EVE-Online – Deciding to take Risks part 2

Lets continue exploring risks in EVE-Online and this time look at them in the context of challenge and reward.

EVE-Online is a super-capitalistic game. Skill points mean nothing more than the ability to use different ships and equipment. What makes a man in EVE is his wealth in both fixed assets and capital in currency, called ‘Isk’. Isk is the official currency of Iceland, the game developers and their studio are located in Iceland so they called their in-game currency Isk.

Many ships cost millions of Isk, but some ships cost billions. Some people manage to make 100 millions in a day, others are lucky to make 10 millions in a sitting. There is the saying that it takes money to make money, the same is true in this game. The real power over others in this game is by controlling the market of a region of space. It takes massive capital to do that but once a cartel is set up the money comes pouring back.

I will be looking at the more accessible ways of making money, as a small time trader. People new to the game can engage in this profession fairly soon and for others who just don’t have much time to play this is a viable option to make some money in order to save up for a bigger ship.

One factor in trading is the time it takes to get from point A to point B.

Moving from one space station to another involves a number of steps and costs a certain amount of time. To begin with the player is inside a station. There he conducts his business, upgrades his ship, buys items, takes contracts etc. Once everything is loaded into his ship he undocks and is moved into space. If you are familiar with science fiction movies then the term ‘warp’ or ‘hyperspace’ should mean something to you, it’s a form of faster-than-light travel. The player has to align his ship in a certain direction towards a star gate, go to warp and will remain in warp for a few seconds, traversing the solar system he’s in, and drop out at the star gate of his choice. Each solar system is connected to others by ’star gates’, a sort of giant teleportation devices (no, not the sort of circly thing from the TV series ‘Stargate SG-1).

The star gate turns the ship into light and catapults it across space to the next solar system where the ship will be reassembled.. or something like that. Then the player warps to the next gate en route and so on until he reaches his destination. This is considered making a ‘jump’ and will show up as a measure in following screenshots and each jump takes a certain amount of time, depending on how much effort the player is willing to put into micro-managing the trip or letting the ship go on autopilot.

Challenge

Assuming the player isn’t starting from absolute 0, he already possesses a transport ship and has some spare cash to buy goods for trade. Transport ships have a certain capacity and items have a certain size, depending on pilot skills this capacity can vary a lot. When doing NPC trading, that means buying items that are useless to players from NPC’s and selling to NPC’s, there is a point where one space station can only supply so much and any one space station only requests a certain amount. If the transport’s capacity is greater than those amounts then the pilot will have to calculate in multiple stops along his trade route.

The challenge now is to analyze the market, to find goods that are easy to transport at the lowest price and to find the closest destination with a higher price to make a profit.

This screenshot shows one type of such goods: Electronic Parts. Usually that’s a pretty good commodity for trade.

We can see the cheapest price being 727.71 ISK and the highest buying order paying 821.89 ISK. Additionally it’s also just in the neighbouring solar system, how convenient. Great deal? I don’t think so, look closely at the quantity. 99 pieces up for sale and 3905 on demand at the destination. According to the info box, my transport ship in its most basic configuration can hold 5625m3 of cargo and each electronic parts item is considered to be 1m3 in size. This trip would be a complete waste of my time.
With this type of goods the money will be in the quantity, not in the margin of a few items so I’ll have to look at sellers and buyers that can take as much as i can fit into my ship.
Additionally the seller should be somewhere close to my current location and the buyer not too far away from the seller’s space station, the aim is to minimise travel time. Profit is counted in Isk/hour or Isk/jump.

Currently it’s probably not such a good idea to trade in electronic parts after all since the profit margin will be really small. The market seems to be quite even, suggesting that some heavy trading has been going on in the last few days or weeks.

A further market analysis shows that prices are indeed at a low at this point in time.

Risk

Assuming the player has found a commodity and entered the trade route into his navigation system he’d be set to take off and do his trade run. Only there’s a few risks he has to consider first.

• Is his corporation / alliance at war? Meaning, could he get shot in secure space, lose the ship and cargo?
• Will someone else fulfill the buy order before he can? Sometimes it’s a real head to head race to get the last shipment in before selling the lot.
• Does the chosen trade route cross unsafe solar systems? If so, what would be the trade off in number of jumps if he chose a secure route?

The red dots on the star map are unsecured systems, there is nothing to protect travellers in those systems, yellow and green dots mean that the game has police NPC’s guarding the gates and they will shoot anyone who attacks another without having the right to do so. Shooting rights are only granted for corps that are at war with each other or for someone who’s been robbed, he’s allowed to shoot the thief. If someone pulled it off to kill someone without having those rights before the police arrived the right for revenge is reserved.

The two routes lead to the same destination but one goes trough unsecure space and the other avoids those areas. It is up to the player to determine if he’s willing to take the risk, knowing that other players are preying on traders like him in those unsafe systems. They will shoot on sight and collect what’s left of the cargo and ship or make the player pay ‘protection’ money.. and usually shoot him afterwards anyway.

Reward

The rewards of a successful, large quantity trade can be several millions. With many ships costing under 150 million, a series of successful trade runs can put the player into a new and powerful ship quite quickly. Once he owns the new ship he still has to run a few trades to pay for the equipment such as weapons, repair modules and ammo but after that he can drop the trading routine and go shoot people or NPC’s to make money, or go into the mining business which is also quite a lucrative upgrade from NPC trading.