Been toying with the idea of coming back fro a while now. I have finally installed the game today and have a few questions…
I left towards the end of 2013 - 7 years is a fairly long time and I literally think I have forgotten everything about the game!
My background is I started as a miner, then went onto manufacturing, then did a bit of transporting stuff and selling between stations, until finally I became a station trader. I also did a bit of PVE combat on the side. But I was pretty good at trading and that is where I made most my ISK.
It’s a while ago, but I remember just before I left I liquidated everything and donated at lot of plex to some player that ran an event that donated plex for charity or something?
Can’t exactly remember how it worked, or if it still exists. Only that i donated everything as I had no intention of coming back and now wish I had at least held onto a few plex to buy some game time! I remember it being enough to pay my subscription for a long time… like 10 years +
Anyway I’ve logged in today to see I have around 500 million isk of assets left. I can’t train anything as I am over the skill cap for non paying account and I can’t even un-dock my ship unless I upgrade to a paid account.
When I used to play I just used to buy plex in game for my subscription. Is it possible with the current game mechanics as a non paying player with 500 million ISK to work my way back to that without upgrading to a paid subscription?
Totally…it might take a month or two (or three) but you’ll make enough to buy 500 PLEX (that system changed BTW) and go Omega…good news is PLEX price is falling so now is a great time to be returning.
You’ll want to look up how player owned structures work too, as the markets in them can have lower transaction costs than NPC stations and you’ll want to factor that in to your trading.
It is “possible” but the activities you used to make ISK are severely restricted in the Alpha state. Plexing your account currently costs roughly 1.5 billion ISK - more than double what you remember and, as mentioned, that’s still a third less than it was this time last year!
Trading has also changed; it is no longer cost effective to micromanage your orders. Instead of “changing your price” you are now “relisting your order”. The relisting fee is now a percentage of the brokerage fee that depends on a skill you can’t use in Alpha state.
By all means, spend some time as an Alpha to re-engage with the game - rerun the career missions and SOE Epic arc but I suspect you’ll burn out quickly if you make PLEXING your account from the Alpha state a priority.
The easiest way to do that would be to extract some skills.
CCP added skill trading, do depending how long you played for, you probably have some skills you could live without for a bit anyway.
Extracting a couple million SP should be enough to get you enough PLEX to go Omega and unlock all your skills. You can then train them back, and then repeat the process at the end of the month and mostly cover the price of a PLEX. Depending on the implants and mapping you might be a little short, but max implants and perfect mapping allow you to about break even each month if you sell your SP. If you manage to earn the ISK while playing, you can not extract all, or even not extract at all if you can earn the entire amount of a month of PLEX.
You will lose the cost of the extractor though. I would suggest just sacrificing the SP and training them back the old fashion way. If you have the ISK, and the need, then buy some injectors, but otherwise they are a bit of a sucker’s play and an inefficient way to get SP. Better to wait if you can and train them via the traditional way.
Wow what did they do to transaction fees! Extracted some skills and plexed my account - just checked the broker and sales tax
Plugged the new rates into an old trading spreadsheet I found… one months trading back in 2013 with the new transaction costs went from 8 billion profit to a 10 billion loss!
CCP significantly raised the trading fees, but they did so more in NPC stations.
If you “offshore” you can avoid some of these fees buy placing ranged buy orders in player-owned market hubs like in Perimeter. But they are still higher than they were before, but you can save a few percent this way. Also, the broker fee to adjust an order is also much higher so 0.01 ISKing forever isn’t really a viable strategy anymore.
That said, the markets have basically adjusted to this and the profit margins are much greater as a result. Everyone has to pay the fee (more-or-less) equally so spreads between the buy and sell prices increased to cover the increased fees. There is still plenty of ISK to be had trading on the market, although your past strategies may not work and you might need to develop new ones.
Really happy 0.1 ISK has gone as that was so annoying and time consuming.
Having now made a few trades the profit margins don’t seem much different to when I left, which is nice.
Margin trading being axed has made me sad though - that skill would have helped me get back up and running a lot quicker. Thinking of cashing in a significant amount of SP to free up some capital.
