Ecliptic Rift

NB: This guide presents a very basic introduction to making ISK through trading. More detailed strategies are left as an exercise for the reader.

One of the least expected bits of the economy in New Eden is that you can often make a lot more ISK via trading than manufacturing. In part, this stems from the fact that we pod pilots can’t make everything – the so-called “named modules, for example – and so we have to feed the market demand. Other factors like convenience and lack of information can also come into play.

The age-old maxim to make money trading is “buy low and sell high“. This means that a lot of pilots spend hours scouring the market for goods whose lowest “sell” order is lower than the highest “buy” order. At first glance, this makes sense, but in reality very few goods have this sort of imbalance. Generic trade goods will have this property at times; the margins, however, often mean you could make a lot more ISK elsewhere. At any rate, those sorts of routes disappear as quickly as they appear.

So, instead, the trick is to reverse that with your own orders. Set up buy orders high enough to bring in goods but low enough that you can resell the items at a decent margin. Your buy orders should cover mission hubs so that you get a constant supply of goods. Generally speaking, you’ll want to set your sell orders in trade hubs, at least when you get started.

Here’s an instructive example. In the Minmatar Republic, the best agent for the Republic Fleet is Vir Honn (level 4 quality 18) in Emolgranlan, which turns out to have a lot of mission-runners due in part to his presence. Minmatar battleships often rely on projectile weapons, particularly artillery, so we look at the market data for large artillery and see the data shown at right:

1200mm Scout Artillery market

Ignoring the one outlier (which will fill quickly), the highest buy order that will cover Emolgranlan is about 3.4m ISK. Yet the sale price in Rens is 3.7m, and in Lustrevik they go for 4.5m (though at lower volume as Rens gets far more traffic). That spread is where a trader makes his money. On the price history, notice that the volume tends to stay between 50 and 100 a day, so there’s enough to make a decent profit.

So set up a buy order a touch higher than the highest one there. Some traders work in increments of 0.01 ISK, while others prefer to compete with larger jumps. Remember, though, that you hurt your own margins first, and that the market will always fill the cheapest available sell order, so don’t set the increments too large.

Once you’ve bought a few, truck them over to your nearest trade hub. In the case of Emolgranlan, that might mean Lustrevik as mentioned, but your volume will improve tremendously (at a hit to your margins, of course) by running them a few more jumps over to Rens.

Trading has many more tricks, particularly when you trade skills like Margin Trading or learn more about the regions in which you’re trading. But the basic path comes down to this:

1. Find a commodity with sufficient spread and volume to generate profits proportional to the capital you will use.
2. Issue buy orders just above the highest that cover the area from which you want to buy.
3. Once your orders fill, pick up the items and transport them to trade hubs.
4. Issue sell orders just below the lowest in that hub.
5. ???
6. PROFIT!

It seems CCP finally has seen the light and will patch up our ships with a little more of everyone’s favorite adhesive.

First, they announced a few updates to the updates for faction ships: the Firetail will see its “scan resolution increased to 660mm, signature radius decreased to 35m”. I love the scan resolution increase (from the current 550mm), and while the sig radius decrease won’t make a huge difference, any decrease beats zero.

Then they updated those updates further, tweaking the tier 1 and 2 Minmatar battleships:

Typhoon:

Slot layout: received an additional launcher slot and turret slot (for a total of 5/5 turrets/launchers, 8/4/7)

Tempest:

Hitpoints: armor and shield values swapped (now has 6954 armor and 6211 shields)

Typhoon Fleet Issue:

Slot layout: received an additional launcher slot and turret slot (for a total of 5/5 turrets/launchers, 8/4/8)

Tempest Fleet Issue:

Slot layout: 7th turret slot removed for a 7th low-slot (for a total of 6/4 turrets/launchers, 8/5/7)
Hitpoints: armor and shield values swapped (now has 10431 armor and 9316 shields)

I feel like I need to digest this a little further, but that Typhoon Fleet issue looks mean.

However, they haven’t stopped there. The hits just keep on coming, so to speak, with a new thread on balancing projectile weapons. Pretty graphs included, pointing out some of the issues.

So they tell us:

The original balance of projectile ammo seems to be skewed towards long range variations. Adjusting the projectile ammo to match its counterparts gives Phased Plasma ammo a 10% damage increase and EMP ammo a ~9.1% damage increase, while reducing the damage of the long range variations. The change will give auto-cannons a good performance boost, and make long range munitions easier to balance through the damage modifier.

Mid-range crystals and hybrid charges give a bonus to capacitor consumption, projectile ammo is reduced in size. We don’t like this, so we’re looking at changing it to a tracking bonus.

After ship hitpoint adjustments, the alpha strike of artilleries isn’t nearly as impressive as it was a while back. In our first iteration of these changes we’ve increased the damage modifier by 50%, along with the rate of fire. The DPS stays in place, but the volley damage is increased significantly. With the increased volley damage, and increased rate of fire, the clip size doesn’t matter as much. We still feel that it can use a boost. We’re looking at doubling it across the board, now with uniform ammo size.

Other things we might be looking at:

• Auto-cannon tracking adjustments
• Auto-cannon tier balancing

Then later:

Oh, and also Tracking Computers. We’re looking at some falloff love.

(Emphasis mine.) If you have detailed opinions on this, please go comment. Personally, as long as they’ve started to give my preferred weapon type a boost, I’ll trust CCP with the details.

And finally, for us lore geeks, CCP Abraxas put up a new chronicle this week, “A Man of Values and Faith“. This really emphasizes the darker side of the Minmatar, particularly with respect to the Ammatar/Nefantar relationship with the Republic. I love this and it plays particularly well with some stuff I have brewing in my duct tape kegs.

As we find out more, I’ll keep posting here.

Image credit northofdenali.