Will pay somebody to teach me how to make 3$/hour

Hi,

as has been mentioned you'd need a nice amount of startup money.
I'd not start such an enterprise without at least 5,000 USD, depending of what solution you prefer. Probably you'll need more, you'll need to make yourself known among the potential customers first, as well as familiar with the game and its many aspects.
So you'll need quite some time to get things going, before you can even think of earning money.

This money should be disposable money because, as you might know, you'd be investing into a game that's not actually at the summit of its success. You should expect any kinds of changes, nothing is safe. "EU is dynamic", means, don't count on any truth of today, tomorrow it could be forgotten.

This was the obligatory warning - EU is dynamic, and it has more hidden traps than you might expect. But now, let's get constructive:

Since the outcomes of all hunting, mining and crafting activities are highly variable as well as dependent of factors you cannot influence (check the various logs in the forums) they're not suited as a base for a sustainable business. Too much risk, not balanced with an sufficient higher average profit. IMHO, for sure.

Piloting taxis and offering FAP services meets a rather low demand, and an already established competition. Such could be done complementary, but wouldn't feed you for long, done alone. IMHO, again.

So, what's left? Trading.

George Skywalker has mentioned SSTS, a business model that seems to have been abolished. Such a model could work, given a determined entrepreneur, some reliable "clerks" and sufficient cash to start it. Lemme draw the basics:

1. You'd have agents standing at a designated place on every (well, almost every ...) planet, 24/7. Would require shift work, sure. But this is important - at any time someone needs to be present, always!
   .
2. These people would buy anything (but stuff available in the TT) for TT + 0.5% (100.5% MU, number is fictional). So every hunter/ miner/ crafter would do a bit better selling to your agents than selling to the TT. And because of this, many would sell to you!
   .
3. You'd collect all this stuff and auction it or sell it again, directly, for the current planet specific daily MU.
   .
4. And you'd have couriers that would transfer the stuff between planets, using mother ships. This way you'd be able to generate more profit using the discrepancies in MU between the planets.
   .
5. And you'd have contacts to crafters that can order certain amounts of certain resources with you, for these your agents could offer better prices:
   "Buying anything (but TT gear) for 100.05, muscle oil for 102.5, basic sheet for 102, blau for 105" ...
   .
6. Would you then find a way to give back boni to the people that sold stuff to you, dependent of their last months sales and the accumulated profit, it would be possible to become a quite big player in the resources market. IMHO.

This is what I could imagine to work. Not easy, though - requires quite some qualifications:

• You, as well as your agents, need to be absolutely integer, reliable and trustworthy. Social reputation is most important in this game, and you'd have to walk a fine line between being "a welcome and beneficial service to the community" or being recognized as "a blood sucking reseller scum".
  .
• You'd need some serious money to start this. To do reasonable trading you'd want to have quite a lot of material stored, to be able to sell decent piles.
  .
• Your agents have to be nice people, communicative, and with at least sufficient knowledge of the English language. In case of disputes with customers there'd need to be a clearance person with advanced permissions available, you don't want to burn your agents.
  .
• This would require quite some "behind the curtains" work. Database work (what do I have, and where is it stored?), market analysis, customer care, public relations etc. etc.
  You'll need quite a team for this ...
  .
• Hiring one of the established, respected old-timers as "consultant" would be priceless. A lot of knowledge to win, contacts, reputation, know-how.

OK, done. This is a free advice, no rights reserved. May it help you!

Have a good time!

PS: I'm not available for any job, but in case someone would succeed with this plan, I'd happily accept a donation ;-)))

 

Get your ava comfortably settled on your planet of choice, then immediately log off forever, and pay yourself $3 per hour not played. :)

For the record - I think that is the second time in 5 years I have used a smiley in forum post.

 

Hi,

The best source of prize information is here, to my knowledge. Take the prices with a piece of salt, some might have become scrambled when OCR'ed, some might be result of a try of market manipulation.

TT ("Trade Terminal") is the base price of the items, that the trade terminal would pay. MU ("MarkUp") is what players pay more than this, in % (102.5%) or in an PED amount ("+100 PED").

In any case I'd recommend to try the game for a while, before starting to do any work - get a feeling how it works, how people are communicating, how the trades are done. Watch it, talk a bit, maybe try a little of the professions, maybe make some friends - your business later will benefit of this.

For the start I'd recommend Planet Arkadia, it's a smaller but good settled planet with a working economy. And it gives you a cool vehicle during the newbie quest line ;-)
Later you might want to travel to other planets, mainly Calypso, the biggest and oldest one.

Have a good time!

 

It's an interesting idea to have a full time team of hunters/miners/crafters, and that might possibly work out to turn a fairly reliable profit in time, but I think the time and money investment would be pretty big, and I'm not sure you could really compete with the current players without sinking huge amounts of cash to get the god-mode tools (mod mercs, mod faps, etc).

To start a trading business with 10 full time employees... well, you're going to need a lot of cash to start out, maybe 20,000 USD, if not more. I'm guessing you can probably start a small RL business in your country for less than that if the hourly wage is only $1 per hour.

The other critical thing... I forget who brought it up, is that 10 full-time traders working together is going to affect the markets pretty drastically (could be positive, could be negative), and MA might interfere if it sees market manipulation.

Overall, I don't recommend going much further with speculations before you get into the game and become very familiar with the economy.