EVE players abuse faction warfare to produce trillions of ISK | Hacker News Reader

EVE players abuse faction warfare to produce trillions of ISK

massively.joystiq.com

101 pointscremnob53 comments

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.

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.

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.

Should be interesting to see how Dust 514 factors into the MMO vs. FPS landscape then.

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.

Also, EVE makes it impossible to achieve the heights of internet spaceship power without cooperation. You cannot hold a region by yourself, etc.

That said, the "unorthodox" gameplay is what makes EVE the best MMO ever. As a veteran of XZH, I helped run logistics for a 3000 person force. At our peak, we were returning pilots to the front within 10 minutes of their death - new ship, fully fitted, ready to fight - at no cost to them. I was spending 6-8 hours a night and loving every minute of it. Sadly, that's unsustainable with my life goals. =)

But let's be honest here, in eve "unorthodox" gameplay generally meant ruining the game for 99.99% of the players apart from a tiny few who were in leadership positions. Eve is about fantasising about what you could do, rather than enjoying what you actually do.

Unless you spend an extremely sad and unhealthy amount of time playing the game you will never, ever get to do anything polyfractal describes.

A good example is the end of the BoB/Goonswarm war (the latter being polyfractal's alliance). Not that I ever had anything to do with either.

Basically a single guy from Goonswarm infiltrated BoB and got granted privileges to delete the BoB alliance. That meant they lost all their territory. OK, the game mechanics sucked at the time with too much advantage given to BoB's defence, but after the alliance got deleted, game over for BoB. And CCP didn't know what to do so just kinda went 'um, yeah, that's a real mechanic, not a bug/exploit'. Game over. No epic spaceship war. No amazing tactical genius. Just some guy lying about who he was with zero consequences and smarming BoB leadership until he could click the iwin button. Just a single click.

And that's the essence of end-game eve, find the exploit, click it, laugh, then wonder why the hell you were even playing the game in the first place.

polyfractal sounds very much like he's in the bright-eyed bushy tailed phase of eve before you realise, hang on a sec, I was supposed to be playing a spaceship game...

Hmm, well, I'm not really sure if you are attacking me personally or the game. If you've read my other posts in this thread, it's pretty obvious I'm not in that "bright-eyed bushy tailed phase". I quit because of time and the fact that it's internet spreadsheets in space. If anything, I can proudly wear the "bitter vet" badge who will probably never play Eve again.

I would argue that the alliance you are a part of is more important than the amount of time spent. I got to do some really cool stuff because I was part of Goonfleet - which was very well organized and interested in playing all the parts of the game...not just the shooty parts.

You are also leaving out all the history that happened after that single "disband alliance" event. Did it suck for their alliance? Sure. What happened after that? They rallied and led an impressive one-year campaign to retake their homeland.

What other games allow for a year-long campaign against other players, keeping everyone involved actively engaged and interested? There were battles so large that the servers crashed, because there were several thousand people playing in the same system at the same time.

Hilariously enough, the same thing happened to Goonfleet (our CEO went rogue, deleted alliance, LOL). We were booted from our homeland as BoB took it back over. Guess what happened? Player engagement rates went through the roof. The alliance had been stagnating and people were quitting...after the exodus many players rejoined and started being active again.

My point in all of this is that the people who gravitate towards EVE are the ones that find this kind of gameplay enticing. It makes it so much more interesting than WoW or any other fluffy MMO where there is nothing to lose.

I didn't mean any attack on you! I just try and help others not look through the glasses of imagination when the game itself is pretty cruddy.

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.

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.

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.

What's your name in GoonWaffe?

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

What made you stop?

Time.

For me, I found myself spending far too much time worrying about my product inventory or how to optimize my logistics chain to squeeze a few more percentage points out of my margin.

Basically, I realized I could be doing the same thing but making real-money instead of space-money. I never really enjoyed the combat part of EVE (it kinda sucks), so when I realized that I was basically playing at business...why not start building real businesses?

It's an awesome game that I'd totally get back into...once I'm financially secure and playing EVE from a yacht.

> Basically, I realized I could be doing the same thing but making real-money instead of space-money.

That line sums up EVE for a good number of bittervets, I'd imagine. It's the reason why I don't want to sign up again, not until I'm on a yacht (as you put it). Also wassup goon buddy.

This is matches perfectly for why I stopped playing as well.

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.

> 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.

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

Corporations are built into EVE, as are alliances.

Alliances were not always built into EVE though, there were alliances of course before there was an in-game mechanic.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Or well, blown up.

Evidently there was a massive Corp that was transporting a huge (1700 'months') amount of ISK and got blown up.

Tidy profit, for the ones who run the game.

It would seem so:

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/08/09/197219/eve-player-l...

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?

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...

O it was a bug, and they patched it.

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

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

This is the opposite.

You can have design bugs, too.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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