I am an old fogey. This means I was there when Elite was first released on tape and I was one of those kids who played forever to grind myself all the way to Elite status. One of the beautiful things about Elite was that you could get involved in trading. Although this was on a small scale and it was fairly predictable. You just flew from one type of planet to another trading what you ‘knew’ they would need.
The materials needed to build a Maelstrom.
Fast forward to Eve around 30 years later and it is quite a different story. Market trading in Eve is so much more dynamic. Prices fluctuate with a fluidity and on a scale that no other game can compare to. I have seen many MMO markets and the truth is nothing comes even close to the degree of sophistication and complexity of the market in Eve. I have spend a few weeks looking at this and I am pretty sure I am only scratching the surface. In fact I know I am.
Lets try a summary. First of all there are thirteen categories (Ammunition and Charges, Apparel, Blueprints, Drones, Implants and Boosters, Manufacture and Research, Planetary Infrastructure, Ship Equipment, Ship Modifications, Ships, Skills, Starbase & Sovereignty Structures and Trade good). Each of these break down into further sub categories for example there are nine types of ship some of these are split into three and four sub types all with different race variants and in some instances other types such as ORE Industrial ships. Then go to modules for ships and it gets more complicated – some ships have multiple slots that can be filled with different load outs. If you do a search on Eve Central there are 5,823 items that can be bought or sold on the market.
Then it gets even more complex. Minerals can be mined, they can also be re-processed from ship components. These can then be combined to build ships. It goes on. To build ships players can build basic ships from things called blue prints. Tech II and Tech III ships are built from Blueprints that are invented, dropped or rewarded from Non Player Corporations. Some Tech II ships are built from BPO’s but CCP stopped something that was once known as the lottery and has made the thing even more player led by enabling players to invent their own BPC’s. I could go on. Just take the Maelstrom it says that you will need the materials that are in the image above.
The Deimos blueprint.
Tech II ships need to have Tech II components some of which cannot be made anywhere but within Player Owned structures. The second image to the right is a good summary of what you would need to build a Deimos. To me the complexity of this way outstrips anything that I have ever seen before. So you have that level of complexity embedded within the game. Most of the high tech components need material that is mined from specific moons which of course is what the big 0.0 alliances fight over. There really is no other way to put it other than this is the engine of Eve. Its the thing that keeps it going.
But it only keeps it going because the economy has the same structure as any other real economy. Basically the engine driving the economy in Eve is that each of these items cascades down into the status of a consumer good. Players engage in combat, they take risks with their ships and they loose them. Because of this the economy of Eve just like our own world economy reproduces itself. The term used in some circles is it is ‘autopoietic’ – but enough of that guff. That is an achievement you have to respect.
Ok so now we have a very basic description of the achievement of the Eve economy. There is a lot of money to be made in trading. Traders make most of their profits – by the looks of things in quite a few ways. Players place buy orders using their skills – from region wide to 20 jumps wide. They then collect those items or goods and trade them to market hubs. Others are obviously buying items at really low levels and reprocessing them for minerals and then selling those. Others are trading from low sec to high sec.
What did I do?
I jumped into a ship and started to work on a route from Jita to Dodixie. I traded in anything that was going to be profitable from Carbon, Nocxium, Ferrogel, Viral agents to Mechanical parts. In one afternoon I had made around 70million ISK just by being careful about my purchases. But there were times when I got stung. The margin was so close at times that the trade tax killed the profit and meant I actually lost out. So buying and transporting goods in the way was not as secure as Elite. There were no guarantees at all that it would work and often you could lose ISK. One way to minimise the risk is to trade with two Alts, one at each location to make sure you are always more or less guaranteed a profit. But that seems like cheating to me. I made quite a bit of ISK by eliminating the risk but in the end by eliminating the risk it was less of a game and more like messing around with spreadsheets. And yes I have read that a criticism of Eve is that it is like “Spreadsheets online”.
Conclusions
There are several criticisms you could make about trading in Eve.
- It seems a blatant contradiction in this super futuristic Universe where you can travel through worm holes that the basic communication technology to tell you what the prices are across regions doesn’t exist. The very fact you really need out of game tools and the fact that you have to have Alts is a failure of game mechanics in my view.
- Once you remove the risk it is simply a non-event. Surely there should be some degree of risk in the game? I have seen a few people get ganked in high sec. But the risk is very low. By eliminating the risk of trading for me the game became less a game and more an ISK accumulation system.
- It just seems so boring.
Finally, after doing all of this and even training a few skills I began to become really really bored with the game again. Things have to change. So I have decided it is time to stop dicking about and have a look at PvP.
Everyday Eve 