the assumption that you have some idea of these things, or (if you don’t) that you can look them up somewhere else. I will try and keep the content general enough for anyone to understand.
So, without further ado, here are some tips to gaining that perspective.
1. Don't Panic.
I am somewhere in between serious and joking on this one. The first time you look at an items description, or look at the market, or open up the contracts screen, or (god forbid) start trying to get into t2 bpo research, you may feel a sense of panic. THIS IS NORMAL. There is a TON of information given to players. In the long run you will come to LOVE that about eve, but for now just don't worry about it.
Even old players don’t know many basic things. There is simply too much information. However, older players have one skill that new players don’t. They know where to find the answers they need.
2. Know how to find answers to the questions you need.
This is what seperates a good pilot from a bad pilot. If you think you can figure everything in EvE out on your own your are not long for this world. One of the beautiful things about EvE is that there are many many many resources out there to answer your questions.
Jumping into any field of eve without doing some basic Google research is going to hurt you very fast. Think you’re going to make a bunch of money on that blueprint? Wonder if its worth jumping into a battleship with your current skills? Google it. Look into it. Save yourself a lot of pain.
The 3 best places to start your search for answers (beyond google of course) are the EvE online forums, the EvE wiki and the in game Help channel.
Eve Online Forums – One of the best things you can find here are stickied links to the many of the major guides for specific parts of the game. Some are out of date, but most are still very useful. If you need to search the forums for something try using Eve-search.com. It mirrors the eve online forum, and has better search functionalities. You can also ask questions here, but don’t be a spambot. There are better places to ask small questions, namely:
Help Channel – This in game chat channel can be found by clicking on the appropriately named Help button in game. Surprisingly this is a well moderated and very useful place to ask simple little 1 shot questions (like “can I be shot at in 0.5 security space”)
EvE Wiki – There are a couple of these, but the best one is the one tied to the EvE Online homepage. Here you will find all sorts of in depth information about every aspect of EvE. Great place to peruse.
Here’s a couple other places I think are quite valuable
Battleclinic – Think Allakhazam of EvE (except that it doesn’t focus on a game that sucks). Tons of useful information in here, frankly too much to list. Look it over some time.
Scrapheap Challenge.com – This site is a fantastic place to find dynamic discussions about ways to fit different ships. Note that the board is moderated, but they don’t seem to have a problem with some terms people may find highly offensive. So, you know, put on your Hazmat suit if you are easily offended.
Finally there are the 3rd party tools. These are programs written by other players to help you get the most out of your experience. Here are the 2 I think are by far the most universally valuable for new players. There is absolutely no reason not to use these. Use them. They are designed as stand alone applications, and don’t require you to be in game to work.
EveMon – This handy little tool helps you plan your skill tree. Many times players (myself included, maybe at the top of the list) haphazardly train
skills and take 3 times to get somewhere than they should. Note, as of right now it only works for Windows and Linux. But seriously, if you are playing on a Mac just /quit life.
EveFittingTool (EFT) – EFT is an incredible tool that allows you to put together mock up ships and based on your choices and your character’s skills it will give you lots of interesting details about the ships capabilities. Using this can save you a lot of money since you won’t have to buy the equipment to find out it doesn’t actually fit on your ship, or that it just isn’t very good. It also works with battleclinic allowing you quickly copy and paste fits from battleclinic into EFT.
Both of these tools will require you to enter API key info, which is beyond the scope of this guide. But, you should be able to find that info now right?
3. Join a corporation.
Eve is not a game that should be played solo. At least not initially. Join a Player Corporation as soon as possible. Player corps are like the Guilds you find in many other MMOs. The biggest differences are that they aren’t attached to a game that sucks, and more importantly, that they have actual uses.
A good corporation will provide you with a lot of advantages early on. Examples include “ops” (operations, like a mining op where everyone goes and mines together), experienced pilots that can help you learn the game, financial incentives (my corp for instance gives 3 mil isk to new pilots that qualify), and protection. Most importantly however, it just makes the game more fun. Space is a cold and lonely place on your own. Get into the warmth of a corp.
You can search through the forums to find a corp to recruit you, but truthfully there is 1 corp that is where all new pilots should go. EvE University. They are a purely altruistic group whose only focus is to help train pilots. Join em. You can’t go wrong with it.
4. Get into it.
EvE has a real community. It is a single server, all players exist in the same world. What one player does can affect every other player in the game. Because of this there are a lot of different media about the game world. There are an untold number of blogs, podcasts, and websites around it. Here are the items I suggest you look into:
EvE radio (Music to mine your ‘roids to) – A 24/7 streaming radio station run by members of the EvE community. Good music, and all sorts of interesting information about the goings on in EvE.
Podded Podcast – My favorite eve related podcast. 2 brits getting drunk and talking about all things EvE. A fair amount of their show is focused on null sec alliances, and their politics and goings on. An absolutely fantastic listen.
Fly Reckless Podcast – Also a good podcast. Usually just 1 person who is not drunk talking about more detailed news/dev blogs in the EvE universe. Has changed hands a couple of times so the theme may change.
Bozokast podcast – Put your hazmat suit on before you go into these murky depths. A couple of members of the Clown Killers Syndicate talk (shit) about all manners of EvE. Can be a very funny and interesting listen. But you see that ‘explicit’ tag? They may need to make another tag to accurately portray how explicit it is.
5. This isn’t WoW (aka WoW sucks, EvE is awesome)
EvE isn’t WoW, but a lot of players have gotten so conditioned to the shitty design in WoW and all its clones that they come into EvE with a lot of dangerous misconceptions about how things work. Here are some of the most impotant ones.
Don’t treat EvE like a grind - EvE, just like any other MMO, can take ridiculous amounts of your life away. However, unlike other MMOs (…WoW…) there is no inherent motivation to do this. Since skills are trained continuously (eve offline) there is no xp/lvl grind. Moreover making money in EvE doesn’t require massive amounts of time invested.
The only reason this works is because EvE is fucking difficult. Many players choose to grind isk (money) all the time, because they are simply too lazy to figure out how to make money a better way. The trick is to work smarter, not harder. EvE rewards intelligence, not time invested.
Bigger isn’t (always) Better- Know how in most MMOs there is pretty much a straight line from weak to strong? EvE isn’t like this. It’s a big part of what makes EvE awesome. Anyone who tells you it takes a year to be viable in PvP is either lying or (more likely) an idiot.
Don’t rush yourself into a battleship then fit it out with garbage because you think there is this simple progression. It’s simply not true. And this isn’t just for PvP, its for every part of EvE. What makes a good player isn’t how much isk (money) he has, how many skillpoints he has, or what ship he flies. The only thing that makes a good player good are HIS skills.
Don’t use something you can’t afford to loose – So you just found a very expensive module, worth 10x your current bankroll. It has great stats, and would make your ship that much better. Before you decide to slap that on a ship, however, understand that you will probably loose it.
Don’t use equipment you aren’t willing to loose. When your ship explodes you can almost always write it off as a total loss. So, if you find a module worth 30 million isk, and you have ~5 mil isk to your name, maybe you should consider selling it and using that money to buy more useful things.
Don’t Talk Shit – Nothing identifies a new player from WoW more than their whiny little pussy trash talk. Since they came from WoW, they think they can just talk shit to anyone they want. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Thing is, EvE is a game of consequences, and talking shit to the wrong person early on will teach you that lesson very very fast. I have actually kicked players from my corporation for talking shit, and I would go so far as to pod one of my own corporation members if he wrote a check with my corporation’s name that his ass couldn’t cash.
Understand that I’m not saying trash talk doesn’t have its place. There are groups in game that are renowned for their ability to emasculate their opponents (see Goonswarm and Clown Punchers Syndicate). The difference is that they can actually back that up. You can’t.
And under no circumstances should you ever talk trash about someone’s real life family or situation or how you’re so much better than them in real life. I know this seems obvious, but…..
Don’t be a Bitch – WoW players are bitches. Pure and simple. They can’t handle a game with actual consequences. To them the worst thing that can happen is a 5 minute corpse run, and yet they cry about it like a spoiled child who isn’t getting what he wants.
In EvE, the consequences will be worse. Much worse. So, the first time you do experience one of those consequences (and you will, everyone does) don’t be a bitch. Don’t cry about it in local chat. Be an adult. Take it on the chin and learn from the experience. Don’t be a bitch. Don’t go on about how the pirate who nailed you in low sec is a loser in real life, or how he must live in his parents basement, or how you are going to find out where he lives and fuck him up (seriously, this is said a lot). EvE isn’t for bitches. Bitches can go back to WoW (which many of them, in fact, do).
One thing you will find if you aren’t a bitch is that people will be nicer to you. Its not uncommon for a pirate to take out a new player’s ship in lowsec and then tell them how they could have avoided that situation. It’s also not uncommon for pirates to continuously declare war on the corporation of someone who responds to a lost ship like a whiny little bitch.
So. Don’t be a bitch.
6. Be Proud
EvE is the best MMO ever made. It is the only truly multiplayer game in existence. While it may not have the market share of a game like WoW, it will undoubtedly be considered the first masterpiece of the MMO world when history looks back on it. EvE is one of the only games in existence that I feel the tag “hardcore” is appropriate for (the only other one I can think of at the moment is Dwarf Fortress.)
This means that you, as an EvE player, have every reason to be proud. You can and should look down upon all of those who play glorified chat rooms like WoW that masquerade as multiplayer games. Take every opportunity to explain to your friends why they are playing an inferior product, and why they are not “hardcore” gamers. Question their intelligence. Question their humanity.
EvE is a game that is fun because of its challenge. A good game should not just be a pavlovian box giving you a serotonin burst every time you hit a button. The best analogy I know of comparing EvE to WoW and its clones is that WoW is to jerking off as EvE is to picking up a girl at the bar. It is more difficult, and therefore far more rewarding (trying to jerk off after you eat sleeping pills is a different matter though.)
As an EvE player take pride in the fact that you get your enjoyment not from a Pavlovian device, but from a truly dynamic, truly multiplayer game that will challenge you as a human, not as a monkey.
As a side note, you alone can say Yahtzee is a twat (he played for a week and never joined a corp, lazy prick doesn’t deserve the respect he gets after that review. By the way, 5 Days a Stranger is a shit game. Adventure games = jerk off.)
This guide is intended to provide a new player a broad set of advice on ways to make your initial play time more enjoyable and more profitable. The fact is that EvE is one of the most complicated games around, and many players /quit before the end of the 2 week trial because they simply can’t figure out the basics.
This leads to a lot of the comments you may see like “I already have a job” or “not interested in playing Excel the Game”. Fact is that EvE can be a far more casual game than your standard MMO (WoW), if it is approached from the right perspective.
Due to the overwhelming quantity and quality of guides out there focusing on teaching new players all the details of how things like sec status, the skill trees, and fitting your ship work, this guide is written on the assumption that you have some idea of these things, or (if you don’t) that you can look them up somewhere else. I will try and keep the content general enough for anyone to understand.
So, without further ado, here are some tips to gaining that perspective.
1. Don't Panic.
I am somewhere in between serious and joking on this one. The first time you look at an items description, or look at the market, or open up the contracts screen, or (god forbid) start trying to get into t2 bpo research, you may feel a sense of panic. THIS IS NORMAL. There is a TON of information given to players. In the long run you will come to LOVE that about eve, but for now just don't worry about it.
Even old players don’t know many basic things. There is simply too much information. However, older players have one skill that new players don’t. They know where to find the answers they need.
2. Know how to find answers to the questions you need.
This is what seperates a good pilot from a bad pilot. If you think you can figure everything in EvE out on your own your are not long for this world. One of the beautiful things about EvE is that there are many many many resources out there to answer your questions.
Jumping into any field of eve without doing some basic Google research is going to hurt you very fast. Think you’re going to make a bunch of money on that blueprint? Wonder if its worth jumping into a battleship with your current skills? Google it. Look into it. Save yourself a lot of pain.
The 3 best places to start your search for answers (beyond google of course) are the EvE online forums, the EvE wiki and the in game Help channel.
Eve Online Forums – One of the best things you can find here are stickied links to the many of the major guides for specific parts of the game. Some are out of date, but most are still very useful. If you need to search the forums for something try using Eve-search.com. It mirrors the eve online forum, and has better search functionalities. You can also ask questions here, but don’t be a spambot. There are better places to ask small questions, namely:
Help Channel – This in game chat channel can be found by clicking on the appropriately named Help button in game. Surprisingly this is a well moderated and very useful place to ask simple little 1 shot questions (like “can I be shot at in 0.5 security space”)
EvE Wiki – There are a couple of these, but the best one is the one tied to the EvE Online homepage. Here you will find all sorts of in depth information about every aspect of EvE. Great place to peruse.
Here’s a couple other places I think are quite valuable
Battleclinic – Think Allakhazam of EvE (except that it doesn’t focus on a game that sucks). Tons of useful information in here, frankly too much to list. Look it over some time.
Scrapheap Challenge.com – This site is a fantastic place to find dynamic discussions about ways to fit different ships. Note that the board is moderated, but they don’t seem to have a problem with some terms people may find highly offensive. So, you know, put on your Hazmat suit if you are easily offended.
Finally there are the 3rd party tools. These are programs written by other players to help you get the most out of your experience. Here are the 2 I think are by far the most universally valuable for new players. There is absolutely no reason not to use these. Use them. They are designed as stand alone applications, and don’t require you to be in game to work.
EveMon – This handy little tool helps you plan your skill tree. Many times players (myself included, maybe at the top of the list) haphazardly train
skills and take 3 times to get somewhere than they should. Note, as of right now it only works for Windows and Linux. But seriously, if you are playing on a Mac just /quit life.
EveFittingTool (EFT) – EFT is an incredible tool that allows you to put together mock up ships and based on your choices and your character’s skills it will give you lots of interesting details about the ships capabilities. Using this can save you a lot of money since you won’t have to buy the equipment to find out it doesn’t actually fit on your ship, or that it just isn’t very good. It also works with battleclinic allowing you quickly copy and paste fits from battleclinic into EFT.
Both of these tools will require you to enter API key info, which is beyond the scope of this guide. But, you should be able to find that info now right?
3. Join a corporation.
Eve is not a game that should be played solo. At least not initially. Join a Player Corporation as soon as possible. Player corps are like the Guilds you find in many other MMOs. The biggest differences are that they aren’t attached to a game that sucks, and more importantly, that they have actual uses.
A good corporation will provide you with a lot of advantages early on. Examples include “ops” (operations, like a mining op where everyone goes and mines together), experienced pilots that can help you learn the game, financial incentives (my corp for instance gives 3 mil isk to new pilots that qualify), and protection. Most importantly however, it just makes the game more fun. Space is a cold and lonely place on your own. Get into the warmth of a corp.
You can search through the forums to find a corp to recruit you, but truthfully there is 1 corp that is where all new pilots should go. EvE University. They are a purely altruistic group whose only focus is to help train pilots. Join em. You can’t go wrong with it.
4. Get into it.
EvE has a real community. It is a single server, all players exist in the same world. What one player does can affect every other player in the game. Because of this there are a lot of different media about the game world. There are an untold number of blogs, podcasts, and websites around it. Here are the items I suggest you look into:
EvE radio (Music to mine your ‘roids to) – A 24/7 streaming radio station run by members of the EvE community. Good music, and all sorts of interesting information about the goings on in EvE.
Podded Podcast – My favorite eve related podcast. 2 brits getting drunk and talking about all things EvE. A fair amount of their show is focused on null sec alliances, and their politics and goings on. An absolutely fantastic listen.
Fly Reckless Podcast – Also a good podcast. Usually just 1 person who is not drunk talking about more detailed news/dev blogs in the EvE universe. Has changed hands a couple of times so the theme may change.
Bozokast podcast – Put your hazmat suit on before you go into these murky depths. A couple of members of the Clown Killers Syndicate talk (shit) about all manners of EvE. Can be a very funny and interesting listen. But you see that ‘explicit’ tag? They may need to make another tag to accurately portray how explicit it is.
5. This isn’t WoW (aka WoW sucks, EvE is awesome)
EvE isn’t WoW, but a lot of players have gotten so conditioned to the shitty design in WoW and all its clones that they come into EvE with a lot of dangerous misconceptions about how things work. Here are some of the most impotant ones.
Don’t treat EvE like a grind - EvE, just like any other MMO, can take ridiculous amounts of your life away. However, unlike other MMOs (…WoW…) there is no inherent motivation to do this. Since skills are trained continuously (eve offline) there is no xp/lvl grind. Moreover making money in EvE doesn’t require massive amounts of time invested.
The only reason this works is because EvE is fucking difficult. Many players choose to grind isk (money) all the time, because they are simply too lazy to figure out how to make money a better way. The trick is to work smarter, not harder. EvE rewards intelligence, not time invested.
Bigger isn’t (always) Better- Know how in most MMOs there is pretty much a straight line from weak to strong? EvE isn’t like this. It’s a big part of what makes EvE awesome. Anyone who tells you it takes a year to be viable in PvP is either lying or (more likely) an idiot.
Don’t rush yourself into a battleship then fit it out with garbage because you think there is this simple progression. It’s simply not true. And this isn’t just for PvP, its for every part of EvE. What makes a good player isn’t how much isk (money) he has, how many skillpoints he has, or what ship he flies. The only thing that makes a good player good are HIS skills.
Don’t use something you can’t afford to loose – So you just found a very expensive module, worth 10x your current bankroll. It has great stats, and would make your ship that much better. Before you decide to slap that on a ship, however, understand that you will probably loose it.
Don’t use equipment you aren’t willing to loose. When your ship explodes you can almost always write it off as a total loss. So, if you find a module worth 30 million isk, and you have ~5 mil isk to your name, maybe you should consider selling it and using that money to buy more useful things.
Don’t Talk Shit – Nothing identifies a new player from WoW more than their whiny little pussy trash talk. Since they came from WoW, they think they can just talk shit to anyone they want. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Thing is, EvE is a game of consequences, and talking shit to the wrong person early on will teach you that lesson very very fast. I have actually kicked players from my corporation for talking shit, and I would go so far as to pod one of my own corporation members if he wrote a check with my corporation’s name that his ass couldn’t cash.
Understand that I’m not saying trash talk doesn’t have its place. There are groups in game that are renowned for their ability to emasculate their opponents (see Goonswarm and Clown Punchers Syndicate). The difference is that they can actually back that up. You can’t.
And under no circumstances should you ever talk trash about someone’s real life family or situation or how you’re so much better than them in real life. I know this seems obvious, but…..
Don’t be a Bitch – WoW players are bitches. Pure and simple. They can’t handle a game with actual consequences. To them the worst thing that can happen is a 5 minute corpse run, and yet they cry about it like a spoiled child who isn’t getting what he wants.
In EvE, the consequences will be worse. Much worse. So, the first time you do experience one of those consequences (and you will, everyone does) don’t be a bitch. Don’t cry about it in local chat. Be an adult. Take it on the chin and learn from the experience. Don’t be a bitch. Don’t go on about how the pirate who nailed you in low sec is a loser in real life, or how he must live in his parents basement, or how you are going to find out where he lives and fuck him up (seriously, this is said a lot). EvE isn’t for bitches. Bitches can go back to WoW (which many of them, in fact, do).
One thing you will find if you aren’t a bitch is that people will be nicer to you. Its not uncommon for a pirate to take out a new player’s ship in lowsec and then tell them how they could have avoided that situation. It’s also not uncommon for pirates to continuously declare war on the corporation of someone who responds to a lost ship like a whiny little bitch.
So. Don’t be a bitch.
6. Be Proud
EvE is the best MMO ever made. It is the only truly multiplayer game in existence. While it may not have the market share of a game like WoW, it will undoubtedly be considered the first masterpiece of the MMO world when history looks back on it. EvE is one of the only games in existence that I feel the tag “hardcore” is appropriate for (the only other one I can think of at the moment is Dwarf Fortress.)
This means that you, as an EvE player, have every reason to be proud. You can and should look down upon all of those who play glorified chat rooms like WoW that masquerade as multiplayer games. Take every opportunity to explain to your friends why they are playing an inferior product, and why they are not “hardcore” gamers. Question their intelligence. Question their humanity.
EvE is a game that is fun because of its challenge. A good game should not just be a pavlovian box giving you a serotonin burst every time you hit a button. The best analogy I know of comparing EvE to WoW and its clones is that WoW is to jerking off as EvE is to picking up a girl at the bar. It is more difficult, and therefore far more rewarding (trying to jerk off after you eat sleeping pills is a different matter though.)
As an EvE player take pride in the fact that you get your enjoyment not from a Pavlovian device, but from a truly dynamic, truly multiplayer game that will challenge you as a human, not as a monkey.
As a side note, you alone can say Yahtzee is a twat (he played for a week and never joined a corp, lazy prick doesn’t deserve the respect he gets after that review. By the way, 5 Days a Stranger is a shit game. Adventure games = jerk off.)
Trading guide. Still lacks an intro and outro to tie the whole thing together.
The Value Of Excel and/or Access: If you want to succeed in the EvE trading community a basic understanding of spreadsheets is a must. Managing the upwards of 150 orders you can and should always have open (300 with Tycoon) is simply impossible without some kind of spreadsheet program. Seriously, you can’t do it unless you are some Jimmy James/Rainman hybrid.
Many people rely on 3rd party apps, and there are some good ones out there, but at the end of the day you and you alone know exactly what it is you want to see about your data, and the easiest (and most accurate) way to get that information is through your own data analysis. 3rd party apps are crutches for the weak. And in EvE, the weak get eaten.
With my market data well organized in my own system I can quickly determine what time of day has what activity for what item in what system. I can also quickly figure out what items buy and sell best in what system and in what region. Where’s the biggest competition? What’s my profit margin on item x for time y? By placing region wide “research bids” (covered later) I can figure out where every significant mission hub is in a region and what kind of a hub they are. I can tell when my competitors are online. I can update the estimated value of items based on my own input. And I can do all of this in less than a minute.
I won’t go into details about how to calculate all of those things, but the point is that a mastery of Excel or Access will go a LONG way to improving your trading in EvE. The rest of this tutorial will assume you have the capability to use spreadsheets as the methods described here will be effectively impossible without it. You may be able to be a successful trader without these tools, but you will only be able to work in highly speculative markets and will never be able to use all of your buy orders.
If you manage your data in an Access database you built you are probably doing a lot of what I am going to suggest here. Access is like Excel on crack when it comes to this kind of data. It’s a lot more difficult to learn and the performance increases aren’t as great as those from using nothing to using Excel, but your effectiveness will be about ½ of what it would be if you were using Access.
Also, a big part of the reason I am telling as much as I am in this guide is that its usefulness is directly proportional to your strengths in excel/access (and of course statistics). Without these strengths you will simply fail at everything I am talking about. But, you should probably read it anyways so you can see why you are getting beaten, and why you should either man up and learn how to do your job right or just go run missions.
As an aside: In the real world a strength with Excel will be a necessity in many many jobs (generally any that are worth having.) So, if you don’t know how to use it, learn, and honestly EvE is a great tool to learn with. Yet again, the value of knowledge of Access is exponentially more valuable. Generally speaking your ability to manage large quantities of data efficiently will do a lot improve your abilities in many many jobs.
Some basic concepts
I should assume people reading this already know the following points, but in case you don’t here are some basic concepts/assumptions:
Oppurtunity Cost - Wherever your money is, if it could be making more money somewhere else then you are
in fact loosing money. This applies both to having money locked in escrow or a blueprint for too long, or how you get materials for building a ship (its not cheaper to mine them yourself.)
Time Value of Money – Money is not a 1 dimensional number. Money has a time value based on the % return
for unit time. If you are comparing 2 investments (and thinking of opportunity cost of course) then
you have to take into account the time values. 1 mil isk that turns into 2 mil isk in a month is worth far less than 1 mil isk that turns into 1.5 mil isk in 1 week. That example is obvious, but most investment choices will be more complicated, and even if you can’t do the calculations its worth at least understanding this concept. (as another side note, being able to do these calculations is a real world skill that will make you a lot of money.)
You will be outbid – Unless you are on 24/7 or trading in some strange item other people aren’t messing with,
you are going to be outbid when you are offline. Never expect to have a buy order last a full day
unchallenged unless it is vastly above the price other people are messing with.
Know what your items are worth, and know the risk
I can’t overstate how important this is. If you don’t know how much something is worth, don’t buy it. You will almost never know exactly how much something is worth, but you should have a best guess along with an error estimate. The more speculative an item is, the higher the error estimate. Generally I focus more on low risk items as maintaining best guesses/error for speculative items is far more tedious and more prone to error. They are also generally far more competitive. M4 items are a good example of this. You would be very lucky to have a buy order last 30 minutes without it getting out bid.
Don’t think that just because something is low risk it means that it won’t make you money. I make more money every day on 1 low risk item I invest in than I ever have on any high risk item.
Volume vs Volume
A lot of guides talk about how important volume is.
However when I look at the market browsers I think a lot of people misunderstand what the best interpretation of that is. Throwing down a buy order for 20,000 units of item X which at best will only sell 100 units a day is a waste of money. Even with Margin Trading V (25% required at time of order) having a buy order that could not, even under the best circumstances, get filled in a week is tying up and wasting capital.
Personally I don’t put orders up that couldn’t be filled by the daily volume within 2 days. This has a lot of advantages. First off I don’t tie up much capital, which is good. Second I am not tied to that order for long. This is important in case for whatever reason the buy orders get crazy and I can’t match the highest buy order and still make a profit. The biggest advantage is that it doesn’t cost me nearly as much to increase that buy order as it does someone else.
Say I have 50 mil in escrow on an item. Someone comes in and bumps the price 20%. I then have to bump the price of that entire order to match him. If 90% of that order isn’t going to be filled any time soon under the best of circumstances I am just pissing my money away.
Also, remember that the chance that I can have a buy order go unchallenged over the course of an entire day is negligible. If you are already logging in every day to modify your orders then why not just place new orders when they get close to filled (usually in a day or 2)? The answer, as far as I can tell, is some traders have more money than sense and are too lazy to find better places to put them than in escrow.
And that’s dumb, and I mean like drooling on yourself while masturbating to static on the TV screen dumb.
So what does Volume mean?
CCP has been kind enough to allow traders to easily get 150 order slots relatively easily. And if you are good, every one of these will be filled most of the time. Having small and nimble buy orders in 100 products is far more valuable than having huge hulking buy orders in a 10 products. You also severely mitigate risks involved in speculation this way.
In the words of WuTang financial: Diversify.
These small orders mean that your capital is rarely tied up in large amounts of escrow and gives you a number of really big advantages.
As you can guess, this isn’t easily done without some data management tool, like Access or Excel, since you will need to quickly identify what your 200 – 600 possible items of interest are.
Ninja Trading
This is an inherent advantage of trading in low volumes that I hinted at above. If someone has a buy order for 10,000 units of Item X (which sells at 100 units a day) I may bump his price by 10% but only place an order looking for 50 units. This has 2 possible results.
The first is that my 50 units may get filled fast enough that he won’t even notice it. This has definitely happened to me before, quite a bit to be honest.
The second is that he sees my bid and decides to just not worry about it because my 100 units will fill fast and don’t really hurt his bottom line as much as increasing the value of his entire buy order. Of course he can lower his buy order later but mine will still be there and more than likely another trader like him will have already outbid him and simply raised the bar.
The amount of times I see someone top my bid is generally proportional to my volume vs daily volume. The faster I get in and out the less chance the other traders care. Now, there is a clear limit to how much you can do this. If I place a 20 unit buy order on the same item every day sooner or later the other trader is going to start caring. So I cycle items regularly.
Its kind of like phaser modulation against the borg.
The Joe Pesci System (aka “What’s my name? F- you, that’s my name”)
“No matter how big a guy might be, Nicky would take him on. You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And if you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead.” -Ace Rothstein.
Trading is PvP. Don’t let anyone call you a carebear for trading. It’s one of the only forms of solo pvp that is widely practiced in EvE. You don’t do better because you have friends. You don’t do better because you buy isk. You only do better because you, and you alone, are better than your competition.
The Joe Pesci system is my manner of hurting enemies. This doesn’t work on all items, and doesn’t work on all enemies, but in the appropriate places it is a guaranteed way of hurting your enemies. So, here’s what is required:
1) You have to know within a small margin of error what this item is worth to you. Not for highly speculative items.
2) Your opponent has to be a lumbering moron with a massive buy order
3) The item in question needs to have sufficient value relative to the buy order volume in question.
4) You aren’t a total fucking idiot like your opponent and you have the proper sized buy order yourself
You would think that these restrictions would mean you couldn’t use this all the time, but to be honest the places I can’t use it are the exception, not the rule.
Lets follow this example of Item X (for the sake of simple math Margin Trading isn’t included.) Daily volume is 100 units @ 50k each, I can turn them around for 100k. The moron in question has a buy order for 2000 of this item. I start by outbidding him.
He beats me with fists. He outbids my buy order.
Bring a bat. Reduce the profit margin to 90% by bumping the order to 55k. Cost to me = 500k
He beats me with a bat. Outbids my order by .01. Cost to him = 10 mil
Bring a knife. Reduce profit margin to 70% by bumping order to 65k. Cost to me = 1 mil, Total cost = 1.5 mil
He beats me with a knife. Outbids my order by .01. Cost to him = 20 mil, total cost = 30 mil.
I bring a fucking gun. Reduce profit margin to 20% by bumping order to 90k. Cost to me = 2.5 mil, total cost = 4 mil
Now at this point, he may very well say fuck it. But if not he will have to put an additional 50 mil in escrow for a total of 80 mil in escrow, earning him dick for profit margin. On top of that 90% of his buy order already went beyond the daily volume, so all of that is more capital not making him money. Which is him loosing money.
Of course at this point you also have your buy order at a relatively unprofitable level. The difference is that your buy order was only 100 units, and is being filled through the course of this engagement. At the end of it you may only have 20 units left. So instead of having 4 mil tied up you actually only have 1.5 mil.
More often than not, you won’t just have 1 of these idiots to deal with, you will have 2-3. You may think this makes it worse, but it actually makes it better. At the end, when you have a couple units left, you can disengage, and leave those assholes to start .01ing each other again, but at the massively increased price point you left them at. Now, go and do the same to another one of his orders.
The exact % points of where you kick up the values are dependant on a lot of things, and I’ll leave that to you to figure out.
And be sure, BE SURE, that every time you bump an order you say to yourself “What’s my name? Fuck You, that’s my name.”
Regional vs Local Buy Orders
I use regional buy orders. A lot of experienced traders may read that line and just stop reading the rest of this guide. Regional buy orders are considered to be a bad idea by a lot of traders. Lets examine the reason why, and also talk about how they can be useful.
There are 2 main reasons you don’t want to do regional buy orders. 1 is that your orders will be filled all over the frakkin region, and going to all the different places necessary to pick up those orders takes a LOT of time, in fact its effectively impossible since they will keep getting filled as you pick them up. The other reason (really an extension of the first reason) is that in some regions this will get your orders filled in low sec space, which is not good.
Depending on what region you are trading in, either of the above issues can be enough of a reason to not do regional buy orders. That said, there are plenty of places where its not a bad idea, and there are some serious advantages to doing them.
The first step to find good regions for regional buy orders is to simply place regional buy orders for a broad spectrum of items. Don’t expect to make a profit. This is research bid. Choose low cost high volume items where the daily average sits near the minimum and put in an order for 1 days volume or so at a price 10% above the highest bid. Don’t just do this for 1 item. Do it for 20 or more, and make sure they represent different aspects of the market (don’t just try and buy drone alloys).
The more money you spend on this research, the better picture you get. Personally I suggest around the 20 mil mark. This may be a lot of money, but if done right you now have a good picture of the region. Using access or excel you can now determine where the purchases went to. From this you can map the market density of a region to figure out where your money is. If 30% of your orders are spread across 100 star systems with similar low density in each one, with 20% in low sec systems and with the other 50% coming into hub systems, then this probably isn’t the region for you. But if 90% come into 10 hubs, then this very well could be a good place to work in.
That 10% does represent a loss but its not as high as 10%. Eventually the value held in a system may justify a run to go pick it up, and you will see some return on it. That said remember time value of money and opportunity cost. If the 10% is stuck there for 4 months, you’re really not actually getting full value on it when you do go pick it up.
The next step is to look at the buy orders in relation to these hub systems. Does one hub dominate the others? Do the other hubs have competitive bids in them? How close are the hubs together (does a 2 jump buy order in 1 hub hit 3 other hubs?) If the answers are Yes, and Not often, and Close and Far, then you should look into regional buy orders.
Why?
The main advantage is that most people don’t do them, or if they do they are ridiculously low ball. In the best regions you will find that 90% of buy orders have a range within 1 to 3 jumps of a single hub. So often you find that some of the major hubs you have found don’t have buy orders in them a lot of the time. This means that you can place regional bids at 50% of the high ball bids and still see returns in these unexploited areas. The volume is lower, but at the same time the ROI is higher.
Hopefully you realize that at this point you are missing out on the orders in the major hub. Well, there’s nothing to stop you from placing a second low range buy order at the more competitive price. 2 tiered buy orders are a good idea on any of your more high profit items. Just make sure your range is the same as that of your competitors.
Sometimes this doesn’t work perfectly. Could be that there are buy orders in all the hubs that are around the same competitive level. At this point it’s a case by case situation. Sometimes its worth it to just put in a regional buy order that beats all of them. Sometimes its just not worth it. At this point I may put in a competitive bid for just my local hub + a couple jumps. I may start to Pesci them. More than likely I will just look at another item.
Regional buy orders have the second advatange that you are effectively playing a ton of markets at once. More than likely the major hub will always have a competitive price (hence the tiers). However the minor regional hubs won’t always have them. Maybe 5 of the 10 minor hubs have competitive local prices, and you put in a regional buy order at 50% value. If any of those 5 drop out, you start capturing them. Maybe all of the regional hubs have competitive prices. If you put in a regional buy order that outbids all of them its quite likely that not all of them will outbid you in one day.
You also have a resistance to being Pesci’d yourself. If I have a regional buy order that tops the charts, and someone puts in a system buy order for 2x that value, I may not care. I don’t have to adjust. Maybe a bunch of other traders in nearby hubs start going up to the Pesci value. If there is enough value lost to the localized buy order I may drop my regional buy order value to wherever the level is and then add a second tier localized buy order to capture the 2x value order.
Also, sometimes you just luck out and someone sells you 200 of some item in some low density system. It happens.
Point is that regional buy orders require less manipulation and observation than a localized buy order. Because of this and the ability to place orders at 50% competitive prices it’s the one place that I often bend my own volume rules and place orders that may not fill in a couple of days.
Other people do regional buy orders as well, so you will often see those multiple tiers in the buy order window already, so you may have to compete with them. The good news is that most of the other people who do regional buy orders are stupid and very easy to manipulate. The Pesci system can be remarkably brutal when applied to them. If you are in a bidding war with someone at the regional buy order price tier and he fits the description of a Pesci target (ie massively large buy order quantity), start working your magic. Once you get him to kick up the regional value to a sufficient point, take a look at all of those assets that you have that are trapped in low sec and low density systems.
Sell them all to him.
I can’t begin to tell you how devastating this can be to someone. It really depends on how much value you have in these low value systems. You could unload 100 mil of items to some shmoe that you have sitting in a low sec system. You actually could have made a profit on these items because you Pesci’d him, and he now has even more money out of the game. As a matter of fact, you may want to go so far as to tell local pirates what you just did, and that they should keep an eye out for this guy, cause he will be hauling a lot of expensive loot soon.
The profit you make on these items won’t be as good as the stuff from your high volume systems, it could actually be a loss. But its about time value of money. Right now I think I have 200 mil isk trapped in low density and low sec systems. The longer I let that sit here the more money I am loosing. It may very well be worth it for me to take a 10% loss on those items just to get the money moving again. Remember that if this is a good region for regional buy orders that’s a 10% loss on 10% of your overall investments. Which isn’t much.
The only way this works is if you don’t have large quantity regional buy orders out there yourself. If you do then the exact same thing will happen to you as you Pesci him up. If (on the other hand) you have a small buy order quantity the damage that can be done to you is very small, and the potential and reward for unlocking your assets is very high.
Also, remember to say “What’s my name? Fuck you, that’s my name” when you sell him 60 Large Plasma Smartbombs in a 0.2 system 4 jumps from high sec.
ROI/Day, Red Herring?
A lot of guides go to great pains to explain things like return on investment, and return on investment per day, and how you should aim to turn your items around for a profit as soon as possible. Some of yall have probably been sitting there reading through that last TL;DR section thinking this exact thing and just jumped on down to here. I’m here to tell you that while there is to the importance of ROI/day, its not a golden rule, and in many cases is flat out wrong (actually its not wrong, but its often thought of wrong)
Here’s a simple hypothetical example (which isn’t that hypothetical.) :
I buy 100 mil isk of item X each week. I can sell it in 3 weeks for 200 mil isk. May sound like a lousy investment. Here’s the trick though. I can buy 100 mil isk of this each week, and each purchase will give me a return in 3 weeks without. Therefore, when I hit my first payout my balance sheet looks like this
Week 3
Invested :
300 mil
Gross revenue
Return = 200 mil
By reinvesting the return you now are able to spot spending money out of pocket. By week 5 you have earned back your original investment. Week 6 and up you will see a 100 mil isk a week (100% return). This is a perpetuity. Put in X amount of dollars in (in this case 100mil) and you will see Y payout forever.
Now of course this is a simple example. Markets fluctuate, and you don’t see the return in one hunk, you see it as a much smaller series (like 20 mil +/- 5 mil a day). The math here can get very complicated. But don’t think that just because something doesn’t give you a return tomorrow that it isn’t a good investment. And don’t think that market fluctiations completely invalidate this. There are plenty of items that are stable enough for this concept to be applied to.
In the case of regional buy orders, if you have 100 orders that you are maintaining amongst 500 different items, then you can actually treat the entire pot as a single perpetuity. Its all about how you do the accounting.
You’re customers aren’t as stupid as you are
People who place buy orders for 1.00 isk are stupid. Plain and simple. There is a reason that there isn’t a business out there called “$1,000 Lemonade.” Even if you are the only person putting out buy orders you should never do this. Your customers aren’t idiots. You may be able to make a 10000% return on the item, but you won’t pick up more than 1 or 2 items a day. For high supply items there is actually a pretty direct correlation between the volume of sales for an item and where the minimum is.
This is because most players will see that big red sign that says “Warning, this is 99% below the regional average” and just say “screw that, I’ll sell it later.”
This should be painfully obvious. What may not be obvious is that in a situation where there aren’t many bidders you should set your entry bid to at least the magic 50% mark, regardless of where there’s are. This may mean that you outbid 1 isk by 16,999 isk, but you want to do that. As soon as you cross that magic mark you will see volume increase. And as volume increases, the regional average decreases. The 1 isk bid never lowers the regional average since the volume is so low. But that 16,999 isk bid will drop the 50% mark down to 14k isk in 1 day. Drop your price to that number, and watch the average go down.
The cost to the player who does the 1 isk bid is that he has a buy order that isn’t making him money. That’s opportunity cost. Don’t think your customers are stupid. They aren’t, and if you act like they are you are just showing how stupid you are.
To be continued.
Many people rely on 3rd party apps, and there are some good ones out there, but at the end of the day you and you alone know exactly what it is you want to see about your data, and the easiest (and most accurate) way to get that information is through your own data analysis. 3rd party apps are crutches for the weak. And in EvE, the weak get eaten.
With my market data well organized in my own system I can quickly determine what time of day has what activity for what item in what system. I can also quickly figure out what items buy and sell best in what system and in what region. Where’s the biggest competition? What’s my profit margin on item x for time y? By placing region wide “research bids” (covered later) I can figure out where every significant mission hub is in a region and what kind of a hub they are. I can tell when my competitors are online. I can update the estimated value of items based on my own input. And I can do all of this in less than a minute.
I won’t go into details about how to calculate all of those things, but the point is that a mastery of Excel or Access will go a LONG way to improving your trading in EvE. The rest of this tutorial will assume you have the capability to use spreadsheets as the methods described here will be effectively impossible without it. You may be able to be a successful trader without these tools, but you will only be able to work in highly speculative markets and will never be able to use all of your buy orders.
If you manage your data in an Access database you built you are probably doing a lot of what I am going to suggest here. Access is like Excel on crack when it comes to this kind of data. It’s a lot more difficult to learn and the performance increases aren’t as great as those from using nothing to using Excel, but your effectiveness will be about ½ of what it would be if you were using Access.
Also, a big part of the reason I am telling as much as I am in this guide is that its usefulness is directly proportional to your strengths in excel/access (and of course statistics). Without these strengths you will simply fail at everything I am talking about. But, you should probably read it anyways so you can see why you are getting beaten, and why you should either man up and learn how to do your job right or just go run missions.
As an aside: In the real world a strength with Excel will be a necessity in many many jobs (generally any that are worth having.) So, if you don’t know how to use it, learn, and honestly EvE is a great tool to learn with. Yet again, the value of knowledge of Access is exponentially more valuable. Generally speaking your ability to manage large quantities of data efficiently will do a lot improve your abilities in many many jobs.
Some basic concepts
I should assume people reading this already know the following points, but in case you don’t here are some basic concepts/assumptions:
Oppurtunity Cost - Wherever your money is, if it could be making more money somewhere else then you are
in fact loosing money. This applies both to having money locked in escrow or a blueprint for too long, or how you get materials for building a ship (its not cheaper to mine them yourself.)
Time Value of Money – Money is not a 1 dimensional number. Money has a time value based on the % return
for unit time. If you are comparing 2 investments (and thinking of opportunity cost of course) then
you have to take into account the time values. 1 mil isk that turns into 2 mil isk in a month is worth far less than 1 mil isk that turns into 1.5 mil isk in 1 week. That example is obvious, but most investment choices will be more complicated, and even if you can’t do the calculations its worth at least understanding this concept. (as another side note, being able to do these calculations is a real world skill that will make you a lot of money.)
You will be outbid – Unless you are on 24/7 or trading in some strange item other people aren’t messing with,
you are going to be outbid when you are offline. Never expect to have a buy order last a full day
unchallenged unless it is vastly above the price other people are messing with.
Know what your items are worth, and know the risk
I can’t overstate how important this is. If you don’t know how much something is worth, don’t buy it. You will almost never know exactly how much something is worth, but you should have a best guess along with an error estimate. The more speculative an item is, the higher the error estimate. Generally I focus more on low risk items as maintaining best guesses/error for speculative items is far more tedious and more prone to error. They are also generally far more competitive. M4 items are a good example of this. You would be very lucky to have a buy order last 30 minutes without it getting out bid.
Don’t think that just because something is low risk it means that it won’t make you money. I make more money every day on 1 low risk item I invest in than I ever have on any high risk item.
Volume vs Volume
A lot of guides talk about how important volume is.
However when I look at the market browsers I think a lot of people misunderstand what the best interpretation of that is. Throwing down a buy order for 20,000 units of item X which at best will only sell 100 units a day is a waste of money. Even with Margin Trading V (25% required at time of order) having a buy order that could not, even under the best circumstances, get filled in a week is tying up and wasting capital.
Personally I don’t put orders up that couldn’t be filled by the daily volume within 2 days. This has a lot of advantages. First off I don’t tie up much capital, which is good. Second I am not tied to that order for long. This is important in case for whatever reason the buy orders get crazy and I can’t match the highest buy order and still make a profit. The biggest advantage is that it doesn’t cost me nearly as much to increase that buy order as it does someone else.
Say I have 50 mil in escrow on an item. Someone comes in and bumps the price 20%. I then have to bump the price of that entire order to match him. If 90% of that order isn’t going to be filled any time soon under the best of circumstances I am just pissing my money away.
Also, remember that the chance that I can have a buy order go unchallenged over the course of an entire day is negligible. If you are already logging in every day to modify your orders then why not just place new orders when they get close to filled (usually in a day or 2)? The answer, as far as I can tell, is some traders have more money than sense and are too lazy to find better places to put them than in escrow.
And that’s dumb, and I mean like drooling on yourself while masturbating to static on the TV screen dumb.
So what does Volume mean?
CCP has been kind enough to allow traders to easily get 150 order slots relatively easily. And if you are good, every one of these will be filled most of the time. Having small and nimble buy orders in 100 products is far more valuable than having huge hulking buy orders in a 10 products. You also severely mitigate risks involved in speculation this way.
In the words of WuTang financial: Diversify.
These small orders mean that your capital is rarely tied up in large amounts of escrow and gives you a number of really big advantages.
As you can guess, this isn’t easily done without some data management tool, like Access or Excel, since you will need to quickly identify what your 200 – 600 possible items of interest are.
Ninja Trading
This is an inherent advantage of trading in low volumes that I hinted at above. If someone has a buy order for 10,000 units of Item X (which sells at 100 units a day) I may bump his price by 10% but only place an order looking for 50 units. This has 2 possible results.
The first is that my 50 units may get filled fast enough that he won’t even notice it. This has definitely happened to me before, quite a bit to be honest.
The second is that he sees my bid and decides to just not worry about it because my 100 units will fill fast and don’t really hurt his bottom line as much as increasing the value of his entire buy order. Of course he can lower his buy order later but mine will still be there and more than likely another trader like him will have already outbid him and simply raised the bar.
The amount of times I see someone top my bid is generally proportional to my volume vs daily volume. The faster I get in and out the less chance the other traders care. Now, there is a clear limit to how much you can do this. If I place a 20 unit buy order on the same item every day sooner or later the other trader is going to start caring. So I cycle items regularly.
Its kind of like phaser modulation against the borg.
The Joe Pesci System (aka “What’s my name? F- you, that’s my name”)
“No matter how big a guy might be, Nicky would take him on. You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And if you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead.” -Ace Rothstein.
Trading is PvP. Don’t let anyone call you a carebear for trading. It’s one of the only forms of solo pvp that is widely practiced in EvE. You don’t do better because you have friends. You don’t do better because you buy isk. You only do better because you, and you alone, are better than your competition.
The Joe Pesci system is my manner of hurting enemies. This doesn’t work on all items, and doesn’t work on all enemies, but in the appropriate places it is a guaranteed way of hurting your enemies. So, here’s what is required:
1) You have to know within a small margin of error what this item is worth to you. Not for highly speculative items.
2) Your opponent has to be a lumbering moron with a massive buy order
3) The item in question needs to have sufficient value relative to the buy order volume in question.
4) You aren’t a total fucking idiot like your opponent and you have the proper sized buy order yourself
You would think that these restrictions would mean you couldn’t use this all the time, but to be honest the places I can’t use it are the exception, not the rule.
Lets follow this example of Item X (for the sake of simple math Margin Trading isn’t included.) Daily volume is 100 units @ 50k each, I can turn them around for 100k. The moron in question has a buy order for 2000 of this item. I start by outbidding him.
He beats me with fists. He outbids my buy order.
Bring a bat. Reduce the profit margin to 90% by bumping the order to 55k. Cost to me = 500k
He beats me with a bat. Outbids my order by .01. Cost to him = 10 mil
Bring a knife. Reduce profit margin to 70% by bumping order to 65k. Cost to me = 1 mil, Total cost = 1.5 mil
He beats me with a knife. Outbids my order by .01. Cost to him = 20 mil, total cost = 30 mil.
I bring a fucking gun. Reduce profit margin to 20% by bumping order to 90k. Cost to me = 2.5 mil, total cost = 4 mil
Now at this point, he may very well say fuck it. But if not he will have to put an additional 50 mil in escrow for a total of 80 mil in escrow, earning him dick for profit margin. On top of that 90% of his buy order already went beyond the daily volume, so all of that is more capital not making him money. Which is him loosing money.
Of course at this point you also have your buy order at a relatively unprofitable level. The difference is that your buy order was only 100 units, and is being filled through the course of this engagement. At the end of it you may only have 20 units left. So instead of having 4 mil tied up you actually only have 1.5 mil.
More often than not, you won’t just have 1 of these idiots to deal with, you will have 2-3. You may think this makes it worse, but it actually makes it better. At the end, when you have a couple units left, you can disengage, and leave those assholes to start .01ing each other again, but at the massively increased price point you left them at. Now, go and do the same to another one of his orders.
The exact % points of where you kick up the values are dependant on a lot of things, and I’ll leave that to you to figure out.
And be sure, BE SURE, that every time you bump an order you say to yourself “What’s my name? Fuck You, that’s my name.”
Regional vs Local Buy Orders
I use regional buy orders. A lot of experienced traders may read that line and just stop reading the rest of this guide. Regional buy orders are considered to be a bad idea by a lot of traders. Lets examine the reason why, and also talk about how they can be useful.
There are 2 main reasons you don’t want to do regional buy orders. 1 is that your orders will be filled all over the frakkin region, and going to all the different places necessary to pick up those orders takes a LOT of time, in fact its effectively impossible since they will keep getting filled as you pick them up. The other reason (really an extension of the first reason) is that in some regions this will get your orders filled in low sec space, which is not good.
Depending on what region you are trading in, either of the above issues can be enough of a reason to not do regional buy orders. That said, there are plenty of places where its not a bad idea, and there are some serious advantages to doing them.
The first step to find good regions for regional buy orders is to simply place regional buy orders for a broad spectrum of items. Don’t expect to make a profit. This is research bid. Choose low cost high volume items where the daily average sits near the minimum and put in an order for 1 days volume or so at a price 10% above the highest bid. Don’t just do this for 1 item. Do it for 20 or more, and make sure they represent different aspects of the market (don’t just try and buy drone alloys).
The more money you spend on this research, the better picture you get. Personally I suggest around the 20 mil mark. This may be a lot of money, but if done right you now have a good picture of the region. Using access or excel you can now determine where the purchases went to. From this you can map the market density of a region to figure out where your money is. If 30% of your orders are spread across 100 star systems with similar low density in each one, with 20% in low sec systems and with the other 50% coming into hub systems, then this probably isn’t the region for you. But if 90% come into 10 hubs, then this very well could be a good place to work in.
That 10% does represent a loss but its not as high as 10%. Eventually the value held in a system may justify a run to go pick it up, and you will see some return on it. That said remember time value of money and opportunity cost. If the 10% is stuck there for 4 months, you’re really not actually getting full value on it when you do go pick it up.
The next step is to look at the buy orders in relation to these hub systems. Does one hub dominate the others? Do the other hubs have competitive bids in them? How close are the hubs together (does a 2 jump buy order in 1 hub hit 3 other hubs?) If the answers are Yes, and Not often, and Close and Far, then you should look into regional buy orders.
Why?
The main advantage is that most people don’t do them, or if they do they are ridiculously low ball. In the best regions you will find that 90% of buy orders have a range within 1 to 3 jumps of a single hub. So often you find that some of the major hubs you have found don’t have buy orders in them a lot of the time. This means that you can place regional bids at 50% of the high ball bids and still see returns in these unexploited areas. The volume is lower, but at the same time the ROI is higher.
Hopefully you realize that at this point you are missing out on the orders in the major hub. Well, there’s nothing to stop you from placing a second low range buy order at the more competitive price. 2 tiered buy orders are a good idea on any of your more high profit items. Just make sure your range is the same as that of your competitors.
Sometimes this doesn’t work perfectly. Could be that there are buy orders in all the hubs that are around the same competitive level. At this point it’s a case by case situation. Sometimes its worth it to just put in a regional buy order that beats all of them. Sometimes its just not worth it. At this point I may put in a competitive bid for just my local hub + a couple jumps. I may start to Pesci them. More than likely I will just look at another item.
Regional buy orders have the second advatange that you are effectively playing a ton of markets at once. More than likely the major hub will always have a competitive price (hence the tiers). However the minor regional hubs won’t always have them. Maybe 5 of the 10 minor hubs have competitive local prices, and you put in a regional buy order at 50% value. If any of those 5 drop out, you start capturing them. Maybe all of the regional hubs have competitive prices. If you put in a regional buy order that outbids all of them its quite likely that not all of them will outbid you in one day.
You also have a resistance to being Pesci’d yourself. If I have a regional buy order that tops the charts, and someone puts in a system buy order for 2x that value, I may not care. I don’t have to adjust. Maybe a bunch of other traders in nearby hubs start going up to the Pesci value. If there is enough value lost to the localized buy order I may drop my regional buy order value to wherever the level is and then add a second tier localized buy order to capture the 2x value order.
Also, sometimes you just luck out and someone sells you 200 of some item in some low density system. It happens.
Point is that regional buy orders require less manipulation and observation than a localized buy order. Because of this and the ability to place orders at 50% competitive prices it’s the one place that I often bend my own volume rules and place orders that may not fill in a couple of days.
Other people do regional buy orders as well, so you will often see those multiple tiers in the buy order window already, so you may have to compete with them. The good news is that most of the other people who do regional buy orders are stupid and very easy to manipulate. The Pesci system can be remarkably brutal when applied to them. If you are in a bidding war with someone at the regional buy order price tier and he fits the description of a Pesci target (ie massively large buy order quantity), start working your magic. Once you get him to kick up the regional value to a sufficient point, take a look at all of those assets that you have that are trapped in low sec and low density systems.
Sell them all to him.
I can’t begin to tell you how devastating this can be to someone. It really depends on how much value you have in these low value systems. You could unload 100 mil of items to some shmoe that you have sitting in a low sec system. You actually could have made a profit on these items because you Pesci’d him, and he now has even more money out of the game. As a matter of fact, you may want to go so far as to tell local pirates what you just did, and that they should keep an eye out for this guy, cause he will be hauling a lot of expensive loot soon.
The profit you make on these items won’t be as good as the stuff from your high volume systems, it could actually be a loss. But its about time value of money. Right now I think I have 200 mil isk trapped in low density and low sec systems. The longer I let that sit here the more money I am loosing. It may very well be worth it for me to take a 10% loss on those items just to get the money moving again. Remember that if this is a good region for regional buy orders that’s a 10% loss on 10% of your overall investments. Which isn’t much.
The only way this works is if you don’t have large quantity regional buy orders out there yourself. If you do then the exact same thing will happen to you as you Pesci him up. If (on the other hand) you have a small buy order quantity the damage that can be done to you is very small, and the potential and reward for unlocking your assets is very high.
Also, remember to say “What’s my name? Fuck you, that’s my name” when you sell him 60 Large Plasma Smartbombs in a 0.2 system 4 jumps from high sec.
ROI/Day, Red Herring?
A lot of guides go to great pains to explain things like return on investment, and return on investment per day, and how you should aim to turn your items around for a profit as soon as possible. Some of yall have probably been sitting there reading through that last TL;DR section thinking this exact thing and just jumped on down to here. I’m here to tell you that while there is to the importance of ROI/day, its not a golden rule, and in many cases is flat out wrong (actually its not wrong, but its often thought of wrong)
Here’s a simple hypothetical example (which isn’t that hypothetical.) :
I buy 100 mil isk of item X each week. I can sell it in 3 weeks for 200 mil isk. May sound like a lousy investment. Here’s the trick though. I can buy 100 mil isk of this each week, and each purchase will give me a return in 3 weeks without. Therefore, when I hit my first payout my balance sheet looks like this
Week 3
Invested :
300 mil
Gross revenue
Return = 200 mil
By reinvesting the return you now are able to spot spending money out of pocket. By week 5 you have earned back your original investment. Week 6 and up you will see a 100 mil isk a week (100% return). This is a perpetuity. Put in X amount of dollars in (in this case 100mil) and you will see Y payout forever.
Now of course this is a simple example. Markets fluctuate, and you don’t see the return in one hunk, you see it as a much smaller series (like 20 mil +/- 5 mil a day). The math here can get very complicated. But don’t think that just because something doesn’t give you a return tomorrow that it isn’t a good investment. And don’t think that market fluctiations completely invalidate this. There are plenty of items that are stable enough for this concept to be applied to.
In the case of regional buy orders, if you have 100 orders that you are maintaining amongst 500 different items, then you can actually treat the entire pot as a single perpetuity. Its all about how you do the accounting.
You’re customers aren’t as stupid as you are
People who place buy orders for 1.00 isk are stupid. Plain and simple. There is a reason that there isn’t a business out there called “$1,000 Lemonade.” Even if you are the only person putting out buy orders you should never do this. Your customers aren’t idiots. You may be able to make a 10000% return on the item, but you won’t pick up more than 1 or 2 items a day. For high supply items there is actually a pretty direct correlation between the volume of sales for an item and where the minimum is.
This is because most players will see that big red sign that says “Warning, this is 99% below the regional average” and just say “screw that, I’ll sell it later.”
This should be painfully obvious. What may not be obvious is that in a situation where there aren’t many bidders you should set your entry bid to at least the magic 50% mark, regardless of where there’s are. This may mean that you outbid 1 isk by 16,999 isk, but you want to do that. As soon as you cross that magic mark you will see volume increase. And as volume increases, the regional average decreases. The 1 isk bid never lowers the regional average since the volume is so low. But that 16,999 isk bid will drop the 50% mark down to 14k isk in 1 day. Drop your price to that number, and watch the average go down.
The cost to the player who does the 1 isk bid is that he has a buy order that isn’t making him money. That’s opportunity cost. Don’t think your customers are stupid. They aren’t, and if you act like they are you are just showing how stupid you are.
To be continued.
J
Jonzac
Well ventured into 0.0 space with an ospray set for mining...there is a 0.0 system only 4 jumps from TEW just past KARI. But I did see some nice ice fields in several 0.6 systems and I've training to use Ice miners....cant refine yet, but that won't be too long.
I could use someone to take the rats out if possible, because I'm putting Large Secure Containers down to hold the ice until I get my hauler there...that should stop can flipping.
I could use someone to take the rats out if possible, because I'm putting Large Secure Containers down to hold the ice until I get my hauler there...that should stop can flipping.
J
Jonzac
They were small rats, so I put a shield booster on the retriever and droned them to death.
On a market note: I see someone has a sell order 3 jumps away that I would like to fill...do I HAVE to go to that station or does my Markerting skill allow me to remotely sell to him...and if it does HOW IN THE HELL do you do it?
Thanks in advance.
On a market note: I see someone has a sell order 3 jumps away that I would like to fill...do I HAVE to go to that station or does my Markerting skill allow me to remotely sell to him...and if it does HOW IN THE HELL do you do it?
Thanks in advance.
J
Jonzac
Darn it. I was hoping for a solution that avoided that
Necronic
Staff member
Marketing is useful for something I covered in my guide. If the item is already in that location, you can sell it to an active buy order whose range includes that station. I use it to fuck over anyone competing with me in my regional buy orders. If I can get them to substantially increase their price past a certain point, I can sell all of my items that are sitting in a low sec station to them. True, I am not making money on those items, but they are already written off as a form of loss anyways, so its actually not so bad.
Necronic
Staff member
Appreciate the response. Hopefully it was funny too, as that was part of the goal. I have been looking at some of the other new player guides out there, and if you can make it through a TLDR guide, Massively.com has some incredible new player guides. Covers a lot of the same things I talked about but a little more PG13 and goes into more depth.
I'm also going to add a section about how its truly a sandbox. There's a great quote from The Fountainhead : ""If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?" In EvE you simply will not survive if you can't answer this question yourself. EvE doesn't give you goals, you have to figure them out for yourself. And that's a valuable life lesson.
J
Jonzac
So just what do the certificates do? I'm training up the skill they talk about anyway...is it a way to just queue a crap full of skills? or do you get extra bonuses for completing the certificate?
They don't 'do' anything,. As far as I know it just makes it easier to figure out what to train for the type of skills you want.
Also, I figured out you can buy Learning 1, and learn that up to level 3 pretty quick for a small % bonus to your skill learning speed.[/QUOTE]
If you set them to "public", you can also use certificates to show other people what you're capable of during a corp invite, or fleet grouping, or something of that nature.
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