

"Unholy Rage": Eve Online bans 2% of accounts, sees 30% drop in CPU use - alex_c
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=687

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maxniederhofer
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.

~~~
roc
Sounds like the two-currency systems frequently floated to combat gold-farming
in MMOs.

It seems to me that a PLEX would be too large a chunk of currency to be
effectively traded about. I wonder how that's going to work for them.

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electromagnetic
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.

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swolchok
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.

~~~
Retric
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.

~~~
njharman
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.

~~~
Retric
You are mistaken.

There is also station effecency, and market effecency, but from:
<http://www.eve-wiki.net/index.php?title=Refining>

_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.

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artaak
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!

~~~
alex_c
As far as I recall, the Eve team actually has a resident economist.

I've always been fascinated by this aspect of Eve... too bad the game itself
is such a large time sink.

~~~
jmillikin
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.

~~~
alex_c
Ah, the simulation is complete, then.

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gruseom
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:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=isk+eve&num=100](http://www.google.com/search?q=isk+eve&num=100)

...which certainly confirms that they have a problem!

~~~
jeroen
I searched for "what is isk eve" and found exactly one answer:

EVE Online ISK (The Inter Stellar Currency) is the currency in Eve.

~~~
gruseom
_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.

~~~
njharman
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.

~~~
gruseom
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. :)

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sachinag
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.)

~~~
electromagnetic
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.

~~~
halo
By my calculations, that means that the Icelandic developers of Eve Online
will represent ~0.5% of Iceland's GDP this year, which is quite impressive.

~~~
whatusername
"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!

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kl4m
_Someone_ is paying for each subscription. Time codes only let someone else
pay for your next month's subscription in exchange for ISK.

~~~
whatusername
Whoops. Of course they are. Thanks.

