How do I play EVE Online for free?

Question

While looking up EVE Online on Steam there is feature bullet that reads:

Play for FREE – You can buy game time with in-game money you earn while playing.

Does anyone have experience playing under this gaming model? If I play the game casually (a couple hours a week) will I be able to earn enough money in-game to pay for my addiction game time?

Answer 1

Yes, it can definitely be done.
You can buy a 30-day PLEX for 300M ISK.
You can make 300M ISK in a couple hours if you know what you're doing.
The only difficulty is in that "know what you're doing" part.
Instead of actively playing (which can easily take more than a couple hours a week) you need to utilize all the methods of generating income while offline. Research Agents, Planetary Infrastructure, and The Market are the three biggies.
You'll need a while to set all that up, but the Steam "21-day free intro to EVE" (assuming that's still running) should be enough. And you'll have to play a bit more than a couple hours a week to get it up and running, too.
Warning: Some mission grinding to increase faction standing will likely be required.

On the whole though, I'd say that if your "addiction" only means a couple hours a week, then you haven't got any addiction to speak of. 8 )

This does bring up the valid question of how to use those three methods to generate 300M/month.

How to make ISK while offline

1. Use the market to generate income
   1. Use the market to buy things you need and sell things you don't need. This will teach you the basics of how it works: buy orders and sell orders. Also explore the 'details' section where you can see the volume traded per day and the low and high prices that day. Notice the systems that the majority of buy and sell orders are based in, this is the 'regional market hub'.
   2. Find items that have a high trade volume in your region and that you can post a low buy order for. Post a buy order.
   3. Collect your purchases, transport them to the market hub (or anywhere that you can get a good price for them) and post a sell order for them. People will pay a good price if you're selling the item they want at the station they want.
2. Develop Planetary Infrastructure
   1. Use the market to find a planetary resource that sells well in your area.
   2. Find a planet that you can produce that item on, drop a Command Center on it, build extractors (and factories if necessary) to produce that item.
   3. Keep those extractors running constantly. Set them to run for as long as it will be till you can set them again.
   4. Post low buy orders for all the planetary resources you're producing on your planet as detailed in 1-2. This is a good alternate source of resources if you can't produce enough raw material to satisfy your factories (and really, who can?)
   5. Transport resources you've purchased cheaply to the planet, take away resources you've created on the planet. Sell those resources as detailed in 1-3.
3. Get Research Agents
   1. Find corporations in your area that have R&D agents. Get the best R&D agents you can. Research the Datacore items they can produce for you, look on the market for which one is the most profitable in your area, start the research. Drop a pile of Tritanium in the station where the agent is.
   2. Run missions for those corporations to raise your standings with them. Note: The missions that Research Agents give once a day count towards the 16 you need to get a storyline mission. Try to get the storyline mission from an agent in the R&D corp.
   3. Once the higher standings you've achieved give you access to higher quality R&D agents, stop the research with the old and inferior agent and start up a new research project with the new and improved agent.
   4. Collect datacores every now and then, sell them as detailed in 1-3.

Note that market ability is the key skill here, all other methods are merely ways of cheaply generating things that you can then sell on the market for a nice profit. Market ability only takes a couple hours to train on your character, but your personal skills at it will develop for years and years.

Answer 2

A bit after the fact, but keep in mind that "playing casually" and "playing for PLEX" are often mutually exclusive. If you're playing because you have to make ISK, are you still going to gain enjoyment from it?

For me, the answer turned out to be 'no' - the things I found most enjoyable were not the things that earned me ISK. You might get lucky, but EVE should be a game, not your second job.

Answer 3

I successfully ran 4 Eve Online accounts for free (roughly 1.2 bil ISK per month), but it took a good deal of effort to do so, and I payed for the first 2 months of my first account with cash.

For me, one of the keys to making good ISK fast on the game was being in a null sec corp.

The reality is that it takes a lot of game time at first, but the further along you get, and the smarter you get about ISK, then the easier it gets to make ISK fast!

Short answer: Yes, you can do it.

Answer 4

Yes, you can do it.

However, I wouldn't recommend it for new characters (specifically, new players). The newer you are, the more limited you options. Furthermore, at this stage, you'll want to explore and try out several things that are not very efficient, using an ISK/h metric. Things such as highsec exploration sites.

Keep in mind that you will also want to have surplus ISK to enjoy the game and PLEXes can be a big ISK sink.

My recommendation is: close the client, figure out what you can do, sort by ISK/h and then calculate how much you'd need to play to cover the subscription costs. Then decide if that's acceptable, or even fun.

After all, instead of grinding for hours each day, it is likely that you could use that time to earn money on the side and then pay the accounts and possibly even trade for ISK.

Remember that PLEX prices fluctuate by market supply and demand. Currently they are approaching 500M.

Answer 5

Multiboxing is one way to earn more ISK for PLEX. Wether it's mining, missioning, or trading none of the EVE gameplay in those areas is particularly intense so it's relatively easy to have several EVE instances open at once and switch betweeen them. Even average players should be able to manage four miners at once, I know I can and I'm pretty average.

Even so it still takes several to many months of setup time and quite a lot of up front ISK invested in characters, ships, etc before you can start earning it back.

Playing for free is really only an option for veteran players.

Answer 6

you can play dust 514, which is linked to your account. You can get ISK that way without paying because it's Free-to-Play. Then you have your ISK for your month.

Answer 7

It is possible. I'm not sure it can be done in a couple hours a week, but it can be done. It probably depends on how high-"level" you are, and what you're doing for money. The real question is can you earn the money fast enough. And that's very variable based on play time.

Answer 8

The idea is this with method 2 on this thread:

1. find resource with demand
2. create source of said resource
3. buy out market of that resource, so as to increase demand
4. when you've raised the price floor enough, sell what you have stockpiled.

I don't play EVE, but this is how the economy works. Establish a monopoly = Win.