EVE players abuse faction warfare to produce trillions of ISK

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/06/22/eve-players-abuse-faction-warfare-to-produce-trillions-of-isk/

by cremnob • 14 years ago

101 53 14 years ago

massively.joystiq.com

cremnob3• 14 years 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=1241...

Retric• 14 years ago

O it was a bug, and they patched it.

cremnob3• 14 years ago

They patched the ability to make ISK in this way but everything these players did were within the rules of the game.

taligent• 14 years ago

A bug is when you have the correct design wrongly implemented.

This is the opposite.

cremnob3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

The revolving door was well in place before the recent financial crises.

dodo53• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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_s2• 14 years 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/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.

njharman• 14 years ago

No, you have thousands upon thousands of players banging away looking for exploits vs tens to hundreds of devs/qa who only spend a fraction of their time looking for exploits.

polyfractal8• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

polyfractal8• 14 years ago

Everything that Axxl said. Eve in particular lends itself too cooperation, since you can literally do nothing enjoyable without other people helping you. To answer your questions:

My corp was (is) one of the biggest ones and was derived originally from the Something Awful forums. So that certainly helps a lot. The corp has a long history, a very unique culture and personality and commands pretty intense loyalty (for an internet spaceship game).

Part of the cooperation in Eve is also because of the "player-owned space". Most competitive corps live in nullsec, which is free-for-all territory. You become invested in the place you live - all your possessions are there, you are familiar with the geography. It's your virtual space-home. Which also means you try to make it better, and try to defend it from other corps trying to encroach in your space.

Leadership is a complicated political mess that leads to a lot of hilarious moments. We have a CEO who is either elected or assigned, depending on the whims of our leadership. The CEO is assisted by a board of directors who basically oversee everything else. A lot is pretty standard - defense, fuel logistics, finance, etc. We have Fleet Commanders who don't hold political power, but are in charge of commanding fleet engagements and organizing defenses/raids. We also have squads, which are basically informal social groups. A lot of people like to chill with their squads when not involved in something else.

But we also have a lot of directors that manage groups of players involved in "unorthodox" gameplay.

For example, we have a large foreign intelligence division, whose sole job is to infiltrate other corporations. They feed false information, obtain intel and occasionally pull of theft on hilariously grand scale. A lot of these agents have accounts bankrolled by the corp (through in-game timecards) as compensation for having to play with terrible "pubbies" all day long.

We also have a diplomatic corp, which is basically the public face of the corp. I was in that for a while and it was very fun. I spent all day chatting with other corps, even ones we were at war with, trying to work out political solutions, swap intel, intimidate, etc.

There are so many more: extreme finance (exploit new CCP releases), foreign legions (helping allies in their wars), scamming/griefing, black ops (lone players that live in enemy space making their lives miserable), Bomberwaffe (stealth bomber raids), counter-intel (finding spies in our corp), etc etc.

rrreese• 14 years ago

MMO's like EVE (or WOW or whatever) reward long term group collaboration. At the highest level of play the level of teamwork required is significant. People who want to participate in this degree of play seek each other out.

When I used to play shooters there where guilds, and the better ones ran in the same way to the guilds in MMOs. A group of players gather together, plays and trains together, discusses strategy etc. The difference is that you can start up Call of Duty or whatever and play a quick fun game by yourself. Playing EVE solo is going to be a lot less rewarding.

This is magnified as the reward structure in MMOs is usually designed around the best rewards being available only to the most coordinated groups. Thus a coordinated group of 15 players will gain rewards far, far greater then 15x that of a single player.

EVE has its guild system built into the game, there are recruitments posts etc. So finding other players is fairly easy. The forums of course extend this, and most serious groups will have their own websites and forums.

scott_s2• 14 years ago

CCP is notoriously bad at understanding the impact of changes on the in-game economy

To be fair, I think that our species is generally bad at understanding the impact of policy on economies. People whose job it is to understand this sort of thing often get it wrong in the real world, so I wouldn't be too harsh on game developers.

fleitz• 14 years ago

So accurately put. Smooth talker makes new law, spreadsheet nerds exploit law for fun and profit, works the same in EVE as it does on Wall St.

crash013• 14 years ago

What's your name in GoonWaffe?

polyfractal8• 14 years ago

I don't play anymore, but my username was SpiderWebMayhem.

cdr• 14 years ago

I would think this happens most every time most every MMORPG releases a new patch. I know it's happened almost every release with the two MMORPGs I follow, D&DO and SWTOR. It's just part of the game.

obtu• 14 years ago

> CCP is notoriously bad at understanding the impact of changes on the in-game economy

Letting these things slip in might be a deliberate choice that rewards out of the box gameplay and generates noteworthy PR. As I understand it, classifying one as an exploit can reverse the damage if it gets out of hand.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

Are corporations built in to Eve, or did players choose that model of organization because it was familiar and preferred to them?

Qworg3• 14 years ago

Corporations are built into EVE, as are alliances.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

I did high school math and science contests en route to becoming an engineer. Should Eve become a respected venue for youth to show prowess as future titans of business and finance?

polyfractal8• 14 years ago

Hehe, I was also a child of science fairs as my route to Science (and now software).

I dunno if I would say it should be a standard teaching instrument, but I certainly learned a lot about macro and micro economics, finance, logistics, supply chain management etc etc.

fourk• 14 years ago

I taught myself to code by writing bots for EVE. At the height of it, I was running something like 13 accounts without paying a dime out of pocket by buying time cards for in-game currency ISK. Most of my money came from bots performing margin trading of commodities in Jita, the trade hub of EVE.

To answer your question, I think it largely depends on what a player does in-game. A young player running a lucrative in-game business is indicative of something very different from, let's say, if they spent their time scamming others or were primarily involved in combat ops.

ericcholis• 14 years 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.

polyfractal8• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

Spoom2• 14 years 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).

polyfractal8• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

Spoom2• 14 years ago

Ah, I didn't know this. Thanks. This is a much less dangerous situation for them, but I would still rather keep real money and in-game money completely separate since if they're not, it creates powerful incentives to cheat the system.

interurban• 14 years ago

CCP doesn't lose a dime when players use in game currency to buy game time, simply because for that game time to exist in the game economy, another player had to purchase it from CCP. That player then sold it to someone with more game currency. In fact, buying time cards that way is more expensive in real world dollars than paying for a subscription, so CCP is making more money this way.

plorkyeran• 14 years ago

And I'd be willing to bet that much like with gift cards, there's a nontrivial number of time cards which have been bought but will never be used.

weego• 14 years ago

It's just a terrible idea and the reason why tons of MMOs die but surprise surprise like a phoenix they turn a decent profit free to play.

MMOs die because the creeping feeling of an empty game wold spreads like a virus and people start to question whether it's worth the money and largely decide no. Anyone who decided yet then re-evaluates when there's even less people around. Continue until income drops below the threshold of staying afloat. If you change the value proposition to allow people to stay by being in the game more (that's the really clever part of this particular model) then you combat the sinking-feeling paradox on 2 fronts.

It's kind of worked out for them OK so far. Why would they need to change it due to unrelated issues that may or may not be an exploit?

ben0x539• 14 years 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=1519...

EVE players abuse faction warfare to produce trillions of ISK

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