The only aspect of Eve I really enjoyed was the economy. It's actually pretty fun to find niches and verticals then exploit the hell out of them.
I played the margins on nullsec loot (often melted and sold for pennies), shipping it off to Jita (using outsourced freighters) and selling for significantly more. Made twenty or thirty billion simply playing the margins between nullsec and highsec.
Another few billion were made by importing "compressed" minerals for all the capital ship producers.
Moonmining was a lot of fun because of the logistics involved. Ditto for the wormhole exploration.
At one point I wrote a bot that sat in Jita and basically daytraded, playing the spread between bid and ask. I lost interest in Eve around that time because of work and a social life, but it was a fun project to work on (lots of OCR involved).
All that said, I was small fish compared to others in my corp. One guy took an investment of 100bn from our corp and used that capital to finance an "Officer Loot Buyback" program. Basically, ratters were bringing in a lot of officer loot, but that stuff is really only worthwhile in Jita, and you had to babysit contract. Most players can't be bothered to sell it themselves...but they know it is worth good money.
This guy purchased the loot at a 10-60% discount simply because of convenience. Ratters were happy with getting some money, he shipped it off to the markets and made the difference.
He quit eventually, having repaid the entire 100bn investment and making several times that in profit. Pretty crazy (for an internet spaceship game)
I played the margins on nullsec loot (often melted and sold for pennies), shipping it off to Jita (using outsourced freighters) and selling for significantly more. Made twenty or thirty billion simply playing the margins between nullsec and highsec.
Another few billion were made by importing "compressed" minerals for all the capital ship producers.
Moonmining was a lot of fun because of the logistics involved. Ditto for the wormhole exploration.
At one point I wrote a bot that sat in Jita and basically daytraded, playing the spread between bid and ask. I lost interest in Eve around that time because of work and a social life, but it was a fun project to work on (lots of OCR involved).
All that said, I was small fish compared to others in my corp. One guy took an investment of 100bn from our corp and used that capital to finance an "Officer Loot Buyback" program. Basically, ratters were bringing in a lot of officer loot, but that stuff is really only worthwhile in Jita, and you had to babysit contract. Most players can't be bothered to sell it themselves...but they know it is worth good money.
This guy purchased the loot at a 10-60% discount simply because of convenience. Ratters were happy with getting some money, he shipped it off to the markets and made the difference.
He quit eventually, having repaid the entire 100bn investment and making several times that in profit. Pretty crazy (for an internet spaceship game)