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EVE Bans Exploiters; Dropping 2% of Users Cuts Average CPU Usage 30%
Earthquake Retrofit writes "Ars has a story about EVE Online banning thousands of accounts for real-world trading of in-game money for profit. From the article: 'Those who buy and sell ISK, the game's currency, are not only exploiting the game, but unbalancing play. That's why the company decided to go drastic: a program they called "Unholy Rage." For weeks they studied the behavior and effects these real-money traders had on the game, and then they struck. During scheduled maintenance, over 6,000 accounts were banned. [Einar Hreiðarsson, EVE's lead GM,] assures us that the methods were sound, and the bannings went off with surgical precision. ... While the number of accounts banned in the opening phase of the operation constituted around 2 percent of the total active registered accounts, the CPU per user usage was cut by a good 30 percent.' Looks like they got the right 6,000.' Further information and more graphs are available from the EVE dev blog."
I'm sure their user agreement spells out that they can ban you for any reason at any time and owe you nothing. But that was before they started selling imaginary property outside the game. THis legitimizes the ingame value of the stuff they just "took" from you without compensation. I bet there are a few in that 6000 that will sue. Might set an interesting precedent if it's not all settled out of court.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Depending on data center costs and decommissioning cycles and billing cycles it is probably that this isn't an immediate 2% hit but for the sake of argument let's assume it is. That said I'm guessing they've done the business case to realize that a 20% reduction in infrastructure costs will pay back their 2% drop in profits within X number of months and that X is short enough time frame to affect yearly operational costs in a positive way for several years to come. Additionally it affects taxes and assets and all sorts of things. I don't know how they justified it but I'm pretty sure there was a positive business case before they did something like this.
Data center costs are brutal for companies with significant infrastructure. Most people don't realize how expensive servers are to run day in and ay out. In a top tier data center it sometimes costs as much or more to run a server for a year than it did to originally buy it, and we're not talking dells from best buy we're talking about $20K+ machines ranging on up to ridiculous numbers for some SunOracle boxes. Once you add in things like the land lease, the power, the telecoms, redundancy, depreciation on the facility, labor, etc. it becomes a rather significant cost. If they don't decide to decommission the freed up capacity right away to get the savings it gives them options for deferred spending or for various corporate trade in programs which allow corps to treat servers like cars and get a good bit off of the next gen, generally cheaper due to efficiency gains versions of hardware. Additionally these days most companies outsource the data center work and are locked into various contracts for given periods of time so the only recourse they have to be more efficient on the infrastructure front is to use less until the next contract cycle comes up.
Again, I have no idea what their numbers look like but it's not crazy to think that a 20% reduction in infrastructure usage could have a very good business case with a very short payback time.
Let me state at the outset that I am a big fan of just about everything Eve.
Disclaimer out of the way, the dirty secret in Eve is that it's real tough to make money as a "glamorous combat pilot." Hi-Sec miner, hi-sec industrialist -- you're swimming in cash. But that's not the glamorous, exciting game one sees in the promos that attracts the curious to play the game. THAT game, the "pew pew" of lasers, the mighty racket of autocannons blazing, the squeal of the drones as they shred your enemies' armor -- exciting as all hell, but costly. The profit margin just ain't there, unless you're really, really good. If you're part of a large null-sec Corp that can replace your ships when they (inevitably) are wiped out when you are jumped by a much larger force, you'll get by, but if you're some lone wolf sociopathic space pirate, you'll be holding your ship together with duct tape and using hurled rocks as ammo in no time.
These are the guys who are the ISK farmers' clients. These guys, who comprise most of the lo-sec game (as opposed to hi-sec and null-sec) are the players affected by the farmer clamp-down. What will be the fall-out when they can't run to their real-world "suppliers" to re-tool? Will these guys leave the game? Join a more established Corp? Switch careers? Grow up? It'll be interesting to watch...