32 ms·

EVE players abuse faction warfare to produce trillions of ISK

101 points by cremnob 14y ago

cremnob 14y ago
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=124145&find=unread https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=1241...
- Retric 14y ago
  O it was a bug, and they patched it.
  - cremnob 14y ago
    They patched the ability to make ISK in this way but everything these players did were within the rules of the game.
  - taligent 14y ago
    A bug is when you have the correct design wrongly implemented. This is the opposite.
    - legutierr 14y ago
      You can have design bugs, too.
cremnob 14y ago
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.
- ta12121 14y ago
  Oh, so that's why the SEC caught Bernie Madoff after being tipped off to his activities and before he could do major harm. Market experience.
- ChrisLTD 14y ago
  The revolving door was well in place before the recent financial crises.
- dodo53 14y ago
  Or because then the banks have an insider who knows what 'features' of the legislation are coming out next so they can exploit them the fastest.
- Estragon 14y ago
  You'd probably find Harry Markopolous's No One Would Listen interesting. He's a bit of a nut, but he's the one who dobbed Madoff in repeatedly, to no effect, and he goes into great detail about the brokenness which makes this possible. For starters, there is no "revolving door." The salaries for regulatory work make it very much the booby prize on Wall St, and every one doing regulatory work is looking to move out of it. So you get the worst of the industry supposedly regulating what amount to their prospective employers. As a result, Wall St regulation is impeded by laziness, ignorance and incompetence.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  I'm not sure if the conclusion follows here though. How are the developers of the game not aware of the game mechanics? Are they not playing heavily themselves, or does the company not monitor these types of things to understand exactly what the community is doing, how the mechanics work, etc?
- scott_s 14y ago
  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/0470553731/ http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-Financial/dp/04705...) 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.
polyfractal 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
  - axxl 14y ago
    I think part of the problem with collaboration in shooters, is after that particular game, there's no reward to collaboration. So what if you teamkill, you're on a diferent team the next match. In EVE there are long term rewards to playing along with a corp, for both the corp and the player. You make money for the corp in some way and the corp provides you benefits (free play-time, ships, etc), security in risky places and the opportunity to explore places you can't on your own.
ben0x539 14y ago
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=1519268#post1519268 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519... https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519338#post1519338 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519...
ericcholis 14y ago
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.
- polyfractal 14y ago
  Certainly, to some extent. However, CCP releases numbers about the state of the economy on a somewhat regular basis, and it becomes clear that a lot of ISK is tied up in inactive or banned accounts. That's one of their greatest ISK sinks. Also, you quickly run out of things to buy when you have trillions of ISK. Most people with that kind of money start bankrolling corps (reimbursement programs, etc). This doesn't destroy ISK since it just gets redistributed, but the redistribution allows for more people lose ISK to sinks (inactivity, fees, etc.)
- rcxdude 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
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).
- polyfractal 14y ago
  The number of people exploiting the game and playing for free forever is vastly smaller than the number of people who hemorrhage a lot of real money on space money so they can buy a new spaceship. It totally makes sense from CCP's point of view to allow gamecards. People get silly about purchasing them so they can buy <shiny new object>. It is also a great carrot to keep people playing...since you can technically play for free if you have enough ISK. I spent quite a while on the treadmill of "Have enough ISK to buy timecards...but need to keep hustling so I have enough for next month". Sometimes you miss your target and have to pay for a month, sometimes you don't. I eventually became "profitable" in that my businesses generated more revenue than what I had to pay in timecards, so I could pay for free as long as I kept them running. But most people like to blow up spaceships, not run businesses, so I was definitely in the minority. Furthermore, the vast majority of players live in crappy space which is not very lucrative. Making that 500m a month for a timecard is a very difficult proposition. Note: I, like most people, had 2-3 accounts that I was playing on. So that's a lot of timecards to buy each month.
- lacksconfidence 14y ago
  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.

101 points by cremnob 14y ago

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=124145&find=unread https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=1241...

Retric 14y ago
O it was a bug, and they patched it.
- cremnob 14y ago
  They patched the ability to make ISK in this way but everything these players did were within the rules of the game.
- taligent 14y ago
  A bug is when you have the correct design wrongly implemented. This is the opposite.
  - legutierr 14y ago
    You can have design bugs, too.

cremnob 14y ago

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.

ta12121 14y ago
Oh, so that's why the SEC caught Bernie Madoff after being tipped off to his activities and before he could do major harm. Market experience.
ChrisLTD 14y ago
The revolving door was well in place before the recent financial crises.
dodo53 14y ago
Or because then the banks have an insider who knows what 'features' of the legislation are coming out next so they can exploit them the fastest.
Estragon 14y ago
You'd probably find Harry Markopolous's No One Would Listen interesting. He's a bit of a nut, but he's the one who dobbed Madoff in repeatedly, to no effect, and he goes into great detail about the brokenness which makes this possible. For starters, there is no "revolving door." The salaries for regulatory work make it very much the booby prize on Wall St, and every one doing regulatory work is looking to move out of it. So you get the worst of the industry supposedly regulating what amount to their prospective employers. As a result, Wall St regulation is impeded by laziness, ignorance and incompetence.
brown9-2 14y ago
I'm not sure if the conclusion follows here though. How are the developers of the game not aware of the game mechanics? Are they not playing heavily themselves, or does the company not monitor these types of things to understand exactly what the community is doing, how the mechanics work, etc?
scott_s 14y ago
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/0470553731/ http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-Financial/dp/04705...) 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.

polyfractal 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.
- axxl 14y ago
  I think part of the problem with collaboration in shooters, is after that particular game, there's no reward to collaboration. So what if you teamkill, you're on a diferent team the next match. In EVE there are long term rewards to playing along with a corp, for both the corp and the player. You make money for the corp in some way and the corp provides you benefits (free play-time, ships, etc), security in risky places and the opportunity to explore places you can't on your own.

ben0x539 14y ago

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=1519268#post1519268 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519... https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519338#post1519338 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1519...

ericcholis 14y ago

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.

polyfractal 14y ago
Certainly, to some extent. However, CCP releases numbers about the state of the economy on a somewhat regular basis, and it becomes clear that a lot of ISK is tied up in inactive or banned accounts. That's one of their greatest ISK sinks. Also, you quickly run out of things to buy when you have trillions of ISK. Most people with that kind of money start bankrolling corps (reimbursement programs, etc). This doesn't destroy ISK since it just gets redistributed, but the redistribution allows for more people lose ISK to sinks (inactivity, fees, etc.)
rcxdude 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago

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).

polyfractal 14y ago
The number of people exploiting the game and playing for free forever is vastly smaller than the number of people who hemorrhage a lot of real money on space money so they can buy a new spaceship. It totally makes sense from CCP's point of view to allow gamecards. People get silly about purchasing them so they can buy <shiny new object>. It is also a great carrot to keep people playing...since you can technically play for free if you have enough ISK. I spent quite a while on the treadmill of "Have enough ISK to buy timecards...but need to keep hustling so I have enough for next month". Sometimes you miss your target and have to pay for a month, sometimes you don't. I eventually became "profitable" in that my businesses generated more revenue than what I had to pay in timecards, so I could pay for free as long as I kept them running. But most people like to blow up spaceships, not run businesses, so I was definitely in the minority. Furthermore, the vast majority of players live in crappy space which is not very lucrative. Making that 500m a month for a timecard is a very difficult proposition. Note: I, like most people, had 2-3 accounts that I was playing on. So that's a lot of timecards to buy each month.
lacksconfidence 14y ago
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.