how i made 1t+ in eve (solo)

posted on June 25, 2024

i feel freeeeeeeee

p.s. this aint a 100% ego post, it’s more of my eve resume (rofl) /// this is about eve online, an absolutely terrible mmo. dont play it.

introduction / how tf to make isk

hey, im sergei alexeyev and between 2018 and 2020 i roughly made 1 trillion doing contract arbitrage. you wonder why the fuck im only speaking about it now? well, i’m not gonna play ever again (and it seems my plan was nerfed, so fuck it)

i actually CARED A SHITTON about keeping this secret while i played, that nobody knew FULLY what i describe below, not a single soul. other people absolutely did this, but i can’t know how many of the tricks i show below they knew. for the time i was active, i presume i was the best at it (even ignoring shit mental)

wtf is contract arbitrage -> buy cheap contract ANYWHERE, relist immediately (thats right: no shame. you dont give a shit if the person that just sold you notices the markup, they just wanted their fast isk, right?) for +30% more, wait, $$$ (do 15x a day for $$$ x15)

you CAN understand it as passive income but not really, you need to be active for hours and hours to refresh the contract window and catch the good shit (which will be gone within minutes, or hours depending on tz), i was online for about 8-12 hours a DAY (neet lyfe) to get to good levels of income.

average contract arbitrator circa 2018-2020

the corp i used for arbitrage was named David’s Space Emporium and the alliance was named Gerbil Space Program (fuck, i even added a logo, but it’s now rip since the alliance fee shit)

NOT EGO STROKING but to my estimates (spreadsheet) i had 1t+ in assets ~2020 (before quitting)
i was EXTREMELY austere and spent only on doctrine ships for f1 blobs (skillu, hk, pl, etc), the most i spent was on a fully fitted rag in pl which i basically only used to warp to belt and get the daily SP bonus roflmao

the plan

the plan was dead simple, so simple even an idiot like myself could do it.

create enough free/alpha accounts so that i could have a single character logged-off in each region of the game. (iirc i had ~25 accounts in total, a few plexed)
each character name + region is stored in a spreadsheet for quick lookup AND in the same corporation with wallet access
search for gOod contracts on a stationary character. when i found a GOOD contract, i’d put it in corp motd. then, i’d quickly log in the alpha character in that region and snatch the contract. usually it took less than 2 minutes from creation!
- wtf is a good contract? any contract that when sold would give me a profit margin. at a certain point i had so much liquid isk (200-300b) that i’d literally throw money at low margin shit that I KNEW would sell.
  - i’d just copypaste the entire contract into evepraisal and make a decision in <5s, then think more about it while logging the character to buy it.
- i didnt give a single shit where the assets were. if there was profit to be made, i’d buy it. asset safety made it SUPER safe anyways.
- i basically looked 99% of the time at new contracts anywhere in EVE (ignoring wormholes)

just how in the fuck does that work? and how can you make such good money? there’s a few reasons.

back in the day, people used to firesale shit and asset safety was always 10% (or was it 15%? anyways, anywhere on eve (except wh), it was safely sent to lowsec if anything blew up.) -> that means anything above 15% margins is literally FREE money.
people, VERY fuckin’ often, had problems with decimals. that meant 32k nyxes, 2m nids, etc. i got at least free 4-5 supers iirc.
people were DUMB with prices OR they didnt know asset safety was a thing.
i used to be online 8-12 hours a day autistically refreshing the latest contracts.
i used a glitch to remove the caching that exists in the latest contracts window. by variating variables (such as min/max isk/m3, you’d get FRESH results instantly. this worked when pvp’ing other contract arbitrators that didnt use it)

me logging into eve for another hard day of **cOnTracT arBitRage**

i also did other vile such as:

in low-volume, high-traffic npc null areas (such as deployment areas of null blobs), you can buy out the entire stock for certain items (e.g. warp scrambler II) and ONLY have your OWN sell orders for an order of magnitude above the real price (e.g. 2.4b warp scrambler II) and idiots EVENTUALLY can fall for it. it worked for me a few times.

I WISH I HAD SCREENSHOTS OR SHIT TO SHOW, but due to weak mental (and not enough caring) i pretty much deleted all my eve related shit. so you’re gonna have to take my word for it 🙂