EVE: Pacifist Experiment

While playing darkfall (or all games!) I got a taste for crafting. Ever since I have been toying experimenting with a style of play I have never done before, that of the carebear.

I figure the ultimate game for a capitalist carebear is EVE. Now EVE is a game I used to play and enjoyed quite a lot, the economy always use to interest me but the actual workings of it where clear as mud.

So This leads me on to my plan I am thinking about going back into the game and to try and make my way with a character who has the minimum combat skills needed and I was wondering if anyone else would be interested in joining me in this?

I notice you say minimum amount of combat skills. Would any combat skills be required at all? It's been a while since I played but I thought you could go straight trading without a single weapon mounted on your ship or any combat skills for your pilot.

I belive you probably can get by without any but I am not 100% sure (thats why I said the minimum :p)

Yep. You can get by with zero offensive skills. Some of the beginning character choices will automatically give you weapon skills but if you do a little research you can make sure your starter character has all industry skills.

The issue comes when it is time to move thing. You need to transport what you make. Also mining. If you decide not to do your own mining then you have to buy ore which really cuts deeply into profit. If you do mine yourself you have to have some sort of protection. Also, mining in highsec will not get you much in the way of useful ore.

You could play a market trader and just buy low/sell high but an actual manufacturing set up will be difficult without some sort of security.

And unfortunately if you are starting a new character it could literally take you months to get the skills required to even make any kind of profit. You will also need skills to evade would-be attackers simply because... well.. you *will* get attacked. And that, of course, will take another couple months.

It would be interesting to see the outcome of this experiment but I honestly dont think its realistic unless you have a character that already has the skills simply because it takes so long to get those skills.

PAR

I suspect my old frigate jocky is still there, he has all the learning skills but I ran into quite a few people who had only been in the agme a few months but had made quite a lot of money already (more than I was). I want to see if I can recreate that.

Waltz wrote:

I suspect my old frigate jocky is still there, he has all the learning skills but I ran into quite a few people who had only been in the agme a few months but had made quite a lot of money already (more than I was). I want to see if I can recreate that.

Well like I said I am interested to see how it goes. I personally do not have the patience to do what you are attempting to do

PAR

The only way you can make money like that as a newbie character is to join a corp that has acces to nullsec. If you have access to nullsec ore and protection while you mine you can make a killing.

Alternately you can make a ton by moving modules from highsec (where they are cheap) to nullsec (where they can be {ableist slur}ly expensive).

But to do any of this you need connections and even then you'll probably get popped by pirates and lose enough loads of cargo that you won't make much money.

There are definately ways of making money without a lot of skill points but they all require business connections.

Sure its possible. You can make a new character, take just the skills he starts with, and never learn a skill specific to combat. You just fly your newbie frigate to a station, dock, and never leave. Hire other people to move your items around, and just learn skills applicable to trading, research and manufactoring. Its entirely possible to play EVE this way, earn billions and never fire a shot, never even fit a weapon onto your ship. You can hire people (legitimately) to grind faction standings for you, so you never need to go blow things up, its just a matter of ISK. Throw money at the problem.

In practice, you'd need to learn some skills applicable to combat. Skills for flying ships to travel and transport, fitting skills to effectively kit out those ships. But its possible to keep that to a minimum. In years of playing, I've only lost a handful of ships (mostly by actively going into harm's way), and only lost one cargo load (entirely due to being stupid, no amount of skill points would have helped there).

As far as needing months to make a profit, erh, no. People that have multiple millions of skill points in market skils, research skills, building skills, they will make a greater profit. The better you get at it - experience and skill points, the better you will do. But its possible to make ISK from day one (might be day two, you may need to learn the basic skills to fly a low end transport ship, such as a Bestower). But you can try buying low/selling high, or running courier missions for NPCs, or contracts for players. Or mining. And then build on that.

As far as joining you, I don't play Eve much at the moment, and I tend to do mission running when I do. Skill points are heavily invested in combat, not much in the way of building or selling.

Waltz wrote:

I belive you probably can get by without any but I am not 100% sure (thats why I said the minimum :p)

I'm not certain that you can roll a newbie character that has absolutely no starting combat skill, but you can definitely move into mining/production/trading without them. Anyone who argues that you cannot get your starting capital for skills without combat has clearly never heard of the old trick where you fit a mining laser to an industrial and go AFK for hours orbiting a large Veldspar asteroid in 0.9 or higher.

The main issue is that the economic side of EVE is just too vicious for me. Normal people will only blow up your ship, and maybe pod you. The hardcore traders and industrialists will end up mortgaging your soul.

It's possible to get a starting character with the new character creation system without any kind of combat skill. Also, getting a decent trading character is a matter of 2.5 days of training with the help of attribute remapping. This means training roughly 3 skills related to actual trading (at work so can't remember skill names, but they are to the effect of increasing order numbers and lowering transaction taxes) to level 3. That time also includes training contract skills.

Warhound is right, you can certainly do what you are proposing to do. Some may find it boring but I've been playing as a trader for over a month now with only occasional breaks for mission running. The majority of my time has been spent playing the markets and transporting goods from one place to another. Nary a shot fired or a weapon needed.

If you pursue it, get rich and need a hauler we can discuss an arrangement.

Slightly off topic, but is this idea possible in X3?

garion333 wrote:

Slightly off topic, but is this idea possible in X3?

Absolutely. You can be a pure trading pilot that never fires a shot. When you are high enough in your capital empire to have automated Universal Traders, those pilots will take it upon themselves to arm their ships. They will never go out of their way to attack anything (unless you order them to) but they will defend themselves.

Of course you wont be able to do any of the story lines w/out the ability to fight, but you can play the open game this way.

PAR

Yeah like the others had said above you will do fine starting out like that. And either as you gain skills or you join a corp that works in eve industry you'll find your able to make a pile of iskies. We have at least 2 members I can think of our corp that started pretty much out that way. Some very simple tips might be;

1)stick to newbie ores, a low level character can actually make more isk/time mining low end ores that they have the skills and gear for then highend null sec ores. Wait until you have the skills to do it right.
2)dont randomly pick item to trade or manufacture, do some investigation on the market using the data table and sell/buy order between different regions. Pick items that have good stock movement, like ammo in mission hubs is a good start.
3)I strongly recommend getting into an industrial corp of some sorts, good ones will have helpful guys with info, (maybe free stuff :D) and often host things like group mining ect.
4)Oh and dont mine in an industrial

One good (and free !) tip is to make use of the price check channel. If you link up the item you are interested in (say tritanium) people will respond providing price information for the region they are in, usually in the format XX/yy - where XX is the lowest price sold by other players and NPCs, and YY is the highest offer price. The more public spirited players (like me) will usually also add if either of the two quotes is for ludicrously small amounts, rather than have players transport millions of units of tritanium only to find that someone was prepared to pay 5 ISK/unit but only wanted 200 units.

The correct channel name is Price_Check.

You can also ask for specific regions or even hubs, but obviously if there's no one on channel at that place, then you'll not be getting an answer It does tend to be a pretty much on topic and polite channel, unlike the ships channel which has just degenerated into a remedial school free for all that a lot of the old time ship dealers just don't spend much time in at all.

Well I down loaded the client last night and have put in a petition to get my old account name (as I can't remember it.

I was planning on doing a new one but since my old one has all the learning skills upto 4 I think I will stick with that (can't face training them again)

Waltz - it's amazing how quick you can get them all up to lvl 4 (even the tier 2 ones), as you can do that at double speed under the new way in which character creation is done. Let me know your char name once you are set up, and you can either spot my character in the GWJ channel (channel name GWJ, password gwjeve) or i can send you an evemail with the training plan that i used on my second account character.

So will I be quicker over all starting a new alt for industrial stuff?

I've set one up for myself, and this one is about to start the science training required for the building of t2 drones (as a start point) as well as doing basic research. She already has 8 build slots for the manufacture of t1 gear. Total time taken...34 days.

This one will be useful as our corp already has the lab and module slots for use within our own hi-sec POS, and also is set up as a separate account. Obviously if you set yours up as an alt, then any training done will prevent your main character doing any training, which may or may not be an issue for you.

My char name is 'Elizabeth Lockley', if you see me in GWJ channel let me know and I can try to answer any other queries.

Well I signed back up the weekend and have to admit I am loving being back in the game, Most of my time so far has been spent organising and doing a bit of mission running while waiting on skills training.
Since I can get a proper mining ship I am having to jet can mine, to minimise the risk I have started doing this after running a mission that has asteroids left, should stop anyone stealing my ore.

Did you go with an alt or your older character?

Old char in the end, he has all the second set of learning skills upto 4 and since I can remap attributes now it's not really an issue

Well so much for taking the game at my own pace.

I joined a small corp on Monday and last night got made mining director.

Considering I know fook all about mining the offer came as a bit of a shock to me.

The corp is on a big recruiting drive since most people are newbie's I had sent out a corp mail trying to organize a newbi mining session on Saturday. as a sort of get to know each other, get the corp some minerals and make a bit of ISK for everyone. This got the directors eye and he offered me the post.

This does give me the chance to put a personal theory to the test. Normally in online games I find the people with the most char skills for a certain area and spend the most time online get given head jobs in guilds, personally I have always felt this wasn't always the best idea and people who organize should get it. Well now I get to put my money where my mouth is.

Well now you can use your directorship to skim a little off the top and help you get some quick easy isk. It's not like stealing from others that isn't pacifist, right.

I have found in EVE that the hardest thing isn't to organize, so much as to make sure you get the participation that you need/want.

That true for all games, I am hoping since most of the corp is new to EVE they will all be nice and keen.

Heh. Some times the best way to encourage initiative is to pander to their greed.

Corp I was in had one member with a POS out in 0.0 (back in the days when ISS was starting to lay down stations). I organized a mining day, since there was all that crokite just floating around unmolested.

We made a damn good haul that day. I ran all the ore through the POS refinery array, then hauled it back to empire space before splitting it out. When I set up the event, I specified that the owner of the POS was getting a large share, since we couldn't have done it without all his hard work. He didn't ask for it, didn't care either way, was just happy people were getting some use out of his POS.

Everyone that participated looked at the amount of ISK they made, went 'wow'. Then started looking at the amount of ISK the POS owner made and went... 'hhmm.' They realized that if I hadn't been so overly generous, then their share would have been even bigger.

I didn't have to organize any more mining runs, other people stepped up, so they could set the shares a little more to their liking.

Greed. Gotta love it.

One thing I love about Eve that no other MMO can match: Greed is King. It's all about the ISK.

Waltz wrote:

Well so much for taking the game at my own pace.

I joined a small corp on Monday and last night got made mining director.

Considering I know fook all about mining the offer came as a bit of a shock to me.

The corp is on a big recruiting drive since most people are newbie's I had sent out a corp mail trying to organize a newbi mining session on Saturday. as a sort of get to know each other, get the corp some minerals and make a bit of ISK for everyone. This got the directors eye and he offered me the post.

This does give me the chance to put a personal theory to the test. Normally in online games I find the people with the most char skills for a certain area and spend the most time online get given head jobs in guilds, personally I have always felt this wasn't always the best idea and people who organize should get it. Well now I get to put my money where my mouth is.

Give me a shout ingame next time you are on a mining op, we might be interested in bulk minerals.

Well my first mining op didn't get off to a great start.

We got 5 people involved (1/4 of the corp) so I was feeling quite chuffed. Three people mining, one hauling and someone guarding the can.

Now in hind site I should have realised we didn't need someone to guard us in high sec since we had a hauler but well I didn't want to leave anyone out.

Alas he turned out to be a Grifer, I lost my cruiser he podded the hauler and too out one of the other guys who was in a hulk and podded him.

There's no such thing as griefing in Eve. That is the game.