Today I post how I made 124B during the Feb 22-28B week, plus a little extra during the run-up and run-down days. The idea came after I made 297B from selling unused skillpoints and (50B more from assorted deals). That 297B isn't "profit", as I merely sold assets I already had. The idea is simple: what if I'd sell the skillpoints of the characters owned by other people. So I hit the bazaar, bought a few pilots, stripped them and sold the skillpoints. Well, "a few" might be an understatement (click name for bazaar link):
That's a nice profit for "buy pilot, strip pilot, sell injector". Why did I stop bidding on new characters at the end of the week and only buy pilots I started bidding earlier? Because this business is extremely grindy and no-life. The first is simple: the strip interface was clearly created with the idea that people will fill only a few extractors (see also: only a handful of titans will ever be built). Stripping down thousands of skills is a horrible clickfest. I don't understand why don't they allow creating more than one injector in one run, for example 10, by making the progress bar 5M long instead of 0.5M and why don't they have some right-click option to extract all ranks of a skill at once. Extracting 5K injector worth of skills was tedious and annoying, and it comes from someone whose favorite playstyle is updating market orders.
The "no-life" part is different from simply "many hours". It means "commanding your life schedule". Mining missions take many hours to create meaningful income, but you can just leave them at any moment and don't return to them until you have nothing better to do. This pilot purchase spree wasn't anything like that. Why? Because I've spent 2T on purchases, and that's 2T I didn't have. I could only do it by extracting a pilot as soon as he arrived so I can sell the injectors to get my money back to pay for the next pilot. I had no control when a seller decided that he waits no longer and accepts my offer. I couldn't even hope that this madness ends in the near future as most of my profits didn't come in liquid ISK but in stripped pilots who do worth their price but take months to provide it in liquid (more on that tomorrow). Please note the two 25B+ worth of pilots, they had titan skillbook injected, so instead of stripping them, I decided to train them to good titan pilots and sell them as one. I won't see that money until the sale.
Let's add that I had money locked in PLEX-es that I got for buy orders. As I converted over 1250 PLEX-es to AUR and another 50 were used on accounts (about 3% of the total PLEX transactions of EVE in this period was me), saving 20-40M on each was quite an income source on top of the mentioned. I also didn't list the extra profit coming from selling the injectors other places than Jita, as I could have that profit if the injectors were from Jita buy orders. These "side" incomes are over 50B. I'm surprised that you can still profitably haul PLEX from Jita to Amarr or Dodi, I expected others to take on this business too. Oh wait, some did.
Also, the character bazaar is full of idiots and the predators feasting on them. Click on any of the links below and you find a moron who sold his pilot at serious loss, because he has the attention span of a 3 years old. Check them out and see a pattern: guy offers his pilot at very low prices, predator jumps on it and he makes the deal, sometimes literally just minutes after the opening post. Despite writing a blog about morons and slackers, they can still surprise me: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25.
The only way to battle that is camping the forum and instantly offer them a decent price, so the predators who would smooth-talk them into an instant sale can't compete. These guys were obviously limited by the same capital issues as me, probably much more, so they couldn't buy several pilots for 2-4B profit, (actually they often outbid me and then failed to deliver ISK to seller and I got the pilot a few days later) they needed to catch that idiot with 10B. Of course this needed pressing F5 in the bazaar main page, waiting for a new idiot offer to appear. If you are pressing F5 on a forum, you should rethink what you are doing and that's what I did. The half trillion per month income be damned, I won't spam clicks on the extraction interface at late night again, nor I will ever deal with the bazaar nonsense.
I rather take a lower income which comes with a schedule I command and much less hours. If you have no life, take this field, it's all yours. Tomorrow comes how can you profit from this on a much smaller scale, but again, with life.
PS: why is this post called "Friggageddon"? Because I made it a personal crusade to extract every frigate skill (except mining) from the pilots.
PS2: some pilots had assets with them at transfer. One of them had extremely valuable ones and it didn't evade the watchful eye of Reddit. So someoen please link this post on Reddit, so people will learn the true nature of that mistery.
| Name | Price (B) | Date | Injectors | Jita sell (M) | Stripped value | Profit (B) |
| leeh loo | 22 | 02.20.16 | 67 | 645 | 2.5 | 5.5 |
| Dark Ni | 33 | 02.20.16 | 96 | 655 | 2.5 | 6.3 |
| angle reaper | 66 | 02.21.16 | 191 | 645 | 2.5 | 7.7 |
| gerku | 84 | 02.21.16 | 249 | 645 | 2.5 | 11.4 |
| Tough Mudder | 17 | 02.21.16 | 45 | 650 | 2.5 | 2.5 |
| john b-ice | 13 | 02.21.16 | 32 | 650 | 2.5 | 1.6 |
| Rancid Cooter | 10 | 02.21.16 | 23 | 650 | 2.5 | 1.2 |
| Sweeter Death | 98 | 02.22.16 | 278 | 645 | 2.5 | 8.2 |
| Celestin Eullon | 23 | 02.22.16 | 65 | 655 | 2.5 | 4.4 |
| Analeesa | 94 | 02.22.16 | 256 | 640 | 2.5 | 2.7 |
| Kohursr Mitthrassafis | 63 | 02.22.16 | 167 | 645 | 2.5 | 1.8 |
| Jarl Borg | 23 | 02.23.16 | 65 | 635 | 2.5 | 3.1 |
| Baldrick Baldicus | 22 | 02.23.16 | 60 | 640 | 2.5 | 2.6 |
| Babylon Wolf | 56 | 02.23.16 | 99 | 640 | 26.7 | 7.1 |
| Drake McCake | 21 | 02.23.16 | 60 | 638 | 2.5 | 3.5 |
| SLEWF00T | 31 | 02.23.16 | 95 | 635 | 2.5 | 6.0 |
| The Crimson Pirate | 23 | 02.23.16 | 55 | 645 | 2.5 | 0.0 |
| Fergus McFeral | 48 | 02.23.16 | 130 | 641 | 2.5 | 2.5 |
| German Lojek | 13 | 02.24.16 | 32 | 635 | 2.5 | 1.1 |
| Ramyan Montaneau | 8 | 02.24.16 | 15 | 638 | 2.5 | 0.0 |
| Argonicon | 37 | 02.24.16 | 98 | 638 | 2.5 | 1.4 |
| DareJedi | 126 | 02.24.16 | 350 | 638 | 2.5 | 4.6 |
| HEnOCEgA | 20 | 02.24.16 | 50 | 637 | 2.5 | 0.8 |
| Coffee Shopper | 20 | 02.24.16 | 59 | 640 | 2.5 | 4.2 |
| Sofocles Immortalis | 27 | 02.24.16 | 67 | 638 | 2.5 | 0.0 |
| YourDread43 | 41 | 02.24.16 | 37 | 638 | 29.7 | 2.2 |
| WhiteRaven27 | 12.5 | 02.24.16 | 29 | 637 | 2.5 | 0.6 |
| KyleTheDefiler | 38 | 02.24.16 | 107 | 638 | 2.5 | 3.7 |
| mescamalug | 63 | 02.24.16 | 172 | 640 | 2.5 | 2.8 |
| Helmstooth | 17 | 02.25.16 | 45 | 638 | 2.5 | 2.0 |
| Johny Silver | 20.5 | 02.25.16 | 59 | 638 | 2.5 | 3.6 |
| Hela Inarhki | 26 | 02.25.16 | 68 | 637 | 2.5 | 1.3 |
| RECONIZ | 33 | 02.25.16 | 89 | 640 | 2.5 | 2.3 |
| Dirty Demon | 53 | 02.26.16 | 148 | 638 | 2.5 | 3.7 |
| Zapp Bastanold | 16 | 02.26.16 | 41 | 640 | 2.5 | 1.6 |
| Valery Sorciere | 47 | 02.26.16 | 129 | 638 | 2.5 | 2.7 |
| Dionysus Nabali | 17 | 02.26.16 | 49 | 640 | 2.5 | 3.5 |
| Tobias Arthie | 9 | 02.26.16 | 24 | 640 | 2.5 | 2.3 |
| Capt Sly | 70 | 02.26.16 | 202 | 641 | 2.5 | 7.0 |
| amego | 126 | 02.27.16 | 346 | 640 | 2.5 | 3.8 |
| GUmaq | 49 | 02.27.16 | 141 | 641 | 2.5 | 5.5 |
| Doctor BluePills | 17 | 02.27.16 | 49 | 640 | 2.5 | 3.5 |
| Miss Texas | 36 | 02.28.16 | 101 | 640 | 2.5 | 3.7 |
| Dakos Arzi | 15 | 02.28.16 | 40 | 640 | 2.5 | 2.2 |
| Commander CJKueller | 24 | 02.28.16 | 68 | 640 | 2.5 | 3.5 |
| Phantom Miner | 39 | 02.28.16 | 110 | 640 | 2.5 | 4.0 |
| DoomLord Kane | 50 | 02.28.16 | 137 | 635 | 2.5 | 2.2 |
| Bambr Lemmont | 38 | 02.28.16 | 102 | 640 | 2.5 | 2.0 |
| Shelen Veres | 5 | 02.28.16 | 15 | 640 | 2.5 | 3.0 |
| Dasa Dah | 35 | 02.29.16 | 97 | 641 | 2.5 | 3.3 |
| PACSguy Von | 19 | 02.29.16 | 51 | 641 | 2.5 | 2.3 |
| zKnightz | 99 | 02.29.16 | 281 | 638 | 2.5 | 6.3 |
| P4elo Matka | 16 | 02.29.16 | 44 | 638 | 2.5 | 2.6 |
| Total | 2029 | 5485 | 183.9 | 177.5 |
That's a nice profit for "buy pilot, strip pilot, sell injector". Why did I stop bidding on new characters at the end of the week and only buy pilots I started bidding earlier? Because this business is extremely grindy and no-life. The first is simple: the strip interface was clearly created with the idea that people will fill only a few extractors (see also: only a handful of titans will ever be built). Stripping down thousands of skills is a horrible clickfest. I don't understand why don't they allow creating more than one injector in one run, for example 10, by making the progress bar 5M long instead of 0.5M and why don't they have some right-click option to extract all ranks of a skill at once. Extracting 5K injector worth of skills was tedious and annoying, and it comes from someone whose favorite playstyle is updating market orders.
The "no-life" part is different from simply "many hours". It means "commanding your life schedule". Mining missions take many hours to create meaningful income, but you can just leave them at any moment and don't return to them until you have nothing better to do. This pilot purchase spree wasn't anything like that. Why? Because I've spent 2T on purchases, and that's 2T I didn't have. I could only do it by extracting a pilot as soon as he arrived so I can sell the injectors to get my money back to pay for the next pilot. I had no control when a seller decided that he waits no longer and accepts my offer. I couldn't even hope that this madness ends in the near future as most of my profits didn't come in liquid ISK but in stripped pilots who do worth their price but take months to provide it in liquid (more on that tomorrow). Please note the two 25B+ worth of pilots, they had titan skillbook injected, so instead of stripping them, I decided to train them to good titan pilots and sell them as one. I won't see that money until the sale.
Let's add that I had money locked in PLEX-es that I got for buy orders. As I converted over 1250 PLEX-es to AUR and another 50 were used on accounts (about 3% of the total PLEX transactions of EVE in this period was me), saving 20-40M on each was quite an income source on top of the mentioned. I also didn't list the extra profit coming from selling the injectors other places than Jita, as I could have that profit if the injectors were from Jita buy orders. These "side" incomes are over 50B. I'm surprised that you can still profitably haul PLEX from Jita to Amarr or Dodi, I expected others to take on this business too. Oh wait, some did.
Also, the character bazaar is full of idiots and the predators feasting on them. Click on any of the links below and you find a moron who sold his pilot at serious loss, because he has the attention span of a 3 years old. Check them out and see a pattern: guy offers his pilot at very low prices, predator jumps on it and he makes the deal, sometimes literally just minutes after the opening post. Despite writing a blog about morons and slackers, they can still surprise me: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25.
The only way to battle that is camping the forum and instantly offer them a decent price, so the predators who would smooth-talk them into an instant sale can't compete. These guys were obviously limited by the same capital issues as me, probably much more, so they couldn't buy several pilots for 2-4B profit, (actually they often outbid me and then failed to deliver ISK to seller and I got the pilot a few days later) they needed to catch that idiot with 10B. Of course this needed pressing F5 in the bazaar main page, waiting for a new idiot offer to appear. If you are pressing F5 on a forum, you should rethink what you are doing and that's what I did. The half trillion per month income be damned, I won't spam clicks on the extraction interface at late night again, nor I will ever deal with the bazaar nonsense.
I rather take a lower income which comes with a schedule I command and much less hours. If you have no life, take this field, it's all yours. Tomorrow comes how can you profit from this on a much smaller scale, but again, with life.
PS: why is this post called "Friggageddon"? Because I made it a personal crusade to extract every frigate skill (except mining) from the pilots.
PS2: some pilots had assets with them at transfer. One of them had extremely valuable ones and it didn't evade the watchful eye of Reddit. So someoen please link this post on Reddit, so people will learn the true nature of that mistery.
24 comments:
1. Create a new account for the character you buy with a referral link
2. Use a plex to activate the account you just created
3. tell the guy who sells you the character to this new created account
You now have a fresh account with 51 days of play time with a character that is most likely able to train at 2700SP/hour, on top of that you get 30 days for your other account via the referral system
You just doubled the value of a plex
First of the bazar links is broken, should be just https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=6356278
@anon: that's obvious that you should use every promotion while creating accounts
@Hanura: fixed
I'm confused about how your stats work out. I take it "jita sell (b)" is really "jita sell (m)". Beyond that, is "stripped value" (which I assume to be the value of the character once you're done with them) included in the profit calculation, or is that deducted as they are likely unsellable at more than the transfer cost? With those characters still having value, does that mean you had to pay to open some accounts to hold them? Is that reflected in the profit?
Also why are some profit zero, like the crimson pilot for example A quick look says that his SP value would be less than the price paid, so is that not a loss, or is zero as low as you consider them?
Jita sell fixed.
Stripped value is included, as mentioned in the post that most of the profit is in them. Tomorrow you see why. The account costs are not listed since they also belong to tomorrow's post.
Some profits are zero, because I made a miscalculation and bid too much. Calculate Crimson Pirate again, the injectors plus leftover is zero.
Even if you never post my comments, I'm glad you noticed me.
Did I? Where, when?
That hurts. I created the reddit thread you linked.
Done, replied on reddit for you :)
"Stripped value is included, as mentioned in the post that most of the profit is in them. Tomorrow you see why. The account costs are not listed since they also belong to tomorrow's post."
Well then I'm really confused. Since that means if the stripped cost is included in the profit column, and the profit column total is lower than the stripped character cost then surely that means you made a loss on the SP?
@Anon: if you buy a new Ferrari for $1, you made a bad deal, since you lost $1 liquid.
"if you buy a new Ferrari for $1, you made a bad deal, since you lost $1 liquid."
Yes, that's obviously silly, but what I'm saying is that you bought characters for selling their SP, and their SP didn't even cover their costs. If you plan on selling the characters that will cost you 2.4b per character + at least one plex per group of 3 (as you can't transfer them from an inactive account). Their stripped value is merely an estimate at this point, so isn't really profit. It's more like buying a garage filled with high tech equipment for $10000, selling all of the equipment for $9500, then hoping someone will pay more than $500 for an empty garage while you continue to have to pay maintenance for it.
I don't dispute that you probably will turn a profit on this, but at this point with the limited information you've given it just looks like you threw away a few billion and spent a lot of time doing so.
1: there are two titan pilots in training. If I'd strip them to 5M, I'd already be in 40B liquid plus.
2: who said I want to sell the garage?! The situation is this: I need a garage for my car. I can buy one for $2000. Instead I buy one filled with equipment for $10000 and sell the equipment for $9500. By doing this I saved $1500, which can be called liquid profit. Now of course if it turns out that owning a garage is a bad idea, I can still lose, but that loss is on the "garage owning business" and not the "garage buying business".
"there are two titan pilots in training. If I'd strip them to 5M, I'd already be in 40B liquid plus"
Ah, OK, makes sense.
"who said I want to sell the garage?! The situation is this: I need a garage for my car. I can buy one for $2000."
Sure, but then you are still only making a profit on many of those characters if you are able to sell the character for the amount you value it at, which is unlikely. 20 of those characters you've technically made a loss on even if you don't consider the price of the accounts.
Also, you bought 5349 extractors for the non-titan pilots right? So if you think, selling those for sell prices estimating the price you brought them would easily yield 8m per extractor (I'd aim for 10, but 8 would be acceptable), which would mean that through station trading the extractors alone you would have made more isk, wouldn't have needed the accounts or the time investment of buying the chars, getting them transferred and stripping all of their SP.
Still just seems like a bad play to me.
"By doing this I saved $1500, which can be called liquid profit."
Can it though? This is some real creative accounting you're doing here.
Liquid: (of assets) held in cash or easily converted into cash.
If you're intending to start up an SP farm, are you going to be forgetting about the fact that you got those characters cheap when working out the ROI for them? You can't eat your cake and still have it in reality.
@Elizabeth: tomorrows post will show my SP farm. Buying-stripping pilots was a method to greatly decrease its initial cost.
If I bought 5M pilots from the bazaar, or just buy a bunch of PLEX and let them reach 5M from newb, I'd spend 2.5B both cases. By not spending 2.5B, I have 2.5 liquid.
" tomorrows post will show my SP farm. Buying-stripping pilots was a method to greatly decrease its initial cost.
If I bought 5M pilots from the bazaar, or just buy a bunch of PLEX and let them reach 5M from newb, I'd spend 2.5B both cases. By not spending 2.5B, I have 2.5 liquid."
I'd really be surprised if that's true. Say we consider that all of your new characters have 5.4m sp after they are stripped, that means you've effectively paid 2.5m per 5.4m sp, so you've paid 51 * 2.5b for 51 non-titan characters. That's 127.5b for 51 characters.
Now, if you instead opened a buddy account to yourself, then paid with a PLEX, you get another plex back as a reward, so you get a 51 day account for nothing. You can repeat this 51 times to reach the same number of characters. Each character you create on those accounts starts with 600,000 SP, so to reach 5.4m SP you need a total of 71 days, so you need 20 more days on each account. Assuming plex is 1.2b for 30 days, you need to spend 800m * 51 = 40.8b for the extra 20 days on all of those accounts. In addition each of those characters needs implants, but since you are only selling the SP, the skills you inject are irrelevant, so you'll only need two implants and you just stick to skills with the same attributes, so that's about 230m per account, so 230m * 51 = 11.73b So to sum that all up, 51 accounts all reaching 5.4m SP would costs 40.8b + 11.73b = 52.53b.
So overall you have effectively paid 127.5b for characters which would cost you 52.53b to create, so you overpaid by 74.97b, or 1.47b per character, and that's if the average remaining SP on those characters is 5.4m which I doubt. If they bring back power of two, it will be ever more of a difference.
You can transfer characters to buddy accounts. So I could get these pilots ON TOP of buddy account promotion
"You can transfer characters to buddy accounts. So I could get these pilots ON TOP of buddy account promotion"
Sure, but that doesn't change that you still had to pay 2.5 for the character while you could build them for about a bil, the the actual characters value is not 2.5b. You couldn't really say "The character is valued at 2.5b AND I get all these free days" because the free days eaten up by the overvaluing of the character. At best you break about even with someone doing it from fresh but had to put in an enormous amount of work to achieve it.
The real question is, did you use the buddy account system to do it?
Are you dumb or trolling?
If you transfer a 5M+ SP pilot to a buddy account, you can use its "free" days to further train it and then sell the SP.
Buddy account, media account, $ paid account makes absolutely no difference in the "buy pilot vs train pilot" question!
Sure you can, but you are valuing the character, not the account at 2.5b, which it isn't. Further down the line once it's happily training along it's not going to be suddenly worth 2.5b, so adding that up as if it's the actual value is a massive misrepresentation, moreso if you then go on to claim the additional SP as additional profit again later. You're also shunning the idea of building characters for SP farms when you have achieved about the same in value as they would for significantly more effort.
Like you said earlier "If I bought 5M pilots from the bazaar, or just buy a bunch of PLEX and let them reach 5M from newb, I'd spend 2.5B both cases", but you wouldn't, you'd spend 1.03b training them up from noob.
By the way, did you use buddy accounts?
Of course I used buddy accounts, but it's completely irrelevant, as the CHARACTER worth 2.5B. I try to explain it as simple as possible:
- you have an account. Normal, buddy, media, whatever.
- Upkeeping that account costs you X for. You have to pay it even if there is nothing on that account, just to keep the account running. It's sunk cost.
- You can put a fresh pilot to it and it will start generating injectors after 9 weeks
- You can buy a 5M pilot on the bazaar for 2.5B and it will start generating injectors instantly, so after 9 weeks, you'll have 9 injectors, 3.2B more than in the first case. So there is 0.7B profit right there.
- I did NOT pay 2.5B for a pilot. I got about 0.5B for every new pilot as I bought high SP ones and stripped them. for about 0.5B more than I paid.
Ouch, so many good characters wrecked.
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