EVE Online's First Quarterly Economics Report Published

The first quarterly report from EVE Online's very own economist has been released at the game's official site. GamesIndustry.biz has some comments from Dr. Guðmundsson on this first batch of numbers, exploring a bit of his methodology and the joys of working in EVE's closed environment: "Since life in Eve evolves at a faster pace than real life, we must use a so-called 'chained price index' rather than a representative basket. In real life, representative baskets are always used and in many cases the surveys for these baskets are done with very long time intervals. By looking at our results it is obvious how the fixed basket approach can overestimate the impact of price changes, just as predicted by theory. With consumer preferences changing faster now in real life than ever before (consumer electronics is a good example), this might be a lesson that could help us understand better changes in price levels and how we measure that outside virtual worlds."

quarterly?

It amazes me that nowadays quarterly figures are analyzed, you can't compare an early spring season with the christmas season, can you ?

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Having an economist look at Eve Online is an interesting idea, but I question the practical value of studying virtual economies. I mean, does this research really tell us anything about how the prices of Tritanium, cybernetic implants, and frigate-class st

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It does provide a bit of a controlled environment that can be used to test economic theories. Ignoring for a moment that these economies deal in imaginary goods, they still provide the human/corporate reaction to stimuli.

You also end up with a pseudo real

Re:quarterly?

Economics is all about models. They LOVE models, big sexy mathematical models, tying together figures on wildly different things to try to get a sense of the direction of the economy...Economists can pick some really silly stuff to plug into their models, so imaginary widgets isn't out of the realm of possibility.

In this situation, they can actually apply their model, and watch things play out through the actions of real people, even if they're all dealing in imaginary goods. It's really exciting stuff, especially since the changes happen faster than "real world time" so you can get a since of price fluctuations much more quickly than you could out in the real world. It's also a closed system, so you have access to ALL the variables.

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I thought it would be interesting to have an MMO where you can create a communist, socialist, capitalist, etc, etc guild and then study the results.

Re:quarterly?

It's a complex spectrum. There are mining guilds who are communistic, pirate guilds who are anarchistic, some who are fascist dictators of their guild, others who have highly stratified bureaucracies and still others who have little need for ranks or hierarchy. Most guilds are multicultural, yet some are nationalistic only having players of one real world country, and there are some who roleplay the ingame factions and only have players from their faction. There may be no ingame mechanic to set yourself 'socialist' or 'anarchist' but such a device would artificially limit the politics. As it stands, the EvE sandbox has the best political and diplomatic atmosphere of any MMO I've come across.

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That's why real economists get paid big bucks to process the figures and turn out reports that reflect the variables that each quarter holds.

However, though EVE's timeline is accelerated and thus requires special attention in that aspect, it is much less s

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Real world quarterly figures are compared to the year-ago quarter, not the previous quarter. If they say "up 3% this quarter, while last quarter was up 6%", they mean up 3% from this quarter last year.

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They sometime makes comparisons with the previous quarter (not the same quarter of the previous year). However, every time I've seen this, it was worded so you couldn't understand something else (the move from loss to profit is usually specified like this)

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Many places do week to week these days, because it's possible, and you may gain some insight. As the above poster pointed out, however, it's always this week last year or the last two, three, or ten years, depending on the type of business.

If you notice tr

But they cannot fix the isk farming problem?

Isk farmers in eve are really out of control.
You can pull up a list of contracts on a farmer character and see trillions of isk flowing into the hands of isk sellers on ebay, report this and nothing is done....

I would ask their economist how rich players can afford the very best and how that shapes the economy in the game, when people cheat.

Cheating is going on, and I know it cannot be stopped... but it is even obvious to the layman by the quantity of isk farmer posts on the official forums.

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I've never played EVE so I'm going to assume that 'Isk' is something like ore or gold?

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ISK: International Standard Kredit. Gold.

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Technically Interstellar Kredit, but whatever. It's a play on the Icelandic Kronar, for which the international designation is also "isk".

~Wx

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ISK is the form of currency in Eve.

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Not to mention spend any time in Jita or Amarr for more than 20 minutes you'll get eve-mail spam about sites to visit to buy ISK and it gets worse from there on (it does seem somebody has written a macro bot for this specific purpose).

You would think by no

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maybe, but why in the world are you hanging around Jita or Amarr? Of all the places in the vast universe, ... ???

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For my alt to pick up large amount of items and then bring it back to me near low sec space which then I jump down to deep 0.0 where I base my operations. So, I really don't hang around those areas. :)

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Jita I can understand. Lag or no, it's the heart of the economy, at least until they come to their senses and allow market information on a galaxy-wide, or empire-wide basis.

Amarr though, seems a dead zone to me. Rens is much more active.

Re:But they cannot fix the isk farming problem?

There's a very simple way to handle isk farmers in 0.0, thankfully.

It involves blowing them up.

(Isk farmers drop great loot, by the way.)

Sounds like a plan

While we're at it, do you think we can try it on spammers too?

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Except it isn't that easy when they fly ravens with cloaks and possibly warp stabilizators, and instantly warp to a safe-spot and cloaks when someone enters local. Pretty much impossible to catch them when they do that.

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Cheating is going on, and I know it cannot be stopped... but it is even obvious to the layman by the quantity of isk farmer posts on the official forums.

There are two types of cheating at hand. One, cheating to produce (farmers). Two, cheating to consume (buyers). I believe both types of cheating reflect fundamental faults in the economy.

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Is it cheating, or is it just trade between two related economies? If the game developers don't have a problem with it, that strongly implies the latter to me.

Link to the report

The summary should include a link to the report [llnwd.net] itself.

my thoughts

They need to work on making the game more fun... The interface and graphics are nice, but 1) combat is boring; and 2) there is nothing to do but repetitively mine asteroids and wait weeks for your skills to increase. During the weeks I played, I managed to buy a ship with a huge cargo hold and a nice mining laser. I would just park the ship on a big asteroid and suck it all in, which takes about three hours. For a while I would get up in the middle of the night or during shows to be continually mining 24 hours a day.

Finally, I realized that it was pointless because I wouldn't even be able to fly the awesome ships for weeks or months simply due to the skill system. I would never buy a Warcraft character online because leveling is 3/4ths of that game. The only way to get even a semblance of parity in Eve is to ebay a character that has been in training for 6+ months.

You can only train skills on one character at a time, so in order to be truly efficient you have to buy two accounts so you can train a mining guy and a combat guy simultaneously.

The auction system and the player crafting are the strong points of Eve. The foundation is there to be a fabulous game, but they need to totally revamp character development.

My dream would be to combine the pre-jump-to-light-speed Star Wars Galaxies ground game with Eve's space system. It boggles the mind why Sony didn't just buy out Eve years ago and do exactly this. Then, you could do missions and skill up on the ground, AND enjoyably fly around in space (JTLS was vomit-inducing).

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You need to get in with the right corp then. A 0.0 corp is where the action is at. Not to mention mining is the worst way to make isk in the game. Freaking go out and do some missions! L4 missions will bring in 20 to 30 mil per mission in loot + salvage. A

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Yeah because missions are way more fun then mining! Oh wait, it involves doing the same set of a dozen missions over and over again? And salvaging is more boring then mining? Damn, I guess I'll sit at a gate camp for two hours and kill the occasional inn

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Going down the list of options for new players: A) Mine B) Missions C) Canon fodder in large corp (or a frigate based corp) D) Market work (trade, transport, building etc) But the game is not meant to be played solo, you need to get into a good corp where

SOE boggles the mind

SOE boggles the mind, there fixed it for you.

I have a theory for why MMORPG's are the way they are. The companies behind aren't run by gamers who enjoy gaming as a hobby.

I will tell you a couple of game elements. SWG's jedi XP grind where as a fully experienced character you had to trade regular XP from killing into jedi XP at a 10:1 or worse ratio. Endless amounts of killing for a slow level up of your jedi skill, so that you could kill things a tiny bit faster.

SWG collectible items, a dozen incomplete sets clogging up your inventory. Lotro's reputation system, that involves farming items for measly rewards. Lotro's deed rewards that involves killing hundreds of critters so you character can go from 10% fire resistance to 11% (which means you still are 89% vulnerable).

WoW's repuation grind for.... eh what was it for again? Special mounts or something?

Eve's online levelling system where you have to keep logging in to select new skills to level up while you are logged off.

Vendor trash, an area populated with half a dozen different critters all who drop 4 different kinds of vendor trash (looted items that have no value except to sold to NonPlayerCharacters, cash but cash you have to have inventory space for) so that you need 24 empty spots in your inventory just for one area, trash like teeth that stack only to ten, while you can carry life sized statues with no problem and go swimming to them.

They are ALL delay tactics. Stuffing your inventory with junk forces you to travel back and forth. Rep grinding is just a way to keep you busy.

The odd thing is WHY? Well, because they want us to pay the monthly fee right? Well, no. Think of it, see gaming as a hobby. Is 14.95 that much? I have a friend with a hobby of scuba diving, he pays he would LOVE to be able to do his hobby for my complete costs of PC, internet and monthyly fee.

Even in gaming, plenty of other games have long lasting appeal without forcing the player to grind. Imagine if MS Flight Simulator only allowed you to fly a 747 AFTER you grinded 1200 Cessna landings. Imagine if Half-Life only allowed to to play multiplayer AFTER grinding the tutorial 100 times.

Imagine if before you could connect to a multiplayer map, you first had to spend several minutes running around a single player map to set up the story.

Plenty of single AND multiplayer games have long lasting appeal without introducing a grind, so why do ALL MMMORPG designers have this desperate urge to inject it into their games?

Would you keep playing a MMO (and more importantly paying the fee) if the pure grind like the reputation grind was removed and the only lasting appeal was the gameplay itself.

Would you raid the same instance if you didnt need to in order to get all the items?

Other games can pull that off, are MMORPG's as games that bad that they got to hook us with something else then the fun of gaming?

No, I don't think so, but it seems MMORPG designers think so.

Oh well, no time, got head into misty mountains and collect rings, almost at exhalted status, so I can get a new skin for my horse.

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The only MMO I played that wasn't like this was Planetside, and it wasn't an MMORPG - it was an MMOFPS. It was fun nearly 90% of the time. It had an experience system, but a brand new character could still beat a veteran any day - because there was skill

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That's exactly why I'm still playing EvE and now WoW, EvE provides a sandbox where the players will set up their own content and drama.

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You don't really make any sense considering your gripe is on MMORPGs other than what SOE is responsible for. I think the fact that millions of people pay an online subscription to WoW just demonstrates how wrong you are. WoW has grinds in them but they a

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Most people - most game players nowadays even - are not computer geeks like many of us here at /. So they are lacking that innate aversion to repetition that we programmers have (we write code to do repetitive stuff for us!). The grind is popular because

Like, duh...

Plenty of single AND multiplayer games have long lasting appeal without introducing a grind, so why do ALL MMMORPG designers have this desperate urge to inject it into their games?

Because an MMORPG without grind is a FPS.

If everyone in EVE could fly a Tita

You mistake grind with levelling

The grind happens when you already levelled, but still have to do the same thing an INSANE number of times to advance tiny amounts.

For WoW and LOTRO this is the reputation grind. For Eve it might be mining.

Let me explain how the rep grind works in lotro.

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In some games, leveling up is (or has been) grinding. Take Asheron's Call. Your character stopped meaningfully improving (versus NPCs) at about level 100 to 110. Your skills were already within 5-10 points of cap (on a inverse tangent system, so the last c

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I have played EVE for a little over two years, and I think I might have mined once for less than an hour the first day. I'm not sure why you felt trapped into playing EVE as a mining simulator. I never felt even the slightest urge to do that.

In the early

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Sorry man, but any MMORPG that allows exploits like the Guiding Hand Social Club [klaki.net]'s is incredible. I don't think there's another game out there that allows playing on that level.

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Actually, the way the skill system is designed, at 3 or 4 million SP, you could be on par with a guy who has 15 or 20 million SP. It's more complicated than SP directly translating into ability to kick serious ass. Even T2 equipment is no guarentee that yo

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You were mining in a hauler, I assume? (one mining laser, big cargohold) You probably found the most boring thing possible in the game, and did it poorly. No wonder you quit. Ironcially, what you did was not even remotely efficient use of time.

Here

Yay Sony?

OP [slashdot.org]

It boggles the mind why Sony didn't just buy out Eve years ago and do exactly this.

I'm glad they didn't. Just look at their current leper Vanguard... They acquired it and almost immediately started dumbing it down. If they got hold of Eve, they'd

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The white elephant in the room is that EvE is much much more friendly towards players with a life outside the game. If you have a life or kids, you can still have a meaningful progression in the game, as the skills progress over time, not with skill use or

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Exactamundo. And, since the game is so complex, you still get better (although in Eve, you get better instead of your character) with practice, so somebody who does that but never plays is still going to be basically worthless. Even better though, if you'r

Ahh the Eve elitist mindset.

You have to actually work hard in this game.

Reread your own statement multiple times if you don't see the fault in it.

Working hard *at* a game is one thing, working hard *in* one is completely different.

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I think the point is that Eve is not as instantly gratifying as WoW. And that's fine, different people will like it for just that reason. You have to work harder but you get a bigger reward in the end making your sense of accomplishment feel all the greate

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It can be if you meet the right people. My first week in EVE pretty much went like this. My friend who got me to try it out showed me the basics. Then I started making friends in the NPC corp I was in. Started doing missions with my newfound friends.

That's Not It

He judged EvE from lowbie character. It would be like judging WoW based on a level 10 character. For a lowbie, grinding a million isk in EvE is about as difficult as grinding a single gold in WoW. Start a brand new guy on a new server in WoW and see how l

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Start a brand new guy on a new server in WoW and see how long it takes you to get a gold, especially if you're just soloing quests.

If you have access to the AH... you'll have your first gold by level 8-10 by selling herbs / ore / skins. By late-teens,

The actual report.

So we have a story that talks about the economic report, that links to a story talking about the report, but doesn't actually link to the report.

The report that the story is actually about (but doesn't link to) is available here. [llnwd.net]

fava