Well then, Iād recommend you this: donāt PLEX your account for just one month, but save up to have enough to PLEX it for several months in a row. This way you can use your Omega time to join a corp outside of highsec, where you will find vast opportunities to get ISK. Also, try to find ways around the usual. If you do exactly what others are doing, chances are that you have to compete with them for income or that the game will be balanced around that. If you get to know more about the game, youāll find other ways, things that not so many people are doing and it can pay much better than following the beaten path.
Sounds like a full-time job to do nothing but ensure your ability to have another full-time job for the next monthā¦ not attaining anything, not really progressing, not playing the actual game.
Again, the problem with Eve is that everyone plays just to try and PLEX their accounts.
Time can be better spent on other games that donāt require so much effort just to stay within reach of par.
In your situation with your mom paying the bills. If you really want to go omega you would be much better off trying to get a part time job and paying the sub yourself.
Alternatively ask your mom if there are any extra chores you could do around the house for the extra 20 a month. (My personal suggestion is to offer to cook dinner one night a week. She may have to teach you some dishes initially but it takes a surprising amount of work off of them. And gives you some damn important life skills)
It takes <1h of RL work to get the 15$ to PLEX for a month. Obviously it is your decision if you really want to waste countless of hours of your free time with a tedious grind each month or if you just pay the 15$ and do something in the game you actually enjoy. Itās also perfectly viable to just play as an alpha.
And donāt listen to the people who promise you better ISK/h with various stuff. It will still be a tedious grind and ware you out.
Therein lies the rubā¦ you only waste countless hours if you try to do it on a single account.
Eve, like most MMOs, is designed such that a single player canāt efficiently do things. Butā¦ alts are quite legitimate. Not bots, obviously, but alts.
Consider that with 3 total accounts you can easily run a P4 chain, all yourself, from start to finish. Thatās 5 bil a month if you maintain it.
3 accounts means 6 skill farms. Thatās another 800m a month. MCTs are cheaper than subs, so it makes sense to fill open slots with skill farmsā¦ train up cyno skills on them and you can build cyno chains with your SP farms (donāt forget to jump out of those +5s haha).
3 accounts means 3 VNIs multiboxing sites. Or 3 rattlesnakes if youāre feeling ambitious. Or 3 spider Sins facerolling 10/10s with zero riskā¦ oh a neutral is probing me down? /jump to exit cyno. Or 3 rorquals.
3 accounts means 3x the industrial mfg capability.
The PI is generally hands-off. The SP farming is hands-off. The mfg is almost hands-off. The VNIs can be done while watching netflix.
Playing on one account, yea itās hard to sub with plex unless youāre ratting in a super.
Playing on 3, I can go for a week at a time without logging in and still have the isk to plex all 3.
But I donāt grind for it. I had some luck (pile of worthless slavage parts became a pile of gold over night) and got space rich so when there was an offer for 30 days for 425 PLEX or something I sunk a big pile of it into it and subbed my main for over a year of something. Previously I payed sub for over 10 years.
As for the alts, I used to pay for two alt accounts for ~2 years, but when skill injectors came around I got another one and now I just PLEX them with the SP I sell every month which costs me overall +/- 400mil ISK per month for all three accounts depending on the market.
With omega and a bit of pimp you can do 150-200 million an hour doing level 4s with burners in high sec. You need a baseline of skills to fly every necessary ship to make that happen though. All anomic teams and the three talos anomic base are pretty new player friendly so you can start including those in your list of acceptable missions very soon if you havenāt already.
My advice is pay with cash because paying rent in a game is annoying. One hour of RL job is one month of EVE, big deal.
Even when I was in wspace and could print money I would not have grinded for PLEX. I only PLEX because I have enough ISK for everything I want to do. But I would never waste my free time doing it. I can literally earn the money for the sub while taking a dump at work
I think you will find this to be the norm. Those of us who plex our account (Or accounts) do it because we can without grinding for it.
Even then I still sub my main account and only plex my alts, because that way if something happens and my IG income tanks Iām still not stuck grinding just to play.
The grind for plex is probably the #1 cause of burn out among new players.
When I started, the advice we always gave was to sub for your first year at least before even thinking about trying to Plex. (Also get out of high-sec. There are ways to make good isk there. But life will be much easier for you in a null alliance. If you decide to go back to HS later you will be in a much better position to do it.)
I would not be so sure of that. I tend to lurk / assist in newbie / player school environments, to relax from - shall we say - other activities. One thing that stands out is that a lot of people arrive with the almost built in behavioural reflex to plex.
And they go to stupendous lengths to do so. Even when thereās simpler or smarter options available, or when a subcription would be economically fine and a lot less tedious. Itās opiate economics. Plexing accounts carries its own version of āmy minerals are freeā ā¦
Honestly, itās gotten a lot harder to get people to take advice on sustainability and staying away from grind challenges. Quite often you see players trying to provide insights, only to met by hostility. EVE is free, so it is my time, so time doesnāt count, I know how to grind anyway from game XYZ, I must plex to be awesome.
Iād almost call it a disease. And I would wager that thereās a fair few quite counterproductive variables in that mess for CCPās retention challenge.
Ah, this took me back. I started EVE when I was around 14-15 or so, so I had the same problem, couldnāt pay sub fee. Back then you couldnāt even play for free either so every time if I had some money for EVE, it was a proper treat. Unfortunately that was super rare.
Try to find some chores to do and get money that way, then ask if you can use that money to buy the subscription for the game. Thatās how I did it, back then we had those prepaid cards at local store so I bought those if I had money. I used to help my grandma with garden stuff for example. However I also understand that finding chores to do and also getting paid isnāt easy, it was super rare for me to find things that actually paid. Usually I did chores for free.
Oh and if you do end up subbing, and use paypal or card, remember to cancel the sub before it ends. Otherwise your mom might get rather angry if she notices that it bought automatically a new subā¦
