Faction warfare: the complete beginner ISK method

This is the method I use, run start to finish on camera in a 1.1 million ISK frigate on a free alpha account. Every number on this page is either measured in game or marked as an estimate. Where the video and the measured data disagree, the measured data wins and I say so.

What faction warfare actually is

Four empires, Caldari, Amarr, Minmatar and Gallente, are permanently at war over a fixed set of low security systems. Any pilot can enlist with one of them and start taking part.

The part that makes money is plexing. A plex is a small deadspace site that sits in a faction warfare system. You warp in, kill the NPC defender, and hold the site until a timer runs out. When it completes you are paid in loyalty points, which you spend in your faction's store on items you then sell for ISK.

That is the whole loop. Enlist, fly to the right system, run a site, bank LP, convert LP to items, sell items in Jita.

Why this one and not mining or missions

Four things stack up in its favour for a new character:

1. The entry cost is trivial. One million ISK buys a fitted ship that can run the site. The career agent missions the game points you at on day one hand you 15 to 16 million, so you can start without earning anything first.
2. No skill wall. This works on an alpha clone. There is no subscription gate and no long training plan before you are earning.
3. It is not twitchy. Compared to abyssal running there is no second by second reaction demand. You can run it semi-attentively.
4. PvP is optional but available. You can run away from almost everything. You can also choose to fight, in a hull cheap enough that losing it does not matter.

What it actually pays

Measured, on the Scout loop, on an alpha character: roughly 50 to 70 million ISK per hour.

That is the number I would plan around. The arithmetic that produces bigger numbers is real but it is a ceiling, not income, and the gap between the two is where most published ISK per hour guides go wrong.

Here is the full chain, because it is worth understanding once:

Step	Value
Scout BSC-1 base payout	7,500 LP
Frontline multiplier	x1.5
Frontline payout	11,250 LP
Site timer	5 minutes
Realistic time per site including travel and the rat	about 8 minutes
LP to ISK, converted properly	roughly 1,000 to 1,500 ISK per LP

Run that out and you get a headline figure north of 100 million an hour. You will not hit it, for two reasons that no rewards table shows you:

• Completion rate. Sites get contested. Someone warps in, you abort, you re-warp somewhere else. Not every site you start is a site you finish.
• Net conversion. The ISK per LP figure is what you get after listing fees and after buying whatever the store offer requires you to bring.

Measured against ceiling, the ratio comes out around 0.57 across every tier I have flown. Apply that and the ceiling maths reconciles almost exactly with the measured 50 to 70 million.

If a guide quotes you a faction warfare rate and does not mention completion rate, it is quoting a ceiling.

How to enlist

In space, open the menu on the left, click Activities, then Theatres of War. The enlist option is on the side panel. Pick one of the four empires.

You can also enlist with an insurgency, which puts you with the Angel Cartel or the Guristas instead. Do not do that yet. The payouts are interesting but it makes you a legal target in high security space and it cuts you off from the main market hub, which is the opposite of what a new character needs.

Enlist with the Caldari State. Any faction works, and the method is identical whichever you pick, but Caldari has one structural advantage: it controls Jita, the biggest market in the game, and the Caldari warzone is a very short trip from it. Set your clone to Jita, and every time you die you wake up in the one place where you can buy a replacement ship instantly and fly straight back out.

Where to fly

Open the Theatres of War map. Every system in the warzone is labelled with a role, and the role decides your pay:

• Frontline. Plus 50 percent LP. This is the only place you should be farming.
• Command Operations. Normal rate.
• Rearguard. Effectively nothing. Avoid entirely.

Then there is offensive versus defensive. This is decided by who owns the system, not by who is contesting it. Flying into an enemy owned frontline system and plexing it is offensive. Plexing in one of your own is defensive.

The common advice is that offensive is where the money is. That is only half right, and the half that is wrong costs people a lot of safety:

Defensive plexing pays the full amount the moment the system is contested at all. It is a binary switch on the contested flag, not a sliding scale that ramps up as the contested percentage climbs.

I measured this in client. A defensive Scout site in a system showing 1.7 percent contested paid the full 11,250 LP, the same as an offensive capture at 58 percent the same hour. A stable, uncontested system pays zero, which is where the "defensive is worthless" folklore comes from.

This matters because defensive plexing is noticeably quieter. You get interrupted less. Check your own frontline systems for the contested flag before defaulting to offensive. The one catch is that defensive captures remove victory points, so a lightly contested system will stabilise back to zero pay after a few runs and you move on.

Grade C. One measured session, cross-checked against the public API. I will re-measure and upgrade this when I have more runs.

The ship

Drones, not guns. Drone damage applies at any range and does not care about your gunnery skills, which on a new character are the thing you do not have.

The fit is a Tristan at about 1.1 million ISK: three drone damage amplifiers, a microwarpdrive, a long point, and eight Warrior I in the bay. At the skill level shown in the video that is 74.5 DPS, all of it from drones. It kites at 16 km, which is outside what the site rats apply well at, and it is genuinely PvP capable. I have taken a kill in it.

The full fit, the skills that matter, and why the drones are Minmatar rather than the higher raw damage Gallente ones, are on the Tristan fit page.

Running a site, start to finish

1. Pick the site. In a frontline system, open the probe scanner or the overview and look for the plexes. There are three flavours: basic, navy and advanced. Take the basic Scout site, marked BSC.
2. Know what can follow you in. A basic Scout site admits T1 frigates only. Not navy frigates, not destroyers. That is the entire reason it is the right site for a beginner. The worst fight you can be dragged into is an even one.
3. Warp in and set up. Orbit the button at your kiting range, launch drones, and lock the NPC.
4. Kill the rat. Five Warrior I go through the Scout site defender quickly. On an offensive site the timer is frozen until the rat is dead. On a defensive site the rat is still hostile and still has to be dealt with, but the timer runs regardless.
5. Hold for the timer. Five minutes on a Scout BSC site, which is the shortest timer of any plex in the game.
6. Warp off. Do not sit on the completed button. Warp to a random spot in space before you do anything else.

Payout lands as a mail. A frontline Scout site pays 11,250 LP.

Watch your local and your directional scanner the whole time. You are in low security space. Nothing about this fit is meant to survive a committed gank, and it does not have to, because it costs a million ISK.

When a system runs dry, sites respawn, but the fastest way to keep working is to build a small rotation of two or three adjacent frontline systems off the Theatres of War map. A Scout BSC site respawns in around 10 minutes, which is roughly the same as your clear time, so one system nearly keeps one pilot busy and two systems fully does.

Turning the LP into ISK

This is the step most guides skip, and it is the step that decides whether your loyalty points are worth 1,000 ISK each or 200.

The short version: dock at a high security station belonging to your faction, open the LP store, and buy the offer with the best ISK per LP ratio that actually trades. Then haul it to Jita and list it.

The trap is that the highest ratio offers in every LP store are implants and clothing that sell two units a day. On paper they are worth five times what the sensible offers are worth. In practice there is no buyer.

The full walkthrough, including how to use Fuzzwork to rank the offers and how to spot the illiquid ones before you spend, is in Turning loyalty points into ISK.

The sites, in the Atlas

Every faction warfare plex, with its payout, timer, victory points and ship restrictions, is in the Atlas:

• Scout BSC-1, the site in this guide
• Scout NVY-1, the same size but navy hulls get in
• Small NVY-1, the next step up, needs a destroyer
• Moderate NVY-3, the highest sustained LP loop in the game, and a multi-pilot site

Or browse all faction warfare plexes.

Corrections

On the loyalty point shortcut. In the video, at 10:37 and again at 10:51, I say to add two zeros to the loyalty point number to estimate its ISK value. It should be three. 11,250 LP is roughly 11,250,000 ISK, not 1,125,000. Thank you to everyone in the comments who caught it.

A note on how current this is

Faction warfare is the fastest changing part of EVE right now. All three 2026 expansions centre on it, starting with Cradle of War in June 2026, which is what everything on this page was written against.

Numbers here that came from a rewards table rather than from my own play are marked. If you are reading this well after the date at the top, check the plex payouts against the client before you build a plan on them. When this goes out of date I will write the new one. That is the deal.