EVE Online's Fight Against Currency Farmers

Massively has a writeup discussing the way CCP Games is battling ISK-farmers in EVE Online (ISK is the game's currency). The developers felt that merely banning sellers whenever they could was not enough, so they introduced a system where players could purchase game-time codes that could then be sold within the game to other players. Since players are unlikely to give up buying ISK voluntarily, CCP's thought is that they can at least keep the money and currency distributed among the real players. Some of the player-base has been critical of the plan, but it's becoming more and more popular as time goes on — and the old ISK-sellers aren't pleased.

Comments

Supply and demand

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect?

GTC are cheaper

[ArtemaOne]

I often see the annoying spam from ISK sellers, and their stuff is more expensive than the current cost and return of game time cards. I hope they die from this game soon. I know a lot of people who spend extra time making money so they can play for free (supplying the ISK in exchange for the GTCs). It creates a nice exchange system.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Barny]

Yup, pretty much they made a system better than ISK farmers could do. They win the fight :)

Unfortunately they still bring their servers down in the middle of aussie prime time every night, so won't be collecting my money.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[ArtemaOne]

Isn't it funny that CCP basically hired people who know how to make ISK to be the farmers?

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Turiko]

well, what can they do? I know they shut down 12:00 to 13:00 in GMT+1, and when that does their whole server goes offline. This can't be helped.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[X0563511]

Yes it can. There are a few timezones that nothing but a few remote islands are in - way out in the ocean.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Chatterton]

Like Australia ?

Re:GTC are cheaper

[FinchWorld]

These are likely times when the server maintainers would be asleep.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[nschubach]

They could always make servers specific to parts of the globe...

Server1 - Pacific
Server2 - Atlantic

Set the reboots to 12 hours from each other and the people will choose the one that doesn't have a reboot during their play time. If you get popular enough, split them into 6 hour blocks.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[PeterBrett]

They could always make servers specific to parts of the globe...

One of the unique selling points of EVE is that there is only one collosal server.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Sobrique]

Indeed. 12-13:00 GMT is in the middle of the day in Iceland, and doesn't clash with EU and US timezone players. Sure, you could have an 'out of hours' downtime, but ... well, there's a lot to be said for having daily D/T when everyone's fresh, alert and in work.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work that way - EVE is a single cluster, single gameworld. You can't reboot 'half the servers' - the thing that the daily downtime does is runs a variety of maintenance routines - backups, database clearups, that kind of thing - on the central infrastructure. You could perhaps redesign things so you didn't _need_ to take a downtime every day, but they've long since had a policy of a daily maintenance window, simply because it's better to have a regular scheduled downtime, than it is to have unscheduled.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[nschubach]

Ah right. I forgot about that... must not have been on the top of my list of demands when I played.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[crashumbc]

plus you get into the time verse occurrences... For instance WoW only has a downtime once a week but its 5-8 hours normally...

 

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

well, what can they do?

They could fix their server software so that they wouldn't need to restart it every single day. But I guess we should be happy that it doesn't crash constantly like it used to.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at how dumb you are. The hardware isn't rebooted because windows is buggy. The database is taken off line for maintenance and so things like asteroid fields can be reset. The actual machines are rarely turned off.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Barny]

You say that like they couldn't spawn those while the servers are online, collision shouldn't be a problem, ships would just bounce off the spawning 'roids.

Why exactly do they need to bring them offline (your right, they likely don't "restart the hardware" more likely the client database access is shut off and the cleanup is run). Why can't they have the servers clean themselves while running?

Other MMO are able to run servers for weeks to months without a restart. Admittedly other MMO don't have that many people on one shard.

In the end, they can make all the excuses they want, if they bring the servers down in a countries prime time (not talking mid day or some shit, this is around 10pm) every night, there will be bitching :)

Re:GTC are cheaper

[vertinox]

I often see the annoying spam from ISK sellers, and their stuff is more expensive than the current cost and return of game time cards. I hope they die from this game soon.

Hehe. My block list lags the game when I try to view it because it is so long in EVE.

The thing is money is the rare source in EVE but rather the skills gains that are basically you waiting a few weeks to get over time. Money helps but not that much.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Turiko]

that doesn't apply to eve online - eve has ONE server in wich all players are - wich is one of the reasons it stands out from the regular MMO market.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Turiko]

i doubt that PPC will do that. They are situated in GMT zone (if i recall correctly). If they do , for example, maintenance at GMT-11 time, and they have their maintenance at noon GMT -11, that means they have to do this maintenance at 1 AM... it's better to keep their work in daytime - a lot cheaper, especially if it's big maintenance.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

GTC's are not cheaper. Some quick research would tell you that at current prices, a GTC is about twice as expensive for the equivalent amount of farmed ISK.

Whilst I in no way support RMT, it does help to be factually correct.

RMT will always exist. CCP has simply looked for the best way to reduce the effect it has on the game and in my opinion have done a sterling job. The fact that there is a legal way to procure ISK dissuades many from taking the illegal approach.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the other selling point - that they let their developers play on the same servers and give help to their favorite corps.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Fluffeh]

Ah right. I forgot about that... must not have been on the top of my list of demands when I played.

Or you were too tired from staying up all night waiting for the server to pop back up after 1am...

Re:GTC are cheaper

[armareum]

60 days costs 34.99 EUR, or 30.0986 GBP.

30 day PLEX costs 310,000,000 ISK
30.0986 GBP gets you 620,000,000 ISK
1 GBP = 20,598,964.73 ISK
.
Some ISK-selling sites:
.
1,551.50 GBP buys you 40,000,000,000 ISK
1 GBP gets you 25,781,501.77 ISK
.
928.14 GBP buys you 19,500,000,000 ISK
1 GBP gets you 21,009,761.45
.
471.65 GBP buys you 10,000,000,000 ISK
1 GBP gets you 21,202,162.62 ISK
.
Hardly twice as much. And that is when buying in massive bulk - buy in smaller packages and you can reduce the ISK figures above by 1/3. Not to mention this ISK can come from hacked accounts and lead to bans.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the best selling point--that the players grouped together and burned those corps unfairly favored by devs to the ground.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

. You could perhaps redesign things so you didn't _need_ to take a downtime every day,

Like _not_ running on M$ SQL?

Re:GTC are cheaper

[julesh]

well, what can they do? I know they shut down 12:00 to 13:00 in GMT+1, and when that does their whole server goes offline. This can't be helped.

Yes, it can. Two possibilities to consider:

* I've played plenty of MMOs that have less than 1 hour of downtime per _week_. Why does EVE need 1 hour per day? Improving their back end systems should be able to bring them up to the standards of others.
* They could shift the time so it's at different times on different days. Thus, maybe Australians find playing on Tuesdays and Thursdays inconvenient, while Europeans have trouble if they try to play on Wednesdays or Fridays, Americans on Mondays and Saturdays, etc. Everyone gets 5 clear days a week (at least) where the time is convenient for them.

Re:GTC are cheaper

[Turiko]

the reason why EVE needs this is because of two reasons. 1: the game has ONE server. the "plenty of MMO's" you describe, don't. Eve is the only one that does this - it's one of the selling points of eve. 2: the way resources are respawned. All the asteroids are respawned in one go during the time the server is offline. It doesn't respawn by itself.

They need...

[faragon]

... inflation.

Re:They need...

[Opportunist]

Why? So new players could never possibly catch up?

One of the things that kept EvE stable was that inflation was nominal, if existant. It's the only MMO I know where prices remained almost rock solid stable over the course of its existance.

One of the key reasons why MMOs eventually crumble was always inflation and the problem associated with it for new players. You wanted to have X. X costs 2000 $money when you start. So you start hacking and playing and finally you have 2000 $money. By that time it costs 4000. You continue the grind, you have 4000. It costs 8000 by now. Will you continue? Or notice that you'll NEVER have the money to buy it and play with the "big boys"?

Inflation has never hurt gold sellers. Quite the opposite, inflation drove people to them because they noticed they couldn't get the money they need with normal means (i.e. farming themselves), they pretty much had to buy money from goldsellers to get whatever they wanted to have.

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is exactly the same as real-world economics. In this case the State role is in the game producer hands, so they could adjust dinamically the relation between in game inflation-adjusted subscription fees new money.

In a virtual world, the State can compete with infinite resources (money, gold, real estate, etc.).

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying Real Life is basically a Virtual World? Because a lot of certain countries recent economic decisions seem based around the latter rather than former method of economics.

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because a lot of people, even in government, thinks that resources are infinite.

Well, they just think the resources last forever, what they don't understand is that it's only true for very short forevers.

This is because money is considered a resource, and other infinite things like intelectual property or ideas are also considered resources and used to make money. Turning money into an infinite thing, but never a resource. Governemnts can print more money and real resources just become more expensive as money is printed every day.

So... Money is a resource.
Money is infinite.
Therefore, other resources are infinite.
Resources of which we have plenty are cheap but last 'forever'.
Scarce resources are expensive, so they are used less and last 'forever'.

Re:They need...

[nelsonal]

No but fiat money is a virtual world.

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying Real Life is basically a Virtual World? Because a lot of certain countries recent economic decisions seem based around the latter rather than former method of economics.

It's a big fantasy called "Hopenchange".

Re:They need...

[amplt1337]

Or you can use the WoW answer -- ensure that very little that's really worthwhile is actually purchasable with transferable in-game currency.

Re:They need...

[Opportunist]

Elaborate please. I don't think I understand what you mean.

Re:They need...

[Opportunist]

That would ensure that EvE dies. Basically because then you also ensure that nobody but the top players will ever have certain equipment. Ever.

You have to see that high level players can effectively, collectively, monopolize certain resources. Nobody but people with access to 0.0 space (i.e. highly hostile space) who can also "hold" turfs there can access certain resources that require you to position stations there. Resources necessary to build the "higher level" equipment. If you make that equipment "nodrop" (something that, afaik, doesn't exist at all in EvE), nobody but people who can and do actually hold turfs in hostile PvP space will ever have access to these goods.

Re:They need...

[nelsonal]

Fiat money is money that only has value because the government says, "it's money" prior to that most civilizations used gold, animal products as money (fish, shells, cattle, etc). Those are real, and have the unique property that they are exclusive, if I have a cow, you can't, but with modern banking and fiat money, you and I can definitely both have a legal claim to the same dollar (which is why bank runs scare the government more than almost anything else). The grand parent post was surprisingly insightful, even if they were just cracking a joke.

Re:They need...

[vertinox]

One of the things that kept EvE stable was that inflation was nominal, if existant. It's the only MMO I know where prices remained almost rock solid stable over the course of its existance.

There is an inflation sink in EVE that most games don't have.

Its called unmitigated and total loss of your ship which is basically where all the ISK goes.

Since PvP is rife in the game, a lot of people need to replace their destroyed ships on a regular basis.

Re:They need...

[Opportunist]

Ahhhh, now it makes sense. Sorry, didn't see that GP between you and me.

Yes, basically that's why "useless" things like money have buying power: People value them and are willing to give you something useful in exchange for them. And as long as people "believe" in that money the system is going to work. In real life as well as in MMOs. As long as people are willing to believe that credits, gold, ISK, you name it will allow them to later get something they need for them, the system will continue to work.

And, as we've seen in rl as well as in MMOs, people are willing to put up with a little inflation. Yeah, that money ain't gonna be worth as much in a week or two as it is today, but it's still more convenient than having to store those goods so long. While they usually don't perish in MMOs, storing them may be a problem because usually you do not get unlimited storage space while usually you can store infinite amounts of money.

It stops being this way when the money loses purchasing power too fast. Then you arrive at a system that is best described as that in some countries that suffer from heavy inflation with likewise fixed prices for government shops. You can buy goods that are available in abundance/store-bought in government/NPC shops, for the legal/in-game tender, but if you want to shop for something rare/drops, you will have to trade in some hard foreign currency/other rare drops.

People do enjoy the exchange of goods and services. Mostly because they're better at some things than at others and it's easier to simply trade for what you need rather than learning how to make it yourself. If the means you give them, the currency, does not suit that need, they will find other means.

Re:They need...

[nelsonal]

Trade is great and money makes trade far easier, but I think people are far worse at estimating inflation's effects than we've all thought. Looking back, how much of the housing bubble (or the stockmarket bubble before that) were mostly people who had no idea how quickly money was losing value, following advice that presumed a different rate of inflation than materialized?
Prior to the removal of the gold backed dollar (that happened slowly from 1907 to 1971) there was essentially no inflation in the US, the dollar's value fluctuated, but it was fluctuating over a very, very horizontal trendline. Since (especially since 1971) it's zoomed downward, that's a huge sea change, that completely changes how assets should be evaluated (and requires an understanding of exponential growth/decay). I don't think it's working (or rather it's working a little too well in a very cynical sense).

Re:They need...

[Opportunist]

Actually, neither the State nor the game producer can compete with infinite resources. Unless of course they don't care about the stability of their system and whether the whole thing eventually crashes and burns.

The similarities are stunning. State as well as game producers could, technically, simply "print money". The state simply prints it, game producers have it even easier, they just have to set a variable. Ka-ching, money created. But what will happen? Inflation. In both systems, people will see that more money is available and they will increase the price of the (much rarer) goods, simply because more people now can pay that price. Eventually, if the printing press isn't stopped, people will stop accepting the official money altogether for their goods and will turn to more "stable" forms of currency. In real life, this means foreign money or tangible goods. In MMOs, this means rare items. Diablo II was a classic example where Stones of Jordan, a fairly rare and quite useful ring, soon replaced the insanely abundant gold as the player trade currency.

Now, of course the MMO creators can increase the amount of those "currency items" as well and sell them instead of gold. That's something that isn't so easily doubled in real life. But this only serves to kill the MMO off faster. Only items that have some intrinsic value will become currency items (because those currency items usually develop out of the fact that someone would rather want the currency item instead of what he has currently, i.e. after people reverted to barter). So pumping in those necessarily rare items into the game devalues the items, making rare items abundant. The spiel will quickly be transfered to other items becoming currency items, which then would also have to be pumped in abundance into the market.

In the end, there will be nothing you could possible want to have because everything is abundant and easy to get.

Why bother playing?

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

When your ship is destroyed, the resources (minerals, basically) that were used to create it are forever gone from the game, but the currency you paid is not removed from the game, just transferred to someone else.

 

Inflation happens when the ratio of money (ISK) to stuff you can buy (resources) increases. You can accomplish this by increasing the supply of currency while keeping the number of resources the same, or by maintaining a constant supply of currency but decreasing the number of resources. Either way, your 1 ISK buys a smaller number of resources than it did before. To buy the same number of resources, you will have to pay more ISK.

 

So ship destruction is an inflationary process. But it's actually even more inflationary than that, because you get an insurance payment in ISK when your ship blows up. The insurance money is not provided by other players; it is magiked into the game by an NPCs. The supply of resources decreases AND the supply of ISK increases, all at the same time.

Re:They need...

[Sobrique]

Goods do perish in MMOs. Maybe not as fast as inflation, but 'power creep' and 'nerfing' are par for the course. Of course, you also get boosts to equipment and stuff, which means you can speculate if you've a large inventory.

Re:They need...

[Sobrique]

Not necessary. EVE works on the basis that ships and their fittings are destroyed. You buy an expensive toy, it blows up. It's gone. So there's a natural self limiting of 'pimp' gear, simply because 'high end' stuff, isn't so much better than low end stuff, that you don't have to consider the relative value of 1 really pimp ship, vs a hundred replacements for an 'acceptably pimp' ship. (And the possibility that you hand the person that killed you a really fat loot drop)

Re:They need...

[Sobrique]

You'll get arguments over that - bear in mind that isks are created when your ship explodes, in the insurance payout. You've not 'destroyed' isks, because you bought it from another player, who now has your isks, and you have a pretty explosion and an insurance payout.
That's an excellent balance point on 'pimp gear' mind - enough gear is destroyed to make it not worth the pricetag for PvP. For isks leaving the game, that's what you get when you buy stuff from NPCs - things like insuring your ship is an isk sink. As too, is buying stuff from the LP store.

Re:They need...

[amplt1337]

Oh, I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that it's the alternate solution that Blizzard has come up with. :)
EvE Online sounds *insanely* tilted to established players, which is why I've never been interested in it really, but a lesser version of what you describe here is in fact true of WoW; you can't get all the really best gear without either extensive (and reasonably successful) PvP play, or a lot of end-game raiding. Of course, gear in general doesn't mean as much in WoW as it does in EvE.

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't played Eve very much. Saying the prices remained 'rock solid stable...' isn't true at all. Eve has an in depth player driven economy that mirrors real world economic markets. It breaths and undulates, it varies from day-to-day, anyone can see this by just loading the game up and going to the market tab and looking at the sales charts they provide you in game.

The Eve GTC (game time cards) and PLEX (pilots license extension program) are the best attempts I have ever seen in an MMO trying to quell the tide of gold (isk) farming.

Other developers should pay close attention to the grand nature of Eve, as it provides -and- delivers an MMO experience like none other with:

Single shard/server play
'Meaningful' PVP
Largely player driven (economies and regions)
FREE LARGE game play expansions regularly (yearly)

There are few other MMO's that even any of those features let alone all of them.

Re:They need...

[pod]

More ISK is lost in the destruction of a ship than insurance pays out. Hence, it is a money drain, not inflationary.

Re:They need...

[vertinox]

When your ship is destroyed, the resources (minerals, basically) that were used to create it are forever gone from the game, but the currency you paid is not removed from the game, just transferred to someone else.

All right then how about rigs then?

Generally you can only get the parts for most of them by salvaging and more than not, people always don't get your rigs when your ships is blown.

Also, a lot of people don't insure ships all the time simply because they have more isk than the premium is worth to them.

Re:They need...

[timeOday]

What's this, are you accusing capitalism of not being fun!?

Re:They need...

[DrXym]

EVE has a free market economy with buyers in sellers and price goes up and down as a result of rarity and supply vs demand. Prices could even be sky high in one place of the galaxy and much more affordable somewhere else. It's hard to say if inflation has come to EVE, but expansion packs certainly have. Most of the original hardware has been superceded by tech level II stuff which is a lot more money. If you wish to stay level with your peers you'll have to fork a lot more to do it.

Re:They need...

[faragon]

You're right. To keep fixes prices in a free market is non sense.

To some extent, long distance (interstellar) comerce problems were addresed by Paul Krugman in the following essay: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (Paul Krugman, 1978) [PDF] (related Slashdot article here).

Re:They need...

[Knara]

When your ship is destroyed, the resources (minerals, basically) that were used to create it are forever gone from the game, but the currency you paid is not removed from the game, just transferred to someone else.

You're assuming that the price paid for the ship purchase (and the parts, etc) was to a player character.

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

Inflation has never hurt gold sellers.

As someone who used to be in the RMT business, I can say that you are dead wrong on this point. We hated inflation, because it lead to sudden price drops that devalued our existing stock, sometimes to less than what we paid for it in the first place. And not dropping your prices isn't an option; you have to follow IGE* where price is concerned.

In fact it was the inflation in WOW that pretty much put our little shop out of business. The rapidly expanding player base meant gold being generated by the silo-full, which meant the gold you bought for $1000 yesterday can only hope to retail for $800 today. It took a while for things to settle out to a point where the devaluation was slow enough to be able to flip gold, and in the meantime we burned out our war chest trying to keep 200 or so servers stocked (100-ish actual servers, but you need an inventory each for Alliance and Horde). IGE could loss-lead like that, but we couldn't.

*At least you did back in 2004-2005; things may have changed since.

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I understand EVE Online's market system correctly, ISK isn't being created at all via people buying PLEX. So the more PLEX that are in the system, the less they'll cost, because supply has increased. It's an alternate currency system that doesn't involve the total amount of ISK in the system changing at all, which makes it vastly superior to merely suppressing gold farmers.

Re:They need...

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:They need...

[Stregone]

But the insurance payout is created out of thin air.

The person you bought the ship from still has the money you paid for it. Plus now the insurance payout puts NEW money into the system. So destroying ships actually adds to inflation.

It's a question of what your time is worth.

[ekran]

A 2 month GTC will cost you around 600-650M isk. With a proper setup and the right skills you can easily make this within 12-15 hours (2-3 days of semi casual playing.) - The way I look at it is that basically you're working for 12-15 hours and the pay you get is $30, which isn't exactly impressive if you compare it with other jobs (i.e. if you take a weekend job every other week and use that money to buy play time.)

Still, if you don't have the money and you do want to play the game, it's a nice way to keep your account(s) running. I definitely think that the GTC trade has made things less interesting for gold miners and that's a good thing. The Eve economy is good, in fact better than most other MMORPGs I've been playing.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[asdf7890]

The way I look at it is that basically you're working for 12-15 hours and the pay you get is $30, which isn't exactly impressive if you compare it with other jobs (i.e. if you take a weekend job every other week and use that money to buy play time.)

$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a currently unemployed someone in a poverty sticken nation who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[calmofthestorm]

The argument is that:

* Finding a weekend job could be difficult in the exact amount desired
* You can play EVE whenever
* You enjoy playing more than you would enjoy working.

Me, I prefer to contribute to the economy, but to each his own.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Austerity Empowers]

k, but 12-15 hours in 2-3 days (4-7 hrs/day) is not semi-casual. That's pretty heavy playing, especially if all you do is farm isk.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[tero]

Very interested in this proper setup of yours that makes 650M ISK in 15 hours - can you post more details please?
I also want to be able to purchase game time with my ISK.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Mhtsos]

600-650M may be made in 15 hours but it's at least 2 years worth of skill training for the skills and ISK gathering for the equipment. So while they take 3 days to make you're actually cashing in your previous long term investment.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[tsotha]

A 2 month GTC will cost you around 600-650M isk. With a proper setup and the right skills you can easily make this within 12-15 hours (2-3 days of semi casual playing.) - The way I look at it is that basically you're working for 12-15 hours and the pay you get is $30, which isn't exactly impressive if you compare it with other jobs (i.e. if you take a weekend job every other week and use that money to buy play time.)

Well, sure, but it depends on what you consider "work". When I get home from my real (programming) job, I'll putter around mission running for an hour or two just to relax. I could never justify it based on $/hr, but, for me at least... it's fun.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[tsotha]

Two years? Nah... maybe six months if you picked the right race and plot your skills carefully.

And that's running missions. The most profitable thing you can do with your time in EVE is market arbitrage, which doesn't take that much in the way of skills. I don't do it myself because it's too much like real work, but I know people who regularly make a billion ISK in a couple full days of fiddling with market orders.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Sobrique]

Buy a Golem, run L4 missions - I can do 300mil in 8 hours in a Nighthawk, so a Golem should be faster.
Alternatively, it _can_ be far faster if you do trade/industry in terms of 'actual hours'. I make a few hundred mil a month, but do so with about 2-3 hours of 'real time' spent hauling materials/product to market, and you could fairly easily expand that throughput. (I'm doing something that's an excellent ROI but not such a great return on time, with 14 day build jobs).
If you're savvy, you can do better market trading. I never really got the hang of that though, so take your pick.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Sobrique]

2 years? Not hardly. You can do quite impressive amounts of cash if you run level 4s in a T2 fit Drake. Maybe not quite the rate quoted, but it's not far off. 30mil/hour isn't particularly hard if you're clever about how you handle missions, loot, salvage and disposal of LPs.
But it doesn't actaully take very much liquid capital to run industry or start market trading, and that's even more efficient on 'working' (More real time generally, but less 'making isk' time if you appreciate the distinction)

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Sobrique]

I do a fair chunk of industry to fund my PvP habit. I make around 300mil/month fairly easily, with 'a couple of hours' of work. Industry being a matter of queuing build jobs and leaving them to run, it's hard to quote 'isk/hour' - my 14 day build jobs net me a useful chunk of cash, with relatively low capital outlay, and low time investment. It'd be enough to fund my account off buying gametime for isk were I so inclined. (I'm not - I'd rather have the isks ;p)

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a good character, a big ol nighthawk whore when they first came out. I made a TON more isk trading inter-regional goods in a crow. Think skillbooks, implants, really expensive stuff that fits in small spaces. my goal was 100m a month logging spending no more than an hour on it. I made two billion in four months logging on 15 minutes every few days. Cake. I hope you like spreadsheets.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Opportunist]

You're ignoring something so many people ignore, even in real life business: Risk. How much is that Golem? How likely is it that you lose it in that endeavour (don't tell me you're SO good that you can overcome a sudden lagspike or discon, that you are somehow magically able to still tell your ship to warp to safety after your connection has been lost)?

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Anonymous Coward]

The EVE economy is the economy, you insensitive clod!

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[adamkennedy]

$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a 13 year old in a rich world country who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.

CCP doesn't invent the isk from nowhere and sell it, they only facilitate trade. So, in effect, they provide a method to get money INTO the system, but no way to get money OUT of the system. So the cheap labour doing the ISK farming shifts from being leeching, annoying, out-of-universe professionals, and moves to being young players who can earn enough to subsidise the regular play.

By making it harder to farm, the labour gets more scarce, the value of it goes up, and more young players can earn their way into the game.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[tero]

Hmm, maybe trade-alt is the way to go, then - my Empire standings don't really allow me to do any high-sec missioning (nor would I want to). Losing a Golem to CONCORD or militia NPCs would suck and skilling an alt to fly it is just...not that effective ;-)

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[celardore]

Unless you happen to be warp scrambled, your ship does enter emergency warp to a safe spot on disconnect.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Hey now, Iceland's not that bad off.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[castironpigeon]

4 hours a day in most other games, not casual. In EVE, that's casual.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Anonymous Coward]

you cant use race etc anymore due to standardisation however you can train 5/4 learning skills in half the time a normal char would during the x2 sp rate then use the remaining time on mining skills for alot of cash that grows daily

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Shinobi]

A decently setup Golem, Paladin, CNR, Drake or Nighthawk tanks the hardest lvl4's without breaking a sweat, permanently. And it can be done without officer or even faction gear(My Golem runs with a T2 tank and permatanks even Angel lvl 4's)

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Opportunist]

Yes. After ... 30 seconds? I forgot, I rarely "use" this feature. 'til then, you get pummeled. Your chance is pretty good that you will make it out in one piece. Question is, how long will you stay in that shape when you log back in and get autowarped back into the middle of 20 ships hitting your already half-wasted hull from point blank because you lost connection RIGHT after warping in before you could even start setting course and throttling up?

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Opportunist]

I've seen the oddest things happen. From reppers that weren't turned on before warp and a discon' right after issuing the warp command to sudden lagspikes that somehow messed with the damage/repair calculations (granted, this was a bug and has been fixed ages ago). Certainly, a well fitted T2 ship with decent equipment and a half-awake pilot will face little troubles, but saying that you're immortal because of a certain ship or setup is almost like begging for Murphy to prove his law.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Sobrique]

Golem + fit clocks in at about a billion isks. Odds of losing it: Next to zero. Missions in highsec are entirely predictable in terms of outcome, and I've put a Raven through the entire selection quite comfortably. Golems are better at it than Ravens - they tank harder, salvage faster, do more damage. *shrug*. Keep your risk down, use a Raven - it's _almost_ as fast. But either way, your odds of losing it are so very low unless you go out of your way to do something stupid.
Risks to missions in highsec are negligable, and entirely in the hands of the user. This is entirely unlike going out PvPing.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[vertinox]

$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a currently unemployed someone in a poverty sticken nation who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.

The way EVE works is that you can trade ISK only for game time and not the other way around. So you buy game time from CCP and then trade it with another player.

That player cannot sell that game time for actual money.

They just get to play the game for free for 30 days.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Sobrique]

Your tank also keeps running until your ship disappears too, even if you are scrambled. I don't have many problems with disconnects, but for those that do, Nighthawks and Drakes do very nicely at staying alive, thanks to their sustained tanking. (Actually, you can sustained tank Golems and Ravens too, you just pay for it on mission efficiency)

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Sobrique]

Well, if you weren't warp scrambled, then warping out remains an option. If you were... you might be in trouble, but the DPS from a mission isn't actually very high, compared to peak tank capability.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Sobrique]

Of course you have. And sometimes there's an idiot flying the ship, that gets themself killed. But ... we weren't talking about whether there is a _chance_ you might die. We were talking about the risk of doing PvE - and the risk is negligable, because in order to die, you need a weird glitch to happen, in such a way that it doesn't get recorded on the server and your ship re-imbursed as a result.
Can it happen? Yeah, I'd have thought so. Does it often? No. You've got lots of people who run L4s day in, day out in Motsu in Ravens, Drakes, CNRs, Golems, Nighthawks. They do so quite comfortably, and rake in quite a lot of isks doing it.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[asdf7890]

The way EVE works is that you can trade ISK only for game time and not the other way around. So you buy game time from CCP and then trade it with another player.

That player cannot sell that game time for actual money.

That is assuming the trade is done entirely in-game. What is to stop the player giving the ISK to another player in game in exchange for real money (or other useful commodity) paid by some other means?

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[jehjr1337]

With R&D agents and the passive isk, it's not hard to get 600m a month...if you play everyday and complete lvl 4 missions. As for wormholes and 0.0, it's really easy to make that kind of money. Not only are the prices in 0.0 much higher for things but the rats in belts give a good amount of isk, if you know how to farm them properly, the downside is always having to watch your back/local. In wormholes, class3, me and 2 other drake pilots took on all signals in there and even mined bistot and ark. We made over 600m each, after pos fuel costs, this is not to include all the megacyte and zydrine we took away from the wormhole. Another approach to making money is buying a separate account and building a miner/orca pilot within 3 months and you can have anywhere from 2.5b to 3b isk just from selling it. That's $15 a month, so $45 plus $20 to transfer. So a total of $65 for 2.5b isk. Where as a GTC is $30 or 600m, $600 for 1.2b....not worth it to me because I'm patient and it only required me to buy skillbooks and use 5 mins a day putting together training queues.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[vertinox]

That is assuming the trade is done entirely in-game. What is to stop the player giving the ISK to another player in game in exchange for real money (or other useful commodity) paid by some other means?

You can, but that is the point of this argument the article is making because it is less convient and not that trustworthy.

Either you can pay pal some guy in Asia and hope he will give you the isk or you use the in game method which guarantees you delivery.

Secondly, the non-official method is against the TOS, and when they ban that account the actually revoke all transactions the account ever made!

Which means when they ban the Gold (ISK) seller, your money is removed from your account retroactively.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[vux984]

4 hours a day in most other games, not casual. In EVE, that's casual.

I don't think you know what casual is. Even 4 hours a day is not casual.

4-8 hours a WEEK is casual. A few hours on Monday, then again for a quick hour on Wednesday, and then maybe a 6 hour session on Saturday, the following week its 3 hours on Tuesday and that's it. The week after that its 4 hours Tuesday, and 8 on Sunday. That's how casuals play. Casually, when it suits, working around their regular schedule.

Four hours a day, isn't casual, its full on part time job. More than four hours a day starts to get into the territory of a full time job.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Anonymous Coward]

4 hours a day in most other games, not casual. In EVE, that's casual.

I don't think you know what casual is.

I say. I say. It's a joke, son.

/leghorn

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't the original poster, but I've been playing Eve Online for several years. The last major change to the game introduced wormholes which randomly spawn in systems. These wormholes will take you to uncharted space (any of thousands of systems that are not on the map, but are persistent). The interconnections between small groups of these uncharted systems are constantly changing, and the entry points are also constantly changing, at about once per day. If you have a decent corporation (guild), you can train up to maybe a battlecruiser, then farm one of these systems. Make sure to insure the battlecruiser first, because if you are in the initial uncharted system, you will likely lose your battlecruiser every couple days, even if you are careful. However, you will make far more money than you lose, if you are reasonably careful (use the on-board ship scanner). You can easily make 200mil ISK a day in a wormhole.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[dullnev]

The way EVE works is that you can trade ISK only for game time and not the other way around.

Not any more... You can now legitimately buy PLEX (pilot license extension aka 30 day time card) from the eveonline site, and sell it for ISK ingame i.e. RL money to game time to ISK. And you can do the opposite, if you have a lot of in game currency you can purchase PLEX with ISK, avoiding the use of RL money for that purpose.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[dullnev]

I also want to be able to purchase game time with my ISK.

Search for PLEX in the market. It really is that simple. Expect to pay about 320M ISK for 30 day PLEX if you want to buy immediately

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been playing for 2 months. I can make 30-50 million isk with one level 4 "The Blockade" mission which takes about 2 hours. The 21 day free trial, plus the first month of game time that comes from buying the game can have anyone playing 'for free' if they have the will to fund their gaming entirely within the game.

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Shinobi]

I never claimed to be truly immortal to bugs. But barring bugs, I can tank any lvl 4 with ease, even if I'm disconnected, even with the Golem, since it can perma-run the tank. If it's my Nighthawk or Drake, it doesn't matter if I disconnect or not, since they are passively tanked(i.e resists+passive shield recharge).

Re:It's a question of what your time is worth.

[Shinobi]

Actually, Raven doesn't get quite as close in efficiency when you factor in some things: Torps vs Cruise and the range of tractor beams/continuous salvaging. Golem has long enough range with torps to actually be useful in mission running, without gimping on tank by using missile rigs. Raven has to sacrifice tank to get any useful range with torps. And torps kill battleships a hell of a lot faster, and are useful against BC's and even cruisers too, thanks to the bonus on the Golem.

Also, the 40km range on tractor beams on the Golem is just awesome

Re:How lucky we are to bother ourselves with this

[Tom]

Taiwan has recently been hit with a devastating typhoon. Some of the pictures show devastation similar to New Orleans after Katrina.

So, yeah, I'm glad I live here where I can worry about some schmuck in his basement spending his allowance on Eve Online and not over there where landslides are causing whole towns to disappear.

There was a supernova in NGC 1559 just a few days ago. Whole towns disappear? Try whole planets.

It's a big world, you know? Worrying about things that happen a thousand miles or a million light years away is just as much a luxury as spending your time playing some game.

Puzzle Pirates did it

[Mr2001]

This sounds a lot like what Puzzle Pirates did with "doubloons": a second in-game currency, used to buy game badges (i.e. subscriptions), which you can purchase with real money or trade on a market for the main in-game currency (pieces of eight). Players with more money than time can buy doubloons and sell them for POE; players with more time than money can collect POE and trade for doubloons to extend their subscriptions.

Re:Puzzle Pirates did it

[VPeric]

Yes, but that's a full microtransactions model, while EVE just allows you to buy in-game money with out-of-game money in an officially sanctioned way. The important distinction is that in Y!PP you spend doubloons in game for buying stuff, while in EVE you can only trade them for in-game money.

Re:How lucky we are to bother ourselves with this

[calmofthestorm]

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant.
But trepidation of the spheres,
though greater far, are innocent.

Re:How lucky we are to bother ourselves with this

[Rennt]

Well, yeah... but that point could be made of just about any aspect of life, so is kind of moot. To say we shouldn't be concerned about X because of Y is a popular logical fallacy, or just subtle trolling :P

People get pretty pissed when you cheat in multiplayer - this includes RL games as well. If you actually publish a MMO, you would be pretty bloody concerned about it too. If the impression that your game was wide open to abuse spread, you would find yourself without players. For a one-trick pony like CCP that would be the end of the story.

CCP have successfully structured the "rules" of the "game" to make traditional gold farming uncompetitive. This is interesting from a sociological point of view as much as from the perspective of a gamer.

Bug exploit

[Anonymous Coward]

I think alot of farmers heavily exploited the duplicate bug with POS silo's.
After CCP closed the exploit (and pwned the players who abused it), ISK prices went up to 3-5 times the standard rate.
From about 12USD per 500mio ISK, to about 40 USD now.
It makes GTC worth it now, and i think it was CCP's plan all along (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Well, it's about time

[Rogerborg]

Every (successful) MOG that I know of has this problem, and most of them go rampaging off down the wrong track: waggling their banstick at anyone who does things that actual humans will inevitably do.

Prohibiting real world trades is both laughable futile, and self destructive. Companies that do it are punishing their paying players and themselves: it's truly lose-lose. I'm glad to see that CCP have finally figured this out, and stopped punching themselves in the balls.

The question that I have is: why did it take them so long to get smart, and why wasn't this designed in from the start?

It's not a trite question. So many MOG developers seem to plan to fail, by assuming that they can control how their (paying) playerbase chooses to play the game and interact with each other. News flash: if your game is actually successful, then you'll have so many players that you will not be able to police them manually. That is a good thing, and a situation that you should aim to reach.

This covers security and exploits, account trading and sharing, and real world transactions. If your game has enough players to pay your salary, it has enough players that someone will exploit or explore any mechanism that you provide, and they will come up with their own alternatives to any mechanism that you don't provide.

If they get hurt through real world trading, then there's no point in you whinging that it's prohibited. It was going to happen, and it will continue to happen until you suck it up and give them a better alternative.

You can either design on this basis - i.e. plan for success - or you can play catch up, paying money to patch the game while losing subscriptions across your entire playerbase as you go - from those who hate the "exploits" that you left in, and those who hate having their "exploits" taken away as you remove them one at a time.

Re:Well, it's about time

[nschubach]

This covers security and exploits, account trading and sharing, and real world transactions. If your game has enough players to pay your salary, it has enough players that someone will exploit or explore any mechanism that you provide, and they will come up with their own alternatives to any mechanism that you don't provide.

Personally, I never understood why someone would want to buy money in an MMO...

But your logic makes it sound like the person in charge should just suck it up and stop trying to prevent people from doing what they want. If I apply that to real life, I should be able to massacre everyone in a square mile of myself so I can have peace and quiet... and the government should provide me the tools to do so.

Re:Well, it's about time

[XMode]

I wouldn't say its 'taken then so long to get smart'. I've been playing the game for well over a year and while the introduction of an in game item to represent play time is new, selling game cards for in game currency (or buying game time for in game currency) has been in the game for longer than I have. There has been section of the forums setup specifically as a market place for time cards and for the whole time I have been playing you have been able to securely transfer game time through the web site.

I remember being told YEARS before I started playing that some people I know were earning enough per month to play multiple accounts for free. This has all been done through someone else selling them a game time card for in game currency. While im not sure for how long you have been able to do this through a secure system, I believe it has always been encouraged (or at least not discouraged)

While im not sure if this system was running from day one, it didn't take long to develop.

Re:Well, it's about time

[tsotha]

Prohibiting real world trades is both laughable futile, and self destructive. Companies that do it are punishing their paying players and themselves: it's truly lose-lose. I'm glad to see that CCP have finally figured this out, and stopped punching themselves in the balls.

The question that I have is: why did it take them so long to get smart, and why wasn't this designed in from the start?

Don't get the wrong idea here. Trading ISK for cash outside the GTC system will still get you banned. This system has been around for years, but it's only recently they've made enough headway against farmers that the cost of ISK through the GTC system is at or below the ebay price. The way they managed to do that was by investigating large transactions between unrelated characters - the same way governments catch drug dealers.

Re:Well, it's about time

[nickco3]

Personally, I never understood why someone would want to buy money in an MMO...

I've bought MMO money, and did it because I have already spent way too much of my life farming cash in meatspace for it ever to be fun in a game.

The absolutely last thing I want to do when I finally get some computer-based relaxation time is a pretend job. My gaming time is limited and I want to cut straight to the fun parts.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Sobrique]

As someone who does buy money in an MMO, permit me to share with you why I do it - I've been playing EVE for something like 5 years now. Over that time, I've made a lot of ISKs, and have similarly blown up collossal chunks of the stuff, playing EVE. I'm currently involved in a fairly active PvP alliance, and am enjoying it immensely. But one of the things about PvPing is that fundamentally, it's a loss making activity - ships die, tend to be expensive, and it's quite rare to reclaim the cost from your combat activity (loot is profitable, but you need a lot of kills to replace one ship, as most 'loot' is destroyed).
So I have a secondary income stream, to finance combat activity - I do industry, and go ratting/missioning to make some isks, to buy new toys, to get back on the front line, which is where I'm have most fun.
However, 'going missioning' takes me time in game, and it's somewhat fun, but I enjoy getting into combat more. So for me, dropping about an hour of overtime pay on 60d GTC for resale, netting me 600mil isks, is equivalent to _not_ spending 20 hours running missions, and instead going and killing pigdogs.
I don't _like_ the real money for in game cash particularly - I think it's somewhat unfair. But none the less, as the option exists, I'll use it. EVE is one of the few games that is 'self balancing' there though - a bad pilot cannot buy the kind of advantage to stop them being a bad pilot. More, they get a bit of an edge, and someone else gets a nice killmail and a pile of valuable loot.
Now, if I were to lose my job, and end up with more EVE time, and less payscale, I'd probably change my mind about it - going the other way and 'playing for free'.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Opportunist]

To combat goldsellers by selling it yourself, you have to be cheaper than the goldseller or at the very least cheap enough that players don't want to risk the banstick. That's tricky, to say the least.

Simply selling money will inevitably drive inflation. You can't just go and simply undercut goldsellers over and over because you will make your in game currency a joke and people will start looking for alternative means to conduct player-player trade. Think Diablo II. Gold was basically worthless, what happened? The same that happened in real life countries with a hyperinflated currency, people will shift to another currency. In MMOs, people used rare items as "currency". That in turn inevitably leads to your currency (and its sale) becoming pointless (if you have a heavily player based economy, or if not, for the market for drop-only goods), and goldsellers will instead sell you the rare "currency" items for real cash. If you start selling the rare items for real cash, players will shift to something else. Currency, by its very nature, has to be scarce and not ad-lib multiplyable.

EvE now ops for a system where people sell in-game currency for game time. Which works out if a few factors are taken into account. First, you must not create a monopolizable farm spot. Else it's trivial for a goldseller to monopolize a commodity, making that commodity scarce and driving its price up. The system will not work for any game where some rare and sought after commodity is only available from a certain mob or from certain mobs in a small area, because they will be farmed and monopolized. EvE is unique in that way that whatever you might want to have is available in multiple, non-monopolizable spots. There is no superspecialawesome gun that ONLY drops from THIS mob and that mob is only available in THIS system.

In a nutshell, it has to be for any farmer as hard as for every other player to get to in-game currency. If the farmer, by whatever means, has easier access to IGC, the system will not work out.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Opportunist]

It won't be this way for long. With EBay being more expensive, people will go buy GTCs to sell them. The increased supply of GTCs will make their price drop, soon making EBay ISK cheaper again.

Re:Well, it's about time

[harl]

How so? What are the tax ramifications of CCP's current set up?

Re:Well, it's about time

[nschubach]

I hate PVP combat, which is part of the reason I stopped playing Eve, but I can see your point. I just don't see the point in killing each other when personal time, cash, and such things are involved. I have no problem with FPS game type PVP because you can pretty easily get power-ups and weapons by learning the levels, but when it involves days/weeks/months of work to get an item and someone is going to kill you in 5 minutes for no good reason... I lose interest.

I guess if it were me, I'd petition to have a greater reward for taking out another player's ship to help compensate for your inevitable loss instead of dropping money on "gold." If PVP combat is so taxing on the income of the player, maybe PVP combat should net better rewards/salvage instead of forcing the "farming" route. That way PVP'ers could have fun instead of wasting time or personal money on farmers?

I've never been in a game without money as playing through the quests, missions, and/or leveling up has provided me with plenty of money to spend in game on things that I need to continue PVE content.

Re:Well, it's about time

[harl]

Nonsensical fear mongering.

The whole premise is invalid. You're playing a game not bartering. It's impossible to barter things you don't own. Read the section of the EULA below.

If you make money by selling services in game then you have earned income and must be reported. This is nothing new and existing tax law clearly covers it.

With RMT there is no ownership and no income so how can there be changes to tax?

From the Eve EULA:

11. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS
              A. Ownership of Software, System and Game
              As between you and CCP, CCP is the sole and exclusive owner of the Software, System, Game and Game Content (as
              defined below). The Software, System, Game and all Game Content are protected by law governing copyrights,
              trademarks and other proprietary rights. CCP reserves all rights not expressly granted herein.

              The Game is comprised of, without limitation, software code, programs, routines, subroutines, objects, files,
              data, characters (and items, currency, objects and attributes comprising or associated with a character or an
              Account), graphics, sound effects, music, animation, video, text, content, layout, design and other information
              downloaded from and accessible through the System (collectively, the "Game Content"). CCP, its affiliates,
              licensors and/or suppliers retain all of their right, title and interest (including without limitation all
              intellectual property rights) in and to the Software, System, Game and all Game Content, and no rights thereto
              are transferred to you, except for the limited license granted above.

Re:Well, it's about time

[sheepweevil]

Runescape all-but eliminated real-world trading in a series of controversial updates that, among other things, made unbalanced trading impossible and removed some PVP combat. Trading was changed so that every trade needs to be equal (with a certain leeway determined by experience). A large PVP section was changed so players cannot attack each other, so killing a farmer and taking the gold from the ground was made much harder.
These changes have pretty much eliminated real-world trading, but with a cost. Many players left because of the radical changes it required in the game, and giving sizeable gifts to friends is now impossible.

Re:Well, it's about time

[nedlohs]

PVPing has to be a net negative, otherwise you have an exploit with friends killing each other and looting more than they lose in total.

The more rewarding (in terms of loot) you make PVPing the more incentive you provide for that "someone is going to kill you in 5 minutes" thing.

Re:Well, it's about time

[nschubach]

Right, but if I remember correctly, you get a random chance to get an item the other player had or nothing... I'm saying that maybe that chance should be increased slightly. If you had two people going back and forth as described, you'd be just as bad off, but not as quickly. I'm not suggesting that players drop 2-3 times as much as they were carrying. Even if they dropped everything they had, they still have to buy a new ship. Net loss.

And yes, I understand the risk reward balance. In whatever MMO I play, the only way I can have fun is with no loss, but great risk (challenge) for the reward. If I spend time getting some item, I don't want some other player to be able to simply kill me for it.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Sqweegee]

There are none, once a game time card (GTC) is transferred into the in-game version (PLEX) no value can be removed from the game without violating the EULA. If you can't extract real life money from the game in a legitimate way, from CCP's and the average player's perspective, there's no tax implications.

Re:Well, it's about time

[harl]

Exactly.

Additionally any money pulled out for providing services, legit or in name only to circumvent the EULA, is already taxes as income under existing law.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Rogerborg]

Are you seriously equating State sponsorship of mass murder with enabling paying players of a video game to enjoy it more without getting stiffed?

That knock at your door? It's the Analogy Police. Don't make any sudden moves.

Re:Well, it's about time

[harl]

An invalid justification for banning gold farmers. What more justification do you need than they are disruptive?

Show me a game that doesn't have have RMT, sanctioned or not, and I'll show you a game that has no player base.

What solutions are their other than sanctioning and securing it?

A game without money or resources might be able to do it and that would be a fun design problem.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Rogerborg]

In short: they punched themselves in the balls until they passed out from the pain.

Re:Well, it's about time

[BobMcD]

Yes, parent seriously is drawing a moral comparison between the two. We are supposed to understand that both of these activities are WRONG, and just because you can doesn't mean you should.

The problem I have with this is that it just doesn't track.

Yes, buying stolen goods is wrong, but I really don't believe that most RMT involves that. Certainly some, but in many (if not all) games, in-game currency only requires time at the keyboard to acquire. I feel it is far more likely that people simply spend more time on it than I do - as opposed to rampant hackery.

The other facet of the 'wrong'ness argument is that the game is actually a competition, rather than a hobby. Those folks don't see RMT as analogous to buying a custom-made set of golf clubs. They see it as buying a full house from the dealer.

That doesn't track with me either, as these games aren't random and they only really require time to master. So, again, everyone has the same amount of time given freely, and some just choose to use it in different ways. I see nothing wrong with exchanges based on this, barring any other immoral activity.

Re:Well, it's about time

[0xdeadbeef]

Prohibiting real world trades is both laughable futile, and self destructive.

No it isn't, because every game that lets people hawk make-believe goods is a laughing stock. No one is going to get on the e-peen treadmill when some joker can just buy his way to the top. The hard-core play these games because they suck at acquiring wealth and status in the real world.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to do that, the game is a design failure. Play something else.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

How so? What are the tax ramifications of CCP's current set up?

Technically, the IRS can claim that whena player is "paid" 100M ISK for completing a mission,that EVE is "employing" them and thus needs to pay and collect employment taxes on that income. There is also a large number of banking regulations - PayPal eventually came under those regulations, you may recall.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

if they tax my mission ISK reward, they shall get paid in ISK.

Re:Well, it's about time

[nickco3]

If you have to do that, the game is a design failure.

Yes ... yes, it is.

Play something else.

Thank you, I will.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

The last thing EVE needs is more rewards for PvP. There's plenty of incentive to kill other players as it is, as anyone not on their toes in low/null security systems can attest. A greater reward would only make the situation worse (from your perspective).

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

but you know how the government is this day.... gold farm in china may be used for money laundering by terrorists, so everyone not trying to stop it is a terrorist.

blizzard may well ban every in game gold transaction as it monitors all accounts every time. it isn't happening as a small farming make the game more accessible to casual players, as you say, but at the same time blizzard has to ban someone now and then to maintain - at face value - the illusion of being against it.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

go cry to your mommy little boy. nobody cares. boo hoo

Re:Well, it's about time

[nobodylocalhost]

Problem is, most games now days are copypasta of previously existing games except having better graphics or physics. Usually they rely on some third rate gimmick to get popular. There are so very very few offers new game play, and even fewer offers true innovation in design. What I am trying to say is that now days, when I pick up a game box, it feels like dejavu. Same design failure has been meticulously replicated and no other choices out there. I end up quit playing games altogether. It sounds pathetic, but I find it more entertaining working at my job than playing games a lot times. It's less grind than leveling a character to say the least.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

That would make life a technical nightmare for players. Bartering tend to fly under the radar as it's very hard to prove. It would be trivial for a software company to track trades and provide a record of the transactions.

There are a host of problems for any company that overtly claims or allows for digital goods in a game to get tied to real hard currency and worth. Lets say that 10 foos start selling for $1(ebay, etc). Sony and most companies claim that their MMORPG digital goods are owned by the company running the servers and not the players. This lets claim a ban on selling these goods. This is important, as it provides some shield to any digital goods being worth money. If these goods are worth money, technically the company is producing and owns goods with some value to them every time a monster drops some foo. This could have tax consequences, especially given some of the inane things I've seen the IRS claim. I have no clue how a VAT would treat this.

Alternately, if the company claims that these digital goods are owned by the players, and these goods have real worth, server crashes potentially open the company up to liability claims. Even restoring from a 6 hour old backup would cause some players to have lost rare drops and/or foo.

Re:Well, it's about time

[harl]

No.

No gain also works. Why would loot be created when PvPing?

Re:Well, it's about time

[Sobrique]

I'm playing EVE to have fun. I make isks, I go out PvPing, and generally if I'm good at it, 300mil will last me a good long time (it doesn't, I tend to buy new toys quite regularly). I don't see that as much of a problem though - the reason PvP is fun, is because you're gambling - you're gambling with what you're flying, vs. whether you're better than them. You're 'buying up' an edge, by T2/faction fitting it, but stand to lose more if you do actually lose. But ... that cuts both ways.
If you're only after the PvE content, then sure - not a problem. PvE in EVE is basically a profitmaking industry unless you're an idiot. But ... it really is missing the point of the whole game IMO.
The idea anyway, is not that you lose your fight, it's that you win. I think we're all agreed that winning is good, and winning when it _matters_ is better.

Re:Well, it's about time

[nedlohs]

Ok, neutral works to. Well other than making life hell for those not liking being killed randomly for their stuff.

Re:Well, it's about time

[nschubach]

When does it matter? You might lose a ship.. but nothing else of any importance happens.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the problems of allowing purchasing of things with real money is that it could set up the following spiral.

1) People spend money to get an advantage in the game over non-money-spenders.
2) The non-money-spenders get discouraged because they get none of the best stuff, always lose to the "cheaters", and eventually quit the game.
3) The player base drastically shrinks, so the money spenders can't be superior to the non-money-spenders (most are gone now), or anybody else (only money spenders are left)
4) The money spenders now leave because they are bored, and there is nobody playing the game left.

I'm not saying this is always the case, and certain games are more immune to this effect than others. Furthermore there are multiple ways to combat this sequence of events, including but not limited to the banhammer.

However it isn't necessarily the case that combating this is "punishing their paying players and themselves". For example, it could be they are punishing the .1% of the population such that the silent 50% of the population which would be annoyed at their behavior aren't and thus don't quit.

Re:Well, it's about time

[zerocool^]

It was done informally with odd rules for a long time. The addition of the in-game item, the "PLEX", pilot license extension, was recent.

But years ago, you could go on the forums, and send someone isk, and they'd evemail you a code from Shattered Crystal. Eventually they made a system by which you could directly apply the time code to another account, to cut down fraud, and now it's strictly plex items, which is handled entirely in game.

Re:Well, it's about time

[harl]

But that's not creation of loot. That's transfer of loot. That can't be exploited since it's sum 0.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

The question that I have is: why did it take them so long to get smart, and why wasn't this designed in from the start?

Game Time Codes (GTC) have been in Eve for as long as I can remember. The only problem was that trading them was only quasi-official. CCP setup a forum for people to sell their GTC, but people had to trust that once you sent the seller the ISK that they'll send you the GTC.

Trust is always an issue in EvE, which is probably why PLEX is such a big deal now.

CCP made a scam-proof system of trading GTCs. You go into your account management and can buy PLEX, or convert GTC to PLEX, to trade in-game or you could simply trade GTC through the account manager: seller puts in the price and code, CCP makes sure it is valid, and the buyer accepts it.

Re:Well, it's about time

[nedlohs]

Yes, hence "neutral works to"o.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

EvE has allowed you to pay in game isk for game time cards for the last 3 years, and maybe even before that, its just alot easier now, and supported much better then it was.

Used to when you wanted to buy game time with isk (in game money) you post on the forums that you wanted a time card, someone else posts that they have one for sale and how much. You then get the code from them via eve-mail or a convo, use it and pay them the isk agreed on, this caused a major trust issue, but as you were not allowed to scam people on these trades the GM's would reverse any errors, or scams. After you got your time and them there money, or vice versa, you would both post on the forums that the trade was complete and that you are happy with the results.

Now however there are in game tokens and a secure game time card trading addition to the account management page to prevent scams.

CCP have been doing this since at least 06 when I started, but its just now catching on with the major community now that plex's are here.

Re:Well, it's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

The question that I have is: why did it take them so long to get smart, and why wasn't this designed in from the start?

They've had the Game-time code feature since before they did the bait-n-switch with Linux users.

CCP: "Come play our video game on Linux!"
Linux Gamers: "Oh, wait it's really a crappy windows 95-era graphics version (classic) running on an ancient commercial wine fork (cedega)."
CCP: "Uh, look it works on Mac, too!"
Linux Users: "We'll pay FULL PRICE for the Premium Edition and run it under wine!"
Mac Users: "What's wine? Updating is hard, we'll stay with classic."
CCP: "Supporting Linux is hard. No support for you!"
[months later]
CCP: "Here's a Premium graphics client, loyal Mac users!"
Wine Developers: "Let's put in patches that works on our Microsoft Office install but beaks tons of other stuff and go on vacation!"
Linux Gamers: :-(
Mac and Windows Users: "Get a Mac or a console. Video games aren't for Linux, n00b!"

The market for GTC and the ability to play the game to pay for it is years old. So the question is, how does this qualify as 'news?'

And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the latest ships cost 1-5 BILLON! ISK fitted out. And you cant insure them for that value, so... Start a new account, buy 1 billon ISK for implants. Train for 1-2years. (No use leaving the station during this time) then buy 10-20billon ISK and you are all set to start playing! :-)

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Mhtsos]

That can't be helped unless they figure out a way to stop someone from hiring their nephew to grind the isk and train the skills, What they did is made it more difficult for professionals to be employed and make money from it.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Sobrique]

What utter nonsense. Expensive toys are not mandatory, and in the vast majority of cases only represent a marginal improvement in capability over MUCH cheaper alternatives. Sure, if you consider the 'point' of EVE to fly a Titan, then you're right, but ... you'd be missing the point of the game entirely.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Opportunist]

I've rarely read so much bullcrap in only 2 lines.

First, yes, those new, spiffy, T3, superspecialawesome, too-cool-to-mention, top-of-the-line, never-been-seen ships cost a fortune and a half. Newsflash: They're not meant to be bought and owned by you! They are supposed to be bought by a whole corporation or even alliance, as a means to support their fleet. Look at their stats, 99% of what they can do deal with boosting other ships. Billions and billions of ISK also won't buy those ships. Why? Because nobody is selling them!

Even if they eventually enter the "end user market" and are no longer top-shelf-alliance-only goods, you won't buy one. Why? Because they're worthless for you as a single player. I do have an Orca (no, far from a T3 superspecialawesome ship), but I would not fly it alone. Because it's worthless for solo play and costing half a billion also a wee bit too expensive to lose to the next effing rat coming along. Hell, even in a group of less than 5 it's better I go out with a Hulk and mine myself!

Most PvP these days is skirmish warfare. Yes, yes, you always get to hear about those huuuuuuge battles where carriers with battleships orbiting them like some moons around Jupiter clash in a system, when you see the starlanes close because CCP has to redirect processing power to the system where 500 vs 500 ships crash together, where 100mil ISK are wasted per second... Know what? I've been playing for 5 years now. I've never even SEEN such a battle. Been in one? Dream on. They don't happen!

If you're aiming to "own" such a 1.5 bil ship right from the start, you're doing something wrong. EvE is not about endgame as so many other MMOs out there that don't really start until you hit maxlevel and start the grind for your ultimate armor (ultimate 'til next patch, of course). Know what I fly into the big battles, a 5 year old player with somewhere between 40 and 50 Mil SP and a purse of a few billion ISK? A standard issue T1 Battlecruiser. If I get cocky and feel rich, and the group I fly with warrants and needs it, I might consider pondering flying my Command ship. Why? Because I don't want to go broke, duh!

Because you don't need to fly anything else to participate in PvP in a meaningful way. I've seen people with less than 6 months of play time participate in big, intense PvP battles in frigates and blow up way more than they're "worth". What you can do is not determined by the time you have been playing, more often than not it's a matter of what you're up against. You can take apart a lone T2 Battleship in a handful of T1 Frigates. Because the BS cannot hit them! At the very least the Frigs have the speed to lock and web the BS 'til the heavy guns can come and lock.

There is no such thing as "you have to play X amount of time and have Y money to do something in PvP" in EvE. Separate yourself from the thinking of other, traditional MMOs. Yes, you will not fly that carrier after 2 months of playtime. But I've seen it more than just once that that "little" 2 months player made the difference because his EW fitted frig could lock&web an opponent to keep him from escaping the trap.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Opportunist]

First, training in EvE is entirely and only time dependent. You start the skill, it will be done in 2 days, 4 hours, 2 minutes, 50 seconds. Nothing you do in game, whether you shoot anything, mine something or are logged in altogether can change that. I also doubt the wisdom to hand your ship to your nephew (or anyone) and have him grind for you. On average, a ship costs what it could generate in about 40 hours of game time (speaking PvE, PvP is a different matter, albeit much more dangerous), I don't think it's wise to have anyone who doesn't know how to play the game well grind money for you in a ship that has to survive at least 40 hours of grinding to get back the money it costed you.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Arimus]

Agree; the alliance I'm in hardly uses any Tech 3 strategic cruisers but we have downed a number of them... and they seem to be as easy to take down as anyother ship if you have your wits about you.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just lost a manticore. It's circa 28M isk, plus my fittings - lets say a total of 40M ISK.

One level 4 mission can do this, if you salvage the wrecks. I've bought ISK before. I would not do it again, because I don't fly what I cannot afford to easily replace, and I don't shed emo-rage tears when I lose a ship.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Wow. Have you even played EVE? This has got to be a troll.

First off, T3 ships are not alliance tools, they're solo ships if anything. Sure, they can fit Warfare Links, but so can battlecruisers and command ships. Battlecruisers do it far cheaper, command ships do it better (much stronger tanks, can fit 3 at once) and still a little cheaper. And that's just one of many possible configurations of a T3 ship. They also make nearly invincible scouts (bubble immunity + covops cloak), or could be set up for an amazing tank, drones, whatever. You also apparently haven't checked the prices on them recently--you could fully fit one now for 5-600m. You'd be an absolute fool to bring one to a fleet fight though--even doomsday-tanked battleships get practically alpha'd.

As for large battles, they don't happen? What? They happen so frequently I got bored of them. Like, every single day in a large alliance with an active war. Cynojammer takedowns, capship fights, you name it, it's happening all the time.

Honestly it sounds like you've spent your entire EVE career in empire. Too bad man, there's an entire game you're missing.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Anonymous Coward]

it takes 3 months to get the skills to fly a T3 cruiser it takes 6 months to get the skills to fly one decently, it takes 2 months to fly a battle ship* 6 months to fly one well.. where did you pull 1-2 years from?

*BS's dont require all those time consuming level 5 skills

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Anonymous Coward]

Large battles do not happen? You must belong to a crappy alliance.

I have seen 900 vs 900 battles. I have seen systems lag to the point of crash. I have seen the enemy lose more than 100mil isk per second... I have seen 20 titans in one location.

I belong to Goonfleet.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a 2 week old newbee and I've already "experienced" one large battle. It basically consisted of my client freezing. I was dead for 10 minutes and didn't even realize it until I restarted the client and saw myself in my clone station. It sounded fun over teamspeak though!

BTW - What kind of computer do I need to not freeze up in large battles?

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy implants. That reduces training time. Buy learning skills and train them. That reduces training time. Some training skills presently go for around 45 million ISK. There is some things you can do to mitigate training time using ISK. Having that ISK is helpful. Just pointing out that training in the game is not "fixed" as you imply and that it can be (in fact is directly) influenced by ISK.

Re:And casual games _MUST_ buy ISK.

[dangitman]

What they did is made it more difficult for professionals to be employed and make money from it.

It's a game. Why should it be a job, let alone a money-making one? I know... professional sports, yadda yadda... but what about just enjoying the game?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Eve downtime atm... they'll argue here instead

[pspahn]

So Eve has an extended downtime tonight. Just so happens this old argument about isk farmers shows up on /. tonight. Coincidence? I think rather not. Did you see those dorks over there whining about how much isk/hour they make? hahaha. That's eve!

Re:How lucky we are to bother ourselves with this

[Mhtsos]

What if it's light years away, that belt of Omber had my name on it.. and now it's gone..

Second link in summary is 404 for me

[Ocker3]

at least on a somewhat slow 'net connection in Australia. First one still works though.

Can someone explain PLEX?

[sleeponthemic]

I read TFA, I read the comments, I'm still clueless as to what it means. Game time? How does this relate to mitigating currency? Isn't EVE a subscription model?

Re:Can someone explain PLEX?

[Opportunist]

EvE is, like many MMOs, selling game time cards (GTCs), so people who do not want to give out their CC numbers or don't have one can play. It's like a prepaid card for cellphones. You buy a card, you get a serial key, you enter the key at their homepage and your account gets credited with 60 days of time.

You may now also go to their homepage and sell those 60 days of time. To do this, buy a GTC and instead of activating it for your account, you go to their page and enter the serial number you got into their selling interface. That interface verifies that it's valid and asks you how much you want for your GTC. You specify the amount of ISK you want in exchange for the GTC time and then you wait for a player to say that it's worth that to him. He clicks on the offer, the amount of ISK is withdrawn from his in-game currency and credited to your account.

Re:Can someone explain PLEX?

[VPeric]

EVE is a subscription model. You buy time in chunks of 30, 60, 90.. days. You can also buy a game-time card (known as "GTC card", an excellent example of RAS syndrome) which is worth 60/90 days. However, you are allowed to sell that card to another player for ISK (in-game currency) via CCP and in doing so officially "buy" ISK. The other player, of course, gets the card (== game time). Make sense? I don't understand why this is here now, though, as they've been running the exact same model for years now.

Re:Can someone explain PLEX?

[johnhoover]

GTCs (Game Time Codes) are purchased from retailers for actual cash. In game, these are converted to PLEX (Pilot Licence Extensions).

The PLEXs can be sold or traded as any other item, though I believe they can't be moved from the station where they're created.

Hope I've got this right. It's a bit early.

Re:Can someone explain PLEX?

[DaveV1.0]

EVE uses a subscription model. This model uses either the standard credit card, or a Game Time Card (GTC) like one can get for WoW. The difference is that one can take a GTC and convert it into Pilot License Extensions (PLEX). A GTC can be purchased in several time lengths: 30, 60, 90 days. A PLEX is a basically a 30 day GTC.

If one buys a 60 day GTC, one can convert that into two PLEXs.

If one has a lot of ISK (the in-game currency), but little or no real currency to buy a GTC, one can use the in-game currency to buy a PLEX and continue to play. This allows a person to pay for playing the game BY playing the game.

Re:Can someone explain PLEX?

[jeff4747]

What you describe is the old system.

In the new system, every 30 days of GTC time is converted into a PLEX, an in-game item. The in-game item can be sold on the regular in-game market. When it's used, it adds 30 days to your account.

Currency farming in space ?

[mbone]

Are they doing this on the ISS ? I was just wondering about the "space" tag on this article.

Re:Currency farming in space ?

[Vrykoulakas]

Are they doing this on the ISS ? I was just wondering about the "space" tag on this article.

The tag is Games Space, not Space. Just FYI.

Gamers are tired of farming

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak for students and other people without a job, but at most I have 2 or 3 hours a day to spend on the game.
Since I don't really consider farming ingame money to be "fun", I don't want to spend most of playtime doing something boring.
As the 'G' in MMORPG says, it's a GAME. It's supposed to be enteraining, fun and all, not something than can be more tiresome than my real job.
I've thought about all this and i'm left with two options.
The first is looking for something else. Games where you can enjoy 2 or 3 hours of playing without 10 hours of farming to get you geared in order to play decently.
The second is to buy ingame credits with real money.

As of now, I've stuck with the first option since the second will get you banned in most games...

Re:How lucky we are to bother ourselves with this

[Opportunist]

Don't shed a tear, Omber ain't worth jack anyway.

So you farm PLEX instead

[SpinningCone]

an interesting solution which essentially allows CCP to snag some profit from the farmers. in the new PLEX model you have users who want to use real money to buy ISK so the purchase a PLEX, you have ISK farmers who have loads of cash offering above market price for players PLEX, then reselling the PLEX at a lower real life cost essentially lowering the price of the monthly subscription for the farmers customers.

PlayerA gets his ISK for RLM, PlayerB saves some money each month the Farmer gets some cash for his time and CCP got in on the action.

Re:So you farm PLEX instead

[KnightElite]

This can't happen (it used to about a year and a half ago with the old timecard selling system). With PLEX though, as soon as you purchase the PLEX, the time is immediately credited to your account, and the PLEX is used up, so you can't resell the thing.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Price Fixing

[shambalagoon]

There's a new trend in WoW of price-fixing. People go to the Auction House, buy up all the valuable items, and put them back on at massive-inflated prices. It's been happening more and more in the last few months, and now it's almost constant. The only time you can buy affordable, useful gear on the AH is when you beat the price-fixers to it. I don't know if it's people looking for gold or gold farmers, but it increases the demand for buying gold offsite because it's nearly impossible to afford the gear you need.

That and spelling out gold farmer's domain names in dead bodies across popular areas - it's a constant battle to keep up with all the ways people will try to make money off of a MMO

Re:Price Fixing

[cowscows]

I don't know that much about WoW, but this sort of market manipulation happens in EvE as well. But it's usually not as big a deal, because the economy is so decentralized. If someone's relisted all of the red widgets in a system, there's a few thousand other systems I can look in. Plus because players have so much control over the production of most items in game, producers will notice the relisting, and will increase their production of that particular item. It self-corrects pretty well.

Re:Price Fixing

[WuphonsReach]

It is something that EVE Online gets *almost* right.

The limitation that markets are only region wide means that there are a few dozen markets within hi-sec. Plus goods have to be physically moved, which means that goods can gain/lost value solely on distance.

Where EVE Online gets it wrong is the 0.01 ISK undercutting due to region-wide buy orders.

(Buy orders should change offered price based on distance from the buy order actual location. Even for region-wide buy orders. This would allow more competition and allow smaller buyers to compete against the big sellers because there would be more niches where the smaller buyers could offer a better buy price.)

Re:Price Fixing

[brkello]

New trend? This has always been going on. If there is something where the item is fairly limited, someone with a lot of gold can buy them all up and sell them for more.

But of all games, WoW makes it pretty useless. You can get everything you really need just from questing. Buying gear isn't really necessary since you level so fast you will be getting better gear from quests in no time. And end game is all about running instances to get better gear. Do a few daily quests and you have enough gold to cover repair bills and any potions you may require.

Re:Price Fixing

[babywhiz]

hahaha...so it's not just our realm that is having that issue? I thought one of them was just an electronics site....the other one a gold seller...

Re:Price Fixing

[Opportunist]

This is near impossible in EvE. Almost everything is available in abundance, the price of a good is determined almost more by its location than its rarity simply because any form of transport has to be done by players. There is no mail system and every system has its own market. So even to "corner" a local market, a player would have to do a lot of system hopping and shopping (and transporting, provided he doesn't simply want to sit on the goods), only to be ignored when his prospective buyers do 2 more jumps to a cheaper place.

There is also no shortage of virtually anything. Anything you might want you can harvest/loot yourself (except some T2 ores that require the existance of a lowsec station you'd have to fuel and defend). But, again, no market cornering there either, simply because too many people offering the goods at too many places.

Re:Price Fixing

[Blakey Rat]

WOW has "fixed" this by making equipment listed in the AH relatively worthless compared to what you can get from just questing. I actually had a friend who was banned from WOW for price fixing, I thought that was crap personally. One of many reasons I stopped playing.

Re:Price Fixing

[seebs]

It's not new, and it's not something that can be sustained for long on most servers -- it's too easy to make or farm more of most items.

Re:Price Fixing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see a more stock-market like approach than the AH approach. Set initial price and minimum price you want, and how long you want it listed for, and the price automatically decays. Set the initial price and the maximum price you want to pay, and how long you want to offer it for, and your price automatically increases. Settle when the prices meet. Offering higher than the lowest price sells for the lowest price, pricing lower than the highest offer sells for the highest offer, i.e. it depends on which order got in first. FIFO at any price level.

You could still corner the market, but timing it would be much more difficult, as someone wanting to buy at a reasonable price will get it as soon as someone offers to sell at a reasonable price (unless the person trying to corner the market has so many high buy orders you can't get in - which simply means that anyone else wanting to sell that item gets a chance to make more money). You should also be able to get a price history (without having to track it all yourself with an add-on) so that people get a good idea of reasonable prices for things and don't buy them at the inflated price. If the only people buying at a high price are speculators, the speculators will eventually run out of money.

The idea that someone HAS to have something goes away if the price gets too high - there are created items, driven by farming materials which anyone can do, so no one can effectively corner those markets - there are quest rewards - there are plenty of random drops and boss drops and so on that you can get with "ordinary" equipment, you don't NEED stuff you can't get for yourself. As long as that market exists (trading in good stuff that you can't use for good stuff that you can), then that market can't really be cornered either.

Re:Price Fixing

[Kryptic Knight]

So some idiot is buying my stuff and reposting it at a higher price?

So I get the gold and the try to resell my original sale for uber-high prices.
If its too high it won't sell.
I just resell more items at higher and higher prices untill the "price fixer" stops buying my stuff.

The market effectively prices the price-fixer out of business.

Making isk is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

The market in EVE is underdeveloped. Buy low, sell high. My advice, buy two game time cards when starting the game. Sell them for capital. Begin trading ships. You need about a month and a half to have a reasonably (not fully) leveled trader, but you can start turning a profit long before then. A friend of mine reflected on his trading days 'your first billion is the hardest'... so buy it for 30 bucks... or don't. Contributing to the eveconomy is for suckers. Just buy and sell things. Buy order manipulation isn't all that hard, and patience is all you need to sell things.

(For those of you who are unaware, Eve is a video game filled with players who want things fast. Items that aren't destroyed are often resold. When a player wants to sell his ship, he will often not want to move it to a market hub. If you have an offer up to buy his ship for 1/2 to 2/3rds the value, many players will jump on it. You can sell the ship for anywhere between 80%-110% of it's current market price, depending on circumstances. All of these trades can be done remotely, with buy orders being set up to cover entire regions of the game. Running an interstellar pawn shop will turn you a great buck for very minimal time investment... mind you, it costs a fair amount of cash to get started)

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Uh, news?

[brkello]

This has been done by Eve for as long as I have known about it. How is this suddenly news? It is an old game and GTCs have been talked about before. Bizarre reading about this now.

In a related story, World of Warcraft now allows you to have paid server transfers. Also, Lord of the Ring online has hobbits.

Re:Uh, news?

[julesh]

This has been done by Eve for as long as I have known about it. How is this suddenly news?

RTFA. It's news because the devs have released data about how well it's working.

At least they are trying...

[PottedMeat]

And haven't yet hacked out huge, popular parts of their game to combat RWT. Like Jagex did with Runescape.

Re:How lucky we are to bother ourselves with this

[jehjr1337]

Don't shed a tear, Omber ain't worth jack anyway.

Indeed, mine veldspar.

solution: don't take servers down

[OrangeTide]

Use fault tolerant and high availability software techniques and construct servers that can be updated while hot. And a network that can allow the removal of individual servers without impacting users.

It's not the same, but we never see sites like Amazon.com go down for maintenance. They run a massive website that probably costs them millions in lost sales for every hour they are down. Now HTTP has some advantages when it comes to distribution and load balancing, mostly the advantages are that the problems with scaling that protocol have already been solved and you can buy special hardware to help construct a cluster of webservers that are transparently accessed as one.

Now a specialized protocol for a massively multiplayer game could still be designed in a way to allow you to migrate player state to different parts of a server cluster and also designed so that rolling updates could be applied to many systems simultaneously without interruption. It's some high tech stuff, but if it makes the players happy and keeps them as paying customers it's worth it.

Re:solution: don't take servers down

[Sobrique]

Why? What does it gain? Downtime happens for less than an hour a day, and 'everyone' is used to it. It's the most straightforward solution to having to do scheduled maintenance on anything - yes, you can do 24/7 fault tolerant systems, and maybe it would be nice if EVE did. But ... it's _not_ like they lose 'millions in sales' during their downtime, like Amazon might. It's also quite unlike a distributed shopping website, because it's a single interlinked cluster. You can't just 'shut down' a few of the nodes, and close part of the galaxy whilst downtime occurs.
I'm sure they _could_ architect a solution, but there's no guarantee it'll actually provide benefit in proportion to the cost.

Re:solution: don't take servers down

[spectro]

The problem is Eve servers were (unfortunately) developed to run over Windows Servers. The first releases of their code probably had big memory leaks on top of Microsoft's ones so they came out with this daily reboot procedure to keep all that in check.

Maybe everything is more stable now, in fact I think in the last few months most of Eve's daily downtimes are as low as 5 minutes.

I still don't understand why they picked windows to run their servers... I believe most of their server code is in python. Linux would've been a natural option.

Re:solution: don't take servers down

[OrangeTide]

Yes, you can shut down a few nodes, if you design the system properly, like a computer scientist would design an HA cluster. Like I said in an earlier post, websites have it easier because it's all been done before and the technology is off-the-shelf now. But it is not an impossible task. It actually only takes a few smart people and a little hard work to have a decent HA cluster. The costs are minimal, how much does it cost to hire 10 smart engineers for 24-30 months? They probably already have a couple of smart people on staff.

Plenty of us just move from company to company turning a text book design into an a working solution. It's not even hard, you just have to know that it can be done and start asking the right questions instead of shrugging and saying it doesn't matter and customers can tolerate it.

And no, Eve will never lose 'millions in sales' in downtime if they don't take a customer-centric view. Providing excellent service on all fronts(servers, customer service, game content, etc). I don't mean to single out Eve, they are actually one of the better MMOs out there in terms of customer experience. But they aren't the best, and what we think as a pretty good MMO today will probably be considered a pretty bad one in 5-10 years unless they can remove every minor thing that pisses customers off.

Re:solution: don't take servers down

[Turiko]

At any given time, any one part of the server(a system, in eve) will have one or more players... In some systems, there will ALWAYS be players. An example of it is Jita, the system where most big trades are done. How are you going to migrate it and/or patch it if there's still players on it?

CCP has become rabid

[infodragon]

I have 4 accounts to play Eve online. I was involved with a friend that participated in trading items and accounts for real money. I had no idea it was going on and because of my close workings with him within our corporation, my accounts were banned and CCP has not taken the time to listen to my side of the story.

I still have 3 petitions opened and one has been responded to with a senior GM stating the one account will remain permanently banned.

They have become rabid in their persuit of stopping the RL money issues and innocent people are being harmed. I consider Eve one of my hobbies and after 3.5 years they arbatrairly destroyed that work.

Re:CCP has become rabid

[jeff4747]

Eve one of my hobbies and after 3.5 years they arbatrairly destroyed that work.

It seems to me your anger is a tad misplaced.

Shouldn't you be pissed at the 'friend' who was involved in RMT? If he hadn't gotten greedy then you wouldn't be banned.

Same here

[Wee]

I'm the same way. I make very good money in the real world. If I spend what I make in one hour on in-game money, I'm good for about 18 months of play (depending on how suicidal I'm feeling, where the alliance is based, etc). It would take me about 60 hours to make that same money in-game. So the issue is a no-brainer for me.

Beyond that, the ISK grind is beyond boring to me. The thought of having to haul stuff around, hassle with market orders for hours on end, grind missions, or fuel a POS every other week is a sure-fire way for me to not log on. I just can't handle the boredom of any of those activities. I only get a limited number of hours a week to "waste" on an online game, so I don't want them to be wasted on carebear nonsense. Buying a GTC every year and a half solves that nicely.

-B

Bullshit

[Xeno man]

This isn't about some gamers buying their way to the top ranks of a game. This is about a business finding ways to stay profitable. People are willing to pay money to play a game because it's fun. If players can buy their way to the top is no longer becomes fun for those that can't or won't pay to compete with them. If a game is no longer fun the the players won't pay any more and leave. And there you go. A business destroyed because a few people need to be at the top to gloat even if they needed to pay to get there.

CCP have been doing this for a while

[kindbud]

It's no different than if I had my own alt for mining or industry or trading, which I used to generate cash to fund my other character's activities. Except that if I've been playing long enough where I no longer enjoy the grind of mining, or building, or trading, I can pay for another player's subscription for his alt through a GTC sale, and gain much the same thing without the grind.

Either way, there was going to be a money-making alt on the server, which did nothing but grind for cash.

Flag Macro-miners as kill-able

[Knara]

I always wanted them to find a way for you to report macro-miners. CCP could check it out, and if found to be macro-miners, have them permanently PvP flagged.

Problem would solve itself (usually the macro-miners are horrible combat pilots, even though they can afford very expensive ships).

That's not what the story says...

[argent]

If the PLEX isn't resellable what the hell is the story about?

Quote: "A PLEX is essentially an in-game item that represents 30 days of game time. They can be traded or given to other players, bought and resold. Once an EVE Online player has a PLEX in his or her possession, all they need to do is right click and credit those 30 days to their account."