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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."
Sounds like it could be a good way to launder money.
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Play? How about making money?
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
> EVE is terrible
Show me another MMORPG (aside from UO = Ultima Online) that doesn't have character classes please?
...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.
CCP ruined everything.
Champions Online (paid version) has freeform characters.
Let's be realistic. They have $290k sales in 10.5 months? That sounds like a lot until you realise that's how much it would cost to cover the salaries of three good software engineers, assuming those guys agreed to work from home. If that's split four ways, then there's a decent chance those four people are making a loss.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
A couple of my friends are really into EVE, and while it doesn't have character classes, does it not have ship classes? And since you need to level up particular skills per ship it's pretty similar.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Is that where all the old World of Warcraft gold selling bots went?
From my brief and infuriating experiences with EVE, my impression was that the in-game economy was already fucked beyond all hope.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
CCP is terrible.
This is very true.
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.
They're based in Moldova where average wage is US$250 per month. It's a large amount for them.
There are quite a few... off the top of my head though, I can name two (Fallen Earth, Darkfall) Most of them are smaller titles. I have speculated that this is because people tend to want direction when they play and people that play with them want them to fit in a role. (I'm a Cleric, I must heal...) I've been playing Rift and noticed a lot of disgruntled people whine and cry when the cleric that joins the group is not a healer or the warrior is not a tank.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The difference is that EVE lets you "skill up" to at least combat-competence in a ship class fairly easily, and once your character is old enough to have sunk enough skills into it, could in theory be proficient at multiple flying ship classes of varying classes (frigate, etc) and races (since some races' ships are better suited as laser boats or shield tanks or gun turrets, and thus fit different players' preferred style).
I hear that Rift comes close, in that you have a lot of choice within your calling (warrior, cleric, etc) as to how to specialize -- both in terms of which soul trees you choose (riftblade, paladin, etc) and how you distribute your points between them. (It sounds really tempting, as someone who mainly plays WoW.) I believe they allow some degree of respeccing among soul trees (the name of which I am surely getting wrong) depending on which you've collected/unlocked/???, so that starts looking pretty close to not having character classes. You do in name, and you have a calling which you can't re-roll, but each of them is so generic that it LOOKS to offer a ton of flexibility.
> 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.
Obligatory: Before you emo-rage-quit, can I have your stuff?
Except to level up the particular skills required per ship class can be as simple as:
1. Log in
2. Set skill training
3. Log out and go do something else until the skill finishes training
With the ability to now queue skills to train so long as the last one to start fits within a 24 hour skill queue length there is no longer a need to log in for skill training more than once per day. The last time I actively played was probably a year ago and yet I haven't missed a single second of "levelling up" in that time. No hours of grinding away doing repetitive tasks in order to level up as many other MMOs do.
Show me another MMORPG (aside from UO = Ultima Online) that doesn't have character classes please?
Runescape doesn't have them.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
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.
I can fly frigates, cruisers and industrials from every race, battlecruisers from 3/4 races, plus just about every minmatar ship that exists apart from super capitals. Comparing ship classes in eve to character class in other MMO's is wrong. I also played wow since the beta. I stopped playing wow because the gameplay is thinner than a lawyers smile, while I am also a little tired of eve I do plan to go back to it, whereas with wow I never will. If someone says they don't like MMO's I nod and agree with their reasons, if someone says eve is worse than the other MMO's they will have huge problems convincing me of that. If you like spaceships, and you don't hate MMO's, don't let these naysayers form your opinion for you. If you have already played it and didn't like it, that is just fine but don't tell other people what to think.
As a former player, it does upset us a bit because it makes the game unfair.
I flew a Megathron. That's a big battleship, and it took me months to save up for it and all it's fittings. It was a good ship, well fit, and very expensive... to someone who doesn't spend real money. But if I were willing to, I could buy one for the cost of one PLEX and still have change. If I cut out the faction fittings, I could buy two, maybe three.
The implication of this is that a player willing to spend real money becomes near-invincible. They can afford to lose ships, and long-term conflict in EVE is all about economic war and attrition - cut off the enemy corp's industry, wear down their funds and resources. But you can't do that when they are spending real money. It's just unfair. It means the game is no longer a contest of skill, but about who has the best funding in real life, which just completly ruins everything.
MMORPGs are to escape reality. If you give those with real money an advantage, that's reality intruding.
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.
It has a *lot* of ships and even ship classes. I haven't played for years and even then it was pretty diverse in that regard. Even ship classes do not limit you to a certain style of play because anyone is allowed to fly any ship class. Some are just harder to train for and to obtain than others.
There are definitely generalized roles that you can get into, but you have a great deal of choice in how you spec yourself. Since skill learning is done in RL time, and not based on "levels", you do have to make some choices about what you are going to do which will be difficult to alter. That is made even more time consuming because the skill trees are very deep. However, there is no bar to one player learning every skill in the game, except for the fact that there are so many skills that no one is ever going to have the time to learn them all unless they stop adding classes and you play for years.
You could, for instance, in a relatively short amount of time become a freighter pilot and also become very, very good at a specialized combat role like flying as a tackler (slows/immobilizes enemy ships so the more powerful warships can catch up to attack it) in a small, but fast interceptor. Being a freighter pilot and also being a tackler are both important, if not overly glorious roles. This also doesn't prevent you from flying a Titan (the biggest capital ship available), but unless you start down the skill path to that end, the skill trees and the realtime skill progression does postpone that day into the far, far future if you are not focused on it.
So, I would say that it absolutely correct to say that there is no class system in EVE. It is clear that there are some broad roles that exist, such as tanking, mining, crafting, logistics and electronic warfare, but players are not forced to select skills based on a class, they select skills based on how they want to play. A priest in WoW may be able to spec for healing or damage, but they will never get to use warrior or warlock or mage skills. In EVE, your one character can use any ship or capability that they have the skills learned for, and later on, they can decide to learn something else, and they don't lose the skills they have already learned.
100 third world sweat shop laborers are probably cheaper than 3 good software engineers - they just run mining operations on several accounts at a time.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
That sounds like fun ^.^
It is what it is.
If it took you months to save up for a BS which costs 150 million isk with t2 fittings then your doing something majorly wrong. You can make 150m in a few hours of rattin gin 0.0 or now doing the Incursions in low-sec.
The implication of this is that a player willing to spend real money becomes near-invincible. They can afford to lose ships, and long-term conflict in EVE is all about economic war and attrition - cut off the enemy corp's industry, wear down their funds and resources. But you can't do that when they are spending real money. It's just unfair. It means the game is no longer a contest of skill, but about who has the best funding in real life, which just completly ruins everything.
Now your just plan wrong. IT (aka Band of Brothers 2.0) had over 500billion isk available yet they couldn't defend against the goons in Fountain. ISK selling may get you a short-term gain but if your alliance is at that point where you need to purchase isk, your alliance is already failing.
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"
I have 15 bill in assets, and no you can't have my stuff...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You are a little off on numbers...IT had more like 1 trillion at the end...
People and Places, character (exact), CorenJames
The part that caused IT to collapse was infighting, and the fact that our two biggest PVP Corps never even showed up to fight goons. I still have like 3 billion in Delve...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Another difference is that there is no "skill point limit" and fixed specialization for EVE characters. It is like being able to learn all the skills from all classes in a traditional MMORPG.
Of course you can fly only one ship at a time, which counts as a temporary specialization. But the "re-spec" is only a flight to your hangar away. So an EVE character is never permanently gimped because of investing in the wrong skills. At worst, it takes extra time to learn the other skills too.
C - the footgun of programming languages
My main income at the time was from hi-sec mining, mostly alone, as my corp-mates tended to be on a different schedule. Timezone issues. Take hulk, get pyroxeres, repeat.
lol. I really don't care what women think of what I do in my free time.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Of course, it is possible to lose skills. In Eve, loss of ship is fairly common. It is also possible to die if you have lost your ship and then also get your pod blown up, in which case your consciousness is restored into a clone (naturally). The trick of it is, you must purchase a clone of sufficient quality to hold all of the skill points you've accumulated. If you don't you will lose some of your skills. With Tech 3 ships, losing the ship causes "neural trauma" and you may lose some of your Strategic Cruiser skills.
If you fail hard enough, you can lose everything you've accumulated, usually at the hands of other players. This is where the meat of the game is. The striving for sovereignty, the warfare between large player factions, each one attempting to protect their own supply lines while damaging their opponents. The "play" extends right down to spies infiltrating rival player corporations and playing trust games to gain access to assets and liquidate them. More than most MMOs, this is a true sandbox game.
WoW funnels its players into "content" using "instancing" to fragment the gameplay player-by-player. EVE puts everyone in the same world, at the same time.
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.
I believe they allow some degree of respeccing among soul trees (the name of which I am surely getting wrong) depending on which you've collected/unlocked/???
You can obtain up to four roles per character, each of which can have a completely different spec built out of up to three of any combination of your classes souls that you have unlocked. You can shift between roles at will (as long as you're out of combat). You can reset and respec a complete role for a small fee in town.
If you're stuck in high-sec, run missions then - getting 150m for a ship is one evening, two at the most.
So wait, I could have a warrior, and swap it to a cleric or rogue-ish person, not just swapping out different soul trees? If so, that's even more character flexibility than I thought.
To be fair, much of EVE is about understanding the economy, and relative strengths of kit -- which is player learning, not character learning. Having your character get Better At Stuff (or unlock new stuff) while you spend time mastering world of spreadsheets has some positive effects, in that you don't have to do both. ;) You can just sit there and learn how best to use what you DO have (as a player).
I liked that aspect of EVE. I had a hard time dealing with the harsh losses incurred by failure.
I didn't know about the T3 changes. I suppose that's what happens when you don't play for years.
On the other hand, I do recall instances where people could risk losing points when it became incredibly expensive for them to keep purchasing Clones at the level required to make sure they didn't lose any skill points when they got podded. Usually that just caused people to stop playing after they realized that they were running out of money too fast to keep PvPing, I don't know if anyone actually lost points that way. I suppose that is one edge case where money did become as important as time-in-game.
Still, technically, my point was more that you don't have to lose existing skills to gain other skills, even if they are skills that might be considered part of a vastly different role. You can lose skills if you don't get or can't afford clone backups, or apparently have your T3 ship blown up, but that doesn't limit your ability to learn skills on any skill tree you want to work on in the way a class system would.
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.
You're also assuming said software developers are overpaid like all the others, and wouldn't stick around unless this was true. Perhaps they enjoy their work there, or the company, or the product etc.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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"
Let's be realistic. They have $290k sales in 10.5 months? That sounds like a lot until you realise that's how much it would cost to cover the salaries of three good software engineers, assuming those guys agreed to work from home. If that's split four ways, then there's a decent chance those four people are making a loss.
Let's be realistic. They have $290k sales in 10.5 months?
290k in revenues from selling in-game currency is breathtaking alright, its breathtakingly small amounts.
While working in anti-cheating side of player support for an online MMORP game developer that does not have a legal way to buy currency, I could quite easily ban gold farming accounts worth that amount in two days (assuming value of both the accounts and the gear/currency on those accounts sold at the cheapest available rates). Is TFA referring to a largely unsuccessful 'goldfarming' venture or is there not a lot to be made from 'botting' in Eve where players can buy money legitimately?
I just don't like PvP games. I hear they do an amazing job managing the in-game economy, however (the in-game currency remains useful after the game being live for so many years)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Wow, so it's just like ProgressQuest!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
lot of disgruntled people whine and cry when the cleric that joins the group is not a healer or the warrior is not a tank.
That's true in almost every MMO ever. That's because no one wants a cleric, they wan't a healer, or whatever. It's a fundamental flaw in MMO design: the LFG system should hide your class, and show only your self-designatedrole. That way everyone is happy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you fail hard enough, you can lose everything you've accumulated, usually at the hands of other players. This is where the meat of the game is. The striving for sovereignty, the warfare between large player factions, each one attempting to protect their own supply lines while damaging their opponents.
Wow, that precisely describes everything I dislike in a game! Now that's targeted marketing!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
I tried it and it was a little bit too in depth. It took weeks just to be able to "really play". It's probably really fun for veteran players though.
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
You mean you dislike being able to lose? You dislike having human opponents? Or you dislike minimum competency requirements?
You actually have to try reasonably hard to lose everything, but if, for example, you buy a character with three years worth of skills, it's possible if you don't bother to learn the game basics.
You have to purposely ignore warnings. You have to put your character in situations where your ship will be destroyed. You then have to hang around while they take the time to target your pod and kill you. Assuming the character was sold to you with a proper clone, you then have to go do it all over again to lose your skills. You've not lost any assets beyond the two ships (one of which was likely free) and any implants in your character's head at the time of the initial pod-kill. You would then have to give away all your money, or continue to lose ships and buy new ones to lose all your assets. Finally, you'd have to do all of this in low or null security space instead of "hi-sec". Then you'd have to purposely avoid activities like missions, mining, killing NPC pirates in asteroid belts, trading, manufacturing, salvaging, and exploration to ensure you had no income.
All of this is possible, but if you manage to pull this off, you kind of deserve it. In fact a better way to put it would be to say "you have earned your losses."
Why shouldn't players be able to make a significant impact on the game world? If you can't really make an impact, then you're merely an incidental game mechanic instead of a driving force.
Now I'm not going to say that if you love WoW you'll love EVE. The two are very different games.
But there's not much else like heading into a fight with other players where you're risking your hard-earned (or bought with real money :p ) ISK. The risk makes the victory all the sweeter, or the loss all the more educational.
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)
EVE Online is a very different kind of MMO that has evolved significantly over time. I haven't played anything else quite like it. I played the beta for it (Armageddon day was so much fun) played a few months here and there over the years and more recently I redeem my 5 free days I get periodically to check out how things have changed how and diligently train some skills.
They have lessened the big startup curve (by eliminating the learning skills, which for players that had them had the skill points refunded for people to allocate into other skills) so you can get into the skills you want to use more quickly and you get a bit more of a skills push when you first start than when EVE first launched etc etc. There is the certificate planning system that helps new comers decide what skills they should be working on, and even veterans can benefit from this, since you can inspect what competencies pilots have before signing them up. The storyline missions structures put in also help pilots on their way getting them so good items and ships to give them a leg up.
Its one of those games that rewards a big investment and is ideal for those types of gamers that like lots of detail in a game. But it can also be punishingly gruelling. In the old days you could fly off exploring into low security space and see the sights, leaving your tin can at the EVE gate arrival system and hunting down that meddlesome Monolith. The people you encountered there as well were usually very nice too. Many a times they could of made life hell, but instead we would form up temporary groups, go exploring together and just have a good time. Nowadays your likely to get podded in next to no time unless you take very good precautions, thankfully however you don't need jump can maps anymore to get within jumping distance of a gate for a quick exit.
It could be said that EVE got off to a bit of a shaky start but they have worked hard and kept EVE evolving and growing its user base. The new expansion with the new character creation was lots of fun and I'm looking forward to the captains lounge that will be coming in the future (should net me another 5 free days).
I have a lot of nostalgia for EVE, even though I don't play it anymore. Its very good at what it does, but I just can't make that sort of investment for a game anymore. I've had a lot of fun playing it, and its nice for people to think twice about attacking me in low sec when they see the age of my character (though the recruiters come out to get me at every turn lol) but its just not for me anymore. I dabble and visit in EVE but thats all.
Yeah, runescape is a UO clone.
Sorry, should of mentioned that one too.
I don't play WoW anymore but before I quit last year, Blizzard had dramatically changed the LFG system. Before it was more like a glorified chat system within a server. It relied on players to list their roles. Most players relied on acquaintances and guild members to find groups. After the change, the system filtered out roles automatically based on your talents. If you were damage and your spec was damage, it didn't give you the option of tanking or healing. The change also allowed you to form groups across servers. That and Blizzard allowed players to dual spec so that they could switch. Before the change, players had to pay in game money to change out their spec.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not quite like that. You have your 4 primary callings. Warrior / Mage / Cleric / Rogue , under each is 7-8 "souls" which is essentially a tiered tree of skills, laid out almost exactly like a WoW tree.
If you choose Cleric for example, probably the most versatile, you can pick 3 souls through your normal leveling 1-10 (out of 50 levels) and then during your rifting you can unlock the 5 others you didn't choose. This is where the choice opens up. Any 3 of those souls can be active under 1 "role" (read spec) you can also pay to have 4 saved roles. So you can have 4 very different roles customized for different activities. The Cleric for example has a Main Tanking soul, 3 healing souls, 2 pure dps souls, and some more hybrid style ones. You could mix tank+group heals+dps, dps+tank+heal, dps+dps+hybrid, heal+heal+heal, all of these can be put together. You then get and to the even more complex part. You get 58 points over your trek to level 50 to spend in the trees, now each tree has around 55 points possible to spend in it, AND each point in a tree goes towards unlocking tree specific skills. So, you can do tri-spec's a little in each tree, pump one tree and unlock the 51 point "ultimate" or just go 30-40 points in one and pickup some starting abilities in the next trees.
OK typing that took longer than I thought, but it's a really interesting system and works quite well, it certainly gives the illusion of choice, but my level 30 rogue isn't end game so I can't comment on how much freedom people will really have inside the roles/souls/trees.
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
Perpetuum Online, aka "EVE in mechs". I like there skill system even better. Your skills progress in time, just like in EVE, but you don't have to set a "Skill in training". Just let the SPs accumulate. And if you know what you're doing and where to progress, you just spend the points the way you like. But the grind is even worse than in EVE.
Fallen Earth = Mad Max style MMO. FE has a few factions (classes), but only insofar as you can choose one of them as a suggestion as for where to spent your SP. What I don't like: you have to grind for SP.
The nice thing about the T3 skills though as that they train very fast, I think it is like 4 days to level 5 in each skill, so replacing them isn't awful when the ship pops, but you do lose one level in the highest skill.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I dislike an MMO (or similarly persistant single-player game) where there are any permanent personal negative consequences for in-game mishaps. That's too much like real life for me, and I get enough "real consequences" from hiring decisions and investment decisions to have any desire to enjoy simulating any such realism.
I also dislike direct PvP - again, I get enough interpersonal conflict from my job to want any from a game, with the exception of simple FPSs if no one on the server is taking things seriously.
there's not much else like heading into a fight with other players where you're risking your hard-earned (or bought with real money :p ) ISK
OK, so for me "risk" is deciding to hire or fire someone, or risking a year's savings in a somewhat speculative investment. Those sorts of decisions keep you up at night. I'm totally not looking for that sort of thing in my recreation.
It does amuse me when gamers like your sibling post think of themselves as "hardcore" when they risk some in-game something. I have it relatively easy - I have friends who run small businesses - that's hardcore (but still pretty tame compared to real-life combat, of course).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.