 | Attempting to make boatloads of ISK in Eve Online |
IntroductionEve Online is a space based MMORPG, sometimes referred to as "internet spaceships". I'm 5 month old. When I first joined, I wasn't looking for a shoot-em-up game, what attracted me to Eve was the open ended universe. There are so many ways to enjoy the game, you find one style, then discover another, even people who have been playing for years discover new things all the time. So my first desire was to make ISK (money), lots of it, without much work. (Get Rich, Quick).First Idea: HaulingWhen you first start the game you have very little money. And just like in the real world, it takes money to make money. In Eve, you can buy and sell any of the 8,586 items for sale, take them to another location, and sell them there. The trouble is that the prices aren't set by the game, they're set by the players, and the prices aren't easy to retrieve.Fortunately, there are sites that attempt to provide that data. eve-central and eve-metrics have an "uploader". People install this on their computer, and it sits in the background uploading market data. So when you check the price of something, somewhere, it sends that to those sites. eve-metrics takes it a step further, and provides that raw data stream to anyone, for free. That's where I come in. I wrote a program that takes all that data, so now I've got a database with 817,000 items for sale in 5346 stations. Next was to calculate how far away each station is from every other station, so I wrote a program that ran millions of calculations to find the shortest route between solarsystems, resulting in a partial set of 9 million paths (there are 5,431 solarsystems in total). I'm sure you're seeing now that the amount of data here is huge! So now I know what's for sale, what's being bought, and how far away they are from each other. So I wrote a program that took all that and gave a list of the most profitable items to buy/sell. The idea was that someone would be selling, for example, a Warp Core Stabilizer in Jita for 10ISK, and someone is buying it in Pucherie for 20,000, 18 jumps away. So that one would yield about 550ISK/jump, plus up to 2% in taxes. Most of the matches it found were either incredible low profit, or the volumes were so huge that you couldn't transport them in beginner-ships. In a game where an average ship costs 100 million isk, the profit was clearly not in hauling. Second Idea: ShuttlesA Shuttle is a cheap ship that you can use to get around the universe quickly and relatively safely. They autopilot about the fastest of any ship, they're really cheap, and they're tough buggers to shoot. So let's say you're 18 jumps away from Jita and you want to buy a new ship. You buy a shuttle in your system, fly to Jita, and trade in the shuttle for a new Battleship, then fly that back (slowly) to your home. So there's a constant need, in every system, for a good supply of shuttles.I've already got all the market data (578,898 shuttles being sold in highsec, average price of 30,000ISK), so now I just need to know what systems already have shuttles available, and which systems are profitable. First I built a table with all the data, you put in your region and it tells you every system and how much profit could be made. It turns out that people won't balk at paying 50,000ISK for an 8,000ISK shuttle if it means they don't have to waste their time flying around to get it. So I fly to Jita and buy 300 shuttles to take back to Everyshore. Unfortunately, it turns out I can only fit 18 at a time in my Iteron IV. So I make a couple of trips and set up my sell orders all over the system. And it worked! Even at a 625% markup they sold well, about 80% of them sold within the first two weeks. Unfortunately, since it takes so long to bring them out, the actual profit to be made for the time invested is low.
The next idea was that there are shuttles for sale in Everyshore, at Jita prices. So I created a mapping program that showed all the shuttles available in that region. The idea was to buy the shuttles locally, move them to underserved systems, and make a profit there. Once I saw the shuttle distribution on a map, it turned out that a shuttle was available within 1 or 2 hops of every system. So while there may still be profit available, a 600% markup might not be realistic.
Third Idea: Expand the Shuttle maps to all itemsSince I already had the mapping software, and had all the market data, I tried expanding the map to allow any item to be selected. That worked great, but with 8,500 items available, how do you choose one to display? So while the idea was good, it wasn't easy to find a profitable item without a lot of work. So this idea could be expanded in the future.During all this time I had been running missions. By doing Level 3 missions and salvaging all the loot, I now had 200,000,000ISK in my wallet, so I had a bunch of money to play with. I was still chasing the "get rich quick" schemes, but my real bankroll came from "normal" means. Fourth Idea: Market Mistakes FinderOccasionally someone will accidentally put up an item for sale that is ridiculously low. Usually due to an accident, sometimes by just not knowing the market, sometimes they just price it to sell quickly. So with all this market data available, I'm in a great position to find these errors and profit off them.First I had to find out the "correct" price of an item. This is harder than it sounds, you can't just take the average sell price because people will put in lowball orders, on the extremely thin chance someone will do it (ie, putting a buy order for something that normally is worth 100 million for 0.01). My first idea was to take the average price of the best 50% by quantity of the orders. That worked fairly well, and gave a good universe-wide average price. However, there were still many cases where it was just plain wrong. What ended up being the best method was to simply check Jita's price for any buy orders with enough quantity to not be an outlier. It won't tell you how much to sell it for, but it will tell you "worst case" what it's worth, since Jita is such an active market that the margins are very slim. Now that I know the "correct" price, I could find any items that were priced well below it. However, it turns out that no one cares what % the markup is, they care about the total profit you can make is. So I rewrote the app to only show items with at least 100,000ISK profit. There were a bunch! Several items had profits over a million isk. Unfortunately, it turns out that these deals get snapped up pretty quickly, so by the time I could buy the item, it was often no longer available at such a great price.
Fifth Idea: Market Refinery Mistakes:So that got me thinking. It's obvious when an item is priced too low, because everyone can see the list of competitor sales on the main screen, so anyone with 2 minutes to do a price check will do a quick flip, without needing any special info. But what's not obvious is what an item is worth if you reprocess it back into minerals! So that was the next program.Note that all of this data, from regions to systems to types, all the way to what an item refines to is available from the game's publisher, CCP, to everyone. This really helps 3rd party developers make new applications, if I didn't have access to this data then none of these ideas would have been possible, so thank you CCP for being so open! The first step was to calculate the current "buy price" of every item. Most reprocessable items break down into only 8 minerals, so it calculated the type and volume that each item broke down into, then found the current price that someone would buy them for in Jita, right now. The first run saw huge profits, billions of isk to be made, then I checked the calculations more closely... It turns out that there are five things that affect your refining ability, and they take huge chunks out of your profit. So I delved into the formulas (all were found online, I'm not the first to look into this) and fixed the software so that it accurately gave the exact amount of profit you could make. One item stood out on my first big run, 10,000,000ISK profit for only spending 40,000,000ISK. So I took the plunge and bought it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be in lowsec, and it was 10,000m^3. It took about an hour of stressfull hauling to get it all back to highsec, and in the end I did make the profit, but it was absolutely not worth it. Unfortunately, the rest of the items that were profitable were only about 150,000ISK profit. So while the idea is sound, the actual profit wasn't very much. Example Data from Everyshore:
Market Statistics:So now I'm out of ideas, but here are some interesting statistics as of October 4, 2010:
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