I really like their approach of trying to solve real-money trading by PLEX (Pilot License Extensions). Essentially a PLEX buys you 30 days of game time. People can buy a PLEX and trade it for in-game items. PLEX only has a value for people who want to play the game because you can't convert a PLEX back into real money. All the economic value is kept inside the EVE ecosystem, allowing for moderate but manageable inflation, hardcore players (i.e. the guys without jobs) to play the game for free and somewhat more casual players (i.e. the guys with jobs) to attain some items using cash. Brilliant.
One day, carefully designed massive-multiplayer online games will provide better experimentation than agent-based modeling used now in economics. This article illustrates that EVE online is already one step closer to it, since they can introduce "governmental" policies and immediately see the impact on their ingame economy. Very neat!
CCP's economist, sadly, does not understand how EVE's economy works. His reports are many things -- "incorrect", "irrelevant", "incomprehensible" -- but never useful or informative. Most of the research into EVE's economy is performed by the large player power blocs, who have the incentives and knowledge necessary to understand EVE.
I think this is a great way to deal with the problem, it also provides a nice insight into the market economics that get screwed up by these people.
I noticed when playing EVE that the unrefined ore was more expensive than refined ore, because there simply wasn't the supply. It makes no sense that iron ore should cost more by weight than iron, despite iron being purer and requiring energy for the production. It was bizarre and made the experience at the beginning quite unfavourable.
There was no benefit in training for ore refining, because unless you had the highest rank imaginable, you couldn't make money off of it.
I'd love it if the EVE developers allowed these RMT's to be hunted down in game. Cost them too much ISK through people hunting them instead of simply banning their accounts and them getting another. Turning the whole RMT into a much less profitable alternative would remove some of the incentive.
I'm sure bank robbers would be less likely to rob a bank if they were allowed to keep the cash but everyone in public could club them and take their wallet and smash their car up for fun. It'd be a much more social form of justice, which is what justice is supposed to be in EVE; it's legal to rob a bank, but you've got to be prepared to be a target. Equally a RMT should be treated like a counterfitter, banning the accounts is just a temporary punishment and should be used against people purchasing money, but you have to make it less profitable to the RMT's to actually remove them from the game.
It's like drug production. Catching every guy with a gram of coke is insane and impractical. However, if it becomes cheaper to do things legally than illegally you won't have a single gram of coke on the face of the planet. Look at some of the Asian countries, some farmers have dropped marijuana and poppies for palm trees, because palm oil pays more than drugs.
Is there a use for unrefined ore in the game other than refining it? Must refined ore be produced by refining unrefined ore? If not, then all you've noticed is that ore refining is a crappy choice of career. If so, then I think you found an arbitrage opportunity -- buy up refined ore and wait for the price to rise, assuming the market is pricing unrefined ore properly.
That's almost correct. The amount of stuff you get from refining ore increases as your skill in refining increases. The price imbalance is created by people with high skill buying up the raw ore, refining it, and selling the result.
Nope. The imbalance comes from there being sources of refined ore other than ore. Namely:
1) Recycling ships and modules. Which can be got from loot, blowing up players, or pirated from other players.
2) Scamming, pirating, ore/refined/ships/modules.
Also, imbalance comes from regional supply/demand.
Player efficiency
Players have an efficiency rating that starts at 37.5% and is modified by the skills Refining and Refinery Efficiency, as well as by any specialized skill for refining that particular material.
Refining provides a 2% improvement in the player's efficiency rating per rank.
Refinery Efficiency adds a 4% per rank improvement.
Each class of ore (Omber, Kernite, Veldspar) has a skill that improves the player factor by 5%/rank. Reprocessing ships, modules, and other items falls under the Scrapmetal Processing skill, which provides a similiar bonus.
The resulting rating is calculated by:
Net Player Efficiency = 0.375
(1 + 0.02* Refining skill rank)
* (1 + 0.04* Refinery efficiency rank)
* (1 + 0.05* specific skill rank) *
Also: Station taxes
NPC stations will take a share of the proceeds amounting to 5% of the resulting minerals. This tax will be reduced by your standing with the corporation running the station. At a standing of about 6.7, the amount taxed will be zero.
So, if you really want to compete, you need to max the market skills, 3 refining skills, and have a standing of 6.7. But, in 6 months you can make other people wonder why it's worth more to sell the ore than refine it themselves.
PS: There are also a few stations where ore price is increased becaue of a quest.
I know nothing about Eve, but this article was actually kind of interesting. So I decided to find out what ISK stands for. (I'm guessing it's the in-game currency?) I never found out because of this:
I searched for "what is isk eve" and found exactly one answer
Heh. You have more faith in NLP than I do. Interestingly, the quotes around your query are critical. Omit them, and you get the same junk I did.
I once heard a guy from Google say that quotes around search queries are sort of the nuclear option of search, i.e. they see it as a failure if the user has to resort to quotes. But they certainly do the job in this case.
There's no NLP going on. Just slight understanding of how to use search engines.
Quotes mean search for this phrase.
Without quotes it searches for those words in anyorder, anywhere on the page. Probably throws out "is" and maybe even "what" as too common. And not all the words have to be on results that returned. This is why without quotes it's same junk you got.
You're right that there's no NLP going on. That's obvious from the results that "what is isk eve" returns (I get two, not one). But that doesn't mean there isn't any faith in NLP going on. :)
They only have 310,000 active registered users? (6,200/.02) Wow.
EDIT: sigh My surprise is that it's not higher. It's an incredibly well designed experience. (Come on guys, at the very least it would be bad business for me to badmouth any game developer/publisher with an off-hand comment. We don't now, but we've always wanted to cut them in on a share of used game sales on Dawdle.)
Yes, approximately 310,000 active monthly registered users. This is their current average, I believe it's been on a slow increase for a long time. I know when I first registered IIRC it was around 275,000.
However, if every account pays the minimum of $10.95 (the lowest rate for monthly subscription) that's almost 41 million dollars and they're finally making it available to buy timecards in-store, so the subscription will likely increase as it's essentially been for players with credit-cards and not teens.
Edit: This isn't always made clear about EVE. They have only one server, that's 310,000 users in on one server, roughly 40,000 at any one time. It's a much more impressive experience than WoW where you might never see another person, where as in EVE you can see hundreds of ships in one area that isn't a guild-war. Guild wars are, to put it quite frankly, insane to watch. I've seen a few hundred ships in a fire fight and I was a newbie.
"It is also possible to pay for a subscription through the purchase of Eve Time Codes using ISK. This allows relatively advanced players to play the game without paying real money. A player may buy an ETC for real money and sell it to another player in-game for ISK. The system is officially and securely supported by CCP"
So I'm not sure all 300,000 are paying customers - still very very impressive!
It's a much more impressive experience than WoW where you might never see another person
Some of us like that about WoW. I really like the dynamic (on some servers, and much more so now in the lowbie areas) where there are enough people for help if you need it, and enough to stock the auction house and for chat, but you can quest or hunt for half an hour or more without seeing another player. It makes the world feel bigger and more open.
You won't necessarily see another player on Eve if you go somewhere remote; it's easy to get lost as long as there isn't a large bounty on your head. But since it's non-sharded you can always chat to people, or go to somewhere there are a lot of people without switching servers. In other words, you are always in the same game universe for purposes of chat, personal vendettas etc. But that universe is not uniformly crowded by any means.
The only reason to switch servers in Eve is if you want to log on to the beta server and play with new ships/weapons that your main character can't use yet or that haven't been released yet.
You say only three hundred thousand people like three hundred thousand people is not a high number of people who play a free-market game set in deep space.
Eve is generally too hardcore to really grow beyond their niche market. You can experience 90% of WoW soloing or operating in small groups and it's impossible to commit a mistake that sets you back more than a few minutes.
In Eve, it's possible to lose months or years of in-game "productivity" from a single battle or event. It's part of the thrill of the game, but most people can't take that kind of pressure, or can't commit to joining a well-organized corp.
Agreed. Having played Eve for three and a half years, the risk of losing your ship or assets in battle can definitely give you a rush. Sometimes the loss stings but you're not going to win every engagement and hopefully you can put yourself in a better position next time through better skills, planning and corp mates.
As for growing their market, they just announced a FPS console game that's linked to the Eve universe. It will be interesting to see how both environments will interact.
It's definitely somewhat of a niche game. Still, with monthly fees ranging from $10/month to €15/month, they're probably bringing in over $4 million a month... not too bad!
It's been niche, but that's allowed them to develop an amazing in-game experience and a stable market and economy. They're now releasing timecards in-store so the subscription base will likely increase exponentially for the next few years, like when WoW went from niche to full-scale.
WoW was niche once? In Australia nearly all stock was sold out to pre-orders and it was about 6 weeks before there were any game cards that weren't pre-ordered.
