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In Isk We Trust: the EVE Online IskBank Exposed
riverni writes "Eve News 24 is running a couple of articles uncovering the lucrative 'black-market' existing in EVE Online, a sci-fi themed single-server MMORPG. The overall scale of the operation is breathtaking. While there exist legal ways to exchange real world currency for in-game currency, the black market, primarily driven by botters (users who utilize automated macros to perform rewardable tasks in game), remains strong. One article reports on how Iskbank.com made approximately $290,000 in sales during a 10.5-month period. These figures do not include any sales made through their sister site, Eveisk.ru and yes, those are US dollars."
Shouldn't that be "In CCP We Trust"?
EVE is terrible, CCP is terrible. Don't play!
Sounds like it could be a good way to launder money.
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what about the tax on that cash will they pay or will the IRS have to bust some ass?
...the people who resort to buying ISK from RMTers are usually those who don't know how to earn ISK legally in the game - i.e. noobs and clueless folk of one form or another. So of course they end up spending all their bought ISK on shiny ships that they have no idea how to fly properly, quickly get themselves blown up, and leave wrecks full of juicy loot for those of us who play by the rules.
Pretty funny reading all the comments on that site. Lots of EVE Nerds apparently like to rage about real-money transactions.
I honestly don't think it matters unless it is screwing up the in-game economy. Otherwise, I think people should probably stop crying. If some fool wants to spend $3,000 buying fake money for a MMO, you should be laughing, not raging about how unfair it is.
Is that where all the old World of Warcraft gold selling bots went?
CCP's attempt to combat real world traders is called the PLEX system. You purchase a 30 day time card using $20 and you can sell it in game to other players for the equivalent of ~350,000,000 ISK (the in game currency). This produces a base exchange rate of about 17.5 million ISK to one USD. The black market does not directly deal in PLEX's, but it is safe to assume that the conversion ratio is at least as high, if not higher in order for it to be profitable for other players to take this route. Because of this, and the company's transactions of $290,000, it is safe to assume that the real world market trading has a value on the approximately of 5 trillion ISK. The second link reports that the company holds an estimated 4 trillion in virtual assets making the total value of this to be 9 trillion. Because the population in EVE is ~300,000 active accounts, this sums to be nearly 30 million ISK per user, the total wealth which based on their most recent economic reports (yes, CCP hired an economist to write these), shows the average subscriber has 300 million ISK. While this is not an insignificant sum of wealth, it is only about 10% of the games GDP.
> yes, CCP hired an economist to write these
Oh that explains it.
How much ISK did they have to sell to make $229,000? 6.1 Billion or so? Back when it was still possible to "get fat" on long limbed roes I made a little over 200mil ISK in my first month as a player. This was probably about 60+ hours of work even if it was mostly just clicking now and then to initiate the next warp or jump gate. If I wanted to buy that much ISK now would be about $8. That's about $0.13/hr. Even if someone was 200 times more efficient than that it the gross for 200mil would be $26/hr. I am still an EVE n00b and don't even play anymore. So can an expert estimate how long it would take to make $200mil? How high is the risk? If you need a 2000mil rig to mine or whatever and the risk is high you stand to have your "profit" wiped out at any time. Bodyguards don't help much either because now you're dividing your gross by n players and multiplying your risk by n as well.
You don't mean GDP. GDP is a rate. You mean 10% of all the cash in the entire EVE universe. Slight difference.
From my brief and infuriating experiences with EVE, my impression was that the in-game economy was already fucked beyond all hope.
From your brief stay, one would assume you had no clue as to how the economy works in the game.
Just to give you all some idea.
US$30 = 350,000.000 ISK.
One battleship, unfit = 65,000,000 ISK
One battleship, moderate kick-ass fit = 150,000,000 ISK.
So it's roughly $15 to buy a battleship. Not the best around, but decent enough to be a potent weapon in a fleet.
Wow, the average subscriber only have 300million isk? They must have no clue how to play the game. I have only been playing for 8 months now and I have well over 3-4 billion isk. I even make enough to pay for a second account with game money via the PLEX system (and am about to start doing the same for all my accounts once I get a little more established). In EVE, you need isk to make isk. Once you have a few billion, you can simply just invest that in the market and can very easily make 10-20% a week of your investment. I make about 100-200 million a week just spending 5-20 minutes a day. And if I actually play the game, I make about 60-80 million an hour.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
So, Eve users buy isk with dollars from botfarms? Just like players of every other MMORPG? Wow, what news.
I doubt anyone would care, but the site is not run by organized crime. It's run by three people from the Northern Coalition and the Drone Russians, I am sure their names will leak out soon.
you play a game where you skill up by logging in once a day and clicking the skill you want, and you buy in game money rather than playing the game to get it. . . .
why do you play the game?
"Gross domestic product (GDP) refers to the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a given period." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product
You are referring to the rate of growth of GDP, which is often quoted in news reports, but is not the same thing as GDP itself (which is, as per the usage of the person posting above, an absolute amount rather than a rate).
Also, if I read the above correctly, 10% is the percentage of the value of all assets, rather than just cash.
Further compounding the demand for easy money solutions is that EVE itself is not designed for the risk-averse. When you lose a ship in EVE it is gone. You may get a token insurance payment, but most of the wealth and effort you had tied up in that ship is lost to you. It is only natural that people who play such a game are more willing then normal to take additional risks to better themselves in EVE, fueling a higher normal amount of cheating. So right away CCP is at a disadvantage compared to other MMOs.
CCP in recent years has demonstrated significant effort in combating external RMT, with the most notable effort being the introduction of the PLEX (an in game item that when redeemed adds 30 days to your subscription). So to combat RMT eve has set a sort of standard RMT model whereby players can buy ISK. The catch to CCPs model is that the value of ISK is tied directly to the number of people who want free gametime.
Now, here's the catch. Thousands upon thousands of PLEX are paid for every month by people running bots (click macro or injection software to automate the game). Botting is the staple of RMT. So long as it is easy for people to bot it will be easy to set up shop in RMT. If ccp really wants to go after RMT they would need to address the botting epidemic in their game, which will absolutely kill the demand for PLEX. This system ensures that forum whiners will always have a reason to call the game unfair, and ccp developers will never be viewed as competent.
Good luck CCP.
Wow, the average subscriber only have 300million isk? They must have no clue how to play the game. I have only been playing for 8 months now and I have well over 3-4 billion isk. I even make enough to pay for a second account with game money via the PLEX system (and am about to start doing the same for all my accounts once I get a little more established). In EVE, you need isk to make isk. Once you have a few billion, you can simply just invest that in the market and can very easily make 10-20% a week of your investment. I make about 100-200 million a week just spending 5-20 minutes a day. And if I actually play the game, I make about 60-80 million an hour.
Soooo.... US$30 == 350,000,00ISK
You take in 70,000,00ISK per hour (Median of your estimate).
Using exchange rate / acquirement rate, we arrive at your USD income.
350,000,000 / 70,000,000 = 5
Congratulations, you make US$5/hr.
I mean, China got sweatshops, Eve got Macroers. Eve just models the real world more than we'd like to admit :-/
Making $5/hour (effectively) means that you can subsidize your month's subscription in about three hours of play. I'm sure most EVE players play a lot more than three hours a month, so it sounds like a skilled player could very easily be self-sufficient.
Yep. It takes a few months to get to that point though. My "afk" income only takes about 3-4 days to train up the in-game skill requirements. The rest is knowing how to read and play the market (the whole, buy low, sell high thing that people still don't understand, which is why they pull their money from the market when the economy has already gone bad, which is one of the worst things you can due unless you expect the market to keep on getting worse and you buy back in before it gets back to the point that you got out.... Which is also how I tripled my retirement funds when the economy dumped and rebounded in the last 3 years).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
US$30 = 350,000.000 ISK.
You don't know what you're talking about. The exchange rate is almost half that. $35 gets you 2 PLEX cards straight from the official site which can sell for ~330mil apiece if you low ball for an easy sell.
What part of "produced within a country in a given period" sounds like an absolute amount, and not a rate to you? GDP as usually presented is the annual production of a nation. This is quite different than its money supply, or its total assets.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
ISK sellers typically sell at around $25 per Billion, to put the difference in perspective.
Wouldn't normally reply to myself, but since you can buy PLEX (a gametime card) for ingame currency (which is how you convert PLEX to isk) you can buy ISK at the lower real money price by buying isk, and then buying game time in game. This is probably the 2nd most common use of isk purchase
Wow, the average subscriber only have 300million isk? They must have no clue how to play the game. I have only been playing for 8 months now and I have well over 3-4 billion isk. I even make enough to pay for a second account with game money via the PLEX system (and am about to start doing the same for all my accounts once I get a little more established). In EVE, you need isk to make isk. Once you have a few billion, you can simply just invest that in the market and can very easily make 10-20% a week of your investment. I make about 100-200 million a week just spending 5-20 minutes a day. And if I actually play the game, I make about 60-80 million an hour.
Soooo.... US$30 == 350,000,00ISK You take in 70,000,00ISK per hour (Median of your estimate).
Using exchange rate / acquirement rate, we arrive at your USD income. 350,000,000 / 70,000,000 = 5
Congratulations, you make US$5/hr.
Well done, genius. You indeed have expert mastery of basic mathematics. But your thinly-veiled insult only makes sense if he's busting his hump to acquire wealth, when in fact what's happening is that he's playing a game. And it sounds like his playing of the game is subsidising his playing of the game by paying toward his subscription. It's like poking fun at someone who enjoys painting and occasionally sells pieces so they can afford more paint. If your only goal is acquisition of wealth, then $5/hour sucks. If you can make $5/hour doing something in your spare time, doing something that you enjoy, doing something that not only would you do for free but that you would pay someone else to let you do, then in what way is that a bad thing? (Hint: In no way is it a bad thing)
I was an average subscriber and yeh I would agree making ISK is easy, I just couldn't be bothered straining my eyes trying to read the damn tiny font so I gave up after only a couple of days of play time and having made around 50 mill in that time...
30 day plex are 340mil. ie $35 = ~670mil isk
I think you must have used a period where you meant to use a comma.
Ahhh, EVE Online. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. :)
Mea culpa - I had thought that the AC parent was referring to the rate of GDP growth as being GDP, but in fact of course you are right and he/she could well have been referring to the fact that GDP itself is an increase year-over-year