So as time goes on and I get more familiar with both the site and my readers I hope to be releasing some suggested EVE reads, views, and listens. These are all generally stories or videos that I have found really interesting and hope you, the reader, will as well.
My suggested read for this week is a story by a former TEST industrialist known as Fortuna. As a pvp focused pilot I never really got the allure of industry and trading blah blah blah. After I read this story though I was blown away. Below is the full text originally posted here on Reddit.
My EVE story – How I built and lost my empire
I feel the need to tell my own personal story of EVE. Feel free to read. Or not. This isn’t about glorious battles, or massive scams, but simply my own personal empire from my ~10 months of playing.
Looking for a new game to play and stumbling around reddit I came across the EVE forums. Decided to start a trial account and give it a shot. Some guy split the invite reward (250m) and I joined dreddit when we were still blue with CFC.
Tried out the whole combat thing in Delve, and found it… boring for a newbie. Ended up heading to Fountain to salvage at the recommendation of a few B0RT dudes, and looted my first hub. 15m in loot. Not knowing what to do with it I check the forums, and find some guy buying scrap for 75% of Jita prices, and end up selling it to him. I’m on a roll, and salvage hub after hub after hub all while training up for a DHD naga thinking I’d enjoy it.
Eventually I had enough loot from my first week alone to plex my trial to a full account. But I wonder, how to keep up the income? I thought about that scrap sale I did and wondered what exactly the guy did with the scrap he bought. After a little recon, I pieced it together.
Myself and two other salvagers decide to use the Germans to ship out our own salvage to jita and build up a nice little 6b bankroll between the three of us by our first month of playing. So I decide to start my own scrap buying service. It did not go well, people would try to sell me 4b in salvage at a time and even a 6b bankroll wasn’t enough with delays from shipping. So I propositioned a few other folks, and within 2 months of playing, I’m managing a 30b bankroll.
Everyone in the investment group thinks I’m crazy, but I decide to open up public and make a post in the TEST forums. Just buying in hubs, easy for shipping. Results are amazing, 40 customers in the first month (many doing repeat sales) and I’m amazed. Our bankroll has jumped up to 55b and everyone decides to keep going.
Goons get unblued, but it doesn’t affect us much. we buy a few blockade runners, contract a few guys to run jump freight intra-region, and start buying salvage in every region. I start placing buy orders in each region that encompass all the high profit items that drop in hubs. The loot is flying in. We’re doing collection runs daily, pulling in 20% profit on 300b in monthly salvage. As the fund owner, manager, and primary workhorse, I’m bringing 50% of that profit myself. But I decide I don’t need that much. I just sit in a station and spin.
The spreadsheets I used when I first started aren’t enough, so I write a full featured .net application to parse my inventory and contracts. My maximum response time to orders is down to 18 hours (15 minute average), I’m up to 500 unique customers, and moving over 500b in loot a month. We lose a JF here and there, but it doesn’t phase us. I buy my own JF pilots and ships, running 7 accounts on PLEX, donating 5b a month to test free (much more than they used from what I understand).
We expand in to TRIBE space, and down to esotaria. I’m running highsec contracts for new people that have loot there still. Our service has loot in 800 stations across 6 nullsec regions and every corner of highsec. We start running buy/sell orders and shipping from highsec hub>hub for easy profits. My monthly income after plex expenses approaches 50b a month.
I find some scam targets in jita to sell my loot for me since I’m dealing with 3000 unique item types, and that’s a fuck load of clicking. I write the software for them, and they buy the contracts up front. A few weeks later they all realize they’re broke, and I’ve been selling to them at 105% of what they get for it.
Then TEST decides to go to war with the CFC. I support the war effort with free ships for pilots, moving cargo, doing loot evacs out of systems that are in the process of flipping (pulled 85b of loot out of a system with 500 goons in it that was in the middle of flipping). I did what I could, but it wasn’t enough.
In 10 months of playing I never paid for this game. Seven accounts, over 200 contracts processed daily. Multiple JF pilots, blockade runners, and an army of friends I speak with to this day. I participated in the defense of Delve, lost a few Rokh’s, and enjoyed myself, but this game for me was never about leet pvp combat. After reading these forums, sometimes I wonder if I was playing the same game you all are. But either way, this game was amazing.
TD;LR:
How I accidentally found my niche and made 50b a month by sitting in a station.
After reading this story I was very curious to know the unwritten ending and so I have attained it for you. Fortuna has confirmed that once TEST lost sov he was bitter with leadership and left the game over a year ago in search of a RL job. He stated that the one goal he could never reach was getting a Titan and if he does return it will be with that goal.
