Choosing a career path in eve

Early days as a ninja salvager

When I started playing EVE I went with the route like the most new players. That is, I started with the tutorials and did missions afterwards. When I was approaching needed standings to start lvl3 missions, I understood that it's not for me. Missions and me don't mix like oil and water. That is when I started looking around to see what else could be done in this game. Randomly I stumbled on a few very interesting Ninja Salvaging blogs. One being Velocity Prime and the other - Mylootyourtears by Paul Clavet. It was a fantastic read. I knew right away what I was going to do the next foreseeable future. Worth mentioning that in early days I barely got skills to fly a battlecruiser. That did not stop me though from stealing loot and salvage. The payout was much better than missions with armor plates costing 250k isk and some meta 4 modules netting a couple of mil.  Very quickly I got accustomed and addicted to the taste of tears and once I got to fly my trusty Myrm, I had an opportunity to start hunting. Hunting carebears back in the day, with old aggro mechanics could easily have a full topic on its own.

As all good things, everything comes to an end. I think the golden Ninja Salvaging days were 2009-2010, while 2011 was ok, but already declining. Mostly due to the fact of many ninja blogs going up and all missioners having learned their lessons and not shooting you. You could always find someone somewhere, but following with some aggro changes later on made most of ninjas find another activity. Though with the recent introduction of mobile tractor units I think HighSec might bring a new era of ninjas v2.

Exploration

Being Ninja meant having at least a scouting/scanner alt, which surprisingly was very compatible with exploration. Shortly, me and my corpmates moved to lowsec where I continued doing exploration as my main income. I like exploration for various reasons. Mostly because it is not as tedious as missions. It can become like it, but it all depends on you how you spice up your game. While most explorers were sighting when finding a wormhole, I was excited. Low sec normally has c3-c2 connections as those are the wormholes with most statics to it. such class wormholes mean there can be easy targets to gank. After finding targets it was just a matter to give a shout to my friends and we are right on top on them, just like a pack of wolves. So in the end you get to find sites to earn some isk and occasional pvp opportunities. If you get burnt out and tired of scanning, there's nothing a low sec gatecamp couldn't fix. The life was good.

Exploration can provide an ok income. However it can be extremely time consuming/dangerous to clear sites in hostile areas and the ones closer to home usually has much bigger competition as you would not be the only guy with a probe launcher. Comparing to my mates, that were rolling missions and earning 200mil+ in an hour, I felt like a poor bastard (story of my life). Then I decided to change my game

Trading

I moved to trading which became my main source of income until the present. It's no secret that trading is where the money is at. Often you hear tips on forums for guys asking how to earn isk, telling them to do some form of trading or industry. It was not often you could find a blog dedicated just for this style of gameplay. People knew it's lucrative, but did not have good idea on how get into it and most would just ignore it and continue shooting red crosses for their isk. Trading as a profession is also not for everyone. It is very easy to burn out and lose money if one does a break. My burnout happened before and during odyssey patch, when exploration changes made decryptor prices crash down tenfold and I lost 25bil+ plus just because I had a lot of stock and a though of logging in my trade alt made me sick. Anyhow there are many forms of trading and you can earn isk just as being active as also being passive. The way you do business and strategy you choose will define your income. I will write a couple of more posts dedicated just for this part later on so I won't expand as much right now.