Question for the Solo players

I think the only isk I ever made legitimately in eve was through Merc work. I make my isk now selling skill injectors.

I pay for my accounts on yearly subs so the skills I extract from my alts (Because they are fully trained in what they need to do) is basically free isk for me. If you don’t include the fact that it takes time and I pay yearly subs.

I don’t sub my accounts with isk. I believe in rewarding the developers for a game I actually do enjoy playing. This more than enough covers my bills and ingame isk requirements.

I did invest invest an obscene amount of isk in plex trading back when it was 150mil for 500 plex so one day I might sell all my plex I made. And lets not forget the day the day they broke 1 plex up into 500 smaller units. I made so much isk and plex of people that did not read the patch notes.

Ditto on the Exploration Combat Sites. Faction module drops can be quite rewarding. The random nature of drops give running the sites more uncertainty and don’t seem to be as much a grind as Lvl 4 missions. I have a main and 2 alts in out-of-the-way systems so they don’t overlap each other. All three are trained in exploration flying Covops frigs. The added benefit to Covops is the ability to use combat probes. These I use for running down abandoned drones. Even a single drone may turn out to be a Gecko, and it’ll make your day.

Out-of -the-way constellations mean lesser traffic thus a greater chance of signatures being present. Data and Relic sites should not be ignored, and since you’re in the system already, do them. If you always salvage after a combat site and add the relic sites the T1 and occasional T2 salvage adds up over time. I’m sitting on 4B in T1 salvage right now.

Each character is set up with a T3 Destroyer, a Noctis (for salvaging) and a T3 cruiser (or Stratios) to do the occasional Ghost site you run across. Limited/Standard Sleeper sites also pop up occasionally.

Check the agency for Cosmic Signature sites in the immediate vicinity. If they are scant, switch to another character. If you base yourself in a mission-runner area your chances of expensive combat drones being abandoned is greater. Even if 0.5 systems are choked with miners and Athanors, they tend to ignore exploration sites, at least in my experience.

Edit: Frequency and value of loot drops increase as system security status gets lower. I stick to 0.5-0.6 systems when in Hi-sec.

Don’t look at ISK as the goal in the game any more. If you do, you are just creating another part-time job for yourself that you will come to loathe.

PLEXing accounts isn’t really viable any longer in-game unless you are already among the established top tier of the blue-ball-bloc. Super-ratting is the only thing that even approaches PLEX-ability. PLEX has risen so high while bounties have remained the same… making the PLEX-account grind even worse.

Play Eve for Eve.

That said… Level IVs, mining/production, gate-camping. That’s how you make ISK… solo or in a group.

3 Likes

Suleman Tazinas , 7 Bi per week is a lot.

How many Lev.4 Missions does someone have to do per day to reach those numbers ?
How many hours per week ?

I do a variety of activities in Hig-Sec and it takes me on average 30 days to do 7 Bi.

The key to making ISK in L4s is blitzing. Knowing what missions to avoid, and knowing what the triggers are. You can make a lot of ISK by blitzing L4s.

1 Like

Thanks for your replies everyone.

I generally treat claims such as Suleman’s with considerable skepticism. In years of watching people math out their returns on L4 runs and burner missions, it’s rare to see someone credibly claim more than 150M/ISK per hour on L4’s and about 200M/hr on burners. Although people sometimes pull out a couple ideal hours where they got the best of everything and claim 200ish on L4s and 250-300 on burners.

The credible claims are also from people who have really maxed out everything and every resource to pull those numbers, and they rarely do so long term because it becomes too grindy.

People with longer term routines that involve lots of mission running, in my experience, are more likely to claim 80-100M ISK/hr on L4s if they are cherry picking, and about 60M ISK per hour if they are running a more normal routine. I haven’t followed burner runners as much but 100-120M per hour seems a fairly frequent claim. (These numbers are still by people who are extremely efficient and highly skilled, not ‘casual’ mission runners.)

Given that, the math on 1B ISK per day mostly from missions seems like somebody’s fudging their numbers a fair bit.

For the OP, a not-too-outdated discussion on solo mission running might be useful:
L4 Missions 100M Isk per hour Solo

4 Likes

You don’t need to be part of the Blue-Ball, Super ratting to be established and isk/plex just becomes another commodity in game for you. You just had to be there first or 10th… :slight_smile:

However I get your point… Most of the really profitable isk generators that does not force you to grind like crazy has already been taken for the most part or is already controlled by others.

I’ll give you some really good advise when it comes to making isk in eve. In general, the average player will have between 10-50 billion. Most players will not exceed 100b, and if they do its likely they are super-capital pilots (specifically piloting titans).

The only real ways to exceed these values are two, in general, which are running an successful entity (Alliance, or coalition), or Large scale market manipulation.

The latter is a little ambiguous, but in general it means effecting key market locations, or the over all market on a massive scale for a few items. In high sec this is largely controlled by goonswarm, as they mass produce items in null and low sec, export to high and then burn everything causing people to run to their product.

This is important to understand because this ultimately means that if you want to engage in manipulation you will need to be part of a larger entity, like one of the super-coalitions (test, nc, goons, etc), and you will need to do so in nullsec.

Now we get to this massive game of manipulating the markets and not getting caught, or finding ways to put alts in the entity, to get access to doing it again, and so on, which is another meta level of understanding the complexities of market manipulation.

IF your happy with the <100b liquid state, then its fairly easy to accomplish these amounts. For example, you can accumulate 80-120m an hour in an incursion fleet, and they are really fun (in ways very similar to pvp, its the best pve combat eve has to offer), you could also optimize in various parts of industry like production or research, or look into the null harvesting (rorq or gas farming )variants.

I’d say the average income of eve across all players added is probably in the area of 70-80m an hour. So if your not making that kind of isk you may want to look around at something else.

1 Like

And this is why people who can’t do basic math shouldn’t pretend to be “genius” game developers, or give “really good advice”.

When you start coming up with numbers that aren’t wrong by almost an order of magnitude, people might graduate your status from “delusional buffoon” to “simply confused a lot and doesn’t realize it”.

5 Likes

@ISD_Buldath

Can you deal with the off-topic posts?
thanks

It’s a good thread so far, I don’t see anything objectionable.

Pretty sure he means “Please remove the posts that point out Naari hasn’t the slightest clue what he’s talking about”.

Because of course when you’re ignorant and clueless, the proper response is to remove the posts that say so, rather than to remove your own ignorance of published numbers. Math is hard, after all.

2 Likes

Most important is you find something you enjoy doing for making ISK. I’ve made most ISK in NS/WH exploration, not going to state any ISK/hr. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not so good.

If you’re solo and want some lucrative PI I recommend checking out Wormlife freeports; publicly accessible wormhole systems with very reasonable tax rates on POCO’s. https://discord.gg/Kfja4Db

Basically I’ve Billions of ISK left from 4-5 years ago when I was the logistic head of a med/large alliance. Since my time is very limited nowadays im playing solo.
I’m doing wh/0/l/h exploration in a cheap probe (it’s more interesting if you don’t have a covops ^^)
Or I’m building some ridiculous oversized MWD ship to taunt pvp duel players.
Sometimes I do public courier contracts (low+high) like back in my old days. Sometimes in a shuttle, sometimes in a freighter.

Yeah I don’t care about ISK anymore. I don’t think I can use all of my ISK until I have more time to play Eve and do some serious pvp.
I’m not the solo pvp kind of guy, I’m more the logi guy orbiting the small/med gang fight at 70km and just care to not get caught by a frigate ^^

BTW: I’ve set up a new character and started from 0 1 week ago. Because having all this ISK and nothing important to spend it on is really sad D:

PS: no i don’t double your isk!!!

Reported for being off topic. :slight_smile:

Anyone that points out that you are wrong on any subject, in any thread, is giving good advice and is on topic to do so.

2 Likes

I pay my two accounts with real money, I sub on a monthly basis so I can stop whenever I want. So all ISK I make in game is mine.

You might want to look at the Emerging Conduits, I dual-box them and it is good ISK, just find an out of a way system and go to town. loot and salvage them, I can blow them up and loot them fully in less than 9 minutes per site. But you should also do other stuff so you don’t get burned out.

Hisec is pretty naff for PI, and the taxes are high especially from PIRAT’s POCO owning corp which has most of the good ones. I brought a huge amount of PI from nullsec and use that. Having your own Athanor to moon mine is also good or you can do what I do which is have friends own it and mine when I feel like it, which is not often…, but you can mine and give them some of it to pay towards their fuel.

You should always build relationships in this game, but like anything you have to put out a bit to get something back. You don’t have to have deep relationships, working ones are also fine, but if you can get a group of like minded people around you doing their thing but able to help each other when needed it makes this game a lot of fun. For example recently I went all in with a group of AG players and we are having a blast with war decs and stuff.

Oh and this is so true:

still something to aim at :slight_smile:

1 Like

Hello Gloria, welcome to the forums.

Here is something you might consider NPC 0.0 Solo Player Community

Being solo is pretty hard to be honest which is why I’m here looking for solo pilots to try and form some sort of loose partnership. Working with others is the best way to get many of the services you need so you might be better off joining a larger corp, If you are determined to play it solo then do look me up, it would be cool working with other solo guys.

Good Luck

2 Likes

I’ve been a solo player for most of my 11+ years in this game and usually buy a yearly sub with real money. My main activity is Exploration with some mission running mixed in. For industry services I mainly use NPC stations, however whenever I have a large production project to do I will search for and use the best priced player structure available. I don’t bother with PI content and most of the minerals I need for manufacturing are gained from reprocessing exploration / mission site loot drops.

1 Like

I’ve run the gamut from solo mining to mission running to a little bit of PI, and I think the most money I’ve ever made was just from missions. You can make ISK doing anything, the trick is doing it in a way that’s more than just financially rewarding. If it feels like a grind, it is a grind, and you will burn out and quit someday.

I’ve found missions to be engaging as well as rewarding, trying new fits and approaches, crosstraining on ships I’m unfamiliar with, etc. While there are some uber-expensive ships out there, L4 missions will usually pay for themselves if you’re careful and studious.

2 Likes