EVE Online's Fight Against Currency Farmers 208
Massively has a writeup discussing the way CCP Games is battling ISK-farmers in EVE Online (ISK is the game's currency). The developers felt that merely banning sellers whenever they could was not enough, so they introduced a system where players could purchase game-time codes that could then be sold within the game to other players. Since players are unlikely to give up buying ISK voluntarily, CCP's thought is that they can at least keep the money and currency distributed among the real players. Some of the player-base has been critical of the plan, but it's becoming more and more popular as time goes on — and the old ISK-sellers aren't pleased.
GTC are cheaper (Score:2, Informative)
Re:GTC are cheaper (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, pretty much they made a system better than ISK farmers could do. They win the fight :)
Unfortunately they still bring their servers down in the middle of aussie prime time every night, so won't be collecting my money.
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Yes it can. There are a few timezones that nothing but a few remote islands are in - way out in the ocean.
Re:GTC are cheaper (Score:5, Funny)
Like Australia ?
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They could always make servers specific to parts of the globe...
Server1 - Pacific
Server2 - Atlantic
Set the reboots to 12 hours from each other and the people will choose the one that doesn't have a reboot during their play time. If you get popular enough, split them into 6 hour blocks.
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They could always make servers specific to parts of the globe...
One of the unique selling points of EVE is that there is only one collosal server.
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Ah right. I forgot about that... must not have been on the top of my list of demands when I played.
solution: don't take servers down (Score:2)
Use fault tolerant and high availability software techniques and construct servers that can be updated while hot. And a network that can allow the removal of individual servers without impacting users.
It's not the same, but we never see sites like Amazon.com go down for maintenance. They run a massive website that probably costs them millions in lost sales for every hour they are down. Now HTTP has some advantages when it comes to distribution and load balancing, mostly the advantages are that the problems
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The problem is Eve servers were (unfortunately) developed to run over Windows Servers. The first releases of their code probably had big memory leaks on top of Microsoft's ones so they came out with this daily reboot procedure to keep all that in check.
Maybe everything is more stable now, in fact I think in the last few months most of Eve's daily downtimes are as low as 5 minutes.
I still don't understand why they picked windows to run their servers... I believe most of their server code is in python. Linux
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You say that like they couldn't spawn those while the servers are online, collision shouldn't be a problem, ships would just bounce off the spawning 'roids.
Why exactly do they need to bring them offline (your right, they likely don't "restart the hardware" more likely the client database access is shut off and the cleanup is run). Why can't they have the servers clean themselves while running?
Other MMO are able to run servers for weeks to months without a restart. Admittedly other MMO don't have that many p
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I often see the annoying spam from ISK sellers, and their stuff is more expensive than the current cost and return of game time cards. I hope they die from this game soon.
Hehe. My block list lags the game when I try to view it because it is so long in EVE.
The thing is money is the rare source in EVE but rather the skills gains that are basically you waiting a few weeks to get over time. Money helps but not that much.
They need... (Score:2)
Re:They need... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? So new players could never possibly catch up?
One of the things that kept EvE stable was that inflation was nominal, if existant. It's the only MMO I know where prices remained almost rock solid stable over the course of its existance.
One of the key reasons why MMOs eventually crumble was always inflation and the problem associated with it for new players. You wanted to have X. X costs 2000 $money when you start. So you start hacking and playing and finally you have 2000 $money. By that time it costs 4000. You continue the grind, you have 4000. It costs 8000 by now. Will you continue? Or notice that you'll NEVER have the money to buy it and play with the "big boys"?
Inflation has never hurt gold sellers. Quite the opposite, inflation drove people to them because they noticed they couldn't get the money they need with normal means (i.e. farming themselves), they pretty much had to buy money from goldsellers to get whatever they wanted to have.
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Or you can use the WoW answer -- ensure that very little that's really worthwhile is actually purchasable with transferable in-game currency.
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That would ensure that EvE dies. Basically because then you also ensure that nobody but the top players will ever have certain equipment. Ever.
You have to see that high level players can effectively, collectively, monopolize certain resources. Nobody but people with access to 0.0 space (i.e. highly hostile space) who can also "hold" turfs there can access certain resources that require you to position stations there. Resources necessary to build the "higher level" equipment. If you make that equipment "nodr
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Oh, I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that it's the alternate solution that Blizzard has come up with. :)
EvE Online sounds *insanely* tilted to established players, which is why I've never been interested in it really, but a lesser version of what you describe here is in fact true of WoW; you can't get all the really best gear without either extensive (and reasonably successful) PvP play, or a lot of end-game raiding. Of course, gear in general doesn't mean as much in WoW as it does in EvE.
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One of the things that kept EvE stable was that inflation was nominal, if existant. It's the only MMO I know where prices remained almost rock solid stable over the course of its existance.
There is an inflation sink in EVE that most games don't have.
Its called unmitigated and total loss of your ship which is basically where all the ISK goes.
Since PvP is rife in the game, a lot of people need to replace their destroyed ships on a regular basis.
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When your ship is destroyed, the resources (minerals, basically) that were used to create it are forever gone from the game, but the currency you paid is not removed from the game, just transferred to someone else.
All right then how about rigs then?
Generally you can only get the parts for most of them by salvaging and more than not, people always don't get your rigs when your ships is blown.
Also, a lot of people don't insure ships all the time simply because they have more isk than the premium is worth to t
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Actually, neither the State nor the game producer can compete with infinite resources. Unless of course they don't care about the stability of their system and whether the whole thing eventually crashes and burns.
The similarities are stunning. State as well as game producers could, technically, simply "print money". The state simply prints it, game producers have it even easier, they just have to set a variable. Ka-ching, money created. But what will happen? Inflation. In both systems, people will see that
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Elaborate please. I don't think I understand what you mean.
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Ahhhh, now it makes sense. Sorry, didn't see that GP between you and me.
Yes, basically that's why "useless" things like money have buying power: People value them and are willing to give you something useful in exchange for them. And as long as people "believe" in that money the system is going to work. In real life as well as in MMOs. As long as people are willing to believe that credits, gold, ISK, you name it will allow them to later get something they need for them, the system will continue to work.
And,
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Prior to the removal of the gold backed dollar (that happened slowly from 1907 to 1971) there was essentially no inflation in the US,
It's a question of what your time is worth. (Score:2, Informative)
A 2 month GTC will cost you around 600-650M isk. With a proper setup and the right skills you can easily make this within 12-15 hours (2-3 days of semi casual playing.) - The way I look at it is that basically you're working for 12-15 hours and the pay you get is $30, which isn't exactly impressive if you compare it with other jobs (i.e. if you take a weekend job every other week and use that money to buy play time.)
Still, if you don't have the money and you do want to play the game, it's a nice way to keep
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The way I look at it is that basically you're working for 12-15 hours and the pay you get is $30, which isn't exactly impressive if you compare it with other jobs (i.e. if you take a weekend job every other week and use that money to buy play time.)
$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a currently unemployed someone in a poverty sticken nation who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.
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$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a 13 year old in a rich world country who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.
CCP doesn't invent the isk from nowhere and sell it, they only facilitate trade. So, in effect, they provide a method to get money INTO the system, but no way to get money OUT of the system. So the cheap labour doing the ISK farming shifts from being leeching, annoying, out-of
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$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a currently unemployed someone in a poverty sticken nation who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.
The way EVE works is that you can trade ISK only for game time and not the other way around. So you buy game time from CCP and then trade it with another player.
That player cannot sell that game time for actual money.
They just get to play the game for free
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The way EVE works is that you can trade ISK only for game time and not the other way around. So you buy game time from CCP and then trade it with another player.
That player cannot sell that game time for actual money.
That is assuming the trade is done entirely in-game. What is to stop the player giving the ISK to another player in game in exchange for real money (or other useful commodity) paid by some other means?
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The argument is that:
* Finding a weekend job could be difficult in the exact amount desired
* You can play EVE whenever
* You enjoy playing more than you would enjoy working.
Me, I prefer to contribute to the economy, but to each his own.
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Hey now, Iceland's not that bad off.
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k, but 12-15 hours in 2-3 days (4-7 hrs/day) is not semi-casual. That's pretty heavy playing, especially if all you do is farm isk.
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Very interested in this proper setup of yours that makes 650M ISK in 15 hours - can you post more details please?
I also want to be able to purchase game time with my ISK.
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You're ignoring something so many people ignore, even in real life business: Risk. How much is that Golem? How likely is it that you lose it in that endeavour (don't tell me you're SO good that you can overcome a sudden lagspike or discon, that you are somehow magically able to still tell your ship to warp to safety after your connection has been lost)?
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Yes. After ... 30 seconds? I forgot, I rarely "use" this feature. 'til then, you get pummeled. Your chance is pretty good that you will make it out in one piece. Question is, how long will you stay in that shape when you log back in and get autowarped back into the middle of 20 ships hitting your already half-wasted hull from point blank because you lost connection RIGHT after warping in before you could even start setting course and throttling up?
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A decently setup Golem, Paladin, CNR, Drake or Nighthawk tanks the hardest lvl4's without breaking a sweat, permanently. And it can be done without officer or even faction gear(My Golem runs with a T2 tank and permatanks even Angel lvl 4's)
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I've seen the oddest things happen. From reppers that weren't turned on before warp and a discon' right after issuing the warp command to sudden lagspikes that somehow messed with the damage/repair calculations (granted, this was a bug and has been fixed ages ago). Certainly, a well fitted T2 ship with decent equipment and a half-awake pilot will face little troubles, but saying that you're immortal because of a certain ship or setup is almost like begging for Murphy to prove his law.
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Hmm, maybe trade-alt is the way to go, then - my Empire standings don't really allow me to do any high-sec missioning (nor would I want to). Losing a Golem to CONCORD or militia NPCs would suck and skilling an alt to fly it is just...not that effective ;-)
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Two years? Nah... maybe six months if you picked the right race and plot your skills carefully.
And that's running missions. The most profitable thing you can do with your time in EVE is market arbitrage, which doesn't take that much in the way of skills. I don't do it myself because it's too much like real work, but I know people who regularly make a billion ISK in a couple full days of fiddling with market orders.
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Well, sure, but it depends on what you consider "work". When I get home from my real (progr
Puzzle Pirates did it (Score:5, Interesting)
This sounds a lot like what Puzzle Pirates did with "doubloons": a second in-game currency, used to buy game badges (i.e. subscriptions), which you can purchase with real money or trade on a market for the main in-game currency (pieces of eight). Players with more money than time can buy doubloons and sell them for POE; players with more time than money can collect POE and trade for doubloons to extend their subscriptions.
Well, it's about time (Score:3, Interesting)
Every (successful) MOG that I know of has this problem, and most of them go rampaging off down the wrong track: waggling their banstick at anyone who does things that actual humans will inevitably do.
Prohibiting real world trades is both laughable futile, and self destructive. Companies that do it are punishing their paying players and themselves: it's truly lose-lose. I'm glad to see that CCP have finally figured this out, and stopped punching themselves in the balls.
The question that I have is: why did it take them so long to get smart, and why wasn't this designed in from the start?
It's not a trite question. So many MOG developers seem to plan to fail, by assuming that they can control how their (paying) playerbase chooses to play the game and interact with each other. News flash: if your game is actually successful, then you'll have so many players that you will not be able to police them manually. That is a good thing, and a situation that you should aim to reach.
This covers security and exploits, account trading and sharing, and real world transactions. If your game has enough players to pay your salary, it has enough players that someone will exploit or explore any mechanism that you provide, and they will come up with their own alternatives to any mechanism that you don't provide.
If they get hurt through real world trading, then there's no point in you whinging that it's prohibited. It was going to happen, and it will continue to happen until you suck it up and give them a better alternative.
You can either design on this basis - i.e. plan for success - or you can play catch up, paying money to patch the game while losing subscriptions across your entire playerbase as you go - from those who hate the "exploits" that you left in, and those who hate having their "exploits" taken away as you remove them one at a time.
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How so? What are the tax ramifications of CCP's current set up?
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Nonsensical fear mongering.
The whole premise is invalid. You're playing a game not bartering. It's impossible to barter things you don't own. Read the section of the EULA below.
If you make money by selling services in game then you have earned income and must be reported. This is nothing new and existing tax law clearly covers it.
With RMT there is no ownership and no income so how can there be changes to tax?
From the Eve EULA:
11. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS
A. Own
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An invalid justification for banning gold farmers. What more justification do you need than they are disruptive?
Show me a game that doesn't have have RMT, sanctioned or not, and I'll show you a game that has no player base.
What solutions are their other than sanctioning and securing it?
A game without money or resources might be able to do it and that would be a fun design problem.
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Exactly.
Additionally any money pulled out for providing services, legit or in name only to circumvent the EULA, is already taxes as income under existing law.
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This covers security and exploits, account trading and sharing, and real world transactions. If your game has enough players to pay your salary, it has enough players that someone will exploit or explore any mechanism that you provide, and they will come up with their own alternatives to any mechanism that you don't provide.
Personally, I never understood why someone would want to buy money in an MMO...
But your logic makes it sound like the person in charge should just suck it up and stop trying to prevent people from doing what they want. If I apply that to real life, I should be able to massacre everyone in a square mile of myself so I can have peace and quiet... and the government should provide me the tools to do so.
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Personally, I never understood why someone would want to buy money in an MMO...
I've bought MMO money, and did it because I have already spent way too much of my life farming cash in meatspace for it ever to be fun in a game.
The absolutely last thing I want to do when I finally get some computer-based relaxation time is a pretend job. My gaming time is limited and I want to cut straight to the fun parts.
Same here (Score:2)
Beyond that, the ISK grind is beyond boring to me. The thought of having to haul stuff around, hassle with market orders for hours on end, grind missions, or fuel a POS every ot
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If you have to do that, the game is a design failure.
Yes ... yes, it is.
Play something else.
Thank you, I will.
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Problem is, most games now days are copypasta of previously existing games except having better graphics or physics. Usually they rely on some third rate gimmick to get popular. There are so very very few offers new game play, and even fewer offers true innovation in design. What I am trying to say is that now days, when I pick up a game box, it feels like dejavu. Same design failure has been meticulously replicated and no other choices out there. I end up quit playing games altogether. It sounds pathetic,
Re:Well, it's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
So I have a secondary income stream, to finance combat activity - I do industry, and go ratting/missioning to make some isks, to buy new toys, to get back on the front line, which is where I'm have most fun.
However, 'going missioning' takes me time in game, and it's somewhat fun, but I enjoy getting into combat more. So for me, dropping about an hour of overtime pay on 60d GTC for resale, netting me 600mil isks, is equivalent to _not_ spending 20 hours running missions, and instead going and killing pigdogs.
I don't _like_ the real money for in game cash particularly - I think it's somewhat unfair. But none the less, as the option exists, I'll use it. EVE is one of the few games that is 'self balancing' there though - a bad pilot cannot buy the kind of advantage to stop them being a bad pilot. More, they get a bit of an edge, and someone else gets a nice killmail and a pile of valuable loot.
Now, if I were to lose my job, and end up with more EVE time, and less payscale, I'd probably change my mind about it - going the other way and 'playing for free'.
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I hate PVP combat, which is part of the reason I stopped playing Eve, but I can see your point. I just don't see the point in killing each other when personal time, cash, and such things are involved. I have no problem with FPS game type PVP because you can pretty easily get power-ups and weapons by learning the levels, but when it involves days/weeks/months of work to get an item and someone is going to kill you in 5 minutes for no good reason... I lose interest.
I guess if it were me, I'd petition to hav
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PVPing has to be a net negative, otherwise you have an exploit with friends killing each other and looting more than they lose in total.
The more rewarding (in terms of loot) you make PVPing the more incentive you provide for that "someone is going to kill you in 5 minutes" thing.
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Right, but if I remember correctly, you get a random chance to get an item the other player had or nothing... I'm saying that maybe that chance should be increased slightly. If you had two people going back and forth as described, you'd be just as bad off, but not as quickly. I'm not suggesting that players drop 2-3 times as much as they were carrying. Even if they dropped everything they had, they still have to buy a new ship. Net loss.
And yes, I understand the risk reward balance. In whatever MMO I p
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No.
No gain also works. Why would loot be created when PvPing?
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Ok, neutral works to. Well other than making life hell for those not liking being killed randomly for their stuff.
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But that's not creation of loot. That's transfer of loot. That can't be exploited since it's sum 0.
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When does it matter? You might lose a ship.. but nothing else of any importance happens.
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Are you seriously equating State sponsorship of mass murder with enabling paying players of a video game to enjoy it more without getting stiffed?
That knock at your door? It's the Analogy Police. Don't make any sudden moves.
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Yes, parent seriously is drawing a moral comparison between the two. We are supposed to understand that both of these activities are WRONG, and just because you can doesn't mean you should.
The problem I have with this is that it just doesn't track.
Yes, buying stolen goods is wrong, but I really don't believe that most RMT involves that. Certainly some, but in many (if not all) games, in-game currency only requires time at the keyboard to acquire. I feel it is far more likely that people simply spend more
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Don't get the wrong idea here. Trading ISK for cash outside the GTC system will still get you banned. This system h
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It won't be this way for long. With EBay being more expensive, people will go buy GTCs to sell them. The increased supply of GTCs will make their price drop, soon making EBay ISK cheaper again.
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To combat goldsellers by selling it yourself, you have to be cheaper than the goldseller or at the very least cheap enough that players don't want to risk the banstick. That's tricky, to say the least.
Simply selling money will inevitably drive inflation. You can't just go and simply undercut goldsellers over and over because you will make your in game currency a joke and people will start looking for alternative means to conduct player-player trade. Think Diablo II. Gold was basically worthless, what happen
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It was done informally with odd rules for a long time. The addition of the in-game item, the "PLEX", pilot license extension, was recent.
But years ago, you could go on the forums, and send someone isk, and they'd evemail you a code from Shattered Crystal. Eventually they made a system by which you could directly apply the time code to another account, to cut down fraud, and now it's strictly plex items, which is handled entirely in game.
Second link in summary is 404 for me (Score:2)
Can someone explain PLEX? (Score:2)
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EvE is, like many MMOs, selling game time cards (GTCs), so people who do not want to give out their CC numbers or don't have one can play. It's like a prepaid card for cellphones. You buy a card, you get a serial key, you enter the key at their homepage and your account gets credited with 60 days of time.
You may now also go to their homepage and sell those 60 days of time. To do this, buy a GTC and instead of activating it for your account, you go to their page and enter the serial number you got into their
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What you describe is the old system.
In the new system, every 30 days of GTC time is converted into a PLEX, an in-game item. The in-game item can be sold on the regular in-game market. When it's used, it adds 30 days to your account.
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EVE uses a subscription model. This model uses either the standard credit card, or a Game Time Card (GTC) like one can get for WoW. The difference is that one can take a GTC and convert it into Pilot License Extensions (PLEX). A GTC can be purchased in several time lengths: 30, 60, 90 days. A PLEX is a basically a 30 day GTC.
If one buys a 60 day GTC, one can convert that into two PLEXs.
If one has a lot of ISK (the in-game currency), but little or no real currency to buy a GTC, one can use the in-game curren
Currency farming in space ? (Score:3)
Are they doing this on the ISS ? I was just wondering about the "space" tag on this article.
Price Fixing (Score:2)
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I don't know that much about WoW, but this sort of market manipulation happens in EvE as well. But it's usually not as big a deal, because the economy is so decentralized. If someone's relisted all of the red widgets in a system, there's a few thousand other systems I can look in. Plus because players have so much control over the production of most items in game, producers will notice the relisting, and will increase their production of that particular item. It self-corrects pretty well.
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The limitation that markets are only region wide means that there are a few dozen markets within hi-sec. Plus goods have to be physically moved, which means that goods can gain/lost value solely on distance.
Where EVE Online gets it wrong is the 0.01 ISK undercutting due to region-wide buy orders.
(Buy orders should change offered price based on distance from the buy order actual location. Even for region-wide buy orders. This would allow more compe
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But of all games, WoW makes it pretty useless. You can get everything you really need just from questing. Buying gear isn't really necessary since you level so fast you will be getting better gear from quests in no time. And end game is all about running instances to get better gear. Do a few daily quests and you have enough gold to co
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This is near impossible in EvE. Almost everything is available in abundance, the price of a good is determined almost more by its location than its rarity simply because any form of transport has to be done by players. There is no mail system and every system has its own market. So even to "corner" a local market, a player would have to do a lot of system hopping and shopping (and transporting, provided he doesn't simply want to sit on the goods), only to be ignored when his prospective buyers do 2 more jum
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WOW has "fixed" this by making equipment listed in the AH relatively worthless compared to what you can get from just questing. I actually had a friend who was banned from WOW for price fixing, I thought that was crap personally. One of many reasons I stopped playing.
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It's not new, and it's not something that can be sustained for long on most servers -- it's too easy to make or farm more of most items.
Uh, news? (Score:2)
In a related story, World of Warcraft now allows you to have paid server transfers. Also, Lord of the Ring online has hobbits.
CCP has become rabid (Score:2, Interesting)
I have 4 accounts to play Eve online. I was involved with a friend that participated in trading items and accounts for real money. I had no idea it was going on and because of my close workings with him within our corporation, my accounts were banned and CCP has not taken the time to listen to my side of the story.
I still have 3 petitions opened and one has been responded to with a senior GM stating the one account will remain permanently banned.
They have become rabid in their persuit of stopping the RL m
Re:How lucky we are to bother ourselves with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Taiwan has recently been hit with a devastating typhoon. Some of the pictures show devastation similar to New Orleans after Katrina.
So, yeah, I'm glad I live here where I can worry about some schmuck in his basement spending his allowance on Eve Online and not over there where landslides are causing whole towns to disappear.
There was a supernova in NGC 1559 [harvard.edu] just a few days ago. Whole towns disappear? Try whole planets.
It's a big world, you know? Worrying about things that happen a thousand miles or a million light years away is just as much a luxury as spending your time playing some game.
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Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant.
But trepidation of the spheres,
though greater far, are innocent.
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Don't shed a tear, Omber ain't worth jack anyway.
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Well, yeah... but that point could be made of just about any aspect of life, so is kind of moot. To say we shouldn't be concerned about X because of Y is a popular logical fallacy, or just subtle trolling :P
People get pretty pissed when you cheat in multiplayer - this includes RL games as well. If you actually publish a MMO, you would be pretty bloody concerned about it too. If the impression that your game was wide open to abuse spread, you would find yourself without players. For a one-trick pony like CC
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First, training in EvE is entirely and only time dependent. You start the skill, it will be done in 2 days, 4 hours, 2 minutes, 50 seconds. Nothing you do in game, whether you shoot anything, mine something or are logged in altogether can change that. I also doubt the wisdom to hand your ship to your nephew (or anyone) and have him grind for you. On average, a ship costs what it could generate in about 40 hours of game time (speaking PvE, PvP is a different matter, albeit much more dangerous), I don't think
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I've rarely read so much bullcrap in only 2 lines.
First, yes, those new, spiffy, T3, superspecialawesome, too-cool-to-mention, top-of-the-line, never-been-seen ships cost a fortune and a half. Newsflash: They're not meant to be bought and owned by you! They are supposed to be bought by a whole corporation or even alliance, as a means to support their fleet. Look at their stats, 99% of what they can do deal with boosting other ships. Billions and billions of ISK also won't buy those ships. Why? Because nobod
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Agree; the alliance I'm in hardly uses any Tech 3 strategic cruisers but we have downed a number of them... and they seem to be as easy to take down as anyother ship if you have your wits about you.
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Wow. Have you even played EVE? This has got to be a troll.
First off, T3 ships are not alliance tools, they're solo ships if anything. Sure, they can fit Warfare Links, but so can battlecruisers and command ships. Battlecruisers do it far cheaper, command ships do it better (much stronger tanks, can fit 3 at once) and still a little cheaper. And that's just one of many possible configurations of a T3 ship. They also make nearly invincible scouts (bubble immunity + covops cloak), or could be set up for an ama