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Goonswarm Shrugged
kovah
Member UncommonPosts: 692
Ahh EvE...
Stolen from: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2011/10/goonswarm-shocks-eve-markets.html
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More evidence that an MMO can look like the real world! Compare the Enron saga to the following story sent in by Goonswarmer endie. Thanks endie!
***
Basically, this is about some emergent gameplay that we in Goonswarm (it's always Goonswarm) are running right now. It requires a touch of background for the non-Eve player, but is fairly easily comprehensible to the non-Eve constituency. There are three basic things to understand:
1- In Eve, "POS Towers" (essentially small space stations) are at the core of much manufacturing, being used to react various compounds to make the building blocks of advanced construction. Of the four Eve races' towers, by far the most efficient for this task are Gallente. Gallente towers are thus used almost exclusively for high-end compound reactions. Without the results of these reactions - many essential items from interdictors to jump freighters - simply cannot be built.
2 - Gallente towers use a specific type of ice which is predominately mined in Gallente empire space (it spawns in a few other places but is economically unrewarding to mine there until prices become vastly higher). By filtering on various criteria, we were able to determine that only seventeen of all of Eve's thousands of systems were suitable for the methods used to mine almost all Gallente ice (automated botting by large numbers of ice-mining accounts). I'll spare you the details of what those criteria were unless you are particularly interested.
3 - The automated bots use ships that themselves require at least thirty or so hours of mining to pay for their own capital investment, when fitted. Ironically, they rely on CCP's own mechanics for protection: if you shoot them in empire space then "Concord" (an external, invincible force of NPCs: essentially town guards) will spawn very quickly and destroy you. However, it is possible to fit certain ships so as to deal sufficient damage sufficiently rapidly to destroy one or more miners before Concord arrive. For obvious and predictably tasteless Goonswarm-cultural reasons this is known as Jihading.
We have therefore announced and begun a campaign aimed at preventing anyone mining for Gallente ice in Empire space. Since we have thousands of members, we have proved able to shut ice-mining operations down almost entirely.
Although prices have already risen dramatically and proceeded to fluctuate wildly (I can provide graphs if you want) we estimate that this is not yet because of a genuine shortage in reserves of ice, but mainly down to panic-buying, deliberate price tampering (by us: we bought up stocks in advance of the campaign) and short-term shortages. We think that the lead time for buying is usually a week and that most major players have between two and three weeks of stocks in reserve. After that is used-up the knock-on effect on a range of items will be fun to watch: unreacted moon minerals will drop; moon reaction output will rise; other components (such as datacores) used in "Tech 2" manufacturing will presumably fall, while the finished products will become more expensive. This will affect virtually all of the hundreds of thousands of Eve accounts.
As someone working for an oil- and energy-market research company I've been watching the related price shock, market hysteria, speculation and rumour-fed manipulation with delight and a strong sense of déjà vu. One post I made in the Goonswarm alliance director forums before we started kinda sums it up in formal terms:
"What [a fellow director] is saying is that while there is a limited degree of elasticity in supply, short- and medium-term spare capacity is inadequate to replace any interruption of current productive capacity, demand is extremely inelastic in the short term, bunkers are inadequate for any prolonged shortage and the cost of removing dependence is high both in immediate terms and in the context of ongoing costs. The market is therefore extremely vulnerable to price shock."
And there aren't many MMOs you can say that about.
***
No there aren't! But now if someone asks me whether an important policy and regulatory issue can be replicated in a virtual world, I can say that some players replicated energy market manipulation just for kicks.
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Great stuff. Some tears can be found here: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=17786
Comments
Haha man this is so awesome. It's stuff like this that make me wonder why there aren't more popular sandboxes out there.
Theme park MMO's
"Hey I got a new sweet axe, its purple!"
.......only the guild hears about it and most wont give a damn.
Sandbox MMO's
"Hey my alliance is going to monopolize the economy and make ourselves rich, come at me bro!"
......thousands of players hear about this and try to organize a resistance.
God I miss Eve
_The Sauce Man
This is precisely why you don't see sandbox mmos more popularized. In regards of a virtual world, or galaxy as it were in EVE, this type of play is both interesting and realistic. However, as we see with how popular themepark mmos are, many seem to just want a certain level of entertainment without the hassle that can come with certain elements of sandbox games.
EVE was never my cup of tea, I prefer fantasy settings. This type of political and economic "pvp" is an extremely interesting mechanic. It also shows how a large force can monopolize a certain portion of the game and could potentially "ruin" the experience of others. While some may consider Goonswarms actions as "griefing", they are working within the mechanics of the game for their own benefit.
I wish there was a fantasy type game like EVE, with the ability to both affect economics and politics, as I might find much enjoyment.
I never should have stopped playing but when I think of all the skillpoints I missed out on over the years it just isn't worth it going back
Man, I loved to gank Goons with a couple of my buddies back in the day. Looks like they really grew and grew over the years. EVE, you are the best game ever and I miss you!
I'm surprised there isn't. Remove both major factions from WoW, allow player-created factions, and you have EvE.
edit: To clarify, by "you have EVE" I mean you have exactly what Kaneth posted: Economics/politics.
Sarcasm is not a crime!
This, like many other of the same types of campaigns, last only a very short time and any price fluctuations are evened out swiftly and die shortly thereafter.
This as all happened before....
In fact, you'll find that the PR and hysteria surrounding these types of events will create the market panic that typically happens which will soon subside. Goonies love to boast but their biggest contribution (negative or possitive) will always be their early attitudes towards noobies and giving them a good solid home and foundation for the game.
possibly the politics part but you will be far from economics as long as you dont introduce some kind of way to lose items when killed.
Bah, you recall that you can only get to V in each skill. It's never too late. Come back! (but wait until they actually do something concrete about their((devs)) direction come the Winter xpac, hopefully)
Eh? People can already destroy certain markets. Buy stuff out completely and put it up for more money.
My guild used to buy out all the major materials common in several crafting recipes for a month or so, then flood the market with them. We'd lose a bit of money on that, but we'd also drive up the prices for the other materials in those recipes and make boatloads off of it.
We also completely destroyed our server's economy and almost killed the server back when gold duping was easy. In the span of only a week we put over fifty million gold into the economy back in vanilla WoW, which was many times more than the amount of money owned by every player on the server put together. We mostly just ran around opening trade windows and giving people 20,000 gold or so.
Sarcasm is not a crime!
for the first part, thats just the basic thing you can do in eve with the market, i mean the BASIC, but sometimes there is so much that unless you have trillions of isk, its just not possible (and if you have trillions of isk there are other more effective ways to do crash a market)
for the second part, thats cheating, not economics.
Well and in WoW, people can just go and farm more of the stuff for the monopolizers to buy up at insane prices or to feed their own needs....
With instances and no loot drop, its impossible to keep someone from getting at anything... Sure you might be able to camp a zone on a PvP server... (Might get some bans thrown around, dunno... not really been that much into WoW) But there are usually little in the open zones that could be completly shut down.. and instances are untouchable.. so While you might be able to corner the market on wool in Elwyn Forest (thats a WoW zone, right?) there would be so many other places to get at it. And it would only mean that you pissed off newbies trying to level in the zone. There would be few knock on effects and you couldnt really monopolize a single item.. there would always be another way of obtaining them.. Even if you buy every single one that isnt for sale by you.
If they did not make the huge promo for their Jihad campaign, the market would hardly noticed any changes. It is no more than regular market swings you can see on futures/fx/ w/e markets when important fundamental data hits.
Do market traders 'panic'? Yes, they do 'panic'. What an amazing discovery...
strange dont remember that one, giving away 20k to peeps when everyone in that time had nothing to spend their gold on, and the top epic gear sold for 700 gold
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
I think what he was referring to is gear being destroyed. Eve's economy works because ships and modules are destroyed when you die. In WoW, once you get the purple uber sword of IWin, you can never lose it unless you yourself destroy it. That's why most game economies don't work, items last forever and only leave circulation if they are voluntarily destroyed. Eventually the market becomes flooded and the value is lost.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville