Trading in EVE takes a good eye for changes in the market, it takes a prediliction for prediction and a fair whack of luck.

EVE Online offers something truely inspired to the player base, an Economy the players have almost total control over. Players can make a huge difference to what the market is doing. So how do I become a successful trader?

Seeing as being a good trader takes a knack that can’t be trained up you may have some difficulties in being a successful one in EVE or in Rreal life. However, the game designers are mindful of this and through the use of the skills in the Trade skill set you can still be quite profitable. In all honesty half of the skill required in being a good trader comes from correclty interpretting the market window. The other half is where the knack comes in as a good memory and ability to value items to know if the deal is a good one. So how do you interpret the window correctly.

Well take a look at the market window; you need to remember that you are only seeing the market window for the specific region you are, currently there is no way to view the complete market or jump from one system’s market to another wthout physically being there. Even though the scope is limited to the region you do have to remember that some of the regions are absolutely huge with more control going to the player control of the market the further away you get from the ‘core’ higher security systems.
Anyway, at the highest level of the ‘Browse’ list hierarchy you will have a list of items in the side menu and in the main window a picture and some details each item. By selecting a specific item there is a more detailed view of the current market situation of the item in question. Use this to see what the market information is truely like. For the region you are you can get the prices sellers are asking for an item as well as how many jumps away they are from you. In the lower panel you will see how much buyers are offering for the item and again how many jumps away from you they are from you.
With some work (and possibly a spreadsheet of recorded best prices you have found for things) you will soon be able to see patterns of where items are being sold cheaply and where people are paying high prices for them. All you have to do is buy said item at the low price and sell it where it has a high price. Now here’s the catch, usually the systems where the price is low is a low security system (and often protected by player pirates and npc pirates that are quite tough) and the system with a high buyers price is often quite similar…. Safe trading routes that yield a good profit are well protected by players already exploiting them and it is not unheard of for players to fight wars over these routes.

SO we’ve discussed the use of the market now how about ships…. well for trading you’d probably want a good large ship with lots of capacitor, lots of cargospace and a reasonable capacitor. Well it just so happens there are 3 types of vessel that fufill this roll, the first type is the basic unit and is the Inudstrial class vessels, the next is the tech 2 version of the industrials and is the Transport class of ship, the third is for the extremely wealthy with major skills in capital ship command and is the Freighters. The Industrials and Transports can hold anything between 2000m3 to 7000m3 depending on model. The Freighter in comparison has an average hold size of 100,000m3. You do the math, thats an awful lot of profit……. Now my favourite Industrial for the starting player is the Amarr Bestower, this ship can be hopped into pretty quickly has one of the best hold capacities for the skill level required and is pretty cheap. Thats only my recommendation however.

Now to help with ship safety you will need some ‘Stabbers’, no not knives, but Warp Core Stabilisers. These handy little things allow you’re ship to keep going when you’ve flown into a Warp Disruption Field. Now each Stabber will cancel out one point of warp disruption at tech 1 level and two at tech 2. They take an awful lot of cpu usage per one though so do bear that in mind. I would recommend you to have 3 of them fitted if you can to guarrantee your survival. Afterburners, armour/shield repairers and maybe even a cloaking device but that has a large cpu usage as well and you may not be able to fit it. I should point out that only Transports and Industrials can fit any modules out of the list of ship types I have provided above. The frieghter can’t fit any modules but then again, the chances of it being destroyed witout a full fleet action is minimal….

Good luck Bargain Hunters!

Oh and by the way, a good link for additional information on Trading is this POST from the official EVE Online Forums.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under Roles, Trading, So you want to be a?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.