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EVE Online Ponzi Scheme Nets $50k Worth of In-Game Currency
Calidreth writes "EVE Online is famous for its stories of theft, underhanded dealings, criminal empires and general unscrupulous play. For EVE players, this is generally an accepted part of the game and part of the risk players run. The type of scheme might be old, but the profits were big in the latest EVE Online scam, which has broken records and is now being called the biggest scam in the game's history."
regardless of how much real-world money the fraud was supposedly worth, it was all fictional money people basically invested for fun. Anyone treating a game as a serious investment has problems that the FEC can't fix.
I see this as a positive thing for EVE, because it underlies how the game is a kind of organized crime simulator all-the-more.
Looking at recent history it seems like they are very likely to fall for such a thing.
How is spending substantial sums of money on in-game items of no practical real-world value any different from spending substantial sums of money on real-world items of no practical real-world value?
Some people get as much enjoyment out of EVE as you might out of a month in the Bahamas. What makes them insane and you perfectly normal?
Social signaling.
Why do you buy $30 t-shirts with hilarious geeky in-jokes, when the 3-for-$5 pack of t-shirts are, functionally, identical?
Social signaling.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Every money making venture in Eve is scam. If it doesn't start out as one it turns into one when the pile of cash crosses a certain threshold.
There is no safe investment in Eve. We are all crooks.
I think the only reason these things continue to work is player churn.
I find being offended by me offensive.
If you want to hear it from the people who created the Ponzi Scam
http://www.evenews24.com/2011/08/14/the-1-trillion-isk-ponzi-phaser-inc-speaks/
They did a write up for this eve centric news site.
My thousand dollar club was worth every penny. With it I shattered the skulls of my foes and defended the realm against the white walkers. Or were you talking about some other type of club?
"Once in Hawaii I had sex with a 102 year old male turtle. It is difficult to argue that it was consensual." - Steve Ma
Someone pilfered a bastard sword, golden dwarven ring, and 150,000 gold coins from another player on my DikuMUD yesterday.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I read the same stories over and over again about EVE it really shouldn't be considered news anymore. It's Monday: babies were born, people died, people got scammed in EVE - business as usual.
The people who are serious about that game are there precisely to play with exactly those sorts of behavior. I feel a little sorry for new players who don't know that yet, but even the most basic research about the game would clue you in. What other games would call griefing and fraud are the real game of EVE - all that crap about spaceships is just to keep the marks distracted while the sharks nibble away at them.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
I don't know anything about EVE, but it sounds like life and Wall street.
Everybody gets fucked and and robbed by a few bad guys and after 2 weeks we continue playing...
Privacy is terrorism.
I and many EVE players will agree 100% with what you said. However, the reason there is an in-game to real life money conversion in EVE is because you can buy game time with real money, convert that game time into an in-game item which can then be sold for in-game money to another player, who can then convert that item back to game time on his account (or a few other services such as character transfers/portrait changes, etc). But the overall idea is simply that some people will have real money but not time, and others have time but no real money. This allows both those groups to enjoy EVE as many people will happily buy game time for the current rate of in-game money since they have good in-game income sources and/or play time dedicated to earning it.
There was recently (end of July) a pretty large revolt in the game based on leaked emails and internal communications from the developers/management at CCP (the makers/runners of EVE) about allowing other items to be purchased with "micro-transactions". That was all about what you are talking about. Most a perfectly fine about the current system of simply trading items which can be redeemed for game time. It is when you can start buying ships, equipment, stat boosts, etc., ( and in this case "gold ammo") that everyone has a problem. CCP is in a bad spot financially right now because they have bitten off more than they can chew. They are developing 2 other games at the moment in conjunction with continuing to run EVE, with their only income stream being EVE. And they took out a lot of loans to develop these 2 other games which are due up in September/October, but those games are not out yet, and are not generating income. Thus their only income stream is EVE, so they were trying to find ways to take advantage of the whole free-2-play model that some new games are using by introducing micro-transactions. The problem is the game isn't free-2-play and the player base didn't like the fact that they were seeing a their in-game market possibly get destroyed by having CCP add an additional way to buy items (i.e. direct purchase and not thru the current in-game systems which are controlled by the players themselves, who mine the minerals, refine the minerals, research the blue-prints, manufacturer the components, manufacture the item, haul the items to market hubs, and sell the items on the market, all of which takes time, required significant investment in both skills and assets to perform. And now CCP was just going to update the database and "poof" add magic items into the game). This would destroy the game market as there multiple prices for the same item would not be tolerated, and would get correct via market forces, but the only market force that is able to change is the one run by players, as CCP's prices would be whatever they decide worked best for their quarterly statements, which means that it would drive a lot of players out of the market, people who have invested billions and even trillions of in game money to make the items they are selling and have certain fixed in-game costs in creating the item, while CCP just updates a database.... Thus the revolt.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
You can sell them on the in-game market for in-game currency. You can't (legitimately) sell them for real money.
Didn't the last 'big' scam in EVE go well past the 100,000 USD mark? This is not the biggest...
There is no real conversion between EVE I$K and real money other than the one players put on it, just like any other MMO game. It is against the TOS to actually buy or sell I$K for real money, though they give you a way to legitimately do it by buying game time cards and 'selling' those for in-game currency.
A 30-day time code will net you between 200Million I$K and 600Million I$K depending on where and when you sell it in the game. Like everything in EVE, there are wide market fluctuations for even the game time items.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Unless you are a GM, you can't make another anything by just hitting a key on your keyboard. Due to abuse, even those powers are carefully monitored.
The marginal cost of any single item in the EVE universe... is roughly 1 super computer cluster, and 10 years of pay for a development team. Because that's what it took to get here. If you have the ability to bang out a new EVE cluster, populate it, breath life into that population, and then just pop new ships and items into being... well you go right on ahead and do so. You can reduce the ongoing costs to a trifle and pretend that makes the marginal cost of any (virtual) item zero, but that is a logically fallacy, because it assumes the existence of EVE and the player base and history, all of which had a cost and still does. If you want to debate real world versus "fake" money... head on over to congress or the house of commons, they have been debating fake money for weeks.
Did you know that the currency in EVE is backed by the EXACT same thing the currency in the united states is backed by? That's right, nothing what so ever. The promise of a government, that's it. It has value because a significant group of people say it does. Is this starting to sound familiar yet?