Greedy Goblin

Friday, June 22, 2012

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette was the queen consort of Louis XVI of France and executed in the French Revolution. While there are serious doubts that she told the phrase "let them eat cake" when she was informed that the commoners have no bread, it's no doubt that she had no clue what is going on around her. She became an archetype of the nobles who waste a fortune while their people are in poverty. While she wasn't worse than anyone in the same circles, she still profited greatly from the politics that kept the average people in poverty and oppression. So while she might not deserved her head cut down, she definitely deserved the hate and despise of the public.

She came to my mind when I was writing the first draft for my July 15 "blogging my profit away" post. In the last week my average daily profit was above 1.5B. My income/active hour is over 500M and I won't stop until I increase it to 1B/hour. While I'm doing it, I'm blogging about making ISK and various things in and out of game. The draft of the post describing my method contained more and more "let them eat cake" ideas like "set 30 buy orders in all 5 hubs, 100M+ each" or "don't forget that due to margin trading you need cash for your buys to complete so make sure you have a few billions on every alt before you log out for the night" and "have more than one orcafleet owning hauler working for you on a daily schedule".

Are these make any sense to write down? I mean the purpose of my blog is not some Marie Antoinette bragging (where you talk casually about extraordinary things to express that these are totally everyday boring stuff for you, like "gosh, I must get my Lamborghinies washed down"). Not only because her behavior caused her some headache at the end, but because it's pointless. It's not like I can force anyone reading useless posts.

I want to show people that by trading they can get rich. But will I convince anyone if I display such wealth? If they believe that I got my money because of me being extraordinary (either as a genius or a no-life grinder) my blog has failed. I believe I'm not making anything extraordinary and anyone can do as I do. However the above comment is clearly Marie Antoinette-ish, because it's obvious that making 40B a month is huge in a game where most people (by definition) can't even get 0.5B to pay their subscription with a PLEX.

There are two possibilities. One is that I'm Marie Antoinette, just like the guy (no link found just rumors) who said "yeah I lost some titans to the Russians, but who doesn't?". This means that I'm filthy rich, my monthly and hourly income puts me among the very best. This case my business posts are generally useless and if I want to be useful, I have to post about much smaller things, like basic money management and "how to get your first 50M" posts.

The other is the community consist of two distinct groups, with one of them being much-much more successful than the other, and I'm an ordinary guy in the successful group. The best example is WoW raiding: the normal mode raids were easy and completing them gave no real bragging rights to anyone, despite only 5-10% of the playerbase did it. Completing it meant nothing more than you are not a faceroller in an ungemmed/unenchanted clownsuit. In this case it's completely normal and beneficial to post in the style that targets the elite, as the rest are the facerolling clowns and beyond hope anyway.

So please tell me: Is 10B+a month the normal thing that every decent player has (or had when he was building his supercap, can't be bothered since then)? Or is it something extraordinary and most good players are making 1-2B a month that is enough to pay for a few accounts and to replace a lost faction-fitted Tengu now and then, but supercaps are strictly alliance-level investments where lot of players work together to provide one ship to a chosen pilot? I'm fully aware that if the second option is the correct one, I'm already Marie Antoinette for not knowing, but the first step of fixing something is recognizing it.


Friday morning report: 61.6B (1+2 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on logi, 0.5 on Titan, 0.4 on Rorqual)

33 comments:

Anonymous said...

A related stat: about 7k PLEX traded each day:
http://twitter.com/CCP_Diagoras/status/190942736222912512

That means ~200k active accounts are run off PLEX. That's about half of the 400k CCP claimed as active subscribers around the same time.

So 50% of the player base are unable to make 500m/month profit.

Anonymous said...

1-2bn per month per account = 35-70m per day per account. I dont know anyone who doesnt make that, so over 5 accounts, 10bn per month = 1-2bn per month, or, 10-20m per char per day.

@anonymous, dont assume that paying by cash = not able to make profit in game. Some prefer to use a cc each month, others a plex.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon
i'm playing since 2006, and as most players that play for that long i have my ways of making isk - but i dont have my focus on it, since frankly i think its the most boring part of eve, no matter what you do to get ISK. Either way, in some month i have income of only 5bn, in some i make up to 12.
However i believe i have alot more costs than you aswell. (Jumpfuel, Posfuel, 5 accounts that need paying, clone replacements, ship replacements..)

btw: i believe you mixed up July / June in your post.

@Anonymous: 7000 traded plex != 7000 conversions a day.

Setsune Rin said...

i usually run an evening of complexes and that pays for my accounts for the month while i fuck around the rest of the week

while silently doing research and waiting for my alt to hit his training goal before switching the in training character to a trade alt

i cant say your blog has been awefully helpfull to this end

but yeah, i make enough to plex my accounts and replace a tengu or two

Anonymous said...

It is really not that much. A lot of PvP'ers make that in order to fund their playing activity. It just seems like a lot to you because you have nothing to spend it on. Your idea of winning is just the accumulation of wealth. Nothing wrong with that I suppose.

Also, in the big picture of things, with the number of accounts you have and characters, you are really making about what an average player makes on one character. Again, nothing wrong with that.

Unfortunately its the people that cry the loudest that you hear. So we always hear from the people who have no ISK. They are the minority, not the majority.

Once you get to the 1 trillion/month from just the accounts and characters you have, then it will be too the more elite status I think.

Anonymous said...

IIRC from a QEN the average in EVE is a few hundred million ISK. So 10B represents the lifetime accumulation of a couple of dozen players.

So you are clearly doing an extremely good job of earning ISK. However, I don't think you need to convince many players that they can get rich from trading. Most recognize this. It's just not something that interests them. For the overwhelming majority of the EVE player base, unfortunately, your billboard is valued far more than your wallet.

Anonymous said...

I'm not entirely sure who uses real money for EVE. My crowd certainly doesn't.

I was on a longish break from EVE, keeping my two accounts active by buying PLEX for isk of course.

I returned only because my isk was running out (that Gevlon has moved to EVE was a nice surprise). Did the lack of capital stop me from making billions? Not at all. Although I did choose simple farming activities.

See, whenever I play EVE, I set myself clear objectives. Objectives like "see what live in w-space is", or "destroy NC" or "make two years worth of PLEX in a couple of evenings".

Last month I made my billions in a single evening blitzing exploration sites for BPCs for the newly introduced modules. This month I made my billions in the Minmatar Tier 5 FW craze weekend, dual boxing major plexes in dual rep incursuses, often spending only 2-3 minutes per site thanks to all the incompetent dramiels setting me up. Of course, it turned out my goonie friends were also kind enough to set up the Tier 5.

Thanks to all that kindness my simple farming activities got me enough isk to comfortably last till Dust is out, when I'll be back with popcorn for the economy wrecking this event will cause. I know I'll make a lot of money that day.

Anonymous said...

Well, I have an old account that I rarely used. A month ago I begun a trial acc in the hope that I can make enough isk in 14 days from null to a plex worth of isk. Ended up with about 350M. Didn't wanted to waste that money on the end I managed to transfer it to my old account that I reactivated. It was a miner and had 8M on it!. With the plus money I had now, in two weeks, I made 1,2B in cash and assets. Yesterday I bought my first plex. So its not that hard if you learn from someone else the basics of Eve trading and use your common sense. And from more money comes more profit. I don't think its too extraordinary.
I learned much from this blog and from Full disclosure blog. It thought me fishing :)

Anti said...

i dont have enough experience in eve to comment.

but in WoW i had raider friends who were impressed by my millionaire status. but when they needed cashflow, for a mammoth or BoE epic, were quite able to go from 10k to 50k bank balance with a bit of effort. they just chose to not play the gold game every time they logged in. but for me it was always in the back of my mind.

NP said...

I don't think there is the dichotomy you're laying out. Yes, 95% of any MMO are facerollers. But no, that doesn't make the other 5% space-billionares who value wealth creation over other aspects of the game.

I, for one, am a new (~2-3 weeks) player and am quite happy with my small, but steadily growing wealth. It allows me to blow up hilariously in ships that match my SP, as I learn PVP. So long as the "dividends" I pay myself cover my losses, I am content. By the time I'm flying a Thundercat Tengu, hopefully my wealth will afford those losses with the same amount of effort as I put into it to fund my frigate losses now.

Do players like me fit within your vision for your readership? Or do you want to write mostly to market-pvp-ers who aspire to go 0-to-Titan one day?

Anonymous said...

>>will I convince anyone if I display such wealth? If they believe that I got my money because of me being extraordinary (either as a genius or a no-life grinder) my blog has failed.

Well it's a common knowledge your blog is from "this freaky dude which does some trading shit voodoo and makes heaps of golds out of his ass - and occasionally gives some down-to-earth gold making advice which you can use in making yourself richer in wow".

Except now you screwed up and switched to wrong game. :-P

You want more popularity? Go back to most recent Blizzard game, get rich there, post "get rich advice" daily and THEN slip some of your personal crusade posts in-between. That is, if you want any of your target population to read it.

Otherwise you are preaching to the audience which already knows the basics. While it's sometimes nice to have some concepts which you unconsciously were always aware of, formulated and structured - no offense, but there are other websites which are better at that.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, in a recent post you noted spending 2.5-3 hrs a day on ISK making. My guess is that only a tiny fraction of players spend that amount of time on the ISK game, most because they don't play the game for nearly that many hours.

My ISK making on far fewer hours/month covers my handful of ship losses and a PLEX, and allows me to concentrate on what I consider fun. Why would I bother making more? There is no need to have an Eve retirement fund.

Anonymous said...

for the majority of eve players, super caps are out of the question. While many super caps, particularly super carriers, are player purchased, the majority are going to be either alliance/corp funded or at least subsidized.

I think that the majority of toons run around with less than 5b in their wallets.

From experience, the only time I've had more than 10b in my wallet is when i was going for a mother ship and not since. with insurance and smart piloting in 0.0, it is somewhat a breakeven game where a billion can keep you in fleet ships for well over a month. it is only small gang and solo pvp that get really expensive.

Anonymous said...

Well, Gevlon... Go and reread the comments you made during the last couple of months, especially on people telling you what you are basically preaching now.

Sit back and look at yourself, and you should come to the correct conclusion by yourself.

From my opinion? You've come over as arrogant, ignorant and basically an asshat towards EVE players, especially when they were more experienced than you.

I remember you going on about "what the hell would someone do with 5 accounts?" or "spare me the I make $$$$$$$ISK/h, idiots", and all the other stuff you've thrown out there, just to see you sitting at that exact spot now.

Of all the ISK you make ingame, you haven't made and progress in what a lot of EVE is: Progress and change.

I think many people simply look at you as the guy that thinks the Wallet is the Highscore and you win the game by simply being on top. That's the reputation you have built up.

That's how you've come across, just saying. If that's good or not, is your choice, but this is the reputation that will stick on you in EVE for a long time.

Anonymous said...

Standard among the "successful" is about 2-5bn/month.
Past that, it's often considered meaningless.
I had managed to get to 1bn/h, but then i played "for money" about 4h/month.

Alkarasu said...

You look at some pretty interesting point here. I guess, the proper answer to this question will depend on what kind of people you really want to work with. If you want to call on someone, who have significant intellect, you can make his way a bit easier, but won't change much, as he'll find everything on his own, given some time (you may notice something he missed on the way, but chances of that are pretty slim). If your target is those people, who do possess some intellect and not afraid to use it, but got misinformed/misguided, your points are good - you really don't do anything anyone else can't (though you tend to spot more opportunities, then most, but that also can be achieved with some training, if needed). And if you want to teach M&S... well, your tuesday post was exactly about that. For them you will always be "Marie Antoinette", as you obviously have and use something, they don't have (or don't use) and can't get (or can't get any motivation to use), with the only difference it wasn't you who took it away from them.

Anonymous said...

for me - I don't have consistent income. I trade for a few days a month or a week or so in a row if there's a lul in nullsec fighting, then when I have enough to last me for a bit then I go pvp until the money runs out. I only have one account - it has a cyno/hauling trading alt that I trained up on another account for a while and also my main which continues training. this is all I want.

as for trading advice - I'm interested in sub-1 billion investments, usually sub 500 mil actually, and methods of finding good trading niches etc. most of my money's made by flipping within stations (or 1 or two jumps) or hauling t2 or faction cruisers/frigates around. I tried the Gallente freighter skillbooks after your first blogging your profit away and made a nice hundred mil but I just can't stomach the boredom of flying trade routes back and forth constantly

Nate Guralman said...

I've made 3B last month. I'm pretty sure I could have made more, but I've been trying out different things, some which make almost no money (click my name, it links to my blog where I've been documenting my trading experiments).

Based on the amount of questions I see on the forums and channels I'm in (including GoblinWorks), I don't think there are that many players making 10B a month. They aren't rare, but they aren't abundant either.

I think your "Marie Antoinette" blog post would still be really good. I'm sure there are players that make load of ISK that would benefit from it, but there are also traders like me that have simple strategies that make good ISK and would like to move to the next level.

Personally, I'd be really interested in your buy strategies, because I've been struggling with them.

Cathfaern said...

I think most people don't understand what Gevlon asks.
He wants to write blog post helping newbies, or avarage players how to get money in EVE (not M&S). But he doesn't know how many income or money an avarage people have in EVE. So he just wants to know that he should calculate with (eg.) 10k daily income and 200k base money, or 1m daily income and 20m base money, etc...

(I don't play EVE, so unfortunatly I don't know the answer)

Anonymous said...

In WoW I easily reached the gold cap long before it's increase with just 30min/day effort.

I started playing EVE a month after you, but I still do it very casually (took me 2 weeks to complete career agent missions). My knowledge about this game is still very low.

Now I actually don't do anything except trying to earn ISK. 30min/day. More on weekends.

My income is very irregular and my total assets atm are just 1B. I still can't find any RELIABLE way to make a steady profit. And my aim is quite low: 5B/month. That would perfectly fit my casual attitude.

Agent Black Cat said...

+1 to Evemonkey's request. My trader alt is sitting on roughly 100m in cash and assets with 4 days left on my trial account. I'd like to be running two accounts on PLEX and have some other large-ish expenses coming up (more about that on my own blog soon).

Instead of "this skillbook is good", I'd rather see some details on the process you personally use to scout for buys, your opinions on low margin/high turnover vs the opposite, what third party programs (if any) you use and so forth. This isn't to say I'll just take it all and do exactly the same thing but the dialog helps me see things I may have missed.

Fade Toblack said...

ISK is a means to an end, not the end-game itself.

I grind enough ISK - through various means - to fund PvP activities and cover certain regular outgoings. My overall net-worth is still increasing, but not as fast as it did when I started playing the game. I realised a long time ago that whilst I could grind a fortune - it wasn't that much fun, and nobody else cared.

As I happy to do some grind, I don't bother buying PLEX (although I get that some players don't want to do any grind, therefore PLEX is ideal.) The inverse of that is that I don't want have to grind more ISK for PLEX to fund accounts (do less of the fun things) and I'm happy to budget real money for the monthly sub.

You talk a lot about making ISK from people that are being M&S on the market - but sometimes I need something now, or just want to dump some stuff because I have something that's more interesting (to me) to do. At other times I'm doing something else in real-life and running EvE in the background, so can sit and play the market properly for a couple of hours.

Cap ships - not on my radar as part of a small alliance. They're a target for larger groups, so it's hard to make effective use of them without losing them. I'd rather spend the ISK on a stack of cruiser-sized ships that can gives me many hours more fun.

Finally something for you to think about... You've made your fortune through market trading - but that itself isn't an ISK faucet, so without all the people out there grinding the real faucets, you wouldn't now be rich.

Malthan said...

I don't think you'll get good answers by asking on the blog, since the average players doesn't read blogs, and certainly doesn't write comments. So you're bound to get a bunch of posts like "Yeah I make 10b a month by playing 1 day a week, so the average player makes billions" posts.

In my opinion if the average player could afford buying PLEX, then CCP would go out of business, or the PLEX prices would rise to a level where it would no longer be possible. It's more likely that there's a bunch of people making less than 100m a month, who buy PLEXes from CCP and sell them for ISK, and another group who make billions and can afford to buy PLEXes for all their 6 or 8 accounts.

Anonymous said...

I've been playing since '09, and accumulated 54 bill worth of assets over the years; despite this my liquid isk tended to hover around 2-5 billion.

I'm trying to get into trade as something to do semi-afk while I'm doing other things. Now that my trade skills on my alt are respectable, I've managed to do a bit of margin trading successfully, as well as the occasional freighter run.

The impression I get from your blog is that you're trying to find a sweet spot between 'this is so light on relevant information that I come across as bragging' and 'this is exactly the procedure I use to trade my way to riches'.

One thing you could consider is to build out some macro-enabled Excel spreadsheets that help you track the types of trades you do, and publish them along with tutorials on how to use them.

Another would be to publish more detailed information on your methods AFTER you have abandoned a particular trade type in favor of a more lucrative endeavor.

I dunno man. I'm still pretty new to trading, and the fact that detailed recipes for success are such a closely guarded secret, I haven't broken 100mill/day on trades.

Anonymous said...

At the end of the day, I guess it comes down to the fact that you might spend a few hours a day making that much money, and do it in a steady, predictable way.

Then there are these guys ->

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=124145

And pretty much every other stunning example of truly inspired people making metric f**ktons of ISK, and not only having fun doing it, but creating spectacular stories as well.

Which brings me to an answer- you're ahead of the curve if watching your wallet get bigger is your thing, but in the sum total, you're just as grindy as a miner or a mission runner, doing the same thing day in day out to make a profit. And that puts you in the 90% category.

Those guys up there? They're the 10% that people want to read about, and think, 'Damn, I wish I had thought of that.'

Kristophr said...

Don't worry about it.

Station trading is the golden road to making tons of ISK.

People like me, who don't have the mindset for it, will be doing the Sleeper/complex thing, and just make enough ISK to cover PLEX and expenses, and maybe grind hard once in a while to buy a new toy they have trained for ( I'll be using a Moros to escalate Sleepers ina week, and actually able to use it instead of swapping back to a sub-cap in about a month or so ).

You are not french nobility if you had to claw your way up from nothing.

Anonymous said...

The average player is seven months old so cap ships are obviously not in their future; even racial BS 5 probably is not. Since most spend the overwhelming majority of their skill point in combat skills, the odds of non-alts even having enough SP to get well-skilled in trade or Orca or freighter is not high, especially for a main.

kuon said...

I've been playing for 3 months and have about 200 million ISK.
I read a lot of your early blogs and a result have a alt that trades skillbooks and implants flying a shuttle for transport.
My other alt I do of mining with an Osprey / Giant Seucre Container / Mammoth combination. Your post blog on the mining battleship made me look at how I was mining. At that time I was just mining with a Badger Mk II.
I found your post on refining useful. Until then I was hauling ore as I though I would lose money refining.
Your first blogging away the profit post was only slightly useful as I couldn't afford most of the skillbooks you were in.
I have done a bit of mining in low sec. Only 0.4 sec at the moment as my ship is power enough to kill the belt pirates in anything lower.
I plan to upgrade to a Basilisk to be able to be low volulme mining of higher value ores in low/null sec.

As long as I can extract the principle of one of your posts and apply it to my level of affordabilty then they will be useful.
Otherwise I read them so that as I get more ISK I can go back and see what you were doing at the level that I am currently at.

Magson said...

I played for about 3.5 years. For the 1st 2.5-ish, I was a hi-sec mission running carebear. I'd log in each night and see if any of my friends were on. If they were e'd usually group up and either blast through some missions quickly, or roam through lowsec to see what kind of trouble we could get into. If no one was on, I'd run a level 4 or 2 solo and call it a night.

I had a CNR worth about 1.5 billion, then when T3's came out pimped out a Tengu and it was worth about 2 billion. Various other ships scattered around probably totaled another billion or so, plus I had a main clone with +5 implants, 2 clones wit +4's and my pvp clone had "only" +3's.

So... total assets in 2.5 years of more or less daily playing for an hour or so a night and I had aybe 4 billion in assets, and I never had had more than about 600 million in cash at any given time.

In the year I spent in nullsec I was in fleets and roams and such, but those didn't make money. I never really ran anomalies either, since my corp asked me to do a lot of PI for them. I was supposedly going to be paid for doing it, but never was, so overall, I'd say I lost about 2 billion out in null over that year. Even with that, I still had probably about 2 billion in assets, and never felt like I really needed more. If I needed something I had enough to buy it, so. . . . chasing ISK wasn't the game for me.

That said, I'm being more and more tempted to come back lately, and since I have the skills to fly a carrier, if not the cash to buy one, I may look into more isk chasing this time so as to get my own carrier, not borrow one from corp/alliance. Time will tell on that, though.

SandallE said...

It's fairly easy to make money trading. I do solely station trading (no hauling) for 15-20 minutes per day and still pull in about 3 billion per month (+15% profit). I could make more if I put more time and effort into it, but I have other things (in-game and out) to spend my time on.

Anti said...

if any complete newbie wants a method to get some startup capital i have a suggestion besides the obvious career agents.

a program called EveRefinery lets you find items on the market that can be reprocessed for profit. it finds sell orders for less than reprocessing value.

it isnt going to make you billions, there just isnt a large enough supply of items. but i was able to go from 5k to almost 3m in about half an hour of reprocessing on a completely new alt with zero skills and standings (87% efficency and 5% tax)

Anonymous said...

What non-speculative activites exist ? e.g. what is creating value ?

1-Mining (at the most 60mil/hour)
2-Industry but the character has to be quite dedicated, far more than what's recquire to mine
3- do missions (30mil/hour if efficient)

So a vast majority of players in EVE are making at most 50mil/hour. I can tell that's like that in my alliance.

Readers of this blog are obviously old players or intrested in finding ways to make ISK so they are making much more.

So yeah, you are making lots of ISK when compared to an average player BUT you are still far from being a top trader in EVE. So i agree with a previous comment, please respect a little more a community that is far less dumb than the average WoW player.

Anonymous said...

I run around in eve with about 1bn in cash and about 2bn in assets spread between two toons. I'd love to get my gameplay covered off by isk to plex, but time is a limiting factor for me. Dabbled a bit in trading, now working in 0.0 and slowly but.ding up income streams. The most I've ever had in my pockets is about 1.4 B, though I could always sell the Vargur.. :). Getting that "one good isk printing method" in place has never seemed to happen.....