How a player with a “useless” item almost took down EVE Online’s entire economy
penny-arcade.com
penny-arcade.com
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.
Training generally wasn't punished because it happened a lot on accident.
I can say though that in persistent worlds there is always a history, usually fresh "meat" too though.
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.
It is not a scam in that it is arbitrage in name only, but it plays on people's greed to get them to purchase a rare item only to turn around and pull the rug out from underneath them and leave them holding this worthless item.
Personally, I am of the "buyer beware" mindset. More power to the scammers and thieves; they keep EVE interesting.
I am having trouble interpreting that like you suggest.
My understanding is that the behavior that was originally called a scam was making it look like there was an opportunity for arbitrage that did not actually exist. That is not just someone bearing the usual risk of arbitrage (second trade happens to be unavailable), but specifically injecting yourself into that window by making sure their second trade will be unavailable by posting an offer you know can't fill.
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.
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.
You had a what now? :-)
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?
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.
My theory on why there were always clusters of overvalued items is that people wouldn't know what to price items at all. They'd watch the item for a couple of days and drop it there, but before they had a clear idea they'd post it at a far higher price on the complete off-chance that someone would somehow buy it.
I eventually lost most of my EQ money by forgetting a 0 when I posted an item, so it all balanced out.
When people are going to buy a certain stock, they don't usually look at the whole order book and say "oh, the highest ask is 200, so this best ask at 100 is really good". They look primarily at recent prices and the best ask and bid, and secondarily at the top 5 or so bids and asks. If you put an order that's double of the last price, it will be far away from those top 5. And it's very unlikely that your order is going to be matched any time soon even if the stock moves up (some exchanges actually suspend trading of a symbol before its price can rise by 100% in one day).
Theoretically, it could work for illiquid stocks, but even then it's not trivial to do since 1) people will still look at historical prices, 2) it's risky, since it costs money to setup and you have no guarantee anyone will fall into your trap; because the stock is illiquid, it might cost you money to undo the setup 3) it's considered illegal market manipulation in some (most?) places, and you can easily get caught.
Kudos to the players who exploited the loophole. I mean that's how a lot of individuals make money in real life.
Standard deviation won't help you when there is no deviation at all.
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.
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.
"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.”"
"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.
Wall Street thinking. How about instead of rewarding cleverness, rewarding one's contribution to the good of the , er, "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.automobilemag.com/features/news/0911_porsche_and_...
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".
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.
Economic Consultant for CCP Games - 2007 to Present
This Reuters article on their first economist hiring has quotes from him. http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/08/16/us-videogames-econ...
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.
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.
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!)
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."
I wish if this was true in real world too.
I'll share my idea, when you share your ideas first ;)
"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.