Skill Extraction

Communications Center Skill Discussion
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People sometimes talk about extracting skill points and selling the injectors on the market from their accounts to keep themselves active in game instead of buying Game Time. Sort of like treading water, where they’re not gaining any further Skills each month but at least they’re able to play.

Yet, I did the math, and that… just doesn’t seem to work.

To explain, at current market prices, that’s not a sustainable cycle. I’ll describe it below, and then ask the question – is this merely an urban myth or is there some unique way to accomplish it that I’m just not seeing?

Large Skill Injectors are currently selling at 840 Million ISK apiece in Jita right now. So, let’s consider that as the potential income.

You can generate 3 Injectors per month on your character if they have +5 Implants and an optimal neural map.

PLEX cost 3.68 Million ISK each right now.

So each Injector, on the market, is worth about 228 PLEX (840/3.68).

Skill Extractors cost 140 PLEX each.

Here’s the Math: Each Month, a Pilot trying to do this would buy 3 Skill Extractors from the New Eden Store at a cost of 420 PLEX. He would then extract and sell the filled Injectors for 684 PLEX, a net profit of 264 PLEX for the month.

264 PLEX is far short of the 500 PLEX needed each Month to keep your account Omega.

Not to mention the loss of SP from any time the character is not sitting in the +5 Implants. Or Taxes. Brokers Fees. Etc. It also doesn’t work if you swap it around and avoid the New Eden Store, buying your Extractors on the Open Markets using ISK.

What am I not seeing? :thinking:

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Now do the math for 3 characters on 1 account, 2 of which are using MPTCs. Also, look at price histories. Sometimes it’s profitable, sometimes it’s not. The market moves in mysterious ways.

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Sure, that’s easy enough to pull up across all 3 Characters.

But it only gets worse doing it that way, not better. Let’s do the math.

Skill Extractors cost 140 PLEX apiece, and if you are using all 3 Pilots on your Account, that’s 9 Extractors that are required each month, at a total cost of 1,260 PLEX.

Multiple Pilot Training Certificates are 485 PLEX. Two = 970 PLEX

Monthly PLEX Cost to stay Omega = 500 PLEX

Income: 9 Injectors @ 225 PLEX = +2,025 PLEX
Expenses: 1260 + 970 + 500 = -2,730 PLEX

The monthly cycle is actually negative when extracting all three Pilots.

You actually lose MORE than a full month’s Omega worth of PLEX doing this.

2,052 PLEX - 2,730 PLEX = -678 PLEX

That’s not treading water, that’s sinking fast.

Again, the above prices do not include Taxes, Brokers Fees, etc., or any SP Loss that would derive from flying the Characters around and doing things in game while not wearing their Implants. Even historically this doesn’t really line up, as Skill Injectors, currently in the 840 Million range, are actually at a high point in terms of demand and sales price in Jita, having been in the 700-million range for most of 2018.

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If I remember correctly, maxed out character can get 1 944 000 SP /30 days. That’s almost 4 Injectors, skill extractor costs only 112 PLEX when bought in packs. Add to that the multiple SP gifts from CCP and your numbers change.

Also, that character does not sit and simply do nothing. You can do PI, Industry, PvE, Trading or any other activity that just adds up to the value of the character.

Still think it’s a myth?

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Some people have all they skills they desire, but still want Omega status to fly their favorite ship. They are already paying for Omega, and the skills they extract just add to their bottom line.

In other words, they aren’t trying to get 500 plex per month, they just need to get more than zero.

1 Like
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they aren’t trying to get 500 plex per month

The original question was actually yes, they were trying to get 500 PLEX per month. The legend was that you could PLEX your character solely by extracting and selling its SP gains each month.

Essentially, what the above responses are saying is that paying for Omega each month purely through extraction is indeed a myth.

I.e., At best, by sacrificing all your Skill Point gains for the month, you can recover only part of your monthly Omega PLEX cost, and you have to make up the difference elsewhere.

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You are missing something but you aren’t far off…I’ll check later (2hrs).

The short version is that you end-up being +/-100M per account.

The up-sides are you have basically 3 toons to earn ISK on at Omega rates for “free” which the only downside really being that all toons are stagnate for SP…ie they don’t improve.

Currently, an account needs to earn 60M a day to PLEX. With one SP farming account, and two of the toons running passive income earning (PI and market stuff), that’s not hard. This easily pays for a second account…rinse and repeat…

Oh and it takes a while to set-up TBH…

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Ok back…

With maxed out attributes and (basic)augmentations, you can earn 1,944,000 SP in 30 days. So call it 31 days to get your 4 injectors as the math shows 30.8 days needed to get 2M SP.

I currently have BUY orders for extractors @ 375M each or 1.5B for 4 units.
I generally sell my injectors not in Jita for added value (I transport a lot so this is not an issue),
All I need is to sell them or contract them at 875M each to make my PLEX…higher is profit with these numbers.

So once set-up (this is key), for almost no effort anyone can PLEX their account for free. Anything they earn with the other 2 toons on the account is gravy.

Hope that helps…

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  1. Extractors only cost 112 plex each.
  2. Buy plex with buy orders
  3. Sell injectors with sell orders or contracts.
  4. Use alts for mining/PI/whatever
  5. ???
  6. Profit
10

That was a deal before taxes were raised. And it was hardly depending on the PLEX rising prices. You buy extractors few month ago, when PLEX was cheapier. You sell injectors now, when PLEX (and injectors price there for) price is higher. It was always next to zero income, sometimes you needed extra 100 million ISK per month, sometimes less… With raised taxes it is always negative now.

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It is not, the current prices are bad, I used to run SP farm with hundreds of accounts, each made over 100M (up to few hundred) per month, which means not only did they pay for themselves, but gained me extra cash.

I just got tired of the extra work, but you can still make money if you know what and when to do it, like the above poster said.

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I did this with 3 characters. First you get a bit more than 3 injectors. I always purchased the 10 injector bundle which is cheaper and rotated which character extracted 4 instead of 3.

At some point I actually made money from this and overall the SP where still somewhat increasing (although not needed, because those are alts with a fixed function that already have all the possible useful SP). After a while it started to cost more than I got from it because of the increasing PLEX cost, but still it was around ~500mil ISK per month for 3 omega chars, which is not bad at all.

Should maybe mention that this was not optimized at all and as low effort as possible, like ~15min per month work for extracting and market stuff.

Also I purchased the PLEX via buy order and sold the Injectors via sell order, which makes a HUGE difference.

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