

EVE players abuse faction warfare to produce trillions of ISK - cremnob
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/06/22/eve-players-abuse-faction-warfare-to-produce-trillions-of-isk/

======
polyfractal
This happens every time CCP releases a new version. Perhaps not to this
extent, but pretty much every time a new release shows up people get rich.

When I used to play, our corp had a subforum devoted to new and upcoming
releases so we could figure out the best way to game it. There are several
opportunities with each release:

1) Some game-breaking design flaw, such as the one illustrated in this
article. CCP is notoriously bad at understanding the impact of changes on the
in-game economy, especially when it comes to nullsec and obsessive nerds
playing internet spreadsheets. These are obviously the best things to exploit

2) First mover advantage. In almost all new features added, there is a
significant first mover advantage. The bigger/more complex the feature, the
more money there is to make because it is more difficult for less organized
individuals/corps to get into. For example, the wormhole mining and ratting
needed considerable logistics to pull off profitably. We had 10-15 individuals
working on the project. Everyone had specific roles - some ratted, some mined,
some scouted, some dealt with logistics and some dealt with shipping and
selling at the market. These exploits can make some pretty good money, and are
pretty reliable

3) Scamming. Every new feature opens up new ways to scam people for the latest
and greatest thing from CCP. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) about how
lucrative this is

4) General income from the new feature, once it's swamped by <everyone else>.
Which means margins are razor thin and you should probably look into the next
big thing coming down the pipeline.

~~~
notintokyo
How did you get started in organizing such a collaborating group, are you
offline friends or used a forum? How does leadership work? I see no
collaboration at all in the shooters I play, so curious about how that
emerges.

~~~
polyfractal
Everything that Axxl said. Eve in particular lends itself too cooperation,
since you can literally do nothing enjoyable without other people helping you.
To answer your questions:

My corp was (is) one of the biggest ones and was derived originally from the
Something Awful forums. So that certainly helps a lot. The corp has a long
history, a very unique culture and personality and commands pretty intense
loyalty (for an internet spaceship game).

Part of the cooperation in Eve is also because of the "player-owned space".
Most competitive corps live in nullsec, which is free-for-all territory. You
become invested in the place you live - all your possessions are there, you
are familiar with the geography. It's your virtual space-home. Which also
means you try to make it better, and try to defend it from other corps trying
to encroach in your space.

Leadership is a complicated political mess that leads to a lot of hilarious
moments. We have a CEO who is either elected or assigned, depending on the
whims of our leadership. The CEO is assisted by a board of directors who
basically oversee everything else. A lot is pretty standard - defense, fuel
logistics, finance, etc. We have Fleet Commanders who don't hold political
power, but are in charge of commanding fleet engagements and organizing
defenses/raids. We also have squads, which are basically informal social
groups. A lot of people like to chill with their squads when not involved in
something else.

But we also have a lot of directors that manage groups of players involved in
"unorthodox" gameplay.

For example, we have a large foreign intelligence division, whose sole job is
to infiltrate other corporations. They feed false information, obtain intel
and occasionally pull of theft on hilariously grand scale. A lot of these
agents have accounts bankrolled by the corp (through in-game timecards) as
compensation for having to play with terrible "pubbies" all day long.

We also have a diplomatic corp, which is basically the public face of the
corp. I was in that for a while and it was very fun. I spent all day chatting
with other corps, even ones we were at war with, trying to work out political
solutions, swap intel, intimidate, etc.

There are so many more: extreme finance (exploit new CCP releases), foreign
legions (helping allies in their wars), scamming/griefing, black ops (lone
players that live in enemy space making their lives miserable), Bomberwaffe
(stealth bomber raids), counter-intel (finding spies in our corp), etc etc.

~~~
mattmanser
But let's be honest here, in eve "unorthodox" gameplay generally meant ruining
the game for 99.99% of the players apart from a tiny few who were in
leadership positions. Eve is about fantasising about what you could do, rather
than enjoying what you actually do.

Unless you spend an extremely sad and unhealthy amount of time playing the
game you will never, ever get to do anything polyfractal describes.

A good example is the end of the BoB/Goonswarm war (the latter being
polyfractal's alliance). Not that I ever had anything to do with either.

Basically a single guy from Goonswarm infiltrated BoB and got granted
privileges to delete the BoB alliance. That meant they lost all their
territory. OK, the game mechanics sucked at the time with too much advantage
given to BoB's defence, but after the alliance got deleted, game over for BoB.
And CCP didn't know what to do so just kinda went 'um, yeah, that's a real
mechanic, not a bug/exploit'. Game over. No epic spaceship war. No amazing
tactical genius. Just some guy lying about who he was with zero consequences
and smarming BoB leadership until he could click the iwin button. Just a
single click.

And that's the essence of end-game eve, find the exploit, click it, laugh,
then wonder why the hell you were even playing the game in the first place.

polyfractal sounds very much like he's in the bright-eyed bushy tailed phase
of eve before you realise, hang on a sec, I was supposed to be playing a
spaceship game...

~~~
polyfractal
Hmm, well, I'm not really sure if you are attacking me personally or the game.
If you've read my other posts in this thread, it's pretty obvious I'm not in
that "bright-eyed bushy tailed phase". I quit because of time and the fact
that it's internet spreadsheets in space. If anything, I can proudly wear the
"bitter vet" badge who will probably never play Eve again.

I would argue that the alliance you are a part of is more important than the
amount of time spent. I got to do some really cool stuff because I was part of
Goonfleet - which was very well organized and interested in playing all the
parts of the game...not just the shooty parts.

You are also leaving out all the history that happened after that single
"disband alliance" event. Did it suck for their alliance? Sure. What happened
after that? They rallied and led an impressive one-year campaign to retake
their homeland.

What other games allow for a year-long campaign against other players, keeping
everyone involved actively engaged and interested? There were battles so large
that the servers crashed, because there were several thousand people playing
in the same system at the same time.

Hilariously enough, the same thing happened to Goonfleet (our CEO went rogue,
deleted alliance, LOL). We were booted from our homeland as BoB took it back
over. Guess what happened? Player engagement rates went through the roof. The
alliance had been stagnating and people were quitting...after the exodus many
players rejoined and started being active again.

My point in all of this is that the people who gravitate towards EVE are the
ones that find this kind of gameplay enticing. It makes it so much more
interesting than WoW or any other fluffy MMO where there is nothing to lose.

~~~
mattmanser
I didn't mean any attack on you! I just try and help others not look through
the glasses of imagination when the game itself is pretty cruddy.

------
ben0x539
According to one of the ring leaders of the whole enterprise, CCP is now
actively going through their accounts and removing assets:

[https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519...](https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519268#post1519268)

[https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519...](https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519338#post1519338)

------
ericcholis
I've never played EVE for more than an hour. However, I always find these
stories intriguing.

Due to the nature of EVE's player-driven economy, things like this can have a
huge impact. In some ways, the value of the ISK could be negatively affected
by this.

~~~
rcxdude
Actually, the article title is technically incorrect, since this activity was
actually an ISK sink, due to the use of ISK in part of buying items from the
LP store (which removes ISK from the game). The trillions they made was from
other players, not from ISK faucets like NPC bounties. What they generated
lots of was the highly valuable items which were then sold to other players.
So it would have a deflationary effect instead of inflation.

~~~
kylemaxwell
By recycling LP into LP, they actually decreased the effect of the ISK sink
(LP store). This means that ISK that should have been removed according to the
intent of the design were not.

------
Spoom
IMHO CCP should never have allowed users to buy game time with in-game
credits. That's effectively tying the security of their in-game economy with
the security of their real world revenue. With the ability to do something
like this, it's possible that users could find an exploit large enough to
never have to pay for their game time again, potentially without CCP knowing
about it.

I would suggest that they limit the number of "30 day game codes" that can be
bought with in-game credits to something like three per year per user. At
least then you're guaranteed that players are paying something (as long as
they're not also sockpuppeting).

~~~
lacksconfidence
When you buy a 30 day time code with in-game ISK, CCP gets real money. This is
because the time codes are bought by other players with real money, and then
sold in game for ISK to other players.

By allowing time-code's to be traded for ISK CCP has basically created a
system where more accounts(= more $$$) are active than would otherwise exist.
I find this method to be particularly ingeneous, because people who want to
farm and horde ISK can have many accounts without having to pay big bucks
every month, and people who just want to sit down and shoot at others in PvP
can pay some other player to do their ISK generation for them.

~~~
Spoom
Ah, I didn't know this. Thanks. This is a much less dangerous situation for
them, but I would still rather keep real money and in-game money completely
separate since if they're not, it creates powerful incentives to cheat the
system.

------
cremnob
Just to be clear they didn't exploit a bug, this was the result of poor design
from CCP. They didn't understand the implications of changes they made in
their latest expansion and these guys took advantage of it.

This thread outlines the details of what they did
[https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=1241...](https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=124145&find=unread)

~~~
Retric
O it was a bug, and they patched it.

~~~
taligent
A bug is when you have the correct design wrongly implemented.

This is the opposite.

~~~
legutierr
You can have design bugs, too.

------
cremnob
I'd just like to add that this is why people from Wall Street end up working
for regulators and government in the real world. Despite the populist
narrative that has emerged post-financial crisis, the real reason for the
"revolving door" is that you need market experience if you're trying to make
effective regulatory and policy decisions.

In the case of EVE, you have players who have a better grasp of game mechanics
outsmarting the developers.

~~~
scott_s
Unfortunately, the opposite is much more common: people who start out as
regulators move to the other side. Sure, high level positions like the
Treasury Secretary and his staff will often have people from industry. But
rank-and-file regulators are, as I understand it, often _not_ from industry.

Harry Markopolous has an excellent book, "No One Would Listen"
([http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-
Financial/dp/04705...](http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-
Financial/dp/0470553731/)) about how he warned regulators multiple times about
Madoff. In the book, he explains how good regulators often end up going to
industry because the pay and prestige is much, much better. So, what you're
left with are the people who couldn't hack it in industry, which means the
regulators are continually going to be outgunned.

