EVE player destroys over $1000 worth of game time

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

by noarchy • 16 years ago

76 63 16 years ago

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

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.

euccastro5• 16 years ago

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

_wdh• 16 years ago

In EVE, players can pay real money for an ingame item called a PLEX. A PLEX can either be sold ingame to another player for pretend EVE money (called ISK) or used up by the player for an extra month subscription. In this way, players can either pay real money for ISK or pay ISK for extra subscription time. A recent patch allows players to move these items about in the game world (before they were locked in the station).

In EVE, players fly spaceships about. There are different classes of spaceship, but the smallest and weakest ship are called frigates. They are also by far the most common ships to see in EVE as they are the only ships that can be flown by new players.

EVE also permits (and encourages) player on player combat. When a player's ship is destroyed, there is a random dice roll for each item in cargo to decide if the item will survive. Surviving items are dropped into the game world and can be taken by other players. Therefore players can attack other players and steal their items. This is normally done by a gang of pirate players who wait at the stargates that act as bottlenecks between areas. These pirates scan passing ships to see what cargo they are holding and if it's worth it, they attack. Mostly they attack large cargo ships, not beginners frigates as the loot you get from a beginning player doesn't outweigh the costs of attacking a ship.

What's happened here is that one player (probably working for some sort of large ingame player run group) was trying to move PLEX around (probably for profit, the market is player run and prices are different from area to area) in a weak frigate in an attempt to avoid attention, assuming that pirates would not bother scanning a tiny frigate. If it works it's a very cheap and easy way to move items about. In practice the pirates much have cargo scanned the frigate and then attacked it, seeking to steal the PLEX's. However the PLEX's were destroyed by an unlucky dice roll, robbing the pirates of their loot.

atomical2• 16 years ago

How is this relevant to Hacker News?

enneff• 16 years ago

How is online currency _not_ relevant to Hacker News?

jonursenbach• 16 years ago

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.

natep• 16 years ago

I'm sure someone sufficiently motivated could write a program to see what percentage of items on the front page have "This isn't HN" in the comments, because it it seems like it's happening more and more.

atomical2• 16 years ago

Tough.

raganwald• 16 years ago

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...

carterschonwald• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

colonelxc• 16 years ago

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.

parallax7d• 16 years ago

>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

Replace the word "keep" with the phrase "cash in on". Eve never really cared about isk farmers/sellers, they are paying subscribers after all. Sure they would ban a few hundred accounts every few months, but it would only be a small percentage of the total farmers.

Once they realized they could be making some of that money themselves did they create PLEX. And the farming continues as they don't want to stoop to the level of selling isk for money.

sanswork2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

euccastro5• 16 years ago

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.

euccastro5• 16 years ago

In this case someone actually paid over $1000 for those assets, so the valuation is warranted.

geuis• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

noarchy2• 16 years ago

Definitely. I was hoping that this article would be of some interest to the HN crowd (figuring some fellow Eve pilots would be lurking), which is why I submitted it.

joshu• 16 years ago

so... is eve fun?

sanswork2• 16 years ago

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.

Tuna-Fish• 16 years ago

Depends on how twisted you are in the head. After playing EVE for a while, all the other MMORPGs feel like small sandboxes where anything that's sharper than a basketball is covered by four inches of nerf. In EVE, the sandbox is filled with razor blades and kids playing there are handed firearms. Depending on what kind of a person you are, this either means you will never enjoy the game, or it will make you quite strongly addicted to it.

pquerna• 16 years ago

Eve at its best is the funest game I've ever played.

Its why I'm still subscribed after years.

At its worst, its terrible, the lag, the waiting, the bordem, and CCP making terrible decisions.

But its hard to beat the rush of crushing a human powered fleet, of hundreds of players. Realistically, you can do 300 vs 300 in Eve Today with relatively little lag, its only when systems top 1000 thats things fall apart -- there is a strategy to some of that, but in the sub 600 person fights, it can be absolutely Epic, and no other MMO or game on the market is even close.

Its Fun. You just have to pick and choose.

gaius• 16 years ago

It's OK, but the original Elite is better.

aaronbrethorst• 16 years ago

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

Tyrant5054• 16 years ago

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.

DLWormwood5• 16 years ago

> 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.

Tyrant5054• 16 years ago

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.)

Tichy2• 16 years ago

And yet, people also play a lot of games where they can lose, for example games like chess. Why shouldn't a "dangerous" MMORPG also be able to provide an escape from reality.

Another example of a "dangerous" CRPG would be nethack, which also is played by many people. ("dangerous" meaning permanent deaths and stuff like that).

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

When the discrepancy in power between you and another player is so great that you can't possibly win, "challenging" isn't the right word. When griefers can lock new players out of the game, that game has a serious problem. Very few players think being bullied is any fun at all.

Tyrant5054• 16 years ago

What's your highest score in Donkey Kong?(Billy Mitchell was once again certified as the world record holder(recent relevance)). Games used to be "challenging". Not to say these early games were the best way to monetize, but I believe you cannot discredit them as "good games," because they were fun to play! MMORPG's can find a player base larger then a "few" by providing a player initiated obstacle.

lreeves• 16 years ago

EVE handles it fairly well though; there's a large area that's mostly secure in the center of the game universe for Empire space. Players can stick to that area and be almost grief free the entire time (aside from the rare suicide attack).

Having said that, the most fun in EVE Online comes from playing in the less secure areas where the interactions are almost all player-driven.

Batsu• 16 years ago

In the end, the hurdles to overcome to build a game that is both player friendly and Pure PK are pretty high, but only because the players make it that way. On a basic level, if the consequences of PK are too high, it's not worth doing. If they're too low, new players are inherently punished by the (lack of a) system. If it's just right... well, EVE has probably come closer than any other modern MMO, and while I can't find subscriber stats, their most users online record was recently broken at ~60,000. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, boasted 11,500,000 active monthly subscriptions late last year. Any PK oriented game on the same grounds as WoW (in a world, have skills and equipment, etc) hasn't come even remotely close. Really, you might argue that the people have already spoken.

loewenskind• 16 years ago

Is the only goal in game making to support the most people? What about those 60k? Should no one provide for their interests because they are a smaller group than the 11 million? I would say there is very little overlap between the two groups so you can't say WoW is servicing both.

euccastro5• 16 years ago

While your point stands, note that 60K are the number of symultaneous online users. Active subscriptions are on the low hundreds of thousands. While not in the league of WoW, it's still very respectable.

You may argue that in music the people have already spoken and that Lady Gaga (or whoever is all the rage these days) is it, or that the Da Vinci Code had set the direction for literature a few years ago. But there's a whole universe of tastes out there. Not only the mainstream is worth catering to.

slyn• 16 years ago

>>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.

Hell yes. I play WoW in a moderately successful raiding guild (very roughly rank #250 worldwide), so a lot of the people that I play with played various MMOs and other various competitive games over the years, but they all act like I'm crazy when I bring up Runescape as a game that did some things right.

I played RS for a year or so when I was 15 (feels forever ago now, just turned 21). The game is totally different now than it used to be, but at the time the risk/reward aspects of RS Pking, dueling, and full scale clan wars made the game amazingly fun at the time. Now don't get me wrong, in retrospect the game was bad. Lots of the good things about the game came out of the player community, lots of the good things about the game were later nerfed or removed altogether, and last but certainly not least the gameplay itself was awful. Despite all this the risk aspect of dueling someone for a million gold or a rare item, or pking someone in the wilderness and taking their armor, or to encounter a 10-15 person group while roving as a 30 person clan in the deep wilderness and then finding out they were luring to another 30+ people just a little bit away was epic and a ton of fun.

WoW isn't really much better. The general gameplay in WoW is actually good and PvE in WoW can be really excellent, but there is no risk in anything, class balance is always a touchy subject , server communities are generally not big or if they are big they are usually horribly imbalanced to one faction, game lag is a problem when that ugly first M in MMO rears its head (for certain definitions of massive, 200 players in combat in the same place is near server crashing in WoW), and million other things are wrong with the game.

Long comment long, suffice it to say the "real" aspects of Eve are probably the most intriguing aspect of the game to me.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

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.

DLWormwood5• 16 years ago

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.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

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.

raquo• 16 years ago

The players were providing liquidity, what could be wrong with that?

jarin• 16 years ago

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.

mattmanser• 16 years ago

I honestly considered down voting you just because you were in goonfleet ;)

johndoe77• 16 years ago

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

Flying with the Goons was always an adventure.

jcurbo• 16 years ago

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

Marticus• 16 years ago

This is in fact why I miss EVE sometimes though - because stuff like the article (and your situation mentioned) can and DO happen from time-to-time.

jrockway• 16 years ago

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

noarchy2• 16 years ago

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.

hackermom• 16 years ago

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.

EVE player destroys over $1000 worth of game time

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