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Does trader careers make sense in this game?
degroove
Member Posts: 25
in EVE Online
The game is great. I'm thinking of playing a pure-play trader, but I was wondering to which extent you thought it made sense on a medium-term basis.
Let me explain. In many games, the trader is a nice profession at the very beginning but becomes useless after a while because there are so many means to earn money that it's not worth specializing in this area.
I have the sense that it might be different in EVE: the technical aspects make it very hard to deal on the markets without having specialized skills, the possibility to deal the assets of a corp, etc.
Can you give me your thoughts on this please? Thanks!
Comments
many players chose to just play the markets .. no doubt about it.. takes time to figure out the best things to trade, and where and to whom and for how much ... but i know of one person in my corp who trades only .. and makes alot of isk doing it. if its your idea of fun then i think eve may indeed have one the best markets for you to work with. worth taking a look.
you will need to get your skills up to a level where you can haul the stuff you need, or at least move around quickly from location to location (market usualy only visible region by region).
Thanks for the tip.
I'm trying to understand the fundamentals of trading before jumping into action.
I'm puzzled by one thing in the manual on which I'd like your thoughts because I'd rather not train my character if I misunderstand the concepts...
Marketing and procurement allow to trade items across say 2 or 3 systems. Let's assume there is an arbitrage opportunity (the sell price in one system is inferior to the buy price in the other). Using these marketing and procurement abilities, can I just realize the gain without actually travelling, thus risk-free??? It seems too good to be true (although it requires quite some levelling up in the skills). Can you confirm this, or more likely explain to me why it is not the case please? In other words, is it possible to develop some kind of uber-trader who can make the market across the galaxy? - which is a pretty cool concept you'll have to admit...
So, right or wrong? Thanks!
The thing you also need to realise is that buy orders can (and often are) limited...
most people who place a buy order want that order filling in that station (ie - they pick it up from there)
if you see a good opportunity, 99% of the time you will have to move goods around. (even if only between stations in the same system).
the better a trader you are, the better visability your order gets (ie, how far ppl can get and still actually see your order.)
there is an art form to doing with little risk. even experience traders sometimes get caught by market fluctuations due to in game effects .. like a big alliance war eating up supply, or a new game feature creating more supply, etc..
you will have to haul stuff .. or buy up all stock in a given area and then set that stock to a higher sell price .. thing is depending on what your selling ,, other players may jump on your higher prices.. and some commodities are also played by the npc market .. which can screw you up by releasing more supply after downtime..
if you like trading though .. and commerce then eve will blow your mind i think .,. but im a fanboy
Haven't played the market much, only things i've sold were rare mods that i've got either from npc-ing or from player that i've killed.
None the less the competion wich i had to deal with made me verry good impresison and all i can say is that if u like trading and selling stuff EVE is ur place to be as the economy is driven only by players .
The trader is a very good money maker. I wanted to test it out after exodus hit and I gotta say Im plesantly surprised.
I created a new character trained him only with the necessary skills for hauling cargo, which took about 4 days and transfered 20m to him from my main, it took me exactlly 6 hrs to turn that 20m into 40m and now i play my alt more then my main cause he makes me loads of cash with minimal risk. Im getting an average return of 30% on each load i haul.
So any new player looking to start a trader i say go for it, it will be hard to earn that first million isk but after that youre gonna be smiling all the way to the bank.
Its now been about 10 days since I started my trader and his bankroll has grown to 300m.
Woah, 300M just with trade running. I'm impressed.
I'm not as lucky as you are, the few times I tried to some trading the buy/sell offer were over before I reach the station.
having capital is the biggest problem for a starting trader to overcome. sometimes you might be lucky and find someone nice enough to loan you half a million. but otherwise a good start is doing mineral runs in a frigate such as a Kestrel or a Probe. while conducting these early runs, you can keep an eye out on the market (now viewable in space, since the Exodus update).
many players rightly argue that a good trader should take the length and time of the trade route into their profibility, however particularly when first starting out, it is often better to just get moving and start running a route that seems reasonably profitable rather than wasting loads of time scanning the markets looking for that short route high return route, these can be found later, and invariably require higher amounts of capital anyway.