From the earliest days of EVE, those who were willing to think outside the box were often the most rewarded. Take celebrity-player Scott Manley, who melted down and sold copies of the Amarrian holy book the Pax Amarria. Yeesh.
The tales of cunning entrepreneurship that result from such schemes are some of the most legendary of all in EVE’s history. While the same few tales tend to be recycled around gaming news outlets, we know that they’re happening every day in New Eden, often without gaining the wider notice they deserve. That’s why we asked our community members to share their greatest stories of wheeling and dealing (and stealing).
For the master collection of true tales from everyone's favourite space opera MMO, check out EVE Online stories.
Which way to Azeroth?
Our first story is about as EVE as it gets. EveOnlineTutorials shares a lucrative heist that they pulled off time and time again, amassing near-endless riches as they cunningly took advantage of other players’ good nature. Sometimes these heists took half a year, but hey, when crime pays, do crime. Don’t quote us on that.
“Back in 2005, I was playing with a fellow from the US named Nirat and a guy from Norway named BioNeb. We’d been playing since Beta and had a scam that we’d use to rob corporations blind.
“We would pose as three new players, survivors of ‘World of Warcraft’, and spin a tale about looking for a new MMO home. We’d join corporations with brand-new characters, train them up, be super active, and pretend we’d picked the game up quickly. We persevered until we became invaluable to the corps. We each had four to five accounts, so between the three of us, we could hit a lot of corps at once.
“Over time, we’d gain access to the corporation wallets and hangars. We would target EU-based corps so that we could wait up ‘playing’ until the time to strike. Then in one fell swoop, we’d empty out their entire wallets. If the CEO wasn’t the sharpest, we could pull off the same scam two or three times in the same corp.
“One such corp was United Players Syndicate. It was probably our trickiest heist and took us seven months, but what we walked away with was just amazing. They specialised in T2 fitted destroyer production. We made a fortune. Nirat still has three of the original T2 blueprints.
“So that was us for three or four years: recycling characters and robbing corps non-stop. We took EVE’s dark universe and the ‘be who you want to be’ ethos seriously. I do feel guilty about it sometimes, especially about the corps that imploded because of us. But hey, it’s EVE Online; being evil is all part of the fun.”
If you enjoyed EveOnlineTutorials’ heist story, keep an eye on our curated content page, because we’ll soon be publishing an article full of others like it.
The price of trust
If EveOnlineTutorials’ story has filled you with despair, then fear not, because the same instincts that drove corp members to accept those fake-WoW refugees drive KAZO+AR’s more uplifting tale. Entrepreneurship, it seems, need not be cutthroat after all.
“The best investment I ever made in skills and currency was a blockade runner with NOMAD implants. I managed to fit a Prowler so that it could align in less than two seconds and had about 3,500 square metres of storage. My plan was the classic buy-low, sell-high approach - I’d scour the galaxy for cheap goods and sell them elsewhere for a profit.
“Being that fast means you have the opportunity to travel a lot and gather info about the locals and dangers of different regions. In a single week, I managed to refund the two-and-a-half billion ISK investment in the ship and its implants, and then I could keep making profit. My long-term thinking paid itself off many times over. But then, three years later, something unexpected happened.
“I was rushing through Stain to buy some P4 planetary resources that’d be put on the market at a ridiculously low price: 2,000,000 ISK rather than 200,000,000. Selling it at Jita would result in a very good profit. Someone had clearly made a mistake, but EVE being EVE, I bought the goods and drift-burned my way back through Nullsec towards Jita - a very happy pilot.
“On my way back, my mailbox starts blinking: ‘You owe me 198,000,000 ISK.’ I don’t usually answer the phone while driving in the dark, but I decided to check who was asking. I saw they’d only been playing the game for six months, so I was like, ‘okay, let’s talk’.
“We chatted by mail for a while, and he said he was a planetary-industry-oriented player, and that I’d bought his first P4 products. Now I know what you’re thinking: he could have told me anything, and it could have just been the alt account of a wealthy character. But I chose to trust him, and I offered him a deal: if I reached my goal of making one billion ISK that week, I’d give him his money back. I hit my goal, and I stayed true to my word.
“This was a while back, but just a few weeks ago I was moving some old mining material in a freighter. As I’m flying my slow Charon through a gate, three billion ISK appears in my wallet alongside a message saying ‘Merry Christmas’. I’m searching my memory for any reason in the universe someone might have sent me that much money. I check my mail, and it’s him: ‘The industry is going great these days. Thank you for not letting me down when I started. Fly safe, and may our paths cross again.’ There’s the worst of humanity in EVE, but also sometimes the best.”
If you enjoyed this feel-good EVE tale, check out our list of uplifting player highlights.
Deep space recon
They say to get rich, you need to be in the right place at the right time. For FUN INC, the right place was always moving, and the right time was just before his nomadic corp. Unfortunately, those good times ended, but while it lasted, the ISK came rolling in. Here’s his entrepreneurial tale:
“Back in the day, prior to corporation bookmarks, I ran a fantastic little earner: deep space reconnaissance. I was in a semi-nomadic corp, and we moved around a lot - approximately every three months. And what do you need when you move to a new area? Bookmarks.
“I’d create a regional bookmark set in advance of moving to each new region, and I’d offer copies of the bookmarks to the corp. To blitz a whole region with three tactical bookmarks on every gate would take me two or three days. I must admit, it was really hectic trying to plan routes without dying, getting camped, or getting too bored. But YouTube and Spotify got me through it.
“Keep in mind that this was about seven years ago, but I used to charge about 250 million ISK per bookmark set. If memory serves me correctly, I made many, many billions copying those bookmarks and issuing them to corp members. The more we moved, the more bookmarks I would collect, the more I would advertise, and the more money I would make. Moving somewhere like Pure Blind was fantastic; you could raid into Tribute, Vale, Deklein, and Venal. I could make 1.25 billion ISK by selling five sets. It was super simple and super easy.
“When the corp bookmark system arrived, I must admit, I was sad. For a long time, it was my only source of in-game revenue.”
If you like the idea of deep space recon gameplay, find inspiration in our list of non-combat ways to help the war effort in EVE Online.
Illustration and emblem design
Rixx Javix’s entrepreneurial story is illustrative (see what we did there?) of the myriad ways of making a living in EVE. He found something he was good at and turned it into his calling. You could even say it’s emblematic (sorry, we’ll stop now) of EVE’s true sandbox universe.
“When I started playing EVE Online, I was the CEO of a creative agency that I’d founded in 2001 called Giant Ideas. We actually pitched CCP Games back in 2009 to run their social media campaigns. Back then my real life and EVE never mixed; I was concerned about keeping my identity, if not secret, at least from becoming public knowledge.
“As time went on, I became less and less worried about it. I began to see places where my skills could be useful. When the alliance I belonged to needed a new logo, I volunteered to design it. It went over great, and everyone loved it. The alliance even threw some ISK at me for making it. Wait a second? Was getting paid in ISK even legal?
“It turns out, yes. It was okay to get ISK for an in-game service. From that moment until today, I’ve designed around 2,000 alliance, blog, Twitch, YouTube, charity, community service, podcast, and other logos for the EVE community. I estimate that in the last 14 years, I’ve earned somewhere around 4.8 trillion ISK from this service alone. And that is just from the in-game portion and doesn’t account for the hundreds of real-world commissions I’ve picked up from other players and CCP Games along the way. If you’ve ever read the Community Beat, for example, that’s also my work.
“And while this kind of story isn’t as exciting as stealing or cheating other players, it has kept me from having to earn my ISK from PvE. Plus, it helps us run our annual FFA (Frigate Free-for-All) events and pays for our alliance to participate in the Alliance Tournament.”
Rixx doesn’t charge for charity work nor certain types of community work, and as funinc points out, Rixx has “also donated many a raffle poster over recent years for NPSI meetups run for the Reykjavik Children's Hospital too!”
Check out some examples of Rixx’s work here:
Thirst trap
You know that scene in post-apocalyptic movies when a supposed damsel in distress flags down the protagonist’s vehicle, only for her hockey-mask-wearing, chainsaw-wielding pals to jump out in an ambush? Well EVEIL decided to take that trap and try it in EVE. The damsel in question? His girlfriend. The hockey-mask-wearing, chainsaw-wielding bandit? That’d be Eveil.
“I convinced my then-girlfriend to try out EVE in 2011. To get her accustomed to combat, we ran missions together out of the Dodixie trade hub. My previous escapades messing with mission runners made me acutely aware that the ships undocking around us were worth billions. Now being an EVE player, I wanted to enrich myself in the quickest way possible. I also wanted to corrupt my girlfriend and turn her to piracy. These two ambitions collided, and a plan was born.
“She would request conversations with pilots in the more expensive ships, dropping not-so-subtle hints that she was (gasps) female. She’d then invite our targets to our ‘mission-running’ corp.
“In case you haven’t guessed where this is going, friendly fire on a corp member is legal in the eyes of CONCORD. We would invite the target to join us on a mission, tell them exactly which resistances they should tank for, and know exactly what ship they were flying. We’d wait for them outside the station and fleet-warp them away to a quiet spot away from prying eyes.
“What followed was me punching straight into their resistance holes while my girlfriend target-jammed them, leaving them completely stranded. A ransom request usually followed with the target begging for their release. Unfortunately for them, paying would still result in their destruction. For the record, I’ve since grown as a person and you should totally pay my ransoms.
“My strongest memory of these grifts - certainly the one that I look back on most fondly - was our very first success. My girlfriend was sat next to me on her laptop, completely juiced with adrenaline. She had jammed our victim and asked with a shaky voice what she should do next. Seeing her get EVE’s famous shakes was both a hilarious and proud moment.”
And in case you were wondering how Eveil’s girlfriend felt about being pirate bait, well, they’re now married and they still brainstorm EVE schemes to this day. Perhaps Eveil’s story should act as a warning to capsuleers: if you’re feeling thirsty, go get a Quafe.
Fancy yourself as an EVE entrepreneur? Share your secrets below! Some text has been amended for brevity. You can find the original wording at the bounty post.
Image credit: Razorien on Flickr
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