

EVE player destroys over $1000 worth of game time - noarchy
http://www.massively.com/2010/08/08/eve-player-destroys-over-1000-worth-of-game-time/

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jarin
This is why I used to love playing EVE Online (in Goonfleet). Since ship loss
(and now monetary loss) is permanent and fully sanctioned by the developers,
it's way more thrilling and nerve-wracking than just dying and going on a
corpse run. Not to mention the hilariousness of blowing up someone's shipyard
hours before their Titan finished building (back when they were rare and
represented months of an alliance's resource output).

I guess the closest thing in real life would be playing high-stakes poker.

~~~
johndoe77
I upvoted him b/c he was in Goonfleet. :o)

Flying with the Goons was always an adventure.

~~~
jcurbo
Same here. I was in Goonfleet for 2 years, it was a blast :)

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Tyrant505
This is what makes games fun. Looting and losing loot is an essential and
fundamental gameplay element which has been disappearing ever since
Everquest(imagine WOW with prepatch UO rules) due to catering to crying and
whining. I remember when I was playing Ultima 7 and 8 while talking on the
phone with friends dreaming of the day would be able to walk down the same
path together in real time. That dream was realized. While it was challenging
to battle PK's on the pathway in UO(get paralyzed and fire balled), it only
made me more determined to become stronger! There is so much potential for
someone to create the killer mmorpg which doesn't nerf real economies and
vilans. This real-life and direct dollar value loss is nothing compared to
losing your house key and having your whole tower looted of a years worth of
stuff because you were careless not to protect the transport.

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DLWormwood
> There is so much potential for someone to create the killer mmorpg which
> doesn't nerf real economies and vilans.

Unfortunately, such an MMO would not be economically stable in the real world
in the medium and long term. Most people who play games do so as an escape,
not as a proxy for real life power politics. If nothing else, any game content
dependent on loss mechanics tend to become avoided by players past a certain
user base size, as they figure out which game content is lower risk. (Grinding
boss runs and the like, for example.) Yes, for some players, this isn’t “fun,”
but game designers have to focus on where the majority of gamers who provide
the monthly fees or “freemium” content.

EVE is the only MMO I’m aware of that avoided this problem, but it has done so
at the cost of being confined to a very tight user community with limited
prospects for growth or mainstream awareness. EVE doesn’t sound very fun to
me; the requirement to make corps (guilds in other games) and be beholden to
your peers makes the social stress requirement worse than public school and
megacorp office work in my mind.

~~~
Tyrant505
I would consider WoW, EQ, and others(Perfect World), economic successes of
course. It depends what do you want to create: shareholder value or a great
game. Perhaps there is a middle ground!

Believe me when I say we are at the cusp of such online worlds. UO is still
online. Guess how many years! But, how much profit is enough? When I "escape,"
I can/'t help but expect the basic rules of property and ownership to entail
the possibility such property to be stolen or taken! (I would rather be
subject to such in a game, rather than real-life of course.) What is the root
of your escape? How do you need to do so? To me, giving real life attributes
to a game allows people to choose different paths than they normally would
which provides that escape you deem important. "Immersion" is of course the
goal however.

Personally, I don't even like character level-ups. I much preferred UO's skill
based numerics. I didn't even mind Stat-loss era when, if you died as a PK,
you would be penalized 20% of your skills when it was heavily weighed at the
higher end(it took just as long to get from 80 to 90 magery as 99 to 100.)

~~~
DLWormwood
> I would consider WoW, EQ, and others(Perfect World), economic successes of
> course.

I wasn’t referring to MMOs in general, but those that assess the players
various forms of "loss" for sloppy play. I played WoW for about a year, and
for the most part, the game has mostly removed the "loss mechanics" that the
original poster was complaining were absent in most modern MMOs. Originally,
WoW had experience and even equipment loss penalties for dying too much. These
have gone by the wayside, as well as making the crafting mechanics in the game
more about personal buffs than creating goods for an economy, something that
EVE is supposed to excel at.

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carterschonwald
summary for those who somehow didn't make it through the article: to keep
sales of in-game currency for real money under control, the
publisher/developer for eve online a while back created the mechanism of
redeemable subscription codes that also are in game items. Presumably it also
has a secondary effect of having an influence on ingame inflation (theres
really cool data available the eve online economy for those who are
interested)

over 1000 dollars worth of these items were destroyed.

now the bit at the end of the article just basically mentions how the reported
event was verifiable, by way of the authenticated api for viewing player
information

~~~
andre3k1
Destroyed because the virtual cargo ship they were being transported in was
attacked by other players.

The ship exploded and all cargo (worth a supposed $1000 USD) was lost.

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colonelxc
A special note for non-EVE-ers, the stuff in the cargo hold has a chance to
either survive or be destroyed.

The players that destroyed the ship (and associated cargo) weren't trying to
destroy the cargo, just got unlucky.

~~~
euccastro
Another bit of context: the ship that was carrying the time codes was a lowly
frigate, the smallest and weakest class in the game. So whoever was
transporting such valuable goods in that eggshell was hoping nobody would care
to intercept such a worthless ship, or he was just plain dumb, or probably
both.

~~~
DaemonXI
He didn't even use a Tech 2 frigate, meaning (IMO) he was going for a super
low-tech ship hoping nobody would notice.

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stcredzero
It wouldn't be the first time players obliterated game time. Players also
sabotaged large inter-alliance battles by doing frequent mercantile/trading
operations until the star system's server would fall over. Admins would come
in and reset the system, with the result being the work of 100's of players
being undone. (6 hours straight causing millions of points of damage.) Waste
the time of players this way, you've easily obliterated their day's
subscription. It doesn't take this happening too many times for this to add up
to $1000.

~~~
DLWormwood
Not quite the same thing; what happened in this instance was game time was
lost that hadn’t been redeemed yet, but paid for. (By somebody, not necessary
the victim mentioned.)

It can be argued that what happened in your instance wasn’t a “real” loss,
since players got to actually play for a few hours, and could have maintained
or created new social ties during that time period, even if they lost virtual
“loot.” It would still sting, but not quite as bad as what happened here.

~~~
stcredzero
_It would still sting, but not quite as bad as what happened here._

Uh, no. We spent two whole months down in zero-security space on a campaign
where we lost a player-constructed station. (The kind with a market!) This
happened to us again and again -- we were winning and the other side lagged
out the system and got everything reset. If it weren't for severs falling
over, we would have won by taking down enemy towers and gaining ownership of
the system.

Not only did this add up to well over $1000 of lost player-time, but the whole
experience was demoralizing and social ties were _broken_ by the experience.

~~~
DLWormwood
You just convinced me to never try EVE. If it is normal for players to spend
_months_ creating content that admins can willingly delete with no recourse,
the real-to-virtual-currency conversion issue is the least of the game’s
problems.

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sanswork
Converting in game assets back to real world currency is a bad idea in my
opinion because you can't really do it in Eve. You can buy game time which is
like that but not the same thing.

You can easily make >1b a week in Eve without too much effort so losing 22B
while not fun isn't equal to losing $1000 for most people that have that much
in game currency.

I've lost ships worth over $300 by this thinking without blinking because its
just in-game currency and apparently have over $3000 worth of in game assets
but its not real and I can't just go cash it out at that rate. Best case is I
never pay for the game again.

~~~
tetha
In the special case of playing time, I think re-conversion is valid, because
buying more playing time basically enables you a certain number of cpu-time in
their servers, which then overall translates into hardware, electricity, ...

Jugding from this direction, $1000 was saved for someone, because the server
costs which would have appeared if the game time was used disappeared.

But besides this, I agree.

~~~
euccastro
I guess per-player costs are significantly less than the full amount. For one
thing, CCP wouldn't make any money if $1000 worth of subscription cost them
$1000 to serve. Moreover, a part of the maintenance expenses go to fixed costs
like development, which are independent of the number of players.

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memoryfault
Too many acronyms that I'm not familiar with because I never played Eve. Can
someone translate?

~~~
zitterbewegung
1 PLEX = 1 month of free game time. ISK = in game currency Plex stands for
pilots licence extension. ISK stands for Iceland Kroner where the parent
company of EVE online is based.

~~~
euccastro
Although the ISK name comes from the Krona, it officialy means Inter Space
Kredit or something like that.

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aaronbrethorst
For some reason, I'm reminded of this Penny Arcade strip: <http://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2004/06/25/>

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joshu
so... is eve fun?

~~~
sanswork
I enjoy it as do a lot of other people. On the other hand lots of people hate
it or have misconceptions about what it will be like only to be disappointed
when they start playing.

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geuis
I was on EVE last night when someone in the corp channel shared the link to
the kill page. I'm rather pleasantly surprised to see something like this make
it to HN. Are there other EVE players here?

~~~
aerique
By the looks of it!

I used to be in Sniggerdly / Pandemic Legion but I havent't played for more
than a year now. Even during the last year that I was a member I played less
than I was coding corporation and alliance tools against the then new EVE API.

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jrockway
This is why you should always pay the extra $2 for insurance.

~~~
noarchy
In this case, the only insurance would have been to not undock. You can insure
ships in Eve, but their fittings and cargo are never covered. The hapless
victim undocked with extremely-valuable cargo in the equivalent of a piece of
wet tissue paper, in terms of his ship's durability. In fact, most smart
players wouldn't undock with 22 billion ISK in cargo, period...at least not in
the game's busiest system, where scores of would-be griefers are waiting to
nab people just like this guy.

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hackermom
For players in Europe, the value of those 74 PLEXes were higher: we actually
have to pay €14.95 per month, while the americans pay $14.95.

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atomical
How is this relevant to Hacker News?

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jonursenbach
Starting to grow tired of all this "how is this relevant" stuff lately. If you
don't like it, flag or ignore it and get on with your lives.

~~~
raganwald
What's wrong with asking? I generally flag things that are gratuitously
inappropriate, and ignore those I don't like but think are appropriate.

Sometimes something seems inappropriate but popular, and I think I understand
why. I flag it and carry on. But once in a while there's a post that I think
is inappropriate but I don't understand why. So I ask.

That being said, I do get why using the question as a passive-aggressive way
of saying "Not HN" is tiresome and also a violation of the guidelines. No
judgment on this specific question, just a general comment...

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khafra
In the case of ingenuously asking, the connotations attached to the question
have to be dispelled somehow; either by asking a different way (perhaps with
more specificity) or adding an explicit disclaimer to that effect.

