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Eve Online's New Chief Economist
eldavojohn writes "Recently CCP, the folks behind the online game Eve Online, hired a real world economist to advise them on their in-game economy. Says the new hire, Dr. Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, 'There's a lot of discussion in the game about inflation and that is my job, to find out if inflation is going on. This makes the consumers behave in a more natural way because they are competing against each other on multiple levels, not only on a tactical level in combat but for logistics and resources. That builds consumer behavior and patterns that you see in the real world.' Is this a serious step to keep Eve Online competitive in the virtual land of MMOs despite scandals, Ponzi schemes & scams?"
Maybe the first step towards keeping inflation stable is making sure developers aren't allowed to create epic/rare items repeatedly. That would be a good start.
The scndals link is broken. Just throwing that out there.
This is interesting, since CCP is actually preparing the introduction of T3 equipment. For a very long time, they've had a very particular way to work with T2 (better than T1) equipment, and that's to raffle the Original Blueprints for T2 items. This was a compromise between many different systems that didn't work very well, but gave many people unfair monopolies over much-wanted items. They've been stepping further and further away from this by introducing invention (which lets you 'invent' limited-run blueprints of T2 ships and modules). I wonder what this new economist will have to say about T3... I don't think there's been any official mention of how the T3 market is going to work.
Now they just need to hire programmers, artists, story writers, customer service reps, and auditors that monitor the employees and they will have a great game! (kidding...mostly)
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
What a silly question, Zonk. No way is Eve doing this to stay competitive! Why would they care about that? They just think economists are fun at parties!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
[Insert rant here about the importance of identity in role play games]
I guess around the 4th of never someone will finally make a space sim that has realistic physics, and lets you float around your ship, board space stations and other spinning bodies, go down to planets, etc. Oh, and try to make it fun.
Which is not to say that there's anything wrong with Eve Online.. at least they have enough sense not to offer a free trial.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There is no functional economy in Eve, because current real-world economic models are based on the concept of scarcity. Given that there are (theoretically) infinite resources in the form of mineable asteroids that respawn twice a week, infinite pirate bounties that spawn ala-WoW-like into existance from nothing, and other ludicrist ideas, I find it difficult to understand how there can be any scarcity whatsoever.
Eve's economy is capitalism at its finest - the people at the "bottom" subsidize the people at the "top" through first-mover advantage, monopoly practices (having done reporting on mineral pricing, I know it exists), scams, etc. So long time-players keep making a mint (and playing the game for free, given that they can trade all of that easily-made ISK into game time via GTC's), and new players end up subsidizing them in the process.
Get the developers out of the game. It's one thing to have a WoW game master pull you aside to see if you are running macros for farming, its another to have them actually interact in-game. There is NO reason for this kind of interference. CCP even condones this practice by turning a blind eye. I have seen it, and many other abuses, that have completely turned me off of the game. Couple this with the near-impossibility to get into any kind of social interaction (all corporations want 3 or more months experience, and while I easily have more than that, many mistreat their members and are demanding) and you can see why such a good idea has gone bad. Eve was a great attempt, and had many innovations that I wish I could see elsewhere, but at the end of the day, CCP has decided to condemn the game to a slow, painful death by apathy of its players. Being logged into the server and not seeing a single person in a system is a sure sign that a MMO is dying.
CCP, fix the game, admit error, remove your devs from interference, get rid of the "infinite economy", and we'll talk, and who knows, I might even sign up for a year. Keep up the errors, and, well, it was nice knowing you.
By the way, your tools for allowing players to perform economic analysis suck donkey. Really, I mean having to dump the data from a CSV into a homemade MySQL databases so that I can do aggregates over ore pricing was a painful, 3-hour ordeal. Not because it was hard to pull the data out, but rather, it took 3 hours of "flying around" to collect all of the necessary data. You want real economics? Fix your data collection. And make a stock market that REALLY works, not this "you can buy 100 shares of a corp at 1,000,000 ISK each" crap.
And for those current players who think I don't know what I'm doing, I have a 9-month-old character with 9 million SP, a niche market based out of Hek, I have run mineral pricing on 9 regions over 5 weeks with composite pricing (and got paid for it by real subscribers), and I am also an experienced builder, with only capital ship parts being beyond my skills. All of this only playing two nights a week for 4 hours a night. In that short time, I have been through two corps, one of which is one of the oldest in-game. I have seen auction and escrow scams, I have seen pirates skirt high-sec systems with loopholes in the game, and many other things that have convinced me that the game is fundementally broken from the start. Tell me how what I have said is NOT true - and I mean in a real, quantifiable way - and I'll consider coming back.
I'll even give you a name - my game name - if you feel like you need someone who can run factory slots at maximum build efficiency from 10 jumps out. Give a real reason to come back... crass answers will only indicate that there is no reason to come back, and verify what I say is true - and indicate that the game should die a slow death anyways. No social interaction = death of an MMO, and smartasses need not apply.
I'm glad some EVE players with a clue had mod points today. I've never seen a worse troll in my life...
Honestly, if the devs simply formed their own guild and (more or less) remained "neutral" there'd be no problem. Super-rare/powerful ships at their disposal? As long as their not selling it off to the highest bidder or using it to smash the other guilds, who cares? They know exactly where and when certain items will appear? Just toggle the dev-only invisibility feature and disable all outgoing messages for the devs then watch players go into a frenzy when someone finally spots the target. Devs REALLY want in-game experience? Limit which guilds they can join and monitor what information/equipment they have access to (for god sakes don't let them join the #1 guild and then expect the community to not suspect foul play.)
Now that we've had the traditional reponse, have you actually seen all the new export functionality implemented in the last release?
Kind of ironic they make such a fuss about their economics now, considering today they've announced the closure of their official moderated Trade forums. Their suggestion? For everyone to use a third-party site.
The most likely reason? Because they're terminating their volunteer service departments who did most of the forum moderations. While this might be an effort to try and erase their image as having players cheating at these levels, it doesn't mean much for those who still trusted CCP and EVE to maintain a fair and effective way to trade in an out-of-game setting (say, from at work). Now who's to trust?
It's a sad day for CCP.
"Is this a serious step to keep Eve Online competitive in the virtual land of MMOs despite scandals, Ponzi schemes & scams?"
Eve Online is popular and competitive because of it's complex and real social/economic system that allows scandals, ponzi schemes, & scams!