Ris Dnalor
Minmatar
Sebiestor tribe
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Posted - 2009.03.28 18:44:00 -
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The first isk was made primarily by mining and selling the minerals to NPC buy orders... alternately by taking (found or bought) npc pirate loot, scrapping it and selling the minerals to npc buy orders. Good refining skills mattered. NPC's purchased minerals in vast quantities at the following set prices. TRI: 1 // PYE:4 // MEX:16 // ISO:64 // NOC:256 // ZYD:1024 // MEG: 4096. The new deep-core mineral didn't exist yet.
There were no Advanced learning skills. No missions. No fractions of isks on the market. smallets price you could pay was 1 isk, next biggest was 2 isk. No capital ships. No Battleships. No sentry guns in low sec. Concord did not have battleships. ( Players got battleships before Concord and some people enjoyed chain-spawning concord, though they dropped no loot ) Everyone shield tanked everything, I don't remember if armor tanking just didn't exist yet or if it just totally sucked arse.
The biggest NPC pirates were 50k cruisers that would spawn 4 at a time, or you could get 40k cruisers that would spawn 5 at a time. When you killed one, a replacement would immediately respawn, so that you could litter an asteroid belt with hundreds of npc loot cans in a very very short amount of time.
The first big race for the corporations was to get the Cruiser BPOS. ( iirc, the first ruptures sold for 25m isk )Offices were in such short supply that people would "sell" them, and also scam people... mostly scam people. ALso Lab slots were in horribly short supply because then you rented the whole slot, and so long as you kept something researching and paid your fees, you got to keep the slot forever. Some corps would do this with both mfg and research slots to squeeze out any potential competition from 'their' station.
There was no warp-to-zero. In fact there wasn't a warp-to-"anything" you just "warped to" the gate ( at 20k ) or nothing. I think it was changed to 15k later to mess up the bookmarks, and then even later you got options of distances you wanted to warp to something. Before that you had to make a bookmark if you wanted to warp to 100k from a specific gate.
Battleships, when they arrived, were godlike. They could just as easily target and kill a frig as they could another battleship. lots of people flew them as they could do lots of things. Not the case today.
Later on they added the "Super-Highway" gate system, which made it much quicker to travel around eve. It linked all 4 race empires with a central hub located in YULAI. YULAI became the first true market hub as so much traffic was forced to go thru it. It became so bad that that people couldn't travel though it because of all the congestion. When CCP moved the highway system, many of the power-marketeers that lived in YULAI chose to move to JITA and start what has become the ultimate marketplace in eve today.
NPC Convoy hunting ( only possible in hi-sec ) used to be a lucrative career choice. The now uber-rare Harvester Mining Drones ( among other less famous valuable items ) would drop from these npc haulers and you could sell them to make a decent living. I once had the chance to purchase 3,000 of these for the now paltry sum of 300m isk. I chose not to at the time as it would have cleaned out my wallet..... oh the riches I could have had if I had made the other choice and sat on them for 5 years :)
Auto-pilot was very buggy in the beginning and would sometimes just stop on it's own for random peiods of time. There's more. theres so much more.
but to answer the OP's question I spent the first month in station training learning skills, then another 2 months earning isk, in the 3rd or 4th month sometime, I purchased my first battleship ( a TYphoon) which was the third one to roll off Techell Corporations production line. ( they did purchase the Typhoon BPO after all other BPO's, however. ) I promptly lost that Typhoon to one of Tank CEO's early gankings. it was him and a fella named Chandragupta iirc.
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