Washaba Tokani
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Posted - 2010.03.17 13:06:00 -
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I started playing years ago before we had invention. We had no salvaging but quite a few named items rats dropped would cost 5-25 million ISK per mod. After running some basic missions I was persuaded by a friend to go check out lowsec, where we eventually started a profitable ratting operation. We killed NPCs in frigates and helped each other ship the loot out to nearest trade hub. We lost some ships of course but we also looted some of those 5-25 mil modules so purchasing new ships was not a problem, especially with insurance, and we also cornered down a few faction rats in this time and ran some static 4/10 and 5/10 complexes. One of my friends also did can-flipping on the side. He would kill haulers and mining barges which he baited in his T1 frigate and gather their T2 and named cargoholds that were worth up to 20 mil a piece back in those times. His profit margin was about same as ratting in 0.0 as we later discovered.
Then we moved into 0.0 and I started making about 15-20 million ISK per hour ratting in a cruiser. This 0.0 was of different race/faction than what my race was so soon I found out that to purchase some supplies for myself I would have to travel back up to my home region. On next trips I started grabbing extra items and listing them on market at profit to supplement my income but kept this little trading exercise to highsec empire only. Then a war hit this 0.0 region and I saw that our side's station had practically no supplies selling and that people were purchasing 100K modules for 1-2 million ISK. Our area started getting heavy camps from our enemies, and on empire side there were several wardecs, so people had problem getting supplies in. So I used my capital from ratting and low scale trading to load up several haulers and bring supplies into our 0.0 area. While the camps were frequent, the campers were not there 100% of time, and with a cloak, some instas, and warp core stabs I would manage to get a hauler through in every 1-3 days without losing a single one and resupply the station. Supplies I imported in would be buying up real fast. So that was how I made my 1st billion ISK - profiteering from a 0.0 war zone.
Then CCP introduced contracts system that replaced old escrow system. The contracts system of course had loopholes enabling people to do scamming just like they scammed with old escrow system. Particularly there was something called freeform contracts that made it super easy to trick players and take huge sums away from them. When contract system was just introduced, freeform contracts did not have any warning messages either. There were also many other scams. Like selling 1 unit of minerals did not actually say "x1" in contract like it does right now. So you could be selling 1 unit as 400,000 units and got many bites on it. Private auctions where you could persuade somebody to set officer module as a private auction to save on listing fees and then simply bid 1 mil on it and wait. There was the infamous missing zeros scam and the [want to buy] scam where instead of money paid you entered sum into the other field, thus having person's item and their ISK at the same time. Right now this scam has been reformatted into [want a gift]. Many of these scams have been nerfed, but it took CCP months to get to some. Meanwhile those players who took full advantage of them became filthy stinking rich, so filthy that they would be losing faction fit faction battleships every week and not feel it. So after 1st billion of ISK that was how I made subsequent billions of ISK. But I still had a heart of a trader more so than a scammer, and so was doing quite a bit of trading on the side. Once scamming got nerfed I completely respecialized into trading, and trading with capital I made scamming it has been very easy to make ISK from that time on.
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