Multi Account management, worth it?

(TL-DR - I show more than one account is not worth your time\money)

This is my EVE situation. I have four accounts, each account has three character slots. I recently sold one of the characters from one ofthe accounts, for 6 billion ISK.

The character was trained to fly a spider tanked tengu (not very well mind you), run PI, scan and fly a cov ops. That’s it. It had 8.9 mil skill points. It sold in 15 minutes of putting it up for auction.

So here is my problem. Well not so much a problem but more an observation of how the game values money and time spent playing it.

The facts:

An account costs me $15 dollars a month to fund. With four, I’m paying $60 a month in electronic entertainment expenses. Since EVE is my primary source of entertainment, I get away fairly cheaply if you compare it to say buying a play station game once a month for near $70 a game for new releases. Or two of those games, half price used.  

Outside life expenses get more pricey. Movie trip with my wife, 20 +10 for snacks. Not to mention the gas it costs to get there an back, works about to be about $10 round trip.  That’s just 1 trip to the movies, which can happen more than once a month. Drinks with friends gets a bit more expensive. EVE soaking all my time is a bargain.

Back to EVE.

So with 4 accounts. Each character is set up for Planetary Interaction. The way I set up Planetary Interaction, I just need touch the character and its planets once every 5 days, for on average 5 minutes per character to reset the jobs and 10 to 15 for a pickup for materials. I do all my PI in our wormhole with a 0% Corp tax.

 Since my PI set up is set on a 5 day cycle, my output is fairly gimped. I could frequently alter what I’m building, run factory planets, resource planets, set up feeding points, blab blah blah, and double what I’m making. But for me, working a another job after I get home from my job is lame in my mind. So I choose to make less. More about that later.

Each planet produces 8 to 10 million isk worth of material every 5 days with little effort from me. So that’s on average of 40 mil ISK (5 planets each char) x3= 120m. 120 ISK per account every 5 days. 4 accounts. 480 from my entire set up every 5 days.  Each month is 30 days. This works out to 2.88 Bil every month.

Not a bad chunk of change.

Getting it to market is a different story. Its stuck in the wormhole and needs to be dropped off in a K-space connection. Since our static is a c3, a high sec connection is fairly common for us. Maybe 2 times a month I undertake what I call a “Shipment event”. This is where I ‘secure’ the wormhole.(nothing is truly secure in wormholes, but you can make it a little safer with some common sense practices) Then make a mad dash with some Iteron 5s to K-space. Each Iteron is carrying about 215 mil. So even if it gets caught/popped. It’s not a really big deal for my operation. I find the nearest station, drop off my stuff. I don’t haul across Kspace because of suicide pilots who will pop me in a 2 mil destroyer.

This is where Redfrog freight comes in. For whatever reason, there are people in EVE who think hauling is the tits. I guess it can be done fairly AFK and it works for them. Redfrog was born. They have an out of game calculator, where you put in the starting system, the ending system and they give you what they charge. You create a contract 1 billion collateral 800m3 max. Done and done. Clean easy, simple. My only hauling danger is the static connection I pass very briefly though.  Average charge is 7 to 14 million depending how far our high sec is from Jita 4-4.

My expenses each month:

350mil ISK for POS fuel.

7-14 million in Redfrog charges per 1 bill worth. About 3 shipments 2 times a month. – let’s say 60m a month total.

So total expenses are $60 real life money and 410m a month.

That’s 2.8bil in each month, 410m out each month. With little to no effort on my part.

Now 4 accounts doesn't go over well with my wife. She already shakes her head at my multi monitor setup. I plex one of those accounts to reduce the glaring. 525 each month – 1.945 bil income. Let’s say I plexed every single one of my accounts,  that still leaves me with 370m each month.

Now here comes the scary part.

If I added 1 more account to my empire, how much money would that add to the process?

Three characters all running PI, that’s 15 more planets, each planet producing 8 mil x5 (lvl 4 skills) 40m x3 chars. 120 every 5 days. 30days in a month/6 – 5 day cycles.  Another 720, only really adding another 20 or so in shipment fees, puts me at a gain of 680m. Plexing that new account, costs me 525. Gain of 155m.  

 In theory, I could add 20 more accounts(not that I would) and gain 3.1b or less and just do it for the 155m a pop. Using the extra cash for skill books.

Sounds reasonable, but then there is something called ‘character sales’.

Each character that is set up for a specific job typically sells for much more than it costs to plex the account through the entire life of the character. Take my character I sold 6 billion last weekend. This character was set up to fly tengus, badly I might add. (only 3 subsystems were at 5) I totaled all the plex it took to get the character to this point and came up with 5 plex( 5 months of just getting XP and doing little else) . Each plex selling for 525m. Total cost 2.62bil. It cost me two plex to transfer 1.05bil. Total cost for this character. 3.67 bil. Sold for 6 bil.

Net 2.33b. And I would like to point out, I was doing it BADLY, days I let the XP stop, or I stopped XP to work on an alt on the same account.  

So if I had been running PI with that character or future characters for that matter. Using the math we have already worked out. Each account gaining me 155m per month.

A fully plexed character/account working its 5 planet PI for the duration of me keeping it (end point would me selling it). Total gain per character… .*drum roll* keeping the character for 5 months gives us an income of 775m per account.  and sold for 6 bil + 775 = 6.75b in 5 months, per account. And I’m only touching the account and its PI like 45 minutes every 5 days.

45 minutes(I’ll include shipping time, and PI set up time in this) x 6 (5 day periods in a month) – 4.5 hours a month. X 5 months. 22.5 hours a selling event( the life of the character working in the PI slave mine, only to be sold upon whatever maturity level I deem fit).

This works out to be 306million isk an Hour. Per account.

Mission runners get like 10-15 million isk an hour. Some miners run 20 million isk an hour. We just made 306 in an hour!!

So back to my original question. To multi account or not to?

Isk making wise, the math, however fuzzy, works.  But remember this. We love to play EVE and it is entertainment!

This shouldn’t be about making money, and if money is your only desire, why make it in the game?

Use your management talents outside of EVE, because in the end. 22.5 hours to get 6.7 bill, works out to be. 6.7b/525m = 12.7 plex, 15 dollars a plex. = $190. – 22.5 hours $190/22.5hr-  $4.00 an hour. Now unless your primary job is sewing NIKE shoes in China, this is a loss. 

Moral of the story, even in extreme cases such as the one I described. Just work a few extra hours a month in overtime. Save that money, put it into the game and enjoy. Make what you need, to do what you want.

Chasing ISK if a fucking waste of time.



EDIT: I received a question from a guy who read my blog and I wanted to post my response because people might get use out of it.

His question;

""What exactly do you do in PI. I understand the basics of it and all, but what were you doing to make that kind of ISK? I'm looking for something to do in my time while i'm at work to churn out a few extra ISK without too much time investment and PI seems to be a way to do so. I'd appreciate any insight/info you'd be willing to provide. I would prefer to keep it highsec if possible though.""


My response; 

""About PI.

So I do PI in a wormhole, which is a -1.0 system. PI outputs scale with the security status of the system. The more dangerous, the more output you can get. Since wormhole sec status is the most dangerous, it has the highest yields.

Another thing, my article assumes, is that you have access to a POCO (player owned customs office) with 0% tax. I make this happen in my worm hole by removing the NPC POCO and putting up my own corp run (my corp) POCO with a 0% tax. The investment for each POCO on each planet is about 90m. I think it cost me about 600m to replace all the planet POCOs when I took the wormhole.

So the main risk factors for me, are needing to defend my POCOs and POS from people who wish to take it from me by force. Since my corp is a pvp corp, this isn't much of a problem and we welcome attackers.

From what I understand of High sec PI, it doesn't pay to harvest materials from the planets. The amount you get off of any one planet in high sec, is very minor. Add a 14% NPC POCO tax rate by default and your profits go way down.

But! There is a way to make a solid profit from high sec PI.

This involves importing P1 material to a set of factory planets and creating P2 material based on market demand. Not nearly as easy as what I do in wormholes, but profitable. I'll run through it.

Using this chart

A guy made it connect to evecentral, which is a real time eve market watching program. You can us good judgement as which PI products are profitable to combine and which are not.

Looking at the chart you can see the materials in column M and the price they are currently selling at. The materials in RED are selling at a loss. All P1(stage 2) materials will sell at a profit, because the P0(stage 1) sell for almost nothing. 

The reason some materials are selling in RED, people are lazy, don't watch the market and don't want to change the PI production lines. I can't blame them, its a total pain.

An example of a good P2 product to make looking at this chart today is, Coolant. Coolant is critical for POS fuel production, since POS fuel is ALWAYS needed, its demand is always high. Supply rarely exceeds demand.

Using the chart you can see that after you purchase the two P1 materials(water and electrolytes) to make the P2 (Coolant) you end up with a 6,253 profit per cycle. Not a huge chunk of change, but good for low risk, and if you can pull it off in high volume. This could be very profitable.

So here is the idea. Each of your characters sets PI base of operations next to a major trade hub. Like the next system over that has a station and at least 5 planets. On each of the 5 planets you set up 19 basic factories, 2 launchpads, and 1 storage(I'm assuming you have level 4 PI skills). This is called a factory planet. The reason you are using launchpads instead of all storage is for pure ease of use as you make your drop off and pick up rounds.

Take 10k m3 water that you have purchased at the trade hub. Drop it off at the NPC POCO. You will be charged a 14% transaction fee to move the materials down to the launch pad.

Do the same with 10k m3 worth of electrolytes. Then set up a route from the launch pad to the 19 basic factories. You will only need to do this once thank god. Each of the basic factories will be set up to make coolant, the output from the basic factories will be smaller than whats been put in. You then route the basic factory output to the storage, where it will sit till you want to ship it to the POCO.

Upon shipping it to the POCO, 14% tax rate included. You pick it up in a hauler and take it to the trade hub for sale.

With 19 basic factories running on 5 planets, you will need to touch your PI empire daily if not every other day, because your supply launchpads will run dry. Most of the time you can keep a 30k m3 storage worth of P1 in the POCO and won't need to actually be at the POCO to make the shipment down to the planet. Just in the system. This will give you an every other day need to fly around and fill up the POCOs. 

The idea is, you are simply being smart about what you are making, and working the market based on demand. As the demand lowers for one type of p2, you can alter your production lines to keep making a profit.

One thing you can do to increase productivity, pay redfrog to move 850m3 worth of p1 from the trade hub to your PI production system. The cost is MINOR compared to buying your own freighter and moving the crap yourself. Like 5 million a trip. Well worth it to move a huge amount of material one system. The alternative would be to buy a freighter yourself or make 20 trips in a Iteron 5. But the more stock you have on hand, the less flexible you are to market changes.

This is the only real way I can see how to make high sec PI work.

I hope this helps.

If you want to know how to make WH PI work, I can discuss that also.""

If anyone wants me to ramble about WH PI idea's just ask, if not. I won't bother.