Challenge Accepted!

I've been thinking about blogging about trading in EVE Online for a while now. This idea was planted in my mind when Gevlon (from the Greedy Goblin blog) was asking if anyone knew of any good EVE trading blogs. I did a quick check of my bookmarks, and there were only a few. The idea quickly faded from my head, since there were plenty of other RL things going on.

Until today. In a recent post, Gevlon argued against the idea that starting a new MMO blog was a bad idea. His basic premise was that valuable information is always worth spreading, and if someone could write, they should. Near the end of his post, he offered to publicise the blog of anyone who wrote well about EVE Trading (or even general MMO trading). While it wasn't intended or even worded as a challenge, I took it that way, as a personal challenge. I've been looking for an excuse to practice writing, anyway, so this is as good a platform to do so as any.

In addition to a writing challenge, however, I'm making this an MMO capitalist challenge. I've been playing MMOs for a few years now, and by far the most interesting aspect for me has been making ISK/gold/credits. Accumulating wealth is always something I've had fun doing in games, but I really only gave it a serious attempt recently, in WoW. I wasn't exactly poor, but I didn't have unlimited gold either. I was doing some research when I ran into Gevlon's blog. I applied a few of his techniques, and next thing you know, I have more gold than I can spend. I wondered if the same strategies could be applied to EVE. Gevlon wasn't an EVE player back then, so there was no indication from his blog that it would work. Gevlon recently jumped into EVE, and his business results were outstanding, proving that they don't only work in EVE, but they work even better in EVE.

One of the difficulties in EVE is figuring out what to do. Players call it the sandbox because of this objective-less type of game, and I was one of those players that couldn't figure out my goal. This little challenge is exactly what I needed.

My goal for EVE is now to make enough ISK to buy PLEX for two accounts, and to fund in game activities as well.

I don't know the exact amount yet, since I haven't calculated how much my PVP alt costs. But I suspect it's around a billion and a half a month (two PLEX, plus half a billion for ships and such, since I'm a crappy PVPer). In my next post, I'll outline my overall plan for achieving that goal.