Dabblers Delight: Income generation in Eve

I'm a dabbler in Eve and in other aspects of life.  It means I'm not likely to be the ace pilot in my group since I'm not solo PVPing exclusively, but I get a number of things going.  Eve seems to reward that, and it also helps avoid burnout to keep some variety going.  This dabbling comes across in my income generation in Eve as well.  So if you're looking for a way to make the ISKies, dear reader, perhaps one of these will appeal to you.

Industrial Wage-Slave (smiling to the bank)

My main income generation right now is via the two alts on my main account doing work for Aideron Technologies.  This is not to be confused with Aideron Robotics, which is the FW corp that Jakob is in.  (The two were linked but are now independent).  The concept is simple: queue up jobs as requested using the mats and datacores provided and get paid for it.  You don't need to worry about the logistics or babysitting any market orders - that's all done by the corp officers.  This is coordinated by the impressive LMEve web application developed by Lukas Rox (blog: Torchwood Archives).  In fact, if you check out this LMeve dev blog entry you'll see some screenshots of what it's like to use this app.  There's also a reference to a player earning 837M ISK in that month - that'd be me, and that was before my second alt was fully skilled up.  Some summer slowdown and logistics issues meant that last month wasn't as good, but I'm hopeful we'll be up and churning out the goods at an even higher rate soon.  So again, all you need to do is log in, fly to the POS, queue up the jobs, and log off again.  Or go on to do other dabbling things with that same alt.

Market Making (and promoting conflict)

I'm posted before about trying to bring our home of Fliet up as a market that players can consistently fit ships from.  Thanks to Sugar Kyle for her excellent blog posts on her work to do this in Bosena and Sujarento that inspired this effort, as well as her advice outside of the blog as well.  We're helped out in AIDER by our excellent corp JF services as well.  Market making has gotten easier to do in two ways recently.  Firstly, a number of other guys in our corp are now helping to stock it too.  We've split up areas of the market so that we can try to cover more ground without stepping on each other.  This was particularly important for those of us without a lot of market slots via trade skills.  If each of us only has 53 slots, we need a fair number of people to cover a wide range of ship fits.  Secondly, I burned my Aideron Technologies paycheck to score a PLEX to multi-train my alt and thus got my own number of market slots up so I can cover even more.  So I think we're getting close to covering a nice chunk of common lowsec fits, particularly on the cruiser-down scale.  The bonus here is also helping both our friends and our local pirates get into ships means more content for everyone (squiddies can't dock, so they have to go home to get their fits). There's still more room to go, but a lot of that is going to be driven by requests so that we know what to cover next.  For instance, when doing exploration recently we realized that we didn't have any  Salvagers on the market.

Exploration (killing Serpentis and Sleepers)

Speaking of exploration, I've been learning more about combat sites and WH diving from corpmates and allies.  This has been a good way to hang out with friendly chaps and talk about how things are going while plugging at red triangles, and an eye on local and d-scan.  With our area being as active as it is, no exploration running is going to be a semi-AFK activity unless you want to lose your ship.  We also tend to have combat-fit ships kicking around, so swapping over to PVP can happen pretty quickly should some of our FW enemies come running through.

Factional Warfare (oh yeah, that)

You might have thought this would be at the top of my list.  While there certainly are times to get LP from plexing, and then turn that LP into valuable assets, that's not what I tend to do a lot of.  If I'm out and about I tend to be looking for fights more often than farming.  The fact that these two can cross-over so easily, particularly if a system is being contested, is really a beautiful part of Factional Warfare.  Of all the complaints from the nullsec folks out there, I understand how it could be frustrating to not get compensated for fighting for control.  I see that nullsec is more of a player-driven sandbox than FW though, so if there was such a payout I'd see it coming from the playerbase itself.  But I digress.  If the proposed changes work through to increase the payouts for killing enemy militia ships then that'll be a nice change on the LP front as well.  I don't tend to turn LP into things to sell in Jita (though I just did that recently), but instead turn Incursi into Comets and Vexors into VNIs for my own use.

Meta-Eve, or Welcome to Crossing Zebras

My most recent addition to the dabbling of income is via the meta-game.  After I made a bunch of editorial comments on a draft article that Ashterothi was writing for Crossing Zebras, I ended up getting invited to join as the newest, greenest editor there.  One thing I'm particularly liking about this gig is hearing more from the guys in nullsec about what their experience is.  For instance, I edited the recent Sarin Goes To War article which gives the POV of a new capsuleer to the recent Providence war.  I'm glad to hear they're having fun, particularly since it feels like there has been so much bitter coming from that part of the game.  Just as I like having lots of things to do, we need Eve to have lots of ways and places to play - each with their own dabbling opportunities.


This little list of dabbling is by no means an exhaustive list of what you can do.  I still need to try out more FW missions, which would give me more LP that I'd probably want to turn into saleable goods.  Maybe an upcoming FW rebalance would make Gallente missions more in line with the ease at which people can do the other factions - honestly I'd rather see theirs get more difficult and ours get a bit easier and meet in the middle.  In the exploration world I don't do Data and Relic sites, so that's another whole potential.