Tuesday, March 13, 2012

On Eve, again

I've dipped in and out of Eve over the years. My most successful attempt to 'get into' the game occured last year where i dabbled in several different features, learned an awful lot and finally felt like i was over the 'hump' .

I set myself a challenge to make the game free to play. Eve is a subscription based MMO, but it uses a 'plex' system where players can buy game time with in-world ISK. This Pilot's License Extension can also be traded on the markets like any other product and thus has steady but fluctuating value. Current prices are around 5-600million isk.

Players both buy the plex with real world money and trade it for isk, as well as buy plexes with isk instead of using real world money and the system suits both those who are time rich but real world money poor and those monetarily rich in real life, lacking the time to invest in Eve but still desirous get most out of their gaming experience.

Given my goal, you might be thinking a legimate question right now, If i don't want to pay a sub, and want to make it instead free to play and all my efforts are towards that end, would it not be simpler to not play at all?

Well, i guess that was my conclusion when i stopped playing before. But i think this also happened for other more important reasons than the game not being interesting and fun in and of itself. Making isk in Eve is a measure of success for most players. Even if your primary focus is pvp, to be successful in that you have to fund your activities somehow. And i believe that it takes a lot of skill and craft to make pvp profitable on its own. Many players fund their pvp sorties with mission running, ratting, industry etc and see this as a good trade off for their fun.

For me, i have less interest in pvp, so defining my success by the amount of isk i can make feels like a legimate goal and being rich enough to buy plex with isk rather than real world money is a signifier of achieving this.

In my dabbles of yesteryear I didn't really commit to any one project and i think that contributed to letting my sub lapse before achieving my goal. My most successful endeavors probably came from tech 1 level production, namely heavy missiles. It was easy to produce the missiles with a reasonable margin by shopping around locally for ores, putting sell orders in Jita, then reinvesting the proceeds, producing larger and larger batches of missiles.

I attempted to use multiple production lines and to refine the number of runs (a two week run left too much money tied up in product) but i didn't really achieve a satisfactory equilibrium. I was also aware that there was more money in tech 2 production but only briefly dabbled again tech 2 blueprint invention and research.

One of the limitations was also the time spent hunting for cheaper ore and fitting the whole logistics around how much would fit into my hauler. For instance, inevitably the weight of ore needed to make the number of missiles that filled my hauler was greater than its capacity.

I will probably use this again as a secondary income source, especially as my production skills are mostly all maxed out at level 5, but i have recently discovered Planetary Interaction and decided that this will be my focus towards achieving the isk/month that will buy my first plex. The numbers have been plugged in, alts have been coerced, skill trained and created and i believe PI will provide enough passive income as well as occupying a satisfactory middle ground between the paranoid ennui of mining and the investment heaviness of Manufacturing.

And PI and how i fare with it will be the subject of my next post.