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?"

Comments

Re:Baloney Economy

[tibike77]

1. Yes, the current state of "the stockmarket" sucks donkey balls, because there isn't any. It's all player-driven, and trust-based. No in-game support for a genuine stockmarket exists, we barely have three decent features: paying out dividends, corporation votes and voluntary share transfers.
As you might have noticed that most developements in EVE were originally player suggestions... it usually takes at least a year to see it in-game if it's a decent and heavily requested feature, but I am sure we'll eventually get an actual stockmarket and many other corp-related tools.

2. Yes, the way the market is handled sucks even more, especially the recent nonsense with "contracts".
They should just merge these two features into one single comprehensive whole, with the ability to buy/sell/trade/auction stuff everywhere in the galaxy from anywhere else, with extra rules and limitations based on personal/corp/alliance standing with the entity you interact with in that transaction.
I have my doubts this will ever happend, though... but you never know.

3. The "monopoly" is all but broken in most of the cases. Everybody and his dog's mom can manufacture T1 or "find" named T1 gear by himself, and with a little bit of effort you can get just about anything T2 by yourself too.
Sure, those that USED to have the monopoly have a financial / "first mover" advantage with their more efficient manufacture methods, but the days of 10000% markup are long-time gone.

4. Mineral pricing is the trickiest possible issue in EVE. It's not actually a free market, it has very "heavy" limits both on top and bottom for most of the individual minerals (the harshest caps are for "low end" minerals, least cap for "high ends"), but also a very narrow bottom AND top cap for an agregate lump of minerals of all kinds. You might be simply mistaking simple game mechanics and smart refiners and traders making a profit for "price fixing monopolies".
If anything else just might, minerals simply CAN'T possibly be monopolised for anything but a very small timeframe and with huge effort.

5. So what if raw resources are infinite ?
I'll tell you what resource is NOT infinite : manpower.
That's right, for each and every bit and piece of "mineral" you see out there, somebody spent time getting it.
EVE's economy is based on that resource mainly... namely, time of its users.