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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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...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'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.
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.
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.
How much ISK did they have to sell to make $229,000?
Let's see.... I haven't played Eve in a long while now, but from what I remember, you could buy two PLEXes for about 35 USD. At the time I played a plex was worth somewhere between 300M isk and 350M isk, but the market is user driven, so the prices vary. Let's say 300M so we don't overinflate the number. (Feel free to pricecheck in that hellhole known as Jita)
229.000 / 35 = 6543 ETCs, which amounts to 13086 PLEXes (both rounded up). That becomes 13086 * 300.000.000 = 3.925.800.000.000 ISK . So rougly 4 trillion ISK, assuming that all items sold were ISK, which they weren't (the article mentions super carriers, titans and characters, but for the sake of curiousity I'm going to ignore the article).
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've played a number of MMORPGs. I've found that most of them make grinding a part of the game. There's some strategy, but it starts to look pretty shallow about 100 missions in or so. You get stuff, but you're limited to which stuff you can use based on choices you made at the beginning of your game. The map is pretty static; nothing really changes unless the developers decide to change something on the map, and any player- or team-owned locations are more likely than not to be instances rather than part of the standard world map.
In this game, there is far less grinding for money or skill, which means that the playing can be done for other reasons; and with the corporation/alliance structures, as well as the ability to control star systems in nullsec (or lowsec, depending on how you roll), there are some definite benefits to play that won't involve grinding, but still include doing stuff.
The Penguin Producer
After we have a possible target fleet, we start with sending a cheap ship in to steal a can. If there's no retribution we move on to bumping. Send in a ship with a lot of mass to slowly nudge the barge away from the belt. If there's no response after a couple of mining cycles worth of abuse, it's game on. Either it's a bot or it's a clueless carebear who needs to learn the value of manning the console.
Bot hunting makes for entertaining pew-pew, but corporate intrigue was my favorite activity. Before I retired we were pulling off Carmen Sandiego scale heists. More than one space station along with all of the trimmings vanished without a trace.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
You don't have to log in every day to make sure your skill queue progresses. set a couple of short skills and a long one at the tail end and you can be away from the game and still progress There are some skills that can take a week to a month to get trained up. I am an impulsive person and when playing WoW would religiously log on everyday to make sure I progressed in either gear or gold. Since switching to Eve online my life revolves less around being chained to a computer, yes it is my failure for not control myself but Eve Online is my nicotine gum compromise.
There are plateaus skill wise easily reached so that a player that's only played a few months might be at a 3-5% disadvantage compared to a perfectly skill trained pilot on certain ships. This means that it is more based on a player's understanding of the limits and strengths of piloting his/her ship, strategy/tactics.
Roles: There are a wide array of different roles to fill in fleets so the newer players with smaller ships are actually wanted by players with more skill points and bigger ships. i.e. a tackler can be trained up with in a day or two. ECM E-war Cruiser in a week. Medium DPS in 2-3 Months.
As shallow or as deep as you want to go. There is a lot to Eve but you don't have to be an expert on everything if you don't want to be to enjoy the game. On the other hand this game is very deep technical wise - People spend literally days trying to squeeze the most out of a ship fitting wise (EFT warriors you know who you are).
Impressive market (CCP has a Doctor of Economics on their staff. Again you can specialize in trading and get your market PVP on competing with others or even denying resources to critical feeder systems or you can just go to a trade hub and grab what you want at middle of the road prices and avoid it. Some Tech 1 and all Tech 2 and T3 ships and modules modules are built by players.
Sovereignty - 0.0 Space can be claimed for resources massive wars between corps unfold over this claimed space.
Subterfuge/Spying/Security - To quote the Joker in the batman movie. "Money, money, money who can you trust?" There are "spais" in game infiltrating corps for the day when a critical warp in point or liberating a corporation of their player owned station or capital ship once the corp leadership grants you roles with out doing background checks on you.
Lore/Blogging/Stories - Lore - I'm not really into this but it's their for those who are interested. Blogging - people writing up on different aspects of game - some on their exploits as a pirate, mercanary, director of a learning corp, pvper. If you talk to any Eve Online player that's been part of the game for a few months they most likely have detailed story of something that happened or they did: Circumstances before the event unfolded, their role in the action, mistakes and ace moves made, how the event concluded and how it lead and affected the next event in their perspective of the game.
Real money trade sucks but it only effects large scale operations, anyone using it is just impatient, it is not required to play the game. I recommend anyone trying the game with the free trial to join the corp Eve University . They have a lot of rules but are highly knowledgeable and helpful, not to mention they have a free skill book and frigate ship program.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.