Making money ...in space!

9th July 2008 – 7.06 am

Penny Ibramovic, space cadet, has been happy dealing with the two agents in Perimeter so far. Quite how I got to Perimeter in the first place is not remembered, and probably simply the result of ending up there after the tutorial agent got bored with me. Despite having read about agents being difficult to find, or perhaps precisely because of this, it has been made clear in at least two different channels how to get a list of agents and their locations. I found a better quality agent in Jita, a system just one jump away.

The quality of agents in Perimeter is -16 and -5, which seems quite low, particularly when there are some listed with just as high magnitude numbers but positive. From what I understand, the quality of the agent has little or nothing to do with the type of mission they give or the danger involved, only the reward that is offered. The better quality the agent, the more ISK they have on account, so a good way to make money is to find a good agent. The agent in Jita has a quality rating of -2, which is a few pegs higher than the best one in Perimeter and should get earn myself money more quickly.

Of course, these are just the agents who are far enough down the chain of command that they'll talk to me. I need to raised my reputation through these lowly clerks before anyone with a positive quality rating will accept a space 'phone call from me.

Having flown through Jita before, and run a couple of missions to clear out some rats in the system, I was aware of the horrible lag that is no doubt due to the system being popular in the same way that Ironforge was popular before auction houses opened in Stormwind and Darnassus. The lag was pretty much what was keeping me in Perimeter for the time being, because I didn't really like waiting several seconds for my missile launchers to fire after selecting them, nor was I particularly keen on warping away from danger only to explode at warp speed from a missile that hit me ten seconds previously. But I had been through Jita a couple of times over the weekend and there was no sign of the lag I had seen previously, which is why I had decided to make contact with the agent in Jita.

Sadly, the lack of lag may have been an anomaly, as it was back last night. It must have taken over a minute just to jump in to Jita, and just as long for the ship to get to warp speed to fly towards the destination space station. I perservered, though, and made contact. I flew three missions, one keeping me in Jita and horribly lagged, and two sending me to visit other systems and going quite smoothly. The missions were fairly standard. One asked me to destroy an enemy convoy that was passing through the system, another to pick up some plans that had to be abandoned after a ship got accidentally blew up, and a third to destroy a whole load of drones that was beginning to infest a system.

The rewards were pretty good, definitely more ISK than the Perimeter agents were offering. The mission reward for the drone termination was huge compared with other rewards I've got, with about 100,000 ISK for completing the mission and a further 110,000 ISK for being prompt about it. The best rewards the -5 quality agent offered were just under half that amount. However, the drones, whilst 'wanted', didn't have bounties on them, so although the mission reward was over 200,000 ISK in total the previous mission that involved killing rats was a bigger earner, with about a 120,000 ISK reward and 125,000 ISK from bounties.

All this means that I made about 800,000 ISK in one session from a few missions and selling minerals dropped by the drones on the market. I'm just going to blow that amount, plus an extra 100,000 ISK, on the Salvaging skill book, but at least I'll have it to spend and likely be able to make it back relatively quickly. I can imagine how much money can be made from an even better quality agent, and how a measly million ISK here and there will come to feel like copper pieces dully clanking off the silver and gold in my pocket.

In other EVE Online news, my skill training continues nicely. I should be ready to train in the Salvaging skill today, after having trained in the skills required to learn it, with Mechanic level 3 being the last. There may be better skills to train first, but I have a Salvager module and I want to find out how useful it is. I also found out that the warp drive takes a huge chunk of capacitor charge to engage. Whilst this shouldn't be surprising, I don't recall it being explicitly stated anywhere before, although one of the skills offers a reduction in charge required for the warp drive. This explains why my capacitor is always having to recharge after warping in to deadspace.

Finally, a note to self: swap the low quality civilian shield recharger out of the Kestrel for whatever the Merlin has, because whatever unit is in the Merlin actually recharges the shield quite quickly. Despite the extra drain on the capacitor, it's worth it.

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