There is something about Eve Online that keeps calling you back to play it. My character was created a few days after launch and has enough skills to make everything more than comfortable and I even had a tech 2 BPO for a while so why aren’t I playing? The whispering has started again so I’m trying to resist.

The big problem is that there isn’t anything I want to achieve in the game any more, and that’s a really good reason not to go back. The way Eve always gets you is through other people playing and blogging about it and so I keep thinking that the solo industrial side could be fun as a low impact month or so because I can play at my own rate and buy and sell materials and make menials do all the hard work for me while taking the bulk of the profits.

This is of course what Gevlon from Greedy Goblin has started doing, but from the minion end and like a cute little newbie he thinks that he’s in control to the point that he sent an “I’m a newbie! Look at me!” message to the person who paid him to do the unprofitable part of their supply chain. Bless. Joking aside it is hard to get your head around your place in the world in a single world game with a complex player driven economy, especially when you go in there assuming that everybody is a fool.

There is a problem with a soloist outlook in Eve, and it’s a trap that I fear Gevlon has fallen into like so many new players before him. Not that it’s a bad thing, everybody learns that lesson the hard way and you just need to recognise that you’re in a trap. Manpower is the most valuable thing in Eve, not ISK, or even skills. More people solve every problem. A hundred day old newbies in frigates will always beat a couple of high skillpoint characters in well equipped ships. Delegating industrial responsibilities will always give better results than soloing, and sometimes people are cheaper than minerals.

An example is a scheme that several of the industrial corps I have been in have used. We would pay higher than market rates for minerals from our members. This bemused a lot of newbies who couldn’t understand why we did it when we could buy on the open market and make, from their point of view, much more profit, but it was all a question of scale.

An industrial corporation gets through a lot of minerals. It soon takes whole freighters full to get anything meaningful done and this just scales up along with the blueprints that you have available to you. A capital ship needs many components made before the ship can be assembled and so you are juggling a dozen BPs with concurrent manufacturing jobs in POSs while BPs are also copying and researching in order to maximise growth. Without minerals all this grinds to a halt and money stops coming in.

So what options do you have as a corp? A region wide buy order at a certain level? Nice, but you just end up with minerals scattered far and wide and often in hostile systems that cost to have a fighting escort for your big industrial ships who go out and collect. Even without hostile systems the real cost of shipping alone is astronomical when you are tying up freighters and skilled pilots who should be moving higher value goods. Another option, contracts, become too expensive to manage very quickly so and people just don’t pick them up so It just becomes economical to pay above the odds and pay a bit of the profits out to the corporation members who bring the minerals into predesignated stations. You cap buying mineral stocks this way by budgeting what you need in the next month or so and so don’t get taken to the cleaners, and if a single corp member keeps buying at a lower price and supplying all your minerals then yay! You have all your minerals but he will get bored of doing that very quickly.  You are actually best off dissuading him from doing it for the sake of the other members or their contributions dry up. This isn’t kindness, it’s miner husbandry After all if you don’t meet your mineral needs for the month then you aren’t making the money you should be, and when your items sell for a billion ISK then that’s a big hole in a multi-month supply chain.

I guess it’s the idea that you have to spend money to make money. In a corp you are paying your members, but in open space as a soloist you are just doing the same in order to make your aspect of industry viable. You can chose not to do it, but you will find you can’t reach the profits of somebody who does because your only limits are available capital and available play time. The capital should always be growing if you are playing correctly, but your play time will always find it harder than going for 23.5 hours a day or so. Less if you don’t want to die. The key for profit as a solo Industrialist is to specialise, which can mean paying somebody to do the bits you don’t do.

This is where Gevlon will fall down as a soloist. It’s really hard to keep a large supply chain going on your own especially as you are pushed towards needing access to POSs for the larger construction jobs. This means living in wormhole space or 0.0 and that isn’t a solo industrial activity. I predict he will stop playing because he hits the limit of what he can do on his own in a few months, or somebody will decide to have a vendetta and drive him out.

Either way it’ll be an interesting look at what Eve looks like from his mindset. I quite like the idea of a fully armed and dangerous Gevlon carving his place in Eve, it’ll be the ultimate test of his beliefs and very amusing no matter if it goes well or badly. He’s sure to polarise opinions along the way, and that is always fun.

So what about the whispering in my ear? Do I want to go back? Maybe. We will just have to see. I think I’ll avoid industry though, it’s far too dull.