The core problem is that for every trade, there has to be another person on the other side. Unlike a world like World of Warcraft, there are no NPC (ie computer controlled) venders that will pay standard rates for items you don’t want.

The main mechanism for finding people to make a trade with is the Market Browser. Lets find an item that I want to sell. For instance, the best item I had in this haul was this Internal Force Field Array. Here’s what the market for that item in my region looks like.

There are two types of orders on the market. In the top pane, we have people who also have this item and are looking to sell their items for the listed price. We’ll call these people sellers. In this scenario, I’m a seller.

On the bottom we have people who would like to buy this item for some specified price. These prices are always lower than the sellers prices. This makes sense – if the buyers were willing to pay the sellers prices, they would just buy from them directly.

The difference in price between the highest buy order and the lowest sell order is known as arbitrage, and it’s where lots of so-called “Station Traders” make their money. You find items that have a nice big gap between the buy and sell prices, put up a buy order, and hope to find someone who will sell you the item. Then you turn around and sell the item back to someone else at the prevailing (higher) sell prices.

In the example item above, current selling prices at this station seems to be 10.41M, but the highest buy price is 9.8M. That’s a decent margin – enough to be worth placing a sell order on it. Luckily there’s quite a bit of demand for this particular item, and it sold pretty much instantly.

So why does anyone ever sell their items to these buyers for less than than the prevailing market value? It’s all about time. Buyers are willing to give you money right now for your item. No waiting. You hit sell, and the money is in your wallet. Sell orders, on the other hand, mean that you have to wait for someone else to come along and pay you for the item. You also have to hope that someone else doesn’t come along and try to sell another copy of your item for less than you’re selling it for. How long you have to wait is more or less a function of the volume of trades on that item. High volume items turn over quickly, so you probably won’t have to wait long for yours to sell.

Station traders get paid because they’re willing to wait. You sell them your item for somewhat under its fair price to not have to spend time babysitting it and making sure it’s well priced as the market values adjust around you.

Every station in EVE has its own market. This means there are many thousands of places to sell your item at. Unsurprisingly, prices vary substantially across the galaxy. In general, the more remote (ie towards low-sec and 0.0) you go, the higher the prices and the lower the volume. So if you’re like me, and you’re looking to offload lots of items as quickly as possible and for the best prices, you want to go someplace that has low arbitrage and high trading volumes. That place is Jita.

The Caldari Navy station at Planet 4, Moon 4 in the Jita system is the biggest trading hub in EVE. It’s the NYSE, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Walmart all rolled into one. When people talk about going shopping in EVE, Jita is usually their destination. There are rarely fewer than 300 people in the system, and 1000 people is not uncommon during peak times. Something like 8% of all market activity in the galaxy happens on this station.

So when I show up in Jita with a hauler’s worth of mission loot to sell, I have to make a decision for each item in my hold. Do I sell it directly to another buyer for instant cash, or do I place my own buy order and wait for someone else to come pay me? To do this, I check the arbitrage rates. If I’m losing less than ~250k ISK by selling it immediately, I’ll do it. It’s not worth my time to squeeze that extra ISK out of it. But if the sell orders are substantially higher than the buy orders, I’ll place a sell order and wait. In Jita, I didn’t have to wait long – all my sell orders were fulfilled within a few hours, and I was flush with cash.

In the end, I probably could have squeezed out another 5-10M out of these items if I’d dutifully placed sell orders on every single one and waited them out. But instead, I effectively indirectly paid a commission to some faceless trader to do the selling for me so I could finish my trading quickly.

Starting Cash: 384M

Ending Cash: 487M

• Ships
• Stuff you equip on a ship to change its abilities (“fittings” or “equipment”)
• Stuff you use to build ships + equipment that goes on ships
• Ammo

Within each of these categories there is quite a bit of structure. There are items for making your ship go faster (afterburners or microwarpdrives), recharge your shields (shield boosters), increase the amount of energy your ship has for using its abilities (capacitor batteries and boosters), and so on. Within each of those categories there are variants on each item type. For each item type (in order of increasing power / effectiveness), there is a Tech 1 version, a bunch of “named” versions, a Tech 2 version, and “faction” versions. (Faction items contain the name of one of the in-game factions in the item name, eg Caldari Navy Cruise Missile Launcher is a faction version of the Cruise Missile Launcher item.)

These items come from different places. Named items and faction items come from the wrecks of computer-controlled ships. Items acquired in this way are called “drops”, and have an associated “drop rate”. For instance, a particular afterburner item might drop .005% of the time you kill a particular ship. This is a vanishingly small number, but there are hundreds of items – the chances you get something valuable aren’t that terrible. These items can also be rewards for missions, or paid for with loyalty-points – think airline frequently flyer miles, except for completing missions for a particular in-game corporation.

Unlike the real world, virtual world economies are pretty much all what are known now as source-sink economies. Economic value is injected into the world at a rate controlled by the game designers, and sucked out of the world at what should be a pretty similar rate. Think of it like a bathtub – if there’s more water flowing in than out, then the amount of money in the world increases. As in the real world, an increasing money supply leads to inflation. Because of this, EVE’s economic overlords have to be careful about how often these valuable items drop.

Vanilla Tech 1 and Tech 2 items come from players. This manufacturing process is detailed (and I’m not that well versed in high-end manufacturing), but it basically works like this. First, you get a blueprint for the item you want to make. The blueprint will specify the materials you need to make the item. To actually make the item, you need to find a production line at a space station that’s not being used. Serious manufacturing oriented players will build their own mini stations dedicated for production. Plug in the blueprint, provide the necessary raw materials, and hit go. Fresh new items will pop out the other side. Building Tech 2 items is more complicated, and I haven’t actually done it yet, so I’m not super fluent on that process, but it’s substantially more skill, capital, and material intensive.

This process sets EVE apart from other MMOs you might have read about or played. Often, items in the world come only from the bodies of computer-controlled enemies. Making the most important and common items (Tech 2 equipment) completely player-generated adds a layer of complexity to the world. Changes in value of the materials to make those items ripple through the supply chain, making substantial amounts of money for people savvy enough to see them coming. It also has big implications for the logistics of players who live in 0.0. It’s essentially impossible to survive off items you find in the world, so major corporations need to either set up their own manufacturing or fly in supplies from high sec space. Either of these choices have their own implications and impact for how wars are fought.

Today, I’m doing the third category. It’s packing time.

I’ve spent about nine months in EVE, on and off, and I’m joining up with a corporation that lives in a different part of space, and I have seven days to move all my assets I want to bring with me to a rallying point at the edge of Empire space.

It’s kind of astonishing how much junk I have strewn around the galaxy. A quick skim of my asset list shows stuff in probably 40 different stations. There are thousands of these stations in EVE, and each one has, effectively, a storage hangar with my name on it.

Looking through these asset lists reveals a lot about what I was doing at these stations. At Rens VI, there’s about a million credits worth of miniature electronics, remnants of a side career in trading commodities. I made money looking for items that I could get cheaply in one part of the galaxy and sell for more in another part. I must have bought these and forgotten to move them to a place where I could sell them. There’s lots of this stuff around the galaxy – ideas I had to make money that didn’t pan out fast enough and I was left holding the bag.

Another station has what amounts to space dust – left-over bits of ore from a mining operation. Most systems in EVE have asteroid belts that contain a bunch of different kinds of asteroids. With the right ship and the right equipment, you can extract ore from these asteroids. Take the ore to the right kind of station and you can get the ore refined into minerals. Those minerals, in turn, can be sold or used for manufacturing items that can in turn be sold or saved. It was good money for a while (and I could do it pretty much with my eyes closed), but it was going to be quite a while for my character to learn the skills to be effective at it. The bits left over from this processes were the remainders from refining – small amounts of ore that were too small to be refined into something else.

My most recent way to make money was running missions. I would go ask a character in the world for a job to do, and she would tell me to go somewhere, kill some enemy ships, and come back for a reward. After I blew up a ship, I could go look and see what was inside – often there would be an item of some sort that I could take with me. I’ve accumulated these items in my hangar. Some of them are worth a lot of money, most of them are worth nothing. Figuring out which is which is trickier than it sounds, and the subject of a whole other post.

If I really cared about squeezing every drop out of these items I could spend a week running around collecting this stuff and selling it off to someone who can make good use of it. But most of this stuff is from my inefficient youth as an EVE player. When you start out, you don’t have any good ways to earn lots of money quickly. I might make 200k ISK on a good day in the first month of playing. Now, I can easily make 10-15M ISK/hour running missions, so the opportunity costs of picking up a few hundred thousand credits worth of items here and there just aren’t worth it. I’ve moved into a different league, financially, so I’m going to leave almost all of these items to collect virtual dust forever.

I can’t ignore my fleet of ships, though. I have lots of different ships to do lots of different kinds of things in EVE, and I want to bring most of them with me. Moving ships around the galaxy is much harder than moving items. Ships are really big. It’s like trying to put a car inside your moving van – it takes a much bigger kind of ship than I own to move anything but the smallest kind of ships: frigates. All my larger sized ships–cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships–I’m going to have to fly myself, one jump at a time. It’s tedious work, but it becomes a kind of lifestyle. You can set a destination and your ship will auto-pilot its way there. It’s slow way to travel, but you’ll get there eventually, and you can do other things while you wait. This is how EVE starts to pervade your life; you start viewing chores around the house as things that will be easy to do while you’re waiting for something to happen in EVE.

I know it seems kind of stupid to play a game where you have to spend hours moving your virtual space ships around the galaxy. Like a lot of the type 2 and type 3 tasks in EVE I’m always a little embarrassed to tell people what I spent my evening doing. Why do this kind of tedious work when I could be doing something that’s straight-up fun? It’s not a question I can answer now, but it’s something I’ll touch on in future articles. EVE is satisfying in a bunch of hard to explain ways, and part of writing all this out is my own quest to better understand what it is that makes it so compelling, even when I’m staring at the engines of a freighter for hours.