Eve.. an important question

Just how realistic is it to expect the game to pay for itself? aka: purchasing game time with in game cash.

If so, how long will it take to get to that point?

CCP has added 30 day PLEX cards to the market in-game. They cost about 400mil right now I think. I haven't run missions for a long time but that might be two or three days of solid Level 4 missions.

From a strictly PvP standpoint, you can get 400mil in a day easy. You just have to find a faction fit ship to ransom/kill or a freighter full of capital parts!

How long does it take to get to this point though? ~1-2 months?

Oh from scratch? 1-2 months maybe. I don't know that much about PVE honestly. CCP got rid of learning skills and each new character now has max learning attributes. This plus a 100% learning speed boost for new characters means you should be able to get into a Level 4 capable ship fairly quickly if you know what to train. Now you also have to have the standings with whatever faction you want to run missions for. I think its something around a 6.0 to do the lowest quality Level 4 agents.

I would say 1-2 months to get everything in working order. If I find any guides on the interwebs I'll post them in here for you.

Hmm.. alrighty.. I'm thinkin bout making an account, but i REALLY don't like paying for games. yeah i'm a cheap-scape lol.

It really depends on how much time you have for it. If you have plenty of time like 10 hours a week to devote to it, you can be making enough to pay for itself within 2 months. However, those few days a month that you'll be working on paying for eve probably won't be all that fun.

Before you start get a trial account from someone. That can give up to 21 days for free!

To completely pay using in-game cash takes a good while. I'd say maybe 2 months to get into a battleship that can run level 4 missions (and the standing to do so). On average I'd say you make maybe 10 - 20 mil per mission. Each mission takes a good 30 minutes to an hour, on average. Once I get high enough standings to do it, I'll have a starbase chain in hi-sec that makes me enough money to laugh my way through eve.

i'm trying it out with the 14 day trial with a bogus account, so if i do decide to play i won't waste too much time. Are there longer trial periods? O.O

I think they have a 21 day trial that a current player can invite you with. Don't forget salvaging!!! The Noctis they added is a dedicated salvaging boat that munches wrecks. Thats an extra 10-15mil per mission.

You've got two ways you can do a level 4 mission. You can either blitz it or grind it out.
A) Blitz means you go in shoot only the target objective and turn the mission in. This is when you want to farm LP (Loyalty Points). These LPs you can use to buy special faction items through the faction store. You in turn sell those for a profit.
B) You kill EVERYTHING, to get the most out of bounties and then you come in and salvage the mission wrecks to maximize your profits. It's slow and boring, but it pays the bills.

Some like A better than B but it's all based on the player's skills and such.

You've also got planetary interaction to make a little extra cash.

You can even play the market. I've got a dedicated market alt that buys low, transports the material to a different region and then sells high. IMO thats the easiest way to make cash.

If i still wanna play after this trial is up, would one of y'all send me said invite? also, what race are y'all mostly so i can join without getting KOS'd?

your race doesn't matter.
what DOES matter is who you piss off

I'd give you 50 mil if you can get to where I live without dying.

P.S. You don't have to piss off people for them to kill you

i'm almost willing to try that

just whatever you do, never go ANYWHERE near amamake, set it to your avoidance list, do whatever, just never go to amamake

o?

lowsec bottleneck, going through it can cut like 10 jumps out of your trip depending on where you are going, but doing so you are near guaranteed to get ganked. also, I am nearing the 20m a day mark on my lvl3 missions, though I have just now spent the time to figure out how to make money properly. In the past 3 days I made 150m using a variety of stuff, the net thing I am going to get going is a research agent somewhere else in the mimnitar region. My next goal is nighthawk in 5 days(I have the command ships skill, unfortunately I forgot I needed HAC4, 4 days more train time) and then I will start running lvl4 missions. And in the near future after my colonies have paid themselves off, I'm going to blow them up and relocate them to wherever we wind up going(none of which will be gas planets, don't set up anything on a gas planet unless you absolutely have to, too powergrid intensive.

i'll take your word for it lol

*sigh* Ammamake is no where near as bad as the 0.0 jump off point from Orvolle/any highsec system. In lowsec you don't have to deal with bubbles. It's not uncommon for 50-60 man gang to camp the PF- gate next to Orvolle. And that's if they don't get run off by a bigger gang.

O.o holy crap.. they just kill everyone that comes through?

Pretty much. It's not for the faint of heart. It still gets my heart beating when I hit a gatecamp. EvE is the only game that does that for me.

Morgan wrote:

It still gets my heart beating when I hit a gatecamp. EvE is the only game that does that for me.

I second this. My general reaction to such gatecamps is usually a calm, collected "Oh.....crap." followed by a rapid spam of the Align To.

To put emphasis on the point... You will become very, very cold-hearted after losing a few battleships in a row. Expect to die in the worse possible way wherever you go (excluding high-security space).

To be blunt, until you've played the game for a few months, don't EVER venture into a system below 0.5 security status.


Also, gate camps do give me a bit of an adrenaline rush. So long as i'm in a frigate I have a fairly good chance of escaping them.

Oh man yes camps do get the blood rushing. But so does finding people in wormholes.

Or a Nyx cyno-ing 5km from your 5 billion isk Golem. 5bill gone in 30 seconds.

MatthewTyson wrote:

](even high-security space).

here, I fixed that for you, just be aware, gankers will find a way to gank you no mater where they are, just like the out of station pvp idiots, you may have someone come suicide gank you for the fun of it. I lost my Ishtar to that the first mission I used it in. I also remember some stuff happened with a ninja salvager in a lvl4 mission and Ras lost a battleship.