If you’re an aspiring space scum bag, looking for a few special moves, with not the faintest interest in making any buddies, this ones for you. Particularly if, like me, you only have the one account.
I first started eve only a few months after release. I mined enough isk for a battleship and promptly quit because I no longer had a goal. I tried a lot of other MMOs afterwards but the thing that always annoyed me was that to be great at them you had to spend more time playing than your rivals. If I suggest to my wife that I’m going to need 6 hours straight to collect purples in raids she gets seriously fucked off (if you’ve seen one of those volcanoes erupting into a lightning storm . . . well, you get the picture). There aren’t many mmos where you can hop on for an hour here or there and get someplace simply by being a massive ass hole.
I came back to EVE two and a half years ago, and this time it stuck. I went straight to null (well, Providence, but I still felt like my balls were massive and brassy), I made friends, they showed me how to fit, how to get stuff between high and null sec, how to use intel and make a bit of isk. After 6 months I stole 15bil from them and felt seriously awesome; I’m not particularly welcome in Providence anymore. Since then I’ve helped my self to assets from numerous corporations by putting in far less effort than I did on my first heist. Yesterday I took 200mil in mining barges, from a corp I’d been in for less than a week, and the crazy thing; I’ve only ever used one character to rob everything I own.
I’ve been told I’ll never join another corp again literally dozens of times, but you’ll be surprised how far you can get with a set of carefully constructed lies. So here’s some tips that I’ve learnt, and to the aspiring scum bag they are worth their weight in gold.
I’ve not yet found a mark who I can’t make a decent profit off, but there are some important considerations to be made. I play on a single character, I don’t make new characters after each heist, I don’t have any alts besides a guy who has spent his entire life in Jita holding all the shit I steal. There are a limited number of corporations who actually do decent background checks when you put in an application, but you would be truly surprised how few and far between these are . I’ve been in numerous respectable null sec entities all with my scum bag corp thief. One of the things that surprised me most after my first few thefts was just how willing CEOs were to accept my lies about the reasons why I left my previous corp. The easiest is just to say that you only recently started playing and bought the character off the bazaar to get a head start. I had a huge amount of success by straight up telling the mark that the previous CEO is a liar whom I just didn’t get on with. Seriously, that works.
If you’re under the impression that you can join a corp and walk away with serious billions in a week you’re mistaken. The amount you can take a corp for is proportional to the time you spend in the corp and the rapport you have with its leadership. You can take 100 mil from 5 corps in a week, or you can take 10bil from a corp every few months. It’s also worth mentioning that the big cons are lot trickier to pull off but are so much more satisfying upon fruition.
You see, that’s just one of those things that people say that simply isn’t true. You can buy trust and it’s quick and relatively cheap. If you’re planning on a big heist, trust is essential, you must have access to the big juicy corp hangars and POSs. If you’ve been in any reasonably decent corp you’ll have undoubtedly received mails about POSs that the corp doesn’t have the liquid isk to refuel; spend 100 mil on fuel blocks for the corp and see how quickly you gain access to that corp hangar and said POS. Buy the corp a few moderately priced BPOs, insist that you have access to their research locations and it invariably happens.
The holy grail of heists is those lovely BPOs that you’ll be wanting to get your grubby little mitts on. They are the perfect target; small and highly valuable. These BPOs are almost always being used either for construction or research and you’ll need to know where they go if you cancel jobs. If they go to a hangar or POS module you have access to you’re golden, if they go somewhere that you can’t access then you’ll either be robbing a lot less than you hoped or the leadership will be onto you and the whole con is up. If BPOs are your target the I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a thorough understanding of how they get moved around.
If your stealing ships from POSs it should be abundantly obvious that you’ll need the skills to fly them in order to get them away safely, it can take a huge amount of time to be able to fly many of them so ditching a character after a heist might not be economical after you’ve put in all the skill training to fly the ships in the first place.
So, if everything’s gone to plan you’ve timed your heist well and made away with a decent pile of swag. If you live in null sec and like me you only have the single account, then extracting the goods can be tricky. If you can get black frog to ship for your area then you’re laughing, if it’s just BPOs there are a range of ships that can get you back to high sec safely. If on the other hand your in the dirty depths of SOV null, with 500 cubic km of stolen product, looking at 25 jumps to low sec and probably 5 gate camps, theres still options.
I don’t like to use the word fire sale because it immediately implies that you’ll be selling off your ill gotten gains for a fraction of their true value, but I’ll call it a fire sale anyway. No matter where you are in null, if you put a post on the eve-o sale forum, stating simply the type of items you have, the volume, and a rough location, and mention you’re willing to compromise on price, you WILL get numerous responses (you’ll want to make the post with one of the other two characters you can have on your single account). Again, this is one of those things that really surprised me when I started screwing people over; I’ve sold stolen shit to members of the same alliance that I’ve just stolen it all from, I’ve sold stolen shit back to people in the same corp as I’ve just stolen it from – this is the ideal scenario, they will want you to keep quiet about the fact that your selling stolen goods back to a member at a discounted value, it means you can blackmail said person once you’ve sold him the contraband. Tell me something more beautiful than that?
So, with that I conclude my first article. Four days ago my wife and I had a baby boy, so my playtime is more restricted than ever. However, I have got a couple of cunning schemes on the go, so if comments are positive (or negative but there’s still at least a little interest) I’ll share my upcoming exploits.
– Rej
