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Space The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games

EVE Online's Fight Against Currency Farmers 208

Posted by Soulskill from the stay-away-from-those-pitchforks dept.
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.
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EVE Online's Fight Against Currency Farmers More

EVE Online's Fight Against Currency Farmers

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  • GTC are cheaper (Score:2, Informative)

    by ArtemaOne ( 1300025 )
    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. I know a lot of people who spend extra time making money so they can play for free (supplying the ISK in exchange for the GTCs). It creates a nice exchange system.

    • Re:GTC are cheaper (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Barny ( 103770 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @03:40AM (#29034875) Journal

      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.

    • 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.

  • ... inflation.

    • Re:They need... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @06:06AM (#29035789)

      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.

      • Or you can use the WoW answer -- ensure that very little that's really worthwhile is actually purchasable with transferable in-game currency.

        • 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

          • 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.

          • What's this, are you accusing capitalism of not being fun!?

      • 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.

  • 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

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by asdf7890 ( 1518587 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by adamkennedy ( 121032 )

        $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

      • $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

        • 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?

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tero ( 39203 )

      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Mhtsos ( 586325 )
      600-650M may be made in 15 hours but it's at least 2 years worth of skill training for the skills and ISK gathering for the equipment. So while they take 3 days to make you're actually cashing in your previous long term investment.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsotha ( 720379 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsotha ( 720379 )

      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.)

      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)

    by Mr2001 ( 90979 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @03:52AM (#29034923) Homepage Journal

    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)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @04:41AM (#29035189) Homepage

    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.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by harl ( 84412 )

        How so? What are the tax ramifications of CCP's current set up?

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by harl ( 84412 )

            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

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by harl ( 84412 )

                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.

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nickco3 ( 220146 ) *

        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.

        • I'm the same way. I make very good money in the real world. If I spend what I make in one hour on in-game money, I'm good for about 18 months of play (depending on how suicidal I'm feeling, where the alliance is based, etc). It would take me about 60 hours to make that same money in-game. So the issue is a no-brainer for me.

          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

      • Re:Well, it's about time (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Sobrique ( 543255 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @05:42AM (#29035635) Homepage
        As someone who does buy money in an MMO, permit me to share with you why I do it - I've been playing EVE for something like 5 years now. Over that time, I've made a lot of ISKs, and have similarly blown up collossal chunks of the stuff, playing EVE. I'm currently involved in a fairly active PvP alliance, and am enjoying it immensely. But one of the things about PvPing is that fundamentally, it's a loss making activity - ships die, tend to be expensive, and it's quite rare to reclaim the cost from your combat activity (loot is profitable, but you need a lot of kills to replace one ship, as most 'loot' is destroyed).
        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'.

        • 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

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by nedlohs ( 1335013 )

            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.

            • 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

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by harl ( 84412 )

              No.

              No gain also works. Why would loot be created when PvPing?

              • Ok, neutral works to. Well other than making life hell for those not liking being killed randomly for their stuff.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by harl ( 84412 )

                  But that's not creation of loot. That's transfer of loot. That can't be exploited since it's sum 0.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by BobMcD ( 601576 )

          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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsotha ( 720379 )

      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?

      Don't get the wrong idea here. Trading ISK for cash outside the GTC system will still get you banned. This system h

      • 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.

    • 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

  • at least on a somewhat slow 'net connection in Australia. First one still works though.
  • I read TFA, I read the comments, I'm still clueless as to what it means. Game time? How does this relate to mitigating currency? Isn't EVE a subscription model?

    • 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

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jeff4747 ( 256583 )

        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.

    • 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)

    by mbone ( 558574 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @07:03AM (#29036181)

    Are they doing this on the ISS ? I was just wondering about the "space" tag on this article.

  • There's a new trend in WoW of price-fixing. People go to the Auction House, buy up all the valuable items, and put them back on at massive-inflated prices. It's been happening more and more in the last few months, and now it's almost constant. The only time you can buy affordable, useful gear on the AH is when you beat the price-fixers to it. I don't know if it's people looking for gold or gold farmers, but it increases the demand for buying gold offsite because it's nearly impossible to afford the gear you

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cowscows ( 103644 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by WuphonsReach ( 684551 )
        It is something that EVE Online gets *almost* right.

        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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brkello ( 642429 )
      New trend? This has always been going on. If there is something where the item is fairly limited, someone with a lot of gold can buy them all up and sell them for more.

      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

    • 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

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by seebs ( 15766 )

      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.

  • This has been done by Eve for as long as I have known about it. How is this suddenly news? It is an old game and GTCs have been talked about before. Bizarre reading about this now.

    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)

    by infodragon ( 38608 )

    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

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