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

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/how-a-clever-player-with-a-useless-item-almost-took-down-eve-onlines-entire

by ssclafani • 13 years ago

452 106 13 years ago

infoman2• 13 years ago

that is why you never should trust the average anything

eterm• 13 years 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.

infoman2• 13 years ago

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

raylu• 13 years 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• 13 years 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).

lectrick2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I'm not sure you understand the difference between "sandbox" and "theme park", even though you just stated it.

praptak• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.”"

phaus• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

mrgoldenbrown2• 13 years ago

It's not clear that the players actually got to keep the stuff. Several articles state that they were stripped of their ill gotten gains, including this one by the devs themselves: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/72972

ucee054• 13 years ago

Cleverness should remain rewarded even if you must close the hole to preserve the good of the game.

Wall Street thinking. How about instead of rewarding cleverness, rewarding one's contribution to the good of the , er, "game"?

cma2• 13 years ago

Wall Street market participants are subject to anti-gaming regulations.

lectrick2• 13 years ago

Because it's a fucking game?

In real life, if you are really successful and exploit all the inefficiencies while staying within the rules, you're still going to get punished.

A game should be immune from this. Game-breaking winnings are one thing- punishing the simple use of cleverness is another thing entirely.

xenophanes• 13 years ago

Guild Wars 2 banned people for being clever shortly after launch. It was dumb :(

joshguthrie• 13 years 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_nimda2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

s_kilk• 13 years ago

CCP have recently started taking player-submitted stories at truestories.eveonline.com

xb95• 13 years ago

One of the most solid news sources for EVE lately is http://themittani.com/ -- it's actually more than just EVE, but they have a large number of EVE related articles.

If you're not a player it can be hard to figure out what's going on, though, as many of the articles target people who are pretty familiar with the game.

mattmanser• 13 years ago

Although it actually ruins the game for the majority of players? And usually because of extremely poor coding by the eve devs?

I remember when the BoB/Goon war was going on and Goon exploited the terrible design of the alliance/corp system and shut BoB down. No rollback from CCP. A massive war between thousands of players, perhaps even 10s of thousands of players over in seconds not because of any skill or battles but meta gaming completely outside the game by 1 player.

How much fun would 'legalized' aim-botting be?

That is Eve Online.

Eve is a game full of potential that it consistently fails to deliver on. And the 'stories' you hear are usually down to allowed griefing executed through exploiting poorly thought out game mechanics. It is hacking at its essence, but Sony Playstation password type of hacking, not the kind it's fun to be on the receiving end of.

pizza2• 13 years ago

Well, if person A makes a lot of money off of population B in a legitimate way, should A be punished?

resu_nimda2• 13 years ago

Um, what? How did they exploit terrible design? They got a really high up guy to defect, and he happened to have the keys to a lot of stuff. Why would CCP roll that back? That's exactly the kind of metagaming they whole-heartedly encourage. You must have ties to BoB if you're going on about this "fair fight," e-honor stuff; this is how the game is played.

But really, what's most confusing is that you say a massive war was ended in seconds. BoB was highly entrenched in Delve and things had basically stagnated, there was less of a massive war going on than trifling skirmishes on the outskirts of their fortress. This singular event created a massive, chaotic free-for-all that injected a ton of life and activity into the region, and got a lot of people excited about the game again. Sorry for your loss.

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

What exploit? Someone was in charge that shouldn't have been, there was no glitching or botting or hacking.

b0rsuk• 13 years ago

Emergent gameplay requires quite complex game systems to happen. The tendency in modern gaming is to make games linear or "streamline" them. Another game that supports my point is Dwarf Fortress.

Big game publishers don't value (new) systems and mechanics. That's one reason why Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin and Sui Generis got funded on Kickstarter.

zipdog• 13 years 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/32...

CamperBob2• 13 years ago

This didn't end well for Porsche, though, which is now a quavering vassal of Volkswagen AG.

green7ea• 13 years 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_...

jfb• 13 years ago

And look at how well that turned out.

baddox• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

tantalor• 13 years ago

I'm not very familiar with Everquest. Was there any in-game law enforcement to punish players doing this? Vendetta? Assassins for hire?

sbov• 13 years ago

We used to train players who pissed us off. In everquest creatures had a tendency to switch who they were attacking pretty easily. So you just anger a bunch and dump them on the offending player. They call it "training" because you have a train of creatures chasing you.

Training generally wasn't punished because it happened a lot on accident.

sendob• 13 years ago

were different rulesets in play(who could attack who, what could be gained in the process(money or gear), pvp was really an afterthought for them.

I can say though that in persistent worlds there is always a history, usually fresh "meat" too though.

sleazebreeze2• 13 years ago

There is a common scam in EVE using buy orders that have a minimum quantity greater than what you're selling in your inflated contract deal so even when the mark buys your 4 cubes of refined ore for 1bil ISK, they can't sell it to your buy order because your minimum quantity is 5.

There is also a variant on it using the Margin Trading skill that lets you put up less money on a buy order than the total buy order is worth. So you can place a reasonable buy order with a minimum quantity that you are selling in your inflated contract and the buy order will never execute fully because you don't have enough money to purchase the item from the mark.

The latter is a bit more devious and harder to spot, although both are well known.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Hardly sounds like a scam to me. Arbitrage is inherently risky.

Androsynth• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I ended up late for work many days from mass-disenchanting.

err_badprocrast• 13 years 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.

henrikschroder• 13 years ago

> but by then i had a lordship and manor in every city in the eastern kingdoms.

You had a what now? :-)

aqme282• 13 years ago

I made a boatload of money on EverQuest (and WoW) with a similar arbitrage "scam."

In older versions of EQ there was a Bazaar zone where you could see the price of all the goods around. For this scam I would find some item that is fairly rare for two reasons:

A) so most users don't know its true price, and B) because rare items would be more likely to have a particular price spread: A couple items for sale for around their true price, and a couple items for sale for far above that. I don't know why there were always people trying to sell items for 10 or 20 times the item's actual value, but it was common.

I would buy up all instances of the item at its normal, lower price, so now the market looked like the item was legitimately valued at this much larger price. Then I would loudly try to sell it for multiples of what I bought it for. People would see that I'm trying to sell for ~half of what the rest of the market is selling it for, so it must be a good deal!

edit: I don't believe this was illegal according to Sony or Blizzard, and besides, how would they prove I was doing this maliciously?

cheald2• 13 years ago

That's not really arbitrage as much as it is cornering the market (since you can ignore the outlandishly-priced items as a part of the viable market volume) and using a price pin to manipulate player psychology. I frequently did it with my own auctions - post 10x of something, then post 1x at +30% cost, so people see "a deal" and grab it. It reliably works in MMOs and in real-life retail - people are manipulable.

It's basically what JC Penny does when they jack prices up and give you coupons - by pinning the price high, but giving you a lower price (which is what they actually want to sell at) by issuing coupons, they manage to twist consumer psychology in their favor, and get people to think that they're getting a deal on what's actually a market-price item.

The reason that people posted inflated (high-volume) items in WoW, by the way, is that once upon a time, addons kept moving averages of item costs, then suggested purchase/sale prices to players. Posting a bunch of outliers could move the average upwards (since you couldn't see sales prices, just posted prices). The outlandish prices on low-volume items are because people are bad at economics and value their item far above the market's value. These are usually people with very little gold who got a lucky drop; they price the item so high because they believe that it "cost" them many, many hours of gameplay, and likely misgauge that cost.

MMO economies are a great example of Econ 101 in action.

kenshiro_o• 13 years ago

So why did they not think about this possibility in the first place? If they had some simple checks that made sure for instance that the standard deviation was not too high then this kind of problem should have been avoided, right?

Kudos to the players who exploited the loophole. I mean that's how a lot of individuals make money in real life.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years ago

According to the story the person literally cleared the market out and then re-listed it at a new price.

Standard deviation won't help you when there is no deviation at all.

flexxaeon• 13 years ago

Similar used to (and I assume still does) happen fairly often in FFXI as well, thanks to the Auction House system, where someone "corners" the market for a short period by buying up the entire stock and then placing them back, incrementally marking up the price. But by driving up the price, it'd attract more sellers and good ol' supply & demand would correct the price back down.

shurcooL• 13 years ago

I remember learning about that type of scam a long long time ago in the first MMO I played. It's fairly basic by those standards.

Kaivo• 13 years ago

The place where I enjoyed marketing the most was on Atlantica Online. I played several other MMOs, including that awesome EVE (which I'd still be playing having the time). Yet, I had more fun with the market on Atlantica Online (that was before they got bought by Nexon).

I would simply talk to people, make deal with them in chat, and work through different market medium to make more money. I started with only a few thousands and finished with almost 4 billions only from trading. I'd use people in the hurry buying from the real money market and trying to sell quickly. For instance, this one time someone said "Selling X quick, for cheap" or something along those lines. He actually wanted 180M for it but I convinced him that was the big price, and I got it from him at 120M. But then, literally 10 minutes later, I sold it for over 200M.

One other thing we would do is play with the amount 0 after the prices. Most of the big items where going at a few tens of billions, but the prices wouldn't be shorten. Therefore, it was easy to forget a 0 or two, or to add some. By keeping a close eye on the market, we'd get some people selling at 5M something worth 500M because they did a typo. The same happened the other way. When an item usually sold a 30K would ran out, we'd put a lot of it at 250K, which would appear to be lower than it's usual price because of the 25, yet it had an extra 0 which messed up things.

stormbrew• 13 years ago

That's actually really close to a real world confidence scam called the fiddle game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddle_game

philh• 13 years ago

I'm curious what they did to fix this.

DodgyEggplant• 13 years ago

Wall street in a nutshell. Brilliant.

glitch273• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Well fixing the price could be exploitable as well.

msg• 13 years ago

The OP is more interesting:

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• 13 years ago

I read this earlier and now 404'd...

ralphc• 13 years ago

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

frakkingcylons• 13 years ago

Like this:

Economic Consultant for CCP Games - 2007 to Present

metachris• 13 years ago

Word of mouth.

iooi• 13 years ago

Valve does too. Hats.

dabarnes• 13 years 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.

NegativeK• 13 years ago

I suspect there were plenty of economists already looking at virtual worlds for research purposes.

This Reuters article on their first economist hiring has quotes from him. http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/08/16/us-videogames-econ...

jotux• 13 years ago

Valve has an economist they work with for TF2, and he blogs: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/arbitrage-and-equil...

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

He hasn't blogged in months, though :(

marvin• 13 years ago

I'm willing to bet that Blizzard has at least one psychologist on board...

caycep• 13 years ago

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

shardling2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

This is why KoL has a money sink which fixes the prices on many common items.

shardling2• 13 years 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/)

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!)

gcb0• 13 years 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.

CurtMonash• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I think this is exploitable in real life too. :)

I'll share my idea, when you share your ideas first ;)

lnanek2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I wish if this was true in real world too.

guiambros• 13 years 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

The entire paper is a gem, but if you're in a hurry, search for "You can't trust anyone".

Yuioup• 13 years ago

This scenario sounds like bitcoin.

toolslive• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Probably got the idea from a TBTF banker.

jrockway• 13 years 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."

nijk2• 13 years 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.

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

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