Alpha to Omega challenge - final stage reached

2 days ago I reached the FINAL STAGE of  the challenge by having accumulated a wealth equal to 1.000 Plex. It's been exatly 80 days since I started.

At the time Plex sell price ingame was 5.125 million ISK * 1.000 = 5.125.000.000.
 

For 2 days now I am converting my assets into ISK and consequently into Plex. The goal is having 500 Plex in my wallet.
I cancelled all buy orders I had set up in Jita and put instead a buy order for 250 Plex for less than 5 mio ISK each, which was fulfilled pretty quickly. 
The remaining ISK in my wallet is currently about 630 million which I use for updating existing sell orders. 
I stopped buying new items and concentrate on selling the existing assets to generate another 620 million ISK (conservatively assuming a Plex price of 5 million ISK and needing additional 250 Plex).

So, the Alpha to Omega challenge sees the finish line on the horizon.

I still have to workout what the next steps for this player account will be.
Maybe I will continue trading, but then be relocating to other trade hubs.
Maybe I go into industry, which is an area I haven't done at all in a serious way. But there is a lot of very good and interesting content around, like the blogs from Stranathor and Alilus Tellis. 
Or maybe I'll find a completely different activity I can put a new challenge in. We'll see.

My next blog entry will most likely be the final status update to this challenge. 
Let's see how long it will take to convert my assets to generate the ISK for the remaining needed Plex.

PS:
I will write a summary of my learnings later on.
This may help other players (capsuleers, as they are called ingame) in pursuing their attempts to generate enough of the ingame currency ISK to be able to pay for their omega subscription without spending real money.

Month End Update - October 2025

This challenge is now going on for 69 days.

During the last week I finally hit the 4 billion ISK mark. 

Learnings and tips

As pointed out in the last blog entry I recently changed my strategy.

In addition to the regular regional trading I do now use the order slots of my Jita alt to put up buy orders as well. 
I put the buy orders out of a Perimeter based player owned structure, which allows me to massively safe relisting fees. I still keep buying directly from sell orders for regional trading if I find profitable opportunities.
After the buy orders have been fulfilled I either sell them directly in Jita or let them be hauled to Dodixie or Amarr to sell. 

To reduce fees and contract rewards I reduced the collateral from 120% to 110% of the expected sell price. This led to a reduced effective contract reward rate, which decreased from 1,5% in September to 1,2% in in October. 

Numbers

In Oktober I made sales of 12,2 billion ISK which is an increase of 1,7 billion ISK (or 16%) in comparison to September.
The ISK paid in market escrow rose from 8 billion in September to 10 billion ISK in October. 

(I recognized that the final Profit or Loss numbers in my former postings had been flawed, because they did not account for the value of the outstanding sell orders. So I left them out of the following screenshot.)

My wealth rose by 1.648 billion ISK to 4.291 billion ISK - which is a whopping 62% increase month over month. As you can see, a significant part of this wealth is ISK put in buy orders and some inventory I still need to sell.

Next milestone:
Reaching a wealth of 5.4 billion ISK, which is equivalent to 1.000 Plex in current plex prices.
This would achieve the short-term goal of this challenge!

As indicated in my most recent blog entry going on accumulating ISK above the 1.000 Plex threshold would not bring any additional value neither to you readers nor myself. 
What I will do instead is starting to buy Plex as soon as I reach a total wealth of 5.4 billion ISK. 


The moment when I finally have converted enough ISK currently tight up in assets into 500 Plex will mark the succesful end of this challenge.   

Update after 7 weeks in the challenge - Change of strategy

  Where did I start from?

7 weeks ago I started a challenge with the goal of making enough ISK to be able to plex a completely fresh account in the MMORPG Eve Online by only doing regional trading as single source of income. 

I started with a total wealth of 75 million ISK, one character in Jita, one in Amarr and one in Dodixie.

After 11 days I reached my first milestone by having a wealth of more than 1 billion ISK.

Now, after 7 weeks I finally reached my next milestone: Wealth of 3 billion ISK

Learnings:

In the midth of last month I already encountered a ceiling of my strategy.
While generating the wealth of the first billion ISK was done in quite a short time frame, the progression afterwards was very slow. 

With only a maximum of 17 market orders per character I had to let go items where I made profits of 5 or 10 million ISK.
Instead I needed to climb the ladder into price areas where trades now would make a real difference for me. So I started buying items in the area of 20 to 50 million ISK with the goal of selling them with a margin of at least 35%, preferably 50% or more.

This came with a lot more competition, as this seems to be an area where a lot of players are trading. As a result I was forced to update orders more frequently. Broker fees started to cut heavily into my profits, much more than I had hoped for.

Maintaining the original strategy would certainly bring me to the point in time where I would finally reach the short-term goal of generating the ISK worth of 1.000 Plex. 
At current Plex prices this requires an additional wealth of 2 billion ISK. Depending on the average daily profit this would take 30 (with 65 million ISK) to 40 (with 50 million ISK) more days to achieve.

The mid-term goal requires a wealth worth of 2.400 Plex. At current Plex prices this requires approximately 12,9 billion ISK. Having a current wealth of 3 billion ISK I need to grind another 10 billion ISK. Using the numbers from above it would take me between 154 and 200 more days to reach the mid-term goal. 

I could grind my way on. But doing this would not give either you or me additional value reading this blog. 

So I decided to change my strategy.

To speed up the process I began to use the available market orders of my Jita alt.
This lets me gain in two ways - hopefully.

I put up buy orders which 

1. allows me to generate higher profit margins for items I buy in Jita and sell in Amarr or Dodixie
2. - and this is the real change in strategy - allows me to generate additional profit by margin trading (= station trading) in Jita itself  

Not using the available market slots my Jita alt has got limits my ability to generate profits by a lot. 

Why did I change the strategy?

The underlying idea of this blog is to show if plexing an account doing this kind of ingame activity is a viable way to play the game. 
From a pure mathematical perspective we already can say it is possible, even if it takes several months. But as time has a value, too, we should try to find ways to reduce the time needed to reach this goal. 

I see several possibilities, all of which require a combination of ingame activities.

1. Combining regional and station trading (which is the way I want to go) 
2. Combining regional trading with PVE activities (Exploration, running missions, incursions, abyssals).
   Added benefit = collecting loot that can be sold.
   Disadvantage = requires a lot more time dedicated to ingame activities
3. Combining regional trading with PVP activities (Faction warfare, ganking (difficult, if not impossible as solo alpha clone))
   Added benefit = collecting loot that can be sold.
   Disadvantage = requires a lot more time dedicated to ingame activities
   

As I don't want to spend significantly more time ingame the combination of regional and station trading will be my choice. Let's see where it will lead us.

What has happened during the last 12 days?

Development was twofold.

1. Turnover the first week was very slow. So I changed my strategy as described above.
   
   
2. Last week I decided to not exclusively buy from Jita sell orders anyomore.
   Instead I put buy orders in Jita as well. Or more precisely, I put the buy orders in a player owned station in Perimeter where I save A TON of fees when updating orders.
   Interestingly a lot of these buy orders have been fulfilled. This way I was able to increase the profit per sold item significantly during the last week. 

How are my numbers?

Since beginning of the month:

• Revenue:
• In the last 12 days I made sales of 5,76 billion ISK for a total of 55 orders.
  That makes an average sell price of 104,7 million ISK per order. 

• Amarr generated 1,965 billion ISK revenue with 16 orders for an average sell price of 122,8 million ISK.

• Dodixie generated 3,702 billion ISK revenue with 37 orders for an average sell price of 100,1 million ISK.

• Station trading in Jita just started and generated 95 million ISK revenue with 2 orders.
  
  

• Costs:
• I paid  432,1 million ISK in Sales Tax which comes down to the expected 7,5% for an alpha character.

• I paid 601,4 million ISK in Brokers Fee which now includes fees for buy orders as well. My total effective broker fee rate (broker fees / (broker fees + market escrows)) comes down to 11,5%. 
  As my base broker fee is 2,38%, the difference of 9,1% means I had - on average - to adjust prices 3,8 times before an item was bought and sold.

• I paid out 86,60 million ISK in rewards for courier contracts.
  I pay 1% reward on the collateral which finally comes down to 1,5% of total actual revenue.

These are my current numbers:

I take a provision of 25% against sell orders and contracts to reflect the fees and potential price adjustments I have to make before finally selling an item. 

My inventory has a relatively high value due to a mistake I made by bying too many items, but not having enough spare order slots to put them up for sale. 

Happy trading and manufacturing to you all. Enjoy the game! o7

Month End Update - September 2025

This challenge is now going on for 39 days and I have finished my first complete month.

Learnings and tips

It makes a lot of fun. Though, I think, this kind of game play style is certainly more suitable for players who like crunching numbers and developing spreadsheets. Not the best fit for someone who prefers ratting, exploring or pvp'ing.

I like ratting, but I consider myself even more as a number's guy. So, good for me.

I certainly spent more time creating and improving my spreadsheets than being actually ingame.
Updating orders daily is tedious. But it's part of the process. And I have only 17 orders at most to update per character, so I won't complain. And as Croda showed in his excellent post it is necessary.

Tips for making this process more efficiently are:

1. Using the mouse wheel to update prices if the price differences are small (see Croda's blog entry on this topic) 
   
   
2. I created a spreadsheet where I can filter for all orders that need to be updated.  I copy the names of the items and paste them into the Quickbar in my market window. Then I work my way through the list. This way I avoid having to scroll through all active orders.
   
   
3. When setting up sell orders I used to put them up one by one and entering prices manually. This was tedious and not very efficient. Especially as I already have them listed in my spreadsheet with names and prices. I figured out I can simply copy the item names and my target selling price. Then I go into my hangar, mark all items to sell and click sell. When the market window opens I import the data and simply click sell on the bottom side of the window. 
   
   

I haven't figured out yet at what day time it's best to update orders to keep them the most competitive as long as possible. Will have a closer look in the next days.

Automatic updating spreadsheets (average prices and numbers of days an item is traded) is still an issue. I guess I do too many requests at once which results in reaching some kind of server limit. Interestingly, this happens only when pulling market history data. I'm using the free online excel version and the eve online excel add-in.

To reduce fees and contract rewards I reduced the collateral from 120% to 110% of the expected sell price, starting from October on. There is a risk of courier contracts being failed on purpose if the contractor decides (s)he can sell the items for more. But in this case I will still make a decent profit - and I get my money much sooner than if I have to wait for the items to sell on the market.

Numbers

As expected and communicated earlier, the taxes and fees an alpha character has to pay are having a big negative impact on the overall performance.

In September I had sales of 10,5 billion ISK and generated a net profit of 442 million ISK. My net profit margin was 4,2%.

I don't know if this high or low. Maybe you post your margins in the comments section below for comparison. Just remember that my characters are still alpha clones having an effective tax rate of more than 23% this month.

My wealth rose to 2.6 billion ISK which is made up from:

Next milestone: Wealth of 3 billion ISK = equivalent to 500 Plex

(As I don't have a lot of (real-life) accounting skills, I do welcome any tips and suggestions where and how to improve the way I present my numbers here.)

Items I trade

I trade almost exclusively in modules and implants.
Some of them have very little to no competition while others are showing 4 or more active sellers.

Is my goal still achievable?

While the overall goal of plexing the account is doable for sure, it all comes down to the question: 
How long will it take?

So far my average daily net profit has been around 66 million ISK.
To reach my short-term goal I need to have a total wealth worth of 1.000 Plex.
At current ingame Plex prices (5,4 million ISK per Plex) I need a total wealth of 5,4 billion ISK. 
So I need additional 2,757 billion ISK.

Making 66 million ISK per day it will last another 41 days to finally achieve the short-term goal. 
I could liquidate all assets as soon as I have the wealth to buy 500 Plex, but that would leave me with a plexed account but no ingame money left.  So no real option.

If I'm able to scale up my net profit per day by either reducing fees (updating less frequently) or generating higher margins through an improved buy-sell-strategy I could reach my goal faster. 

Let's see what the future will bring.

Alpha to Omega by regional trading - Milestone 1 reached after 11 days

Milestone

I reached the first milestone. 
Having a wealth of more than 1 billion ISK. 

What has happened the last couple of days

Due to a mistake I made while using the spreadsheet where I identify items to buy I double-bought some items. 

This led to the unfortunate situation that my inventory is way bigger - in terms of ISK - as I would like to have it.

My problem now is simply not having enough spare sell orders available as I'm restricted to a maximum of 17 sell orders per character.
There are some items currently contracted. For these items spare sell order slots are already waiting.
But for the items in inventory, I need to wait for existing sell orders to be fulfilled. Then I can clear my inventory and put it on sell orders.

Another challenge I face is that my wallet size grows faster than my opportunities to invest.
Sometimes only 1 or 2 sell orders per market hub are available for me to fill with new items.
As my wallet size increases so much, buying and selling items for 20 million ISK or below does not accomplish my goal of having as much ISK as possible invested in the market.

Strategy:

My current strategy is identifying items that trade at least every 2 days. 

They need to show at least a gross profit margin of 50% when comparing prices between Jita and the trade hub I plan to sell it. 
My third criteria is that the Buy price in Jita needs to be below the 60 day average price. This is simply to avoid getting sucked in a price bubble where I eventually might not able to sell the item with a profit or at all. 

To be able to invest my growing wallet size I will need to adjust some criteria. Either by reducing the required margin, or mabye by expanding the search to items that trade only every 3 or 4 days on average. 

I try to update my prices at least once a day. 
To avoid scrolling through all orders I copy/paste from my spreadsheet the names of items that need price updates and then I import them in the Quickbar. 

Items I trade

For the moment I sell few blueprints, and they are moving very slow.
Most of the items I sell successfully are implants and modules, mostly deadspace and faction modules.
Some of them have very little to no competition while others are showing 4 or more active sellers.

Next milestone: 3 billion ISK = equivalent to 500 Plex

If you'd like to try out Eve Online, please click my referral link. It gives you a million skill points and it helps my characters progress as well. Thank you.