EVE Corporation - Page 557

The overall idea of contract sniping is simple. You find mispriced contracts, buy them, and put them back up on the contract market (usually immediately) for the correct price.

Why this works: This works because the contract system functions differently than the regular EVE market. There is a broker fee attached to every contract you make, and if you want to re-price the contract you will lose the broker fee. As such, the chance for any contract above 30 mil will be cancelled and repriced under you. This is coupled with the fact that the prices for many high movement faction modules to be relatively sticky, it is pretty much impossible to lose out on a resell if you put it back up immediately.

There are no 0.1 isking contractors that I have seen. Risk is relatively low to nil if you only deal with high movement items when buying/resell. And 0 if you find them below wtb orders.

How to do it:

Under the new contract system, the contracts usually refresh every minute or two. Therefore spamming the search button isn’t really necessary and it’s not hard to find mispriced contracts. You can easily do it while doing homework, watching a Starcraft stream or running a mission/roam. Hell, I’ve done it while playing League of Legends before and waiting to respawn. The effort required is low.

Have the sort pages by “Date Created (newest first).” “All regions” under locations, All contract types, All items, Public availability. All other fields clear.

Most importantly, have the “Created” column arrow pointing down.

How it looks:
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Hit search once in awhile and profit.

Tricks I’ve learned over past 6 months.

Contract alt placement: Amarr/Jita and Dodixie are where most of the mispriced contracts are from my experience. Rens interestingly enough does not come to my mind for people putting up underpriced contracts (this does not mean it doesn’t happen though it does).

Currently my alts (each on different accounts) are placed in Ourapheh, Bhizeba and Magiko. I also have one in Everyshore/Essence border region, but this was made mostly for Quafe Zero contracts.

Ourapheh (Genesis) gate borders Sinq Laison (Dodixie) as well as Verge Vender and Essence. I usually leave this alt on the Dodixie side.

Bhizeba (Amarr) borders Tashmurkon, Kador, and is 2 jumps away from Kor-Azor. I leave this alt sitting on the Tashmurkon gate.

Magiko (Heimatar, same region as rens) borders Teonusude and is two jumps away from Metropolis.

Main contract account either sits in Jita 4-4 station or on Sobaseki/Muvolalien gate.

I have found that having a private channel where all your alts are placed is very beneficial. This will allow you to link contracts between each alt, and quickly transfer isk from your main contractor.

If you only have one account to contract snipe with, than there are two places I recommend. Sitting in Perimeter on the Iyen gate to quickly access the Dodixie region, or in Jita sitting either on the Muvolailen (The Citadel) or Sobaseki (Lonetrek) gate.

If you’re not sure if a contract is underpriced, first double click it to open up the window for a quick accept if needed. Go back to contract window, Right click the contract-> Find related contracts -> Same type, and single click price column to rearrange the item from highest buy order to lowest sell. To quickly reset, Click on the X on top left to clear field, double click Created column to get the arrow pointing down and hit search again.

When you first start out and are not sure of the average going price to quickly buy up a mis-priced contract, the above method is a good way to see if the contract is truly mispriced. If you see a bunch of items selling 5-10 mil above your contract, go ahead and buy it up and relist it 0.01 mil less than the highest sell order.

2nd most common contracts are people that sell a 2-3 stacked faction item for the price of 1. Which is why you always unstack all items in your hanger, or place them inside a cargo container.

3rd most common contracts are when people sell a bunch of faction items along with a rigged faction ship. These types of contracts you just appraise real quick and add it all up in your head if you think its worth it (or you can do it slowly and manually by right clicking certain item if you’re not sure of its cost)

I usually don’t bother checking any of the corpii c-type reppers/resists or 1mn abs/mwds unless they are A-types.

Watch out for the sellers of large packs of cybernetic implants. Most are easy to spot scams that still catch some people (because people in eve are stupid), and if they aren’t a scam almost 99% guaranteed it’ll be cheaper buying it off the market, either way not worth my time and these are rare anyway.

Aside from that just know the general sell range of all the active/passive hardeners for shield and armor, and boosters. Oddly enough I only recall 5-7 mispriced/stacked armor reppers from my time contract sniping.

Turnover rate for most of these repriced contracts are anywhere from a few minutes later to about a day later. Out of the thousand plus contracts I”ve put up, I think the only expired ones are when I tried to resell some IN megapulses, which after out of 6, 2 ended up expiring, but I was able to resell the next time around (still no loss in isk, since they were a mis-priced 6 stack below the current WTB orders)

I personally don’t buy faction guns even if I see one is 5-10 mil below the avg sell order. I don’t know the movement for them but my gut feeling tells me its too slow to be worth my time.

Faction launchers (CN Cruise/HML best, HAMs/siege are okayish, smaller ones no idea) on the other hand have good item movement, and if I find one for 5-10 mil under what I know is the average selling price, I will buy it up and 0.01 mil isk the next closest contractor.

For the high rollers:
Set the minimum price to 1000 (1 billion essentially) and look at all the multiple item contracts. 1 billion usually means a multiple item contract will either be a bunch of bpcs for a cap ship, a scam, or a faction ship w/faction mods. The latter is what we are looking for to see if it is mispriced. Usually the mispriced ones will be T3's etc.

On principle, I never fulfill a WTB order. It is a loss of money in almost all cases unless the person mispriced the WTB order and the isk gained from fulfilling it is more than the isk gained from 0.01mil isking the current lowest contract minus broker fees. Use your gut feeling here.

If your faction items are in amarr/dodixie/rens/any major trade hub. Just make a courier contract with a small reward 100k up to 2 million. In general, as long as the collateral (please price this accurately) isn’t greater than 100 million, a 100k isk reward is enough if the package is small as the numerous freighter runners will just pick it up along with whatever they are currently doing and the item will be delivered to you in Jita usually within 24 hours. Using your main to haul the faction stuff that are more out of the way works in well too. 4x lse, 2 invuls, 1600mm dcu, 2 pdu’s and you’re good to go for autopilot. Just double package the stuff to be on the safe side. And don’t be in a war mkay?

Most importantly, have patience. In the end contract sniping is based on luck and the stupidity of your fellow eve pilots. On someday you won’t find any and some days you’ll hit the jackpot. As of writing this I found a mispriced carrier, a 2x stack of caldari photons and both contracts had been up for like 10 minutes. Of course they weren’t in Jita region, the photons were in amarr, and carrier was in lonetrek, but it was still a guaranteed ~120 mil profit for me.

Do note that in my opinion, contract sniping does not beat out a person with a specialized maxed out social character blitzing level 4’s in total isk earned (as long as that person does it 1-2 hours a day assuming they can earn 50-100 mil an hour), but it requires almost no effort and no need to have any skills except a large enough bank roll, and you can start/stop at anytime.

If you think contract sniping takes no effort, wait till you see how easy it is to manage a small scale WTB/WTS setup.

The overall idea is simple. You put up a WTB order for some faction item, and when it gets fulfilled, you 0.01mil isk the current lowest WTS order and pocket the difference as a profit.

Why this works: Like I’ve said in the contract sniping tidbit, there are no 0.1 iskers in contracting above 50 million. Some other person might top your WTB order, but if the item you are putting the order up has high enough movement, it’ll get fulfilled eventually. It also helps that there are enough idiots that are too lazy with contracts and will just fulfill wtb orders and lose out on an easy 5-10 mil.

As long as you are working with high movement items, you do not lose out on your investment, and broker fees are pretty much negligible under 100 mil anyway as long as you have IV/V in broker relations.

TLDR: Put up WTB orders for high movement faction items 1-3 times a day. 1-3 times a day you find out which WTB orders get fulfilled, replaced that WTB order, and put up the WTS order and pocket the difference for being the middle man.

What I’ve learned:

Off the top of my head high movement items are Zor’s custom navigation hyper links, all the faction damage mods (except mag stabs because every knows gallente sucks balls in the PVE ship department and in general of course!), faction launchers, pithi/gistti b-type shield boosters, sister launchers and the faction EANMs.

To a lesser extent the CN/DG invuls, pirate faction damage mods (not commander) that are the equivalent of the empire factions mods, and active pith/pithii/gistum B type and up shield hardeners/boosters all have decent movement, but are a little more volatile comparatively. These items will tie up your isk more though.

If you’re really shy about it here’s something I did for about 2 weeks for kicks and giggles with a guaranteed profit margin. Put up buy orders or hell, even buy sister core/combat probes off the regular market and put them back up for 5 to 10 packs. The movement is kind of slow, but you get about 30-40% of your investment back. It costs like 2.5 mil for 5 of them if you buy them off sell orders, and people will buy them in packs off contracts for 4-5 mil. Only reason I stopped doing this was because I didn’t know about the corp contract trick and I only had 20 contracts to work with(more on this in other section)

I tested the waters with CN BCUs almost exclusively for about a month. At my high I had about 60 CN bcus on hand (not counting those on wts orders) bought at the 76-80 mil range and was just holding onto them because I knew the average price settled around 86 mil and didn’t want to sell for too much lower. Eventually some guy did crash the market by liquidating 3-4 hundred of them which caused me to liquidate my stock, lowest they got to were about 79mil sell orders down from 89 mil or so(but at the same time I still was doing my WTB setup but at the new range of only 72-76mil). Morale of story, even if crap happens and some mission runners decides to nuke it, the chance for you to lose out is zero if you only ever carry a small stock on hand and keep the flow going and not be greedy like me. I do admit the possibility of me losing out a little did cross my mind because I was still putting up WTB orders, but to be honest, I had been in the business long enough to know the prices for CN BCUs at least were relatively sticky, and the BCUs would have had to drop to below 70 mil sell range before I might have taken an overall loss.

Quick appraisal for Faction bpcs: 90-100 mil to build a pirate BS, 10 mil for a Cruiser, less than 1 mil for the frigs. This assumes Builder PE IV. About 12 mil loss in broker fees for selling the BS, and 2 mil loss for Cruiser should be taken into account. Reselling the built ship is a lot easier and in most cases more profitable than reselling the contract, and you can modify your sell price.

The one caveat to running a business like this is A) Having a large enough bank roll, and B) being able to generate enough contracts (see Corp contracts section). However, I feel 1-2 billion isk is more than enough to do your very own small scale setup and get to earning 3-10 mil gross profit off each fulfilled wtb order if you work with 100 mil and less faction items. You can choose to focus on only 1-2 faction items, or spread yourself out to increase your revenue and chance of having one wtb contract fulfilled if your backroll allows it.

So if you max out Contracting, you can only have 21 contracts up at any one time for a single account. If you are only contract sniping, this should never be a problem, but if you are doing the wtb/wts setup for contracting, 21 might not be enough (it wasn’t for me).

Luckily, CCP implemented this great skill called Corporation Contracts, which allows you to have 60 more contracts which is great! Unfortunately, to utilize the skill the way CCP envisioned, you need to have an office in the station you want to set up the contracts as. This way you can utilize the separate divisions (which an item needs to be in) before you can make contracts “on behalf of your corporation.” Now if you’re like me, the idea of paying 646 million to rent out a jita office for a month sounds like a downer to me, even if I know I can make more than that in a month. Luckily there’s a way relatively unknown (at least my googlefu couldn’t find any specific way to do it) way around it.

The way around it is simple, you use the deliveries division of each station you want to trade in as the place to store all your faction mods.

To set it up, you just find an item that is being sold from the station you want to trade in (Jita 4-4, Amarr 8, Rens 6-8 etc) and accept it for your corporation. Tada, you can now make contracts on behalf of your corporation from that station without needing to have an office there. I personally just spent 100k to buy an Elite Drone AI for each station.

To make a WTB contract: Make a public contract with the “On behalf….” Checked, select the station you want the item in and hit next twice, and fill out the form regularly. You don’t have to bother selecting any divisions as the item will be put into your delivery division automatically.

To make a WTS contract: Similarly you can other open up your deliveries tab and right click the item in question and create contract, or just make a public contract and select the delivery hanger and find the item you want to sell.

Do note that the isk to do this will be taken out of the Corporation funds, so it is pretty important you be the CEO of your own Trade corporation (Team Magical Unicorn Beta Strike Force, ticker: NASL) if you want to avoid a lot of hassle.

You can not simply drag and drop items into your delivery division though to make WTS contracts, but to get around this just make a private contract to an alt that’s in the corp, and have it accept it on behalf of your corp and you are good to go.

All WTB/WTS corporation contracts will be made utilizing the skills of the character making them, so Broker Relations/Accounting V helps a lot. You can also make corporation WTB orders for other regions even if you are not there as long as you have an item sitting in the delivery hanger for that station. Same with WTS orders, but I personally ship all of my items to Jita for fast resale.

81 contracts I think should be enough.

0) Broker Relations and Accounting to IV min, preferably V if you plan to be pushing billions around.

1) Split every faction item immediately into the stacks you want to sell. Do not be like those players you just ripped off and put up your stock of faction items for the price of a single one.

2) Re-Check all your contracts after you’ve finalized them.

3) Keep 1-2 billion on hand at all times

4) Beware of scams when snap buying. Easiest way to prevent yourself from screwing up royally is depositing all your isk except for 0.5 to 1 billion into your trade corporation account.

5) Double check your contracts a 2nd time. Don’t screw up your WTB orders by putting one up to buy the item, while also giving the item too. See rule 2.

6) Be patient, and don’t expect to hit jack pot immediately if contract sniping.

7) Don’t do this drunk or too tired. (I’ve only ever screwed up twice, once snap buying something I shouldn’t have, and once putting up WTS orders, only cost me a few hundred mil so no big deal)

8) Don’t get scammed. Statistics say that ignoring Jita local reduces the chance of being scammed by 99 percent. You do not want to be in the top 1%.

9) Drake makes a good transport ship whether you double packet your items or not

Contracting should be considered a way to augment your income, it might seem hard or time consuming at first, but soon it should only take 10-30 seconds to scan all the recent contracts to see if any are cheap. When in doubt, right click -> show all same type.

Contracting is pretty easy. I’ve made about 25 +/- 2 billion over the course of 6 months or so from it. This amount isn't alot compared to the hard core mission runners, but I think if you add up the time I actively spent doing it, the aggregate hourly income could very well rival the best level 4 mission runners. Either that or I’m very lucky.

Screw rigs. I don't factor them into my appraisal but I know they should. I just like to play it safe and never really care enough.

If you see any faction item x2, right click it to make sure its mis priced! This is very common.

Being mildly proficient in Excel can help you keep track of your finances and crap. Though honestly the overarching fact is that you're making isk. I just like to know how much.
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This is what mine looked like. First sheet was mostly for calculating BPC build costs and other stuff. Other sheets were just some secret finance stuff and to keep a rough track of my own faction stock of mods and how much isk I had on hand/expected if I liquidated. I think on average I was earning 8% back for every isk I invested from doing the WTB/WTS thing. So toss in 1-2 bil, earn back 80 mil every few days for relatively low work wasn't too bad. It is good to note though that throwing more than a few bil worth of isk at the contract system gives quickly diminishing returns.

Contrary to popular belief spamming refresh to contract snipe does not take very much time, and I tried to make other people think so because I didn't want that much competition.

Special thanks to Motbob for introducing me to it and of course for trusting me with 6 billion isk during that contract op, even if I did have those 2 machs and a crap ton of t2 mods on hand as collateral, loaning out approx 3 bil to a "relative" stranger is still a lot, and of course your commission that was more than anything I imagined you would have given me. Your advice that Eve players are idiots is still holding very strong.
Looking back on this, it is kind of ironic due to Motbob's recent post about not trusting people that only post in this thread and nowhere else on TL, which is completely logical and I agree with. Though I was also a Liquid director at the time.

Also shoutout to Jitatradewomen, though we’ve never talked or communicated. I have been told you are Russian and from some of your contracts that you've sniped (while I was not on) the profits look pretty crazy, perhaps you are some secret black market isk laundering machine or something. (J/k) Nonetheless, your placement of Amarrtrade women/man, metropolistradewomen etc to battle my own less than aptly named trade alts (dontshootmeplzplzplz comes to mind) was fun. You've also been on a lot less I think? A majority of the mispriced contracts I've found recently have on average been up 5-20 minutes. Back in motbob times this blasphemous outcome never would have happened! The ironfist of regulating correct pricing of faction mods has gone down hill apparently.

Also apparently Krystys(sp?)/Pufftrees fulfilled a WTB order of 53 mil for a RF gyro recently. Real contractors do not do this shameful act. Do not be like him. Though apparently he has shown me that if you spend enough time spamming your contracts in Jita local you can find idiots that will buy them without checking that there are 10 other cheaper sell orders on contracts, but I'm way too lazy to do this and I hate Jita local.

Also thx ccp for Quafe zero. You've let me make a billion or two over the past few days.

Zor's custom navigation hyper links give huge %profit return for their cost. WTB orders of 10-13 mil sell for 17-20 mil. There could be other faction mods, but I'll let you guys find them out yourself.

It takes a considerable amount to crash the popular faction items to any sizable degree. Even the CN BCUs are bouncing back now to 81-84 mil ish a pop, and wtb orders were around 74-75 mil last I checked.

No I"m not quitting. I just realized over the past few days during liquidation that I've earned enough isk and since CCP is dropping my packets so I can't even go on roams (I really wanted to try and get on the -A- EVE tourney team since Mukk is heading it and than brag about it but alas it was not to be), I don't have any isk drain in the foreseeable future. I’ll still be online to contract snipe a few times a day.