They pay way above the extraction value i.e: (SP - 5mil SP)*(Injector price - extractor price).
My only theories are: a) they extract then turn them into skillfarms, but I’m unsure the benefit of why one would lay out dozens of billions to buy a reasonably high SP pilot when this can be done with a 30 day old character fine. or b) they finesse them, that is to say they extract useless skills, turn into a dedicated dread/rorqual pilot for instance.
I have no interest in doing this, I’m just intrigued why there are so many prolific pilot purchasers.
You can’t farm a 30 day old character. You need at least 5.5M SP to extract. So even if a 5M SP character is useless to extract anything, it is useful as another body in the skill farm. To train a fresh character to 5M SP is either around 2.5 months of training (so ~4B ISK in PLEX) or way more in Skill Injectors. So skill farmers are happy to pay a few extra billion ISK for another warm body they can immediately start farming.
Very true! This doesn’t really explain why they’re buying 60m SP characters for, let’s say 50b isk though, surely they’d focus on the cheapest going ~5-10m SP? Why tie up 10’s of billions in a skillfarm toon.
Ah yes. My comments were more for the low-end of the market.
I am less sure of the high-end, but I imagine there there is still value in having a focused character for what you need. Skill Injectors are awfully inefficient for high SP characters, so if you want a specific alt with focused training, there probably is a supply problem and good character still goes for a premium like the used to in the old days before skill trading.
Those characters I am sure are not being fully extracted. At best perhaps the extraneous skills are removed, but they are almost certainly being used in game, or resold to be used in game. Because as you say, it makes no sense to pay 10B ISK above extraction value if you are just going to extract them.
Don’t sssume they are using current prices. The big farmers stock piled hundreds if not thousands of extra extractors and mptc when they were dirt cheap months ago. This essentially locks in their profits regardless of current inflation
Another thing to keep in mind is that not every sells in the forge. Selling in outside markets, although slower, you can usually do a lot higher of a markup.
Here’s a business model for you. Requires around a trillion in capital to start.
Buy generalist characters with lots of ‘wasted’ SP at or near melt value (i.e. the amount you’d get if you sucked out all their SP then biomassed once unable to suck more out)
Find a core that the character is really good at. Maybe they have 30% of their SP in mining, 40% in subcapital combat, 20% in core skills and 10% in science. But the 30% in mining plus the 20% in core, taken on their own, form a highly focused mining character.
Extract everything that isn’t part of the core.
Spend one to three months improving the character’s new core identity and fixing any serious flaws (e.g. outstanding killrights, negative sec status, etc).
Sell the character as a highly focused toon. Shop around until you find the right buyer.