Greedy Goblin

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Second account trader alt

There are 4 market hubs: Jita, Amarr, Dodixie and Rens. If you already have the knowledge to station trade on one, why not do the same on all 4 to multiply the profit? It's easy: you start a second account and create 3 alts on them.

Philosophical disclaimer: I uphold that paying money inside a game (opposed to for the game) is generally buying boost, implies sucking in the game and also idiotic: if you enjoy playing why do you pay for fast forward, if you don't enjoy playing why do you play? Buying a second account is no different, you could experience the game fully in your first account, you are paying for increasing your income bypassing in-game restrictions like travel times between hubs and trading slots. However you can "un-boost" yourself by paying the second account with PLEX you buy for ISK. This way your second account is upheld by in-game means, aka "playing better". The obvious consequence is that your second account must make more than a PLEX worth. Since my second account was activated via the "power of 2" program, allowing 6 months play for 3 months price, I'm now 3 PLEX behind the equilibrium point and this will be displayed on my business report (despite I used only 2 weeks of the 6 months yet and the alts there are not yet able to earn serious money).

The characters on your second trader account need the same skills as the main station trader. To get them as soon as possible, I suggest the following path:
  1. Cybernetics 1 and get +3 implants to Cha, Mem, Will, +1 or +2 to the rest
  2. Skills needed to do the career missions in all 3 faction bases: this is advised as the fastest way to get faction standing. The skills are Destroyers 2, Faction Frigate 3, Targeting 1, Astronometrics 1, Industry 1, Hull upgrades 1, Afterburners 1, faction specific weapon 2. If you value playing time over skill learning time, train Caldari Frigate 3 and Small hybrid turrets 2 regardless of your faction. Small railguns with iron charge oneshots starter mission frigs from maximum targeting range, saving you lot of chasing. Get a cargo magnet to pick up the mission-loot they drop in that distance.
  3. If you are going to get your standing via distribution missions and pay mercenary/bring your main for encounter storyline, get Faction Industrial 3 and Anchoring 1. If you'll get your standings via doing security L3/4 via your main boosting, skip
  4. Remap for Cha 8, Will 6.
  5. Get Social 4, Negotiations 2 (or 3). Getting Distribution/Security relations is questionable as the book cost 20M so you need to earn 150M from mission LP rewards just to break even and I doubt you can do it before reaching 6/6 standing (which is good for a trader alt)
  6. Learn Connection 3, to access higher level agents faster, then learn your starter trading skills which are Trade 4, Retail 3, Accounting 4, Margin Trading 3, Broker relations 3, Contracting 2, Diplomacy 2. While the learning is in progress, do the next steps, these skills won't help them.
  7. Get a destroyer, fit it with 6 weapons, leave 2 slots for miner, civilian salvager, civilian logi modul that you'll get for missions
  8. Do all the career agent missions. When doing the scanning missions, take 3 documents from each container
  9. Fly to the next career agent hub and do the missions. You can instantly complete the scanning missions using the documents from the first hub
  10. Elevate your standing using distribution missions and datacenter missions or your main boosting securities. Your alt can safely join the fight in a capsule as the NPC pirates don't podkill.
  11. If you want to haul between hubs, watch out for dislikes! You must stay above -5 with diplomacy or the faction police shoots you. It's especially nasty with Caldari-Gallente as they hate each other with 0.5 modification. Remember, you don't have to get to zero, just to -4.9, and Diplomacy is a simple (x1) skill, with Diplomacy 4, you can go down to -7.7 unmodified skill and stay safe.
  12. When your skills are learned and your standing is above 5/5, start trading and keep learning skills or start your next alt if you have capital

Business report: 4.48B (0.4B gifts, 3 PLEX behind for second account) Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.  Personal note: I finally got to 8 standing with Caldari Navy, so can have jump clones. No more missions for my main. Ever.

PS: if you know about EVE business blogs (trading, hauling, mining, manufacturing, planet industry), please send me the link. It's not like I don't want to link them, I just can't find them.

16 comments:

IO said...

http://ardentdefense.wordpress.com/
http://k162space.com/
http://eve-fail.blogspot.com/

There are not much industry/trade blogs, these are the only ones I found.

Anonymous said...

www.eve-central.com
Not a blog, but a good resource for finding some trading trends in profitable sales. Information posted is usually not in real time (they upload data from 3rd party software) so the profits it predicts are seldom 100% accurate. Possibly more useful for haulers than station traders, though it could be of use to a station trader.

Peter Petermann said...

Well, i'm aware that you are far from this kind of gameplay, but there is stuff for which you really want at least two accounts.

Basically every pilot who has a jumpdrive capable ship should get a second account, simply to be able to drop cynosural fields for his capital ship, otherwise hes always dependend on others to move those ship arround.
Obviously this is semi-true for Black Ops or Jump Freighters, but what good are those if you can't use the jumpdrive?

Also, when training for a capital ship, and even more when training for a supercapital ship, you should always do that with an alt. When playing the (super)capital game, nothing is more annoying than having your main character bound in a ship which is on standby.
Also when flying supercarriers or titans, which you cannot dock, you really want them on a fully trained alt rather than switching ship around all the time (risky)

Anonymous said...

Hope you didn't spend too much time keeping your standings up; faction standing can go as low as -5.00 before the police start shooting at you. Security status, you're safe up to -2.0 in 1.0 sec systems, -2.5 in .9, -3.0 in .8, etc.

Gevlon said...

@Peter: I fully accept these reasons for a second alt. However you should really be able to fund these with PLEX bought for ISK. I mean if you have a jump freighter and can't haul enough to pay for a PLEX you must really really suck. Not to mention a 78B titan in the hands of someone who can't even get 0.5B for a PLEX.

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: damn, you are right. Luckily I did not start it, so no time wasted there. I thought faction standing act exactly as security standing.

Dàchéng said...

I'm not sure I understand why you are reporting the PLEX separately from the ISK. Surely the PLEX is just another item you bought with your ISK? For instance, if you paid, say, 1.2B for 3 plex, then your business report should simply read "3.28B (0.4B gifts)"?

Gevlon said...

@Dacheng: PLEX prices vary. When I'll buy a PLEX, it may cost much more than today.

Caramael said...

This is really getting sillier each week. You oppose people buying time spent in-game, yet you agree to sell it to them.
No longer are you proving a newbie can play EVE without buying time, you're only proving that the game is, in fact, designed to heavily motivate time trading.
Just look at how fast you bought into starting up another account which needs to be paid for with real money. EVE's skill system wins again.

Also, anyone can train to fly a jump freighter. Whether they'll be able to make enough ISK to buy a PLEX, only depends on the amount of time they are willing to fly it, everything else is hardly significant.

Dàchéng said...

Gevlon, of course I understand PLEX prices vary. But I had gotten the mistaken impression that you already paid for them with ISK, and knew exactly how much you paid. I didn't understand that you bought them with real-life money. Is that correct? Did you pay for the plex in Forints?

When you already have enough ISK to buy the PLEX with that, what was the motivation for using real-life money?

Gevlon said...

@Dacheng: I did not buy PLEX, I bought 6 months game time via a credit card, using the "power of 2" promotion. It was a "pay 3 months worth, get 6" sale. I also paid the first 2 months of my main with my credit card.

Buying time for yourself is cheaper than buying a PLEX and using it yourself.

Peter Petermann said...

@Gevlon shouldn't be if you buy Timecode and convert that to Plex

Ephemeron said...

However you can "un-boost" yourself by paying the second account with PLEX you buy for ISK. This way your second account is upheld by in-game means, aka "playing better".

That logic would work if you could buy PLEX for ISK directly from CCP. That, however, is not the case.

When pay for your account with ingame-bought PLEX, your ISK are going to some Arthasdklol. You're spending your own time and energy to give him stuff - just like "freindly helpful ppl" that you so rightly despise. And now that you have two accounts, you'll be boosting twice as many of them!

No, paying directly for your accounts (whether 1, 2 or 20) is the correct way to go. That 15$/month is a fee that you pay for the privilege of denying boosts to M&S.

Andrei said...

@Ephemeron "No, paying directly for your accounts (whether 1, 2 or 20) is the correct way to go. That 15$/month is a fee that you pay for the privilege of denying boosts to M&S."

But what if you suck in RL or spend too much time and energy in EVE so you cannot afford to pay $15/month for multiple alts? In this case you have to rely on rich Arthasdklol to boost you.

Ironic how your logic can work both ways. Anyway if you can afford $300/month to pay for 20 accounts you can spend the same $300 to buy roughly 9B ISK/month. Pretty nifty worry free income by any standard.

Ephemeron said...

"But what if you suck in RL or spend too much time and energy in EVE so you cannot afford to pay $15/month for multiple alts?"

If my financial situation is so dire that I can't afford 15$/month, and yet I still choose to spend my time playing EVE instead of working, looking for a job/better job or studying, then I'm either an irresponsible moron or an indentured gold farmer from a third world country.

Joe said...

1. Buy skilled characters via the Character Bazaar instead of waiting?

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=277

2. "The Standing Correction Agency" will raise your standing for ISK.

http://community.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1460506&page=1


Surely station trading is a better use of time for a goblin, not running missions for standing or waiting for a character to train skills.