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."

But they cannot fix the isk farming problem?

[Mark19960]

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.

Re:But they cannot fix the isk farming problem?

[flynns]

ISK: International Standard Kredit. Gold.

Re:But they cannot fix the isk farming problem?

[GearheadX]

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.)

my thoughts

[theMerovingian]

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).

Re:quarterly?

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:my thoughts

[Drakin020]

Yes you obviously must be a WoW player. Sorry but not every game is going to allow you to be uber l33t in just a week. You have to actually work hard in this game. That is one of the many reasons I love EVE. It does away with the carebears and WoW players, and has a more mature player base.

You say combat is boring? Yeah you obviously never been in a hundred man op before either. Once again if you dedicate some time to the game and put forth the effort you might get something out of it.

This isn't WoW and it never will be.

Ahh the Eve elitist mindset.

[juuri]

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.

Re:Ahh the Eve elitist mindset.

[sqrt(2)]

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 greater.

Re:quarterly?

[Nazlfrag]

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.