
Eve Evolved: Analysing Eve's New Economic Reports - sybhn
http://massivelyop.com/2016/03/06/eve-evolved-analysing-eves-new-economic-reports/
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carlosdp
Eve's player-based economy is really badass, to the point that they have an
economist on staff to generate reports like these. CCP found a great way to
combat RMT (real money trading) rampant in MMOs where you buy in-game currency
with real-world money with the introduction of PLEX (aka Pilot License).

Basically, you can pay ~$15 for an in-game PLEX, which when "used" adds 30
days of game-time to your account subscription. But this is an in-game item
just like any other, which means it can be bought and sold in the in-game
markets for the in-game currency (ISK).

Hence, it gives a legitimate way to purchase in-game currency with real-world
money, without inflating the economy (because no ISK is generated and added to
the economy at any time during this transaction, it simply changes hands until
the item is "used" and therefore destroyed). In addition, it allows dedicated
players that are cash-strapped an avenue to play for free by using currency
acquired in-game to fund their subscription.

It also had the side-effect of giving an approximation of what the virtual
exchange rate is between dollars and ISK, which makes for very attractive
headlines when larger ships and assets get destroyed in the game.

~~~
stcredzero
_Eve 's player-based economy is really badass, to the point that they have an
economist on staff to generate reports like these._

I just read somewhere that their economist left in 2014.

~~~
imchillyb
His name:

Eyjolfur Gudmundsson

Rector at University of Akureyri

IcelandComputer Games

Current: University of Akureyri

Previous: CCP

[https://is.linkedin.com/in/dreyjog](https://is.linkedin.com/in/dreyjog)

\----- Dr. EyjoG felt an itch to apply some of the lessons he’d learned at Eve
to the world of higher ed. So when Akureyri advertised for a new president in
2014, he once more found himself jumping industries.

[http://web.uri.edu/quadangles/the-virtual-
economist/](http://web.uri.edu/quadangles/the-virtual-economist/)

~~~
jjoonathan
See also: Yanis Varoufakis

[http://www.ibtimes.co.in/valve-economist-yanis-varoufakis-
ap...](http://www.ibtimes.co.in/valve-economist-yanis-varoufakis-appointed-
finance-minister-greece-621689)

~~~
jbpetersen
Notably he went from being an in-house economist for Valve Software to being
the Greece's minister of finance.

------
sybhn
"At the end of February 2016, the total liquid ISK in the EVE Online economy
was 948.043 trillion ISK (equivalent to $16.45 million using PLEX
conversion)."

find this fact mind boggling!

~~~
stcredzero
Meh. It's a by-product of the typical hyperinflation you get when you try to
devise an economy where everyone gets to print as much money as they care to.
(Which is what MMO grinding for cash basically amounts to.) Their trying to
peg ISK to real world money through PLEX is a typical strategy to try and
counteract this, which also typically kind-of works, but only typically kind-
of.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE)

My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going
to let players print money.

~~~
jerf
Rather than avoiding printing money, I'd suggest considering using feedback
loops to try to control the economy.

One of the core problems with a simulated economy is that it can't ever really
be a real economy as long as it has significant chunks of the economic
transactions coming from programs rather than people. There's always a border
between the humans and the machines, and I think a lot of the silliness of MMO
economies comes from that border, and the way it can be exploited, rather than
the economic issues themselves.

For instance, in the real world, there is no such thing as a fixed price. You
can't wake up one day, harvest a bushel of apples, and take it down to the
fruit stand down the street to sell for $5, regardless of all other economic
conditions. That bends the economy. In the real world, you can't buy an
unbounded number of apples for $10 a bushel. That bends the economy. In the
real world, if you sell a bushel of apples, it doesn't essentially disappear
from the Prime Material Plane, it has to be transported to someone else who
wants it, without destroying the apples, before they go bad. That bends the
economy.

The inaccuracies are fundamentally unfixable in some sense, but they could
probably be mitigated by trying to put in a feedback loop where things get
more expensive as more people buy them, and get cheaper as fewer people buy
them. If done correctly, this would also prevent the problem where you have to
explicitly create and manage sinks; you let the economy figure out the sinks
for you.

It would also almost certainly be dynamically unstable, with some things being
under- or over-priced all the time in various cycle... but this can be seen as
advantage for a game as much as it can be seen as a disadvantage. Some very
clever thinking might even let you exert some control over the cycles and do
things like try to ensure they don't all end up in sync (i.e., consider the
equations for simple harmonic motion and how you can affect the "k" constant
for different commodities).

The other thing I'd consider would be implementing storage fees (which
themselves float) to prevent hoarding and gathering excessive wealth, probably
structured as a progressive tax, too. Or at the very least, make it a knob you
can crank and tell people it may change on a day-by-day basis.

~~~
FreezerburnV
If you're talking about fixed prices in EVE's economy, you possibly don't
understand it very well. There are very few fixed prices in EVE, most of which
are things like skill books which by necessity have to be generated by the
game systems. Or commodities, which have no real use outside of buying and
selling for some small profit.

All useful items in the game are sold to other players, and the price changes
over time based on supply and demand, or other traders just being cutthroat
about selling their items. I made a decent chunk of money by putting up buy
orders for items to get from actual players, and then selling those items to
actual players for several hundred percent markup. (that was just how the
price was at the time) Occasionally a single item could become entirely
worthless to sell because other traders would get into price wars to make sure
their items sold first by modifying their sell price down by a small amount.
Or buy price up by a small amount.

Recently there was a large war, and the price of a lot of the popular ships
went up because the large alliances were buying large amounts of them.
Possibly the price of manufactured items went up by some amount as well due to
minerals becoming more scarce from alliances consuming huge amounts of them to
fuel their war.

All that is to say: you don't sell apples for $5 every time ;) Though the
price of certain base goods, such as a common mineral, might only vary by +-
0.10 of an ISK in general.

------
stcredzero
_While the majority of EVE players are content to run missions or smash
spaceships together for fun and profit_

When I was playing Eve Online, ships didn't have collisions with anything but
force field bubbles. (Planets were nothing but really huge force field
bubbles. (Tower) You could still skillfully terminate a warp to get to the
center of one, however. I never figured out how to exploit that.)

~~~
splesjaz
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8K18S_RNEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8K18S_RNEQ)

This video shows how grid bombing was done, sadly i don't play EVE anymore
it's a great game lots of different Players/groups

~~~
stcredzero
There were too many meta-exploits in Eve. My alliance lost our player
constructed station because we kept on having the server crash underneath us
when we were clearly winning a battle to take down an enemy's tower. After the
3rd time that happens, it's harder to get people to the battle.

