
How a player with a “useless” item almost took down EVE Online’s entire economy - ssclafani
http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/how-a-clever-player-with-a-useless-item-almost-took-down-eve-onlines-entire
======
trout
When I played Everquest I did a very similar thing, except without the ship
component. We found an obscure item that was not in any of the well-known
databases, which is fairly difficult considering how far reaching they were.

Then we advertised a 'want to sell' considerably lower than the 'want to buy'
we advertised in a different zone, both very high prices. Someone decided to
make a quick arbitrage sell and found out I didn't want that item at all.

I'm sure some have learned the risks of arbitrage the hard way through these
games, among other things.

~~~
Androsynth
I've always found arbitrage to be the best way to earn money in mmo's. I used
to buy up all levels of cheap green items in the wow auction house, according
to exact limits i came up with and stored in a spreadsheet. then i would
disenchant them and sell the byproduct.

It was time consuming, but i made a lot of money and it took a long time
before anyone else figured it out and joined in. the problem was it only took
a few people on a server to skew the prices of the masses. but by then i had a
lordship and manor in every city in the eastern kingdoms.

~~~
LancerSykera
I ended up late for work many days from mass-disenchanting.

~~~
antoko
....of the boar... +spi and +sta not a single class wanted those greens but
they disenchant to the same as the others... loved those ugly greens :)

------
lectrick
“Oh, absolutely,” Lander said, laughing. “Good for them! Clever guys.”

This alone is reason enough to respect these guys. Blizzard would have
confiscated anything you won by being clever, which is a much more asstarded
strategy in my opinion.

I recall a certain mage who realized he could spellsteal a certain boss buff
after a certain patch and who ended up soloing the instance for a while and
winning a lot of loot. Blizzard closed the hole and confiscated everything and
may have even banned the player. Dumb.

Cleverness should remain rewarded even if you must close the hole to preserve
the good of the game.

~~~
ucee054
_Cleverness should remain rewarded even if you must close the hole to preserve
the good of the game._

Wall Street thinking. How about instead of rewarding cleverness, rewarding
one's contribution to the good of the , er, "game"?

~~~
cma
Wall Street market participants are subject to anti-gaming regulations.

~~~
justanother
Are you very, very sure about that?

~~~
cma
<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation>

------
joshguthrie
I love stories about EVE. Though I couldn't give any minute to play it, I'm
pretty sure this is the closest to a "hacker" game.

Sure, there are big factions, and ship-blowing and warfare and stuff, but all
the stories we read about it, are about human interaction, and how it can be
gamed: how VileRat made his way to the opposing faction as a mole, how he
started a diplomacy corps, how this user found a loophole in the economy, how
other users are playing the market everyday,... And EVE is rewarding: you
"win" by thinking outside-the-box, you get points for being creative, the
whole system WANTS you to think of something new.

Just like real life.

~~~
mattmanser
Although it actually ruins the game for the majority of players? And usually
because of extremely poor coding by the eve devs?

I remember when the BoB/Goon war was going on and Goon exploited the terrible
design of the alliance/corp system and shut BoB down. No rollback from CCP. A
massive war between thousands of players, perhaps even 10s of thousands of
players over in seconds not because of any skill or battles but meta gaming
completely outside the game by 1 player.

How much fun would 'legalized' aim-botting be?

That is Eve Online.

Eve is a game full of potential that it consistently fails to deliver on. And
the 'stories' you hear are usually down to allowed griefing executed through
exploiting poorly thought out game mechanics. It is hacking at its essence,
but Sony Playstation password type of hacking, not the kind it's fun to be on
the receiving end of.

~~~
resu_nimda
Um, what? How did they exploit terrible design? They got a really high up guy
to defect, and he happened to have the keys to a lot of stuff. Why would CCP
roll that back? That's exactly the kind of metagaming they whole-heartedly
encourage. You must have ties to BoB if you're going on about this "fair
fight," e-honor stuff; this is how the game is played.

But really, what's most confusing is that you say a massive war was ended in
seconds. BoB was highly entrenched in Delve and things had basically
stagnated, there was less of a massive war going on than trifling skirmishes
on the outskirts of their fortress. This singular event created a massive,
chaotic free-for-all that injected a ton of life and activity into the region,
and got a lot of people excited about the game again. Sorry for your loss.

~~~
rcxdude
the design is bad in that there's not good granularity of controls. You _have_
to have someone holding pretty much all of the keys so there's not a way to
even try to protect yourself against such actions.

------
gcb0
Silly. they just distorted the balance when they inserted a God figure giving
out prizes to entice war. (maybe they wanted more wars happening?)

if they left the real world analogy (you blow up a ship with an item, you get
that item) then it would never have happened. but since they've added 'reward
points' for the value of items in the ships you destroy, that offseted the
balance because, well, it's silly.

------
msg
The OP is more interesting:

[https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=1241...](https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=124145)

The real problem was that they had a fixed exchange rate between the ingame
currency and loyalty points. If the loyalty point formula asymptotically
approached a max, this would have been a non-issue.

The real lesson is about the naive approach to forex.

You could also take a lesson about "optimizing the wrong thing". In machine
learning it comes from telling the learning system to optimize a means rather
than an end, frequently with hilarious consequences. See also paperclip
maximizer.

~~~
startswithaj
I read this earlier and now 404'd...

------
CurtMonash
My slickest move in LOTRO was to buy scroll cases -- which give random recipes
-- on the auction house when they became available at the prices one could
sell them to vendors at. Then I waited until an update introduced new recipes
(most notably Coffee), opened cases, and sold some of the new recipes for
scarcity value.

Before that, I built up a relative in-game fortune by buying low and selling
high in all sorts of items, as well as picking my targets in crafting. My
initial grubstake came from people who'd make items to practice crafting, then
offer them on the auction house for the same price they could sell to vendors.
I bought them, held on until no other copies were for sale, then sold them for
prices that reflected their usefulness.

------
zipdog
Cornering the market in a useless item in order to drive up its price? Reminds
me of the time Porsche cornered the market in VW shares and squeezed the
short-sellers:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/32...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/3281537/Porsche-
and-VW-share-row-how-Germany-got-revenge-on-the-hedge-fund-locusts.html)

~~~
CamperBob2
This didn't end well for Porsche, though, which is now a quavering vassal of
Volkswagen AG.

~~~
green7ea
I wasn't aware of the negative turnout of this until now. I hadn't seen an
article since porsche was in a power position. For those who are in that boat:

[http://www.automobilemag.com/features/news/0911_porsche_and_...](http://www.automobilemag.com/features/news/0911_porsche_and_volkswagen_what_happened/viewall.html)

~~~
nijk
Amazing that 74.1% is not considered controlling ownership in German law.

------
guiambros
Nice story. Very very similar to what happened with Lucasfilm's Habitat, in
the mid-80's.

<http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html>

The entire paper is a gem, but if you're in a hurry, search for " _You can't
trust anyone_ ".

------
lnanek2
In the 1991 multiplayer AD&D RPG on AOL, Neverwinter Nights, you used to be
able to buy packs of +1 arrows in a far off town in the game called Red Larch,
split the arrows up, sell them at the shop, and make more money than they
cost.

You could basically make as much money as your character could hold. If you
then traveled to a jeweler or the vaults you could stash the money, convert it
to lighter gems, and do it again. Not many people knew this and you could
generally trade for most items that came as treasure with these gems. So you
could buy +3 plate mail or whatever. Usually obtained from hours of work
killing drocoliches or whatever.

I guess if everybody had been doing it, the in game money would have been
worthless, though.

------
ralphc
EVE has full-time economists. How do you even put that in a job posting?

~~~
jotux
Valve has an economist they work with for TF2, and he blogs:
[http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/arbitrage-and-
equil...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/arbitrage-and-equilibrium-
in-the-team-fortress-2-economy/)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
He hasn't blogged in months, though :(

~~~
janzer
He was a guest on EconTalk a few months back and it was mentioned that he is
now at the University of Texas. Most of the conversation was about Valve's
corporate structure,
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/varoufakis_on_v.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/varoufakis_on_v.html)

------
glitch273
Sounds more like a poorly implemented game mechanic more than cleverness on
the players part. They basically let their users set the price then distribute
rewards based on that.

~~~
cdash
The game mechanic itself is not actually the problem here but the way it was
implemented left it open to easy exploitation. It can be implemented in a way
that is not easy to exploitation though. Basically their algorithm for
deciding on the worth of an item based off of market transactions was not
good.

~~~
Houshalter
Well fixing the price could be exploitable as well.

------
marme
When they say one player did this they mean a group of well coordinated
players did this. It was done by a group inside goonswarm federation which is
the something awful forums in game guild. They are one of the largest and most
organized groups in the game and the regularly do stupid shit that tries to
break the game. The figured this out almost immediately and racked up enough
in game currency that they controlled a sizable portion of the liquid assets
in the game. enough that they would be able to bank roll their in game
operations for years without worry. This is when they finally publicly
revealed what they were doing and the game devs had to step and tell them they
could not keep the money. They devs did not figure out what was going on until
the guys doing the exploit publicly described how they were doing it on the
game forums.

Other shit goonswarm is known for doing is destroying ships in the games safe
zones. The game mechanic is that in the safe zones there is NPC police that
will kill anyone who attacks another player without consent. But the catch is
that the NPC police have a response time that can be gamed. The response time
is only a few seconds but a well coordinated attack can destroy a ship within
that time. The attacking player still gets killed by the NPC police but they
accomplish their suicide kill anyway. The goonswarm offers rewards to players
to make it worthwhile to do these suicide attacks on players who sit in the
safe zones and just mine resources in expensive ships. Making the safe zones
no longer safe. They do this just because they can and they want to watch
everything burn.

------
toolslive
There is this man who owns more than 1000 Warhols. how now goes to auctions,
and bids lots of money on Warhols that are for sale. This affects the value of
the ones he owns.

------
shardling
Heh, that's something that happens in the Kingdom of Loathing too, though it
doesn't impact any built-in gameplay.

There are third party sites that get a feed of all in-game transactions, and
track whether prices are rising or falling on items. Of course, this can be
manipulated in exactly the same way described in the OP -- either for humorous
reasons, or for some sort of trade scam.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
This is why KoL has a money sink which fixes the prices on many common items.

~~~
shardling
Nah, those two things aren't really related. My post was about gaming the
marketplace prices that show up on coldfront.
(<http://kol.coldfront.net/index.php/content/view/1903/146/>)

Though KoL's economy is in general really fascinating. And it interacts in
neat ways with the way they make money. They were _way_ ahead of the curve in
using a sort of free-to-play model. (And even doing it in a way that doesn't
feel scummy!)

------
DodgyEggplant
Wall street in a nutshell. Brilliant.

------
alexvr
That's awesome. In most MMOs, you would be permanently banned for doing
something like that. And EVE actually encourages it. In the world of MMOs,
that's great publicity - it really sets them apart, I think

------
jrockway
_“It’s a fuzzy line, and we have to be very, very careful,” Lander admitted.
“This had the potential to fundamentally destabilize the game, and that’s bad
for all the players. Because it was very obviously something wrong, whilst we
didn’t take any action against the players who were doing it, we did fix the
problem.”_

I had to check the date on the article. If this were from 2013, it would read,
"These players gamed the system at the expense of everyone else. I think two
years in prison barely scratches the surface of what they deserve."

------
infoman
that is why you never should trust the average anything

~~~
eterm
Or have more accurate valuation techniques. "Last settlement price" is a
really, really, bad way to ascertain "value". They should be looking at the
market depth of demanded prices, etc.

~~~
raylu
Well, it wasn't last settlement price, it was average. It's just that nobody
traded in these items so completing even a single transaction practically sets
the price.

------
Yuioup
This scenario sounds like bitcoin.

------
senthilnayagam
"It’s worth noting that nothing happened to those players, and they were
allowed to keep the fortunes they had amassed while the exploit worked. “Oh,
absolutely,” Lander said, laughing. “Good for them! Clever guys.”"

I wish if this was true in real world too.

------
bentcorner
I very recently started playing Eve, and the marketplace is a fascinating
piece of the game. Without it I feel like it would be a ho-hum space MMO.
(FWIW, I haven't played any other MMO before).

------
philh
I'm curious what they did to fix this.

------
X4
I think this is exploitable in real life too. :)

I'll share my idea, when you share your ideas first ;)

------
prirun
Probably got the idea from a TBTF banker.

------
caycep
the goons have a long list of market shenanigans like this. cough cough ice
cough cough.

------
nijk
From then linked devblog:

"a disparity between the actual value of the item on the market and the
average price we use to calculate LP."

Seems a rather newb mistake to come out off a company that has full time
professional economists on staff.

Simple fix: charge sales tax for transfers of "valuable" items.

