Art by Major Sniper
This is C4rlit0, one of the oldest and most valuable characters in Eve Online.
While it’s common to see gamers trading old or highly skilled characters in Eve Online for in-game currency, the marketplace was blown away last week when C4rlit0 sold for 510 billion ISK.
A conservative estimate places the value of that character, born on the same day Eve Online’s servers went live in 2003, at more than $6,200 according to current PLEX prices.
After more than a month on the open market, Shionert Aucie had the winning bid. Aucie did not respond to INN’s request for an interview.
The previous owner, however, did speak to INN about C4rlit0 and what it meant to hand over what could be the most valuable character in the entire game. Along with being one of the oldest still active, he has more than 300 million skill points after years of training. Morvinn from the No Handlebars alliance said it was hard to let go.
“He was a popular member of No Handlebars and people were used to taking his titan bridges,” he said. “For sure the ISK helps me get over it though.”
Morvinn wasn’t the first owner, however. He picked up C4rlit0 a few months ago for about 230 billion, managing to double his investment in less than a year.
“I’ve actually only been playing Eve since 2013, and I realized quickly that if you wanted to get ahead, you needed to have lots of ISK to buy the character the 2003 players already had. So that’s what I did, tried to be smart with ISK-making and buy the character that way,” Morvinn said. “I made a lot of my ISK buying and selling characters before injectors, and made some good ISK doing it.
He saw value in his date of birth: May 6, 2003. That’s the day Eve Online went online. The character’s corporation history doesn’t go back that far, but it’s common for early characters to not show their entire history in game without access to their data source.
“I knew there were buyers out there willing to pay the extra due to the history. I had to be patient, but it was worth it I think,” he said.
Large-money transfers like this are extraordinarily rare in Eve, just like the availability of characters now pushing 15 years old. The next-most valuable character might be Mortanius, which sold for 230 billion ISK in April, possibly to The Judge.
Professional trader Brock Khans, who owns the EveSkillboard website used to assist character transfers, said there’s no way to objectively value someone like C4rlit0.
Khans said there initially was suspicion that the sale might have been a ploy to drive up the price, but it now appears it was a legitimate transfer, possibly to someone new to Eve Online’s Tranquility server.
“(Shionert Aucie) had previously been in Fraternity, so I’m making the assumption they recently came over from the Chinese server. Those players moving over have to start back at 0 SP,” Khans said. “For someone not about that life and wanting to just get back into the saddle, this type of character is a win. Essentially no training needed, and you can fly everything.”
Morvinn, who still has about 1.5 billion skill points across all his remaining characters, gave thanks to Baltrom and Jericho Stormcloud, along with his alliance mates at No Handlebars for assisting in the sale.
Pew Pew
“there’s no way to objectively value someone like C4rlit0”
This is an interesting comment. I think that the value of anything is what people are willing to pay for it. So they day it sells in an open auction you have a perfect measure of it’s value.
However I can see the other side of it, that the person has paid a big premium for sentimental reasons, and it’s hard to guess in advance how much that type of premium will be.
Still even with something simple it’s hard. Imagine there was a bond guaranteed to pay you $1k per year for the rest of your life, how much would you be willing to pay for that? I think a lot of people would have different answers (due to inflation + time value of money + difficulty of raising money now etc) so it’s not easy to value.
August 28, 2018 at 8:00 AMaeTher
I have a character one month younger than C4rlit0 and he’s still active, I’m going to have to sell him lol..
August 28, 2018 at 10:19 AManaisanais501
It’s about 237bn in skill injectors if you extracted all his SP. Otherwise I have no idea why somebody would pay that much just for a character made in 2003. There were several thousand made that first day. The server hovered at 2-2.5k all that month. I remember because that’s when I made my first character, which I’ve long since extracted and doomed.
August 28, 2018 at 11:53 AMDickDastardly anaisanais501
It makes no sense to me either but I guess it’s a bit like first edition books.
People pay a lot more for them than for later print runs but the story doesn’t change. It’s basically the same book but an old one has an inflated price.
I’d just buy a brand new copy myself but other people don’t.
August 29, 2018 at 9:10 AManaisanais501
Also just occurred to me, ““For someone not about that life and wanting to just get back into the saddle, this type of character is a win” makes no sense whatsoever. Why would you spend 510bn when you could “get back into the saddle” for 100?
August 28, 2018 at 12:20 PMMoonDogAFO
Hmm, one of my pilots was born on July 22, 2003. He doesn’t have as many skill points though due to occasional sabbaticals from the game.
August 28, 2018 at 8:36 PMGanthrithor
People pay $70m for old Ferraris. IDK man, whatever floats your boat. Kind of cool to have an OG character I guess.
August 29, 2018 at 5:12 AM