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EVE Morning Report provides news-style daily snapshot of game's economy
EVE Online is a game that can be different things to different people. While some players are intent on the destruction of their fellow capsuleers, others prefer to focus on other aspects of the game like trading and mass production. After all, EVE's setting of New Eden is one largely dominated by megacorporations. For those involved in the complexities of the game's economic side, having frequent snapshots of New Eden's virtual economy would be a boon. The game's would-be tycoons now have this, thanks to EVE Online player Utemetsu and the EVE Morning Report -- short, 5-minute audio recordings released daily that convey information about major commodities traded on the open market in New Eden. EVE Morning Report with Erik Mumm is presented in the style of NPR or the Marketplace Morning Report. It also provides players with the graphed price history of major commodities, captured from the in-game tools. The sponsors of the EVE Morning Report are other players whose various services are mentioned each day in exchange for their patronage. Although Utemetsu's program has only been running for a few days, EVE Morning Report is already expanding to include interviews with New Eden's marketeers. Individual EVE players, corporations, or alliances interested in sponsoring EVE Morning Report can contact Erik (Utemetsu) via email or let him know in the program's thread on the official EVE forums.
EVE Evolved: Trading: Advanced trading
In the first part of this guide I covered the basics of trading in EVE Online and some of the jobs best suited to newer players. There's a lot more to trading than buying low and selling high and in this week's installment, I'll cover some of the more advanced trading and marketeering tactics that have proven themselves effective in EVE. From margin trading on the market to making a living off the contracts page, anyone with enough dedication can learn to rake in hundreds of millions of ISK per day without even leaving the station. For the gamblers and risk-takers among you, market speculation and price manipulation can produce incredible short-term profit but with significant risks attached. In this second part of my concise guide on trading, I look at margin trading on the market, playing the contract pages, market speculation around patches and the dirty art of market manipulation.
EVE Evolved: Trading: Advanced trading, part 2
A good example of market speculation is the recent issue of moon minerals and the Dominion expansion. It was predicted that the expansion would contain a revamp of the moon mineral distribution system. For those who felt the risk was worth the potential rewards, it was a no-brainer to buy up rare moon minerals now and wait for the expansion.
EVE Evolved: Trading: The basics, page 2
The two primary ways to make money off the items you get are reselling them for a profit and reprocessing them for minerals. Tech 1 items may be resold or reprocessed depending on which will give the most profit. Keep in mind that some named modules actually refine into fewer minerals than their standard Tech 1 counterparts.
EVE Evolved: Trading: The basics
Of all the moneymaking endeavours you can take in EVE Online, trading is perhaps the one with the highest potential for profit. While mission-running profit tops out at a few tens of millions per hour and the profit margin from production isn't that big, trading is limited only by the amount of effort you're willing to put in and is much improved by inherent business talent. At the low end of the trading spectrum, beginners can make a healthy income ferrying items from A to B. At the other extreme, a market-savvy individual can pull billions per week out of the players in EVE's great conglomerated marketplaces. In this first guide in a short series on trading, I look at the different types of trading options available to newer EVE players.
EVE's Quarterly Economic Newsletter focuses on impact of anti-RMT operation
One of the strengths of the sandbox game EVE Online is its player-driven economy, which developer CCP Games monitors through a small team of researchers headed up by Lead Economist Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson (aka CCP Dr.EyjoG). They observe all manner of player interactions and sift through a tremendous amount of data to track how EVE Online's economy changes over time. Their findings are presented to the playerbase (or to anyone curious about virtual economies) in the form of Quarterly Economic Newsletters (QEN). CCP released the 3rd Quarter 2009 report this week, which gives us a look at player demographics and the most popular ships flown by those players. (It's interesting to note that the most popular ship in the game is now the Hulk, a mining vessel which has usurped the Raven battleship as EVE's most flown ship, while Black Ops battleships are EVE's least flown ships.) This latest QEN also gives various price indices and Market Snapshots, which chart the volumes of a number of popular items traded on the open market. CCP also shows the impact "Operation: Unholy Rage" -- their anti-RMT initiative -- has had on EVE Online's economy with over 18,000 (paying) accounts banned to date. Dr.EyjoG writes, "Unholy Rage taught us a great deal about RMT operations in EVE. We now have a much clearer picture of the extent of operations and the tools and methods they use."
EVE Evolved: Corporate Infiltration for fun and profit, part 2
end-legacy-contents -->Planning the dirty deed: Once you're in the corp, you absolutely must
EVE Evolved: Corporate Infiltration for fun and profit
Of all the EVE Online stories I've heard over the years, none have impressed and inspired me as much as those detailing a well-planned corporate heist. These aren't your run-of-the-mill contract scammers or corp hanger thieves. A professional corporate spy can earn the deepest levels of trust, destroy a corporation from the inside out, rob its members of their most prized possessions and then disappear without a trace. They're the people that pull the strings of war in the background, pitting alliances against each other to meet their own ends. The Guiding Hand Social Club's famous 2005 heist remains to this day possibly the single most impressive story in EVE history and serves as a benchmark of value and style for a heist that has seldom since been matched.When I'm not busy writing about EVE or running sleeper anomalies with my buddies, I find myself delving more and more into the dark side of EVE. From wormhole piracy and courier contract theft to full-blown corporate infiltration, this year has bestowed on me a great deal of experience in the dirty underworld of EVE. In this article, I explain how to infiltrate a corp successfully and capitalise on the opportunities it throws at you.
EVE Online: The taxman cometh
When EVE Online developer CCP Soundwave isn't entertaining fans of internet spaceships with his wit during the EVE Alliance Tournament, he's apparently finding new ways to ... impose taxes on players? His dev blog today explains that CCP Games will tax the earnings of players in NPC corps and their reasons for introducing this taxes. This won't apply to those in EVE's player corporations or those enlisted with a militia for factional warfare. "Service guarantees citizenship and all that, so keep on trucking," he writes. (Note: For those less familiar with EVE Online, this deals entirely with in-game currency of course, InterStellar Kredits or ISK. No real world taxation is involved.)After all these years, why impose taxes on players in NPC corps? CCP Soundwave explains it all in "I Bring Gifts! (By Gifts I Mean Taxes, Sorry)". NPC corps have a few advantages over player corps in that they cannot have wars declared against them by player corporations; immunity to wardecs is perhaps a key reason some players don't move on to player corps. In addition, members of NPC corporations don't have taxes subtracted from their NPC bounties and mission rewards, which most player corporations impose.
EVE Evolved: Organising your own PvP tournament, part 2
Many tournaments have been started up and run for short periods of time, only for players to begin losing interest. This is a chronic problem as with less ISK from entry fees the prize levels will drop and you'll get less interest. Things that can turn people off entering include not being able to use their favourite size class, entry fees being out of their price range or other competitors being notorious for winning.
EVE Evolved: Organising your own PvP tournament
If you've been following the latest official Alliance Tournament in EVE Online, you've probably been glued to the match videos being posted on Youtube. Every year as I watch the matches, I find myself wishing I'd entered even though my rag-tag group of pilots would probably get knocked out in the qualifying rounds. What you might not know is that the official Alliance Tournament wasn't the first PvP tournament on the block and it's certainly not the only one running. Players have been taking advantage of EVE's open-ended sandbox design to set up their own competitions and arenas for years. They routinely organise successful lotteries, industrial ship destruction derbies, space races, full on PvP tournaments and even poker championships by themselves. Some, such as the BIG lottery, have become long-standing and respected institutions. Organisers of these types of event also have the option of taking a percentage cut for themselves, which can build up to a huge amount of ISK for all the organisation effort they put in.Have you ever wanted to set up your own PvP tournament complete with prizes and your own unique set of rules? Whether you want to start a new popular competition tradition in EVE or just want to make some ISK off the entry fees, events organising is certainly one of EVE's most rewarding freeform professions. In this article, I dish out some handy information on how to organise and set up a trustworthy tournament without putting any of your own ISK on the line.
EVE Online player elected council rep steps down in wake of insider trading
One of the unique aspects of the sci-fi massively multiplayer online game EVE Online is that it has a peer-elected council of players that represents the interests of EVE's subscribers to the title's developer CCP Games, working with them to improve the MMO. This select group of EVE Online players is called the Council of Stellar Management (CSM). No other online game in operation has anything quite like it, but that's because EVE Online is one of the few games where something like this would even work. Given the scope of interactions that happen in EVE's single shard setting of thousands of solar systems where player actions have the potential to affect others in the game, it comes as no surprise that players can take the game very seriously. They form military and political alliances to conquer and hold regions of space. Players even establish financial institutions built upon the game's virtual economy. Any insider knowledge about how the game's New Eden galaxy will change through future development could be valuable. CSM delegates are expressly forbidden from divulging or using insider information for their own advantage, or those of their friends. However, CCP Games revealed today that exactly such a situation has arisen. Larkonis Trassler, a prominent member of the Council of Stellar Management, used insider information to attempt to profit in the game's virtual InterStellar Kredit (ISK) currency. He has stepped down from his position on the council and his accounts have been banned by CCP for Non-disclosure Agreement violations.
EVE Online's anti RMT operation Unholy Rage bans over 6200 accounts
Last week, Massively explained a bit about the war on real money trading (RMT) in EVE Online. The game's developer, CCP Games, has approached the problem from a few different angles. Central to their strategy of combating sellers of the game's currency called ISK (Interstellar Kredits) is to offer another way for players to exchange real world currency for the virtual in EVE Online -- "PLEX", or the 30 Day Pilot License Extension. PLEX is an in-game item that represents gameplay time and can be bought, sold, or traded on the open market in-game. PLEX has been integral in combating the numerous shady ISK selling websites in operation and CCP's dev blog last week showed how the playerbase is starting to embrace this system. After all, if this practice of outright buying in-game assets with real world cash is going to happen in EVE, as with most MMOs (and regardless of what the developers try to do to curb this) it might as well be via a system the devs can regulate. It's a slippery slope, and CCP's approach to the problem does have some critics, but thus far it's been successful. PLEX has only been one facet of their battle against the ISK spammers, sellers, and the virtual armies of macro-using operations, though. CCP's operation "Unholy Rage" is a major offensive against the RMT operations exploiting the game, and is the subject of a dev blog from EVE Online's GM Grimmi.
The fight against RMT in EVE Online
It's an unfortunate reality that most any massively multiplayer online game running has to cope with outside influences on an in-game economy because of real money trading (RMT). Game developers tackle the problem in different ways. For instance, Final Fantasy XI has an anti-RMT task force and Warhammer Online has a zero-tolerance name-and-shame approach to RMT. Other companies grab the bull by its horns and base their game around a virtual item trade they can regulate. The problem of RMT has affected EVE Online just as it has other MMO titles, if not moreso given how its player-driven economy and the Interstellar Kredit (ISK) currency is central to the game. Beyond the potential revenue lost to the black market when players pay real cash for their ships and modules or buy huge sums of ISK outright, there are also issues with players getting their accounts cleaned out by the shady companies (ostensibly) selling the ISK. When that cleverly-named player "ajakdsk" links you to his ISK selling site in a chat channel, following that link could infect your computer with a keylogger, resulting in a fire sale on whatever they find in your account. EVE Online's creators CCP Games have taken a two-prong approach to handling these issues.
EVE Evolved: Untangling the mystery of the Sleepers
When EVE Online's Apocrypha expansion was released, details on how wormholes and the 2500 new systems that came with them worked were sketchy. The advanced Sleeper AI found protecting these systems were a force to be feared, unknown and mysterious. There were no guides, no stories of encounters on the forums and anyone that had mounted a successful expedition was keeping their closely guarded secrets to themselves and raking in the ISK.My corporation (Pillowsoft) were among the first to launch their expedition, having previously prepared an Orca with a medium POS, fuel, equipment and everything else we thought we'd need. We set up in an unknown system and explored this new frontier with a cautious optimism. Over the months that followed, we learned a great deal about EVE's new wormhole systems and the Sleepers that lived in them. After striking gold many times and making each of our expedition members over a billion ISK richer, we began telling our story and giving up those secrets we had been so careful to protect. Today, a great deal is now known about the "unknown" wormhole systems and with ever more corporations launching their own expeditions, it's now more important than ever to research the Sleeper menace before venturing into the abyss.Join me for this extensive three-page article where I dole out the fruits of my research on wormholes and begin to untangle the mystery of the Sleepers.
EVE Evolved: Mission-running top five tips
In the first two parts of this guide on mission-running in EVE Online, I explained the basics of mission-running and went on to give a race-by-race breakdown of the most popular mission-running ships. In this final instalment of the EVE Evolved mission-running guide, I dig up my top five tips and tricks for improving your standings, mission-running speed and general mission income in EVE. Tip #1 - Gaining faction standing As high faction standing unlocks the agents of every corp in an entire faction rather than just from one corp, faction standing gains are very desirable and often the ultimate goal of early mission-running. In addition to a few other methods discussed later in this article, faction standing gains can be had from COSMOS missions. These are special once-only missions, like quests in the standard MMO paradigm. They are given out by special agents-in-space located within EVE's COSMOS constellations, some at designated agent sites and some hidden away at moons or sites only able to be found with probes. Each of these missions counts as an important mission for the purposes of faction standing gains and their rewards can be extremely good. Using COSMOS missions, it's possible to boost your faction standings from around 4 to up to 6 or 8 in some of these areas. Read on as I give my top five mission-running tips to maximise your income from mission-running.
New perspective on EVE Online's latest bank embezzlement part two
We read about these things happening periodically, an EVE player pulls a runner with some huge amount of ISK and all sorts of drama ensues. It makes me wonder, what has the real life impact of this theft been on those of you involved with EBANK?If you are to trust the forum trolls, EVE is JUST a game. But having spent 2 years on this project, real-life money and a lot of sweat and tears, it hurts to see EBANK's name being dragged through the mud, and putting up with the drama. It of course causes a huge amount of real-life stress, and makes you wonder about a few things. I even almost managed to miss 2 exams, due to having to deal with this. But it also gave us the opportunity to realize just how many people EBANK have helped.2% of EVE's playerbase has an EBANK account, and we came to be the biggest investment venture in EVE, peaking at 2.5 TRILLION ISK. That, to me, is a pretty big thing, which I'm proud to take part in. But I can't answer this question on my own, hence here's my new CEO's take on it:
EVE Evolved: Mission-running - the basics
Agent missions are one of EVE Online's most popular pastimes. While EVE is most often lauded for its open-ended gameplay, player-determined markets and PvP action, a significant portion of the game's players use missions as their primary income source. There is something comforting about missions that seems to draw players in. For many, running missions and upgrading their ship with the ISK becomes the focus of their achievements and their primary measure of progress. The ability of mission-running to provide a direct translation of effort into a stable ISK income offers us a reassuringly linear work-to-reward scheme in a relatively risk-free environment. Missions and exploration are EVE's primary PvE experiences and new missions are released with each major expansion to help keep the game fresh for casual players. There are even several epic mission arcs planned for the future, long sequences of storyboarded missions much like the quest chains you might find in other MMOs. In this multi-part guide, I will thoroughly examine the profession of mission-running, from the basics to ship fittings and finally some tips and tricks for maximising your performance. In this first part of the guide, I look at the basics of mission-running from mission types and rewards to agent standings and how to find the best agent for you.
EVE Online's largest player-run bank rocked by embezzlement
We've just gotten word that EBANK, a player-run bank in EVE Online self-described as "the largest financial entity ever seen in EVE" has been rocked by embezzlement from its own CEO, Ricdic. The former CEO stole roughly 200 billion ISK from EBANK, which is roughly 8.6% of the entire 2.3 trillion ISK that EVE's playerbase has deposited. EBANK chairman Hexxx has issued a statement on the game's official forums, stating that Ricdic has been banned by CCP Games for engaging in RMT, also adding that the former CEO "has scammed." The loss of nearly 9% of EBANK's deposits is a serious blow to the player-run institution, perhaps as much to investor confidence in the bank as it is to their funds, but Hexxx says their liquidity is still between 400 billion and 500 billion ISK. A June 6th news item on the EBANK site written by bank auditor LaVista Vista states, "We are currently experiencing some technical problems. Therefore, we ask that people do not deposit any ISK, until we have solved the problem." EBANK's director and head teller Athre has now assumed the role of interim CEO, as the EBANK staff determines the best way forward from here.
Next EVE Online patch will boost Tech III production
The Apocrypha expansion for EVE Online introduced wormhole exploration to the game and with it, the potential to reverse engineer advanced technology from the Sleeper NPC race. The goal for many such explorers is ultimately to produce the next iteration of ship technology in the game; these Tech III strategic cruisers feature modular designs that can accomplish some impressive things. This, coupled with their rarity and sky high prices make Tech III ships into everybody's favorite multi-billion ISK gankmagnets, and it's that scarcity that EVE game designer CCP Chronotis addresses in his latest dev blog.He writes that CCP Games will make some changes in the next Apocrypha patch that will affect the supply of Tech III materials. Specifically, they're going to boost reverse engineering while also balancing out the types of salvage gained from Sleeper NPC wrecks, and increase the availability of Tech III production materials in general. If you're involved in wormhole exploration or Tech III production, consider this dev blog from CCP Chronotis a heads up as to the changes on the way.
