9 ms·

How a player with a “useless” item almost took down EVE Online’s entire economy

452 points by ssclafani 13y ago

infoman 13y ago
that is why you never should trust the average anything
- eterm 13y ago
  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.
  - infoman 13y ago
    Somebody from teh c-level said, cmon we need to release the addon. Don't waste your time on mathematics ...
  - raylu 13y ago
    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.
bentcorner 13y ago
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).
lectrick 13y ago
“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.
- saraid216 13y ago
  I'm not sure you understand the difference between "sandbox" and "theme park", even though you just stated it.
- praptak 13y ago
  As far as I recall, these guys also confiscated all of the benefits from the exploit, although all of it was conducted on rather friendly terms. The team that had devised the scheme actually disclosed it to the game devs but the policy on loopholes was clear: even if you disclose, you don't get to keep the loot.
  - lukevdp 13y ago
    From the article "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.”"
    - mrgoldenbrown 13y ago
      That statement doesn't jive with several other articles about this exploit, and this post from the devs themselves. The players weren't banned, but they weren't allowed to keep their loot. http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/72972 http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/72972
- phaus 13y ago
  At some point in every development shop's existence, they must ask themselves a question. "Do I want to make games for gamers, or do I want to make a fortune for myself?" It's not Blizzard's fault that the majority of gamers don't like hardcore PVP. Every time a new PVP oriented MMO launches, it either fails immediately or quickly transitions to a more PVE-centric philosophy.
- floody-berry 13y ago
  They must have gotten it all out of their system with Diablo II, because they rewarded the hell out of hackers there. The only players who suffered were the ones who tried to play legitimately.
joshguthrie 13y ago
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.
- resu_nimda 13y ago
  Yep. The major alliances have numerous people that essentially have full time jobs running logistics operations (there is no instant travel, you actually have to move goods through often-dangerous space. Also the mechanism for controlling space, "sovereignty," is complex and requires constant maintenance), commanding fleets of hundreds of ships, and performing IT/security for their forum communities. One thing that amazed me: since spying and infiltration are real problems, some forum administrators implemented a form of steganography where an algorithm makes imperceptible edits to posts, uniquely for each user, so that when a leak is posted, they can figure out who it was. This was a few years ago, I'm sure by this time a few rounds of counter-measures have been tacked on. The depth and sophistication of strategy in this game are just way beyond anything else.
  - aerique 13y ago
    Yes, for EVE the metagame is half the fun! I wrote an API trawler for Sniggerdly / Pandemic Legion when the API key functionality got released. We tried catching alts and spies that way (applying required giving us their full API key). Another way to get more info on people was putting images in forum posts and hosting those images on your own server.
- ejfox 13y ago
  I love these stories as well and would love to read more. Is there a central place to find more? Or would someone care to drop some links my way?
gcb0 13y ago
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.
zipdog 13y ago
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/3281537/Porsche-and-VW-share-row-how-Germany-got-revenge-on-the-hedge-fund-locusts.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/32...
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  This didn't end well for Porsche, though, which is now a quavering vassal of Volkswagen AG.
  - green7ea 13y ago
    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_volkswagen_what_happened/viewall.html http://www.automobilemag.com/features/news/0911_porsche_and_...
    - nijk 13y ago
      Amazing that 74.1% is not considered controlling ownership in German law.
- jfb 13y ago
  And look at how well that turned out.
- baddox 13y ago
  The player didn't really "drive up the price by cornering the market." This was just an exploit of an edge case in the game's "average market price" algorithm, and didn't really have anything to do with cornering the market.
trout 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    I ended up late for work many days from mass-disenchanting.
    - antoko 13y ago
      ....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 :)
  - err_badprocrast 13y ago
    The definitive version of that which printed vast bucketloads of internet money was the JC Shuffle. buy ore (direct from farmers aka botters) -> prospect ore -> craft green rings (I think? been a while) -> disenchant -> sell enchanting scrolls and cut rare gems left over from prospecting In Guild Wars 2 I found some other interesting arbitrage opportunities - for example, Mystic Coins (available from monthly and daily tasks) had very predictable price cycles due to supply spikes on the first few days when it became possible to complete the monthly task.
philh 13y ago
I'm curious what they did to fix this.
DodgyEggplant 13y ago
Wall street in a nutshell. Brilliant.
glitch273 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    Well fixing the price could be exploitable as well.
msg 13y ago
The OP is more interesting: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=124145 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=1241... 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 13y ago
  I read this earlier and now 404'd...
ralphc 13y ago
EVE has full-time economists. How do you even put that in a job posting?
- jotux 13y ago
  Valve has an economist they work with for TF2, and he blogs: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/arbitrage-and-equilibrium-in-the-team-fortress-2-economy/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/arbitrage-and-equil...
  - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
    He hasn't blogged in months, though :(
    - janzer 13y ago
      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.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/varoufakis_on_v.htm...
- frakkingcylons 13y ago
  Like this: Economic Consultant for CCP Games - 2007 to Present
- metachris 13y ago
  Word of mouth.
- iooi 13y ago
  Valve does too. Hats.
- dabarnes 13y ago
  I play the game quite a bit, its said that there are some very rich russians that hire people to manage alliances, make money, and lead fleets.
caycep 13y ago
the goons have a long list of market shenanigans like this. cough cough ice cough cough.
shardling 13y ago
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 13y ago
  This is why KoL has a money sink which fixes the prices on many common items.
  - shardling 13y ago
    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/ 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!)
daemonfire300 13y ago
This article couldn't be more inaccurate and delayed. Shame on you.
CurtMonash 13y ago
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.
alexvr 13y ago
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
X4 13y ago
I think this is exploitable in real life too. :) I'll share my idea, when you share your ideas first ;)
lnanek2 13y ago
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.
senthilnayagam 13y ago
"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.
guiambros 13y ago
Nice story. Very very similar to what happened with Lucasfilm's Habitat, in the mid-80's. http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html 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".
Yuioup 13y ago
This scenario sounds like bitcoin.
toolslive 13y ago
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.
marme 13y ago
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.
prirun 13y ago
Probably got the idea from a TBTF banker.
jrockway 13y ago
“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."
nijk 13y ago
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.

452 points by ssclafani 13y ago

infoman 13y ago

that is why you never should trust the average anything

eterm 13y ago
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.
- infoman 13y ago
  Somebody from teh c-level said, cmon we need to release the addon. Don't waste your time on mathematics ...
- raylu 13y ago
  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.

bentcorner 13y ago

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).

lectrick 13y ago

“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.

saraid216 13y ago
I'm not sure you understand the difference between "sandbox" and "theme park", even though you just stated it.
praptak 13y ago
As far as I recall, these guys also confiscated all of the benefits from the exploit, although all of it was conducted on rather friendly terms. The team that had devised the scheme actually disclosed it to the game devs but the policy on loopholes was clear: even if you disclose, you don't get to keep the loot.
- lukevdp 13y ago
  From the article "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.”"
  - mrgoldenbrown 13y ago
    That statement doesn't jive with several other articles about this exploit, and this post from the devs themselves. The players weren't banned, but they weren't allowed to keep their loot. http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/72972 http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/72972
phaus 13y ago
At some point in every development shop's existence, they must ask themselves a question. "Do I want to make games for gamers, or do I want to make a fortune for myself?" It's not Blizzard's fault that the majority of gamers don't like hardcore PVP. Every time a new PVP oriented MMO launches, it either fails immediately or quickly transitions to a more PVE-centric philosophy.
floody-berry 13y ago
They must have gotten it all out of their system with Diablo II, because they rewarded the hell out of hackers there. The only players who suffered were the ones who tried to play legitimately.

joshguthrie 13y ago

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.

resu_nimda 13y ago
Yep. The major alliances have numerous people that essentially have full time jobs running logistics operations (there is no instant travel, you actually have to move goods through often-dangerous space. Also the mechanism for controlling space, "sovereignty," is complex and requires constant maintenance), commanding fleets of hundreds of ships, and performing IT/security for their forum communities. One thing that amazed me: since spying and infiltration are real problems, some forum administrators implemented a form of steganography where an algorithm makes imperceptible edits to posts, uniquely for each user, so that when a leak is posted, they can figure out who it was. This was a few years ago, I'm sure by this time a few rounds of counter-measures have been tacked on. The depth and sophistication of strategy in this game are just way beyond anything else.
- aerique 13y ago
  Yes, for EVE the metagame is half the fun! I wrote an API trawler for Sniggerdly / Pandemic Legion when the API key functionality got released. We tried catching alts and spies that way (applying required giving us their full API key). Another way to get more info on people was putting images in forum posts and hosting those images on your own server.
ejfox 13y ago
I love these stories as well and would love to read more. Is there a central place to find more? Or would someone care to drop some links my way?

gcb0 13y ago

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.

zipdog 13y ago

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/3281537/Porsche-and-VW-share-row-how-Germany-got-revenge-on-the-hedge-fund-locusts.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/32...

CamperBob2 13y ago
This didn't end well for Porsche, though, which is now a quavering vassal of Volkswagen AG.
- green7ea 13y ago
  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_volkswagen_what_happened/viewall.html http://www.automobilemag.com/features/news/0911_porsche_and_...
  - nijk 13y ago
    Amazing that 74.1% is not considered controlling ownership in German law.
jfb 13y ago
And look at how well that turned out.
baddox 13y ago
The player didn't really "drive up the price by cornering the market." This was just an exploit of an edge case in the game's "average market price" algorithm, and didn't really have anything to do with cornering the market.

trout 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  I ended up late for work many days from mass-disenchanting.
  - antoko 13y ago
    ....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 :)
- err_badprocrast 13y ago
  The definitive version of that which printed vast bucketloads of internet money was the JC Shuffle. buy ore (direct from farmers aka botters) -> prospect ore -> craft green rings (I think? been a while) -> disenchant -> sell enchanting scrolls and cut rare gems left over from prospecting In Guild Wars 2 I found some other interesting arbitrage opportunities - for example, Mystic Coins (available from monthly and daily tasks) had very predictable price cycles due to supply spikes on the first few days when it became possible to complete the monthly task.

philh 13y ago

I'm curious what they did to fix this.

DodgyEggplant 13y ago

Wall street in a nutshell. Brilliant.

glitch273 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Well fixing the price could be exploitable as well.

msg 13y ago

The OP is more interesting: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=124145 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=1241... 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 13y ago
I read this earlier and now 404'd...

ralphc 13y ago

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

jotux 13y ago
Valve has an economist they work with for TF2, and he blogs: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/arbitrage-and-equilibrium-in-the-team-fortress-2-economy/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/arbitrage-and-equil...
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
  He hasn't blogged in months, though :(
  - janzer 13y ago
    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.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/varoufakis_on_v.htm...
frakkingcylons 13y ago
Like this: Economic Consultant for CCP Games - 2007 to Present
metachris 13y ago
Word of mouth.
iooi 13y ago
Valve does too. Hats.
dabarnes 13y ago
I play the game quite a bit, its said that there are some very rich russians that hire people to manage alliances, make money, and lead fleets.

caycep 13y ago

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

shardling 13y ago

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 13y ago
This is why KoL has a money sink which fixes the prices on many common items.
- shardling 13y ago
  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/ 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!)

daemonfire300 13y ago

This article couldn't be more inaccurate and delayed. Shame on you.

CurtMonash 13y ago

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.

alexvr 13y ago

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

X4 13y ago

I think this is exploitable in real life too. :) I'll share my idea, when you share your ideas first ;)

lnanek2 13y ago

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.

senthilnayagam 13y ago

"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.

guiambros 13y ago

Nice story. Very very similar to what happened with Lucasfilm's Habitat, in the mid-80's. http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html 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".

Yuioup 13y ago

This scenario sounds like bitcoin.

toolslive 13y ago

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.

marme 13y ago

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.

prirun 13y ago

Probably got the idea from a TBTF banker.

jrockway 13y ago

“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."

nijk 13y ago

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.