ISK

During my latest job search one of the recurring requirements in order to be a good corp member was "an independent, reliable source of ISK".

Sadly, by this (and many other) measure(s), your author is not a good corp member.  He has no "independent, reliable" source of income.  For him generating ISK tends to be ad hoc - i.e. when he's broke.  Because he is prone to PvE burnout he also tends to only farm ISK until he is barely not broke any more.

A casual query in corp revealed various "good", some even "great" corpies with lucrative income sources.

One has an alt corp in a wormhole.  Another manufactures rigs.  We have a builder of capitals.  Yet another has an army of alts doing PI.  All of these endeavours take a bit of time, skill and toil -  virtues distinctly lacking in your authors' persona.

To be honest the most tempting source of ISK  was suggested by a corp mate who claims to find 500 or so plex "lying on the floor of his hangar" every now and then - i.e. put there by his credit card.

Tempting, but as explained before I have an unfortunate moral aversion to this.

Of course with great amounts laziness and small amounts of creativity the commensurate adjustment to expectations and quality of life soon follows.

Whereas the aforementioned "good" corpies can fly "decent" ships and maintain losses of 3 to 5 Billion ISK a month, your author cannot.

He makes do with somewhat less "decent" ships and have to contain his losses.

Still even at his level he has to raise 500 million to 1 Billion ISK per month.

ISK generation follows the course of least resistance, which in the faction warfare context this means "selling" loyalty points from FW missions.

There is a nice guide on FW missions published by the Crossing Zebra's website.  In it that author - Gorski Car outlines how he runs batches of 10 FW missions in around 90 minutes.

Of course I am no Gorski Car and the same loop of 10 faction warfare missions takes me closer to three hours.

In addition Gorski seemingly has the luxury of running missions only when Minmatar is at Tier 4 or 5. Sadly waiting for an advantageous tier is not an option when you are broke.

Running missions and obtaining loyalty points is only part of the story.  LP has to be converted into items which in turn has to be sold on the market - (read: more time and effort).

One gets roughly 50k LP per mission and normally get a conversion rate of around 1000 ISK per LP - so I have to run between 10 and 20 missions in a month to sustain this level of activity.  Five to 10 hours a month of missions/hauling/market transacting.


This happens to be the absolute minimum amount of ISK to maintain this level of involvement (T1 frigates in novice plexes).  This is ok, and it happens to still be fun for a noob like me, but I cannot help but think longer term this will need to stagnation and falling into just another rut.

The consequence is that ISK generation has to be upped in some way shape or form.

One has to appreciate the irony in the fact that in order to experience PvP to the full one has to embrace a system that mandates more PvE to generate ISK, and at the same time then encourages risk aversion to contain losses.

I cannot help but think this is why some people stoop to botting.  Tempting but not for me.

Just one more of life's great contradictions.

If you, dear reader happen to have a nice idea for easy ISK please let me know!