In Isk We Trust: the EVE Online IskBank Exposed 145
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."
Dirty use? (Score:3, Insightful)
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It is interesting you say this as one of the largest purchasers has also spent vast sums of isk on ingame lotteries and is listed on their highest purchaser list.
I would also like to point out that Eve news 24 has a poor reputation for publishing stories without any fact checking, furthermore they have notably removed people from the list of "outed" isk buyers.
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On the plus side.. (Score:3)
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That's completely false. I know of several people ( that were caught ) buying isk. They all knew exactly what they were doing and did it because they wanted "that extra 500 million isk" to play around with or they didn't want to run missions for isk. A LOT of people buy ISK to fund PvP.
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Yes, a lot of people do buy isk! You know. By buying PLEXes and selling them in the market like you're supposed to. The question is, why to people use illegal outfits like this, instead of the CCP-sanctioned method?
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It's cheaper.
When I played Eve, I had a single etailer that I used for ISK. It was a Chinese bot farming company, and they seemed to be doing quite well. I bought probably 20billion ISK over the course of 2 years.
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* grind for hours to get the ISK you need to buy the ship
* sell PLEX/buy ISK from farmers
Since ship loss is permanent and EVERYONE loses in EVE eventually, you need some source of cash to keep PvPing. People play games to have fun, and if your time is more valuable than your money, why would you do all that grinding? It doesn't actually
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Why you'd go to farmers instead of using PLEX is very much an open question, though I imagine that the exchange rate is better for the buyer to offset the risk of black-market trading.
This is what I have heard, but I just pay the additional fee as I don't want my account banned. But I am also pushing something like 5 GTC a month, so no biggy.
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This is why i play PlanetSide. Vehicles come out of a vending machine. No grinding. No crafting. No player trade. We just go at it.
Diff'rent strokes i guess.
As long as people buying ISK think of it as an entertainment expense rather than an actual purchase, i guess it's OK. But the idea the people "own" any of this stuff is worrisome to me. Once the servers go cold they'll find out exactly what they bought.
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You missed option 3, which is scam it. It's the proper pvp way of doing it anyway.
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True. Making ISK legally is painfully easy. I have made hundreds of millions of ISK in game by simply having a character with a newb shuttle sit in Jita and do market speculation. Not very interesting, but devoting an alt to it beats the hell out of mining in just about every way. Anyone who needs to buy ISK with real money is doing it wrong.
In fact, mining is so boring, you almost should be paying someone to do it. I should know, I spec'ed into T2 mining barges and there is nothing more lucrative, but
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When you get to 0.0, it becomes pretty much no work.
Run two towers, do simple, then complex reactions
input ~2 bill a month
output ~4 bill a month
Empty towers every other day, transport final product to empire once a month...I don't know why more don't do it.
That explains a lot (Score:2)
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Nah, I doubt that, I bet in WoW it just went more underground, like it did with FFXI back in the day.
There probably are more gold farming bots than before, but they are controlled by the fewer big seller sites instead of dozens of smaller sites all spamming in game to get buyers to flock to their sites.
So you "see" less spam about it in game, but it's as active as always, so therefore less uproar over it by real users.
Currency conversion and a reference of the value. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Oh that explains it.
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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.
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ISK sellers typically sell at around $25 per Billion, to put the difference in perspective.
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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
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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.
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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 suc
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"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 [wikipedia.org]
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 c
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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.
Needs more data (Score:1)
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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 tril
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You are very accurate. Current PLEX rates are between 300m and 350m. GTCs are 550m - 650m, as they plummeted recently.
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lol Botters (Score:1)
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.
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How much ISK did they have to sell to make $229,000? 6.1 Billion or so?
6.1 billion is slightly less than what I make legitimately on the market monthly.
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There's an idea - incentivize killing macro miners. If a player spots a suspected macro miner, a petition function should be there so they can report it. A dedicated GM should then respond and verify the macro behavior - once verified, the player should be awarded the opportunity to destroy the offender's ship, and kill rights than last 30 day on the offender.
Integrate this into the story, of course. "A recent drone evolution has created nanodrones that infect the minds of podpilots via the mind/machien
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Macro-ers are a little harder to detect. What if someone is simply mining by hand in several accounts simultaneously? How is that distinguishable from someone who is, e.g., checking Facebook while playing?
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Steal their can, if no response after a couple times, they are macros.
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Ideas like this have been around for five years. CCP simply does not deal with them in any way that's effective. Since they can effectively print money by generating ISK in their database, I suspect that this has a lot to do with it. ie - they don't really case in the end as long as they get some of the money, be it via subscription fees or PLEX that's bought.
Also, stories like this are four years old. The reality of game currency trading is that it's all connected to massive third world country server
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The scale is smaller, but since they have virtually no way to actually catch all but the most stupid bots and farmers out there, it effectively is as good as no enforcement at all.
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But they don't allow players to shoot at them, they don't enforce measures to hang up scripting, they don't block connections from most providers that are known to be problems (third world countries mostly)... the list is enormous.
But the biggest one is that they allow you to buy game time for isk, from inside the game. As long as you can do this, it's impossible to stop the farmers.
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Their real goal isn't plex but your identity. Virtually all of these game-money companies and websites are funded by criminal organizations and several have direct ties to the infamous Russian botnets. They make huge amounts of money - just not from the items they are "selling":
As for EVE, What you are doing is exactly how the bots and farmers are also surviving. They love it as they can play and as long as they can generate enough isk per month (imagine large factory scale sweatshops in India and other
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Any hints on how to identify bot miners?
Would train up a bot hunting alt for this!! ;)
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The botters tend to do ice mining is what I have heard. Ice "rocks" never pop, so they can just mine forever, dropping the ice into cans which haulers pick up and move.
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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
MMORPG users buy in game money for real money. (Score:1)
so let me get this straight (Score:2)
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?
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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 pa
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I realize this may blow some WOW-infected minds, but the point of an RPG, much less a game in general, is not actually to level up. The point is to do something fun.
For me, in EVE, I do this by security territory, fighting off attacking fleets, throwing together fleets of my corp-mates, and going to attack their territories. Usually not with actual intent to capture anything, just for the fun of PvP. Siege warfare is actually relatively boring, if nobody comes to try and stop you.
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Amen brother.
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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
RMT, Bots, Grind (Score:2)
Further compounding the demand for easy money solutions is that EVE itself i
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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.
No it wouldn't. People still want to play. There'd be a lot more people buying plex than currently. Keep in mind also that cheap plex means the cost of maintaining large numbers of accounts goes down. There are a number of relatively passive activities (for example, character farms, ice mining, passive afk ratting/mining, and datacore research) which can be done with large numbers of non-bot afk alts. A few are isk sources and hence, would provide floors for how low PLEX could get.
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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.
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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 the
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> EVE is terrible
Show me another MMORPG (aside from UO = Ultima Online) that doesn't have character classes please?
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CCP ruined everything.
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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 (w
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 t
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That sounds like fun ^.^
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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.
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Wow, so it's just like ProgressQuest!
Re:EVE is terrible. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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 cause
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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
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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.
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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!
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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 p
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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 seri
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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.
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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.
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Show me another MMORPG (aside from UO = Ultima Online) that doesn't have character classes please?
Runescape doesn't have them.
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Yeah, runescape is a UO clone.
Sorry, should of mentioned that one too.
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Perpetuum Online, aka "EVE in mechs" [perpetuum-online.com]. 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 [fallen-earth.com]. FE has a few factions (classes),
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CCP is terrible.
This is very true.
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Obligatory: Before you emo-rage-quit, can I have your stuff?
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I have 15 bill in assets, and no you can't have my stuff...
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lol. I really don't care what women think of what I do in my free time.
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From my brief and infuriating experiences with EVE, my impression was that the in-game economy was already fucked beyond all hope.
Re:Loving all the rage (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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...
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If you're stuck in high-sec, run missions then - getting 150m for a ship is one evening, two at the most.
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They have lessened the big startup curve (by eliminating the learning skills, which for players that had them had the skill points refun