I lol’d at all the people asking “how can you make negative ISK” as if they don’t understand that profit = income - costs.
They’re the same people who think that ore and minerals you mine yourself are “free”. 
2 Likes
Need more mining consortiums
Indeed, time has value because it’s tied in with opportunity cost.
Hence some of us are suggesting optimising the time spent, both in terms of task efficiency and the best return on it.
Look. I’ll say it again. The task itself is not worth doing. It’s prone to inflated claims due to gambler’s effect.
Actual returns are really low.
Use a stop clock and do exactly 2 hours a day for 7 days and you’ll see it comes out to like 5m isk an hour.
Gamblers score big and forget the million tiny cuts they lost.
1 Like
If you consider something to be not worth doing, don’t do it.
I consider salvaging to be not worth my time, hence I don’t do it; I spend the time doing something else that gives a better return. It also removes a sizeable amount of RNG from my income sources.
Not bothering with loot, with some exceptions, and salvage is just one way of streamlining your activities in order to make more isk doing something else.
Sure I might miss out on some juicy loot every once in a while, but on average I earn more by not bothering with it.
Different strokes for different folks.
There is no substitute for victory
Hard to pin down what exactly you are finding wrong without real specifics. You have mentioned many highsec activities you tested, but no mention of ships, fits, specific missions, types of anomalies, etc.
Some of these activities are effected by market, and that has nothing to do with CCP. And all are effected by skills, ship, fit, and so on.
Now I know your mission isk per hour is low, very low. I rarely if ever do highsec anomalies because they never seem to pay out much. Not sure about scanned down combat sites.
Mining seems about right, but I 3 man mine now so it’s been a long time since I solo mined. I assume you are solo mining. If not you are very low.
I had a chat with the OP ingame. Turns out there’s a few issues with the fit that makes it take eons to complete a site: He fitted relic/data scanners, which in HS pay fckall and are a waste of time compared to combat exploration income, making his ship less combat capable. It has almost no tank meaning he always had to kite which wastes even more time. And doesn’t use sentries meaning it takes ages to kill anything.
Beyond that I did a quick test and timed myself doing a 3/10 and 4/10 (blood raider) showing how fast a site can be done. The 4/10 took 6 minutes total and dropped nothing, the 3/10 took 10 minutes (5 pockets of fcking frigs) and dropped 80 mil. Total time of starting scanning and finding and completing those two sites: 30 minutes, and that’s with the chatting ingame.
I also gave him some tips on scanning and how to speed that up, I hope he picks up something from all that. Outside optimisation it’s just RNG.
5 Likes
Here’s a summary of a recent 3-hour chunk of L4 mission running from my database:
Rewards: 15,000,000
Bonuses: 13,000,000
Loot Value: 100,000,000
Bounties: 126,000,000
Total: 254,000,000
That’s a leisurely 85,000,000 ISK p/hour NOT including LP.
Notes:
-Flying a Golem with all Level 5 skills
-Time includes warping to and from agent station
-I loot and salvage everything
-Fairly risk-free. I’m usually doing something else on the PC.
1 Like
The level 4s, in particular, I don’t think you could earn that little even by just playing poorly on accident. You would have to go out of your way to intentionally earn that little.
1 Like
I’ve been taking a closer look at what constitutes my average monthly income for the past 3 months and it turns out that out of 7 bil monthly almost 50% are c-type pithum invulns, 8 of them, they seem to drop at 10-15% chance from Gurista 4/10s (5 minutes blitz), so it really is the question of numbers how many of the sites you can find.
Another 15% were implants from Faction rats, mostly from Watches (2 minutes blitz) and Vigils (15 minutes) also Hideaways/Refuges/Dens.
Yet another 15% Shattered Villard Wheels from Lesser Covert ‘Ghost’ sites. The only Data site worth doing in highsec, its always Data level III btw. 20-70 mil per site.
10% for Drone Capillary smthn, 10% various ded and faction mods.
2 Likes
After that 3/10 the OP had to log and I continued for an exact 60 minutes. Sites found in that time: 1 Lookout, 1 3/10 and 2 4/10. Not an amazing amount but enough to make it worth while.
Total profit after 90 minutes of scanning and completing sites:
207 mil, so that’s 138 per hour. Thing is of course that with such a small sample size it could have been anything: nothing at all or get 3x 300 mil jackpots, or (as is the case) something in between. But it was 207, meaning you can make isk just fine with HS combat exploration, as long as you optimise and do it right™ AND accept that RNGesus taketh and giveth.
That 200 mil came from both 3/10s btw, the 3 4/10s paid very little. This is also why doing these sites in a BC is problematic: they can’t enter 3/10 and those tend to pay really nicely.
2 Likes
Lv4 Mission running (when i can be bothered to run them for a day)
10-20 minutes (except for Angel Extraveganza) with a Golem/Palidin/T2 fitted Raven
Approx 30-180 million Isk per hour, includes loot/salvatge/LP conversion rates.
after 4-6 hours…
Turn salvage into rigs, roughly 10-300 million more isk depending.
Melt down non-relevant loot…build a catalyst or 2: approx 2 million more ISK
Sell other loot: buy tags…turn in LP…approx 50-200 million ISK more.
in short Lv4 Highsec mission running without turning any mission down can net about 800-1.5 Billion in about 6 hours or less.
Faster with a Tengu/Noctis team. (and more lucrative)
1 Like
Well its 85,000,000 isk per hour divided by 24 to optimize to daily income.
This is why hourly rates are grossly inflated.
You playing the game 24/7?
I’m just answering the OP. You can divide ■■■■ however you want.
O.o You must be CLEARLY doing something wrong. 10M+ is with L2 missions … IN PROCURER!!!
I manage to do over 150M+/h reliably and 200M+/h on good hour running l4s - and I don’t even run burners.
30*6 + 10 + 50.
Using your own figures your bottom convertion rate is actually 240 mil or 40 per hour. Using Marauders which go for over a billion.
I also call BS on those loot/salvage claims to get 60 mil value per mission. Unless you are calling that a triple scarlet. and you seem to be counting LP twice plus counting industry which then requires all the Bpos to be bought and researched at significant cost.
So… Your top figure requires significant billions isk of investment and months/years of preparation to get the research done.
Saying all that, 40 Mil / hour or even 60 mil / hour is decent rates. Not null carrier rates but not to be sneezed at either.
Funny enough but I use warp speed lock speed optimized PHANTASM for hs anoms when I feel like it - in angel space. Most angels can be one shot by it - and as a bonus no need to haul much ammo.
Sir, have you ever heard of our lord and saviour, James Barghest ?
It’s like a raven. Just better.
even the cruisers in the den ?
even the scram rat that end up orbiting you ?
On the thorax I ended up using sebo scripted lockspeed and rof rigs to reduce the time between shots.
LOL. How about 100M+/30 minutes ? There are some really good missions - but you will have to find them.