Why is EVE so Darn Cool?

Because of posts like this? To me anyway.

There can be little doubt about what the coolest aspect of EVE is. Inflation, money supply and the velocity of money is where it‘s at, right? Well, that‘s what this blog is about.

Ghosting Through Venal

Last night I conducted a survey through the region known as Venal. My CEO, Eperor, asked me to look for a moon producing a particular raw material that was unoccupied. So I spent several hours flying around cloaked, looking at said moons, and pondering the state of the economy in EVE.

Venal is NPC space. The Guristas Pirates hold sovereignty in every system. Which means that basically, its up for grabs. My survey shows that it is mostly populated by blues, and has a fairly vibrant marketplace, with significant quantities of goods, at least raw materials up for sale.

I visited 30 moons which, according to the database at DOTLAN, provided the desired material. Every single one of them were already being worked. All but about 5 by the same alliance, all save about 10 by the same corp within that alliance.

One of my first reactions was, "Good Lord, there's a lot of work going into servicing all those POSes". You see, with the Planetary Interaction feature that started about six weeks ago, all the fuel to power those stations is made by players. It's somewhat time-consuming, too.

The first reaction of most corps that have POSes was to sign up a few, or maybe several players to provide the fuel for the corp's POSes. This has led to burnout, and complaints about "clickiness". These complaints typically come from people who have 8 characters each running 5 planets, and resetting extractors daily. I run 5 planets with one character, resetting extractors takes about 10-15 mins. However, the goods must be hauled somewhere as well, and so the owning character must visit the planets where the goods are being produced to gain access to them. So there's more time.

I get it. I wouldn't think that doing this times 8 every day would be much fun, either. There's a simple alternative, though. The fuels can be bought on the market from other players, decentralizing the economy.

But apparently, human beings come with a built-in desire to not do this. "That's not the way we do things" is a phrase I've heard when I bring this up. Vertical monopolies may have worked well for Andrew Carnegie, but I don't think they do all that well in general. There's too much diffusion of effort, lack of specialization.

That corp that has 25 moon-mining stations in Venal does not produce fuel for those stations itself. Guaranteed. Those POSes produce an enormous amount of value, at least, if they are mining the valuable thing at the moon, and not some junk. And now, some of that value is going to go to other players, to pay for the fuel that runs the poses that mine it.

Furthermore, those other players aren't necessarily the rich and powerful senior members of EVE. No, it takes maybe two weeks to train up the skills for a fairly robust operation - five planets with advanced command centers. So the lowliest carebear can run a planetary operation and make some cash. Given where prices are, it's a decent bit of cash. And it's clear that many of the wealthier, more senior players of EVE don't like it.

Control of their own destiny has been taken out of their hands and put into something called "the economy". Apparently trusting in the marketplace is a hard thing to do.

****

CCP is on record as saying things like "we want to see more people in 0.0", and "we will be seeking to provide alternate pathways into 0.0". The space where my alliance has Sov, in Deklein, is reasonably well populated, but nothing like the major high-sec systems. The space I flew through in Venal was very sparsely populated. I flew into one cul-de-sac where the entrance was bubbled off and a few people were in there, presumably mining the highest-value ore. It may be "NPC" space, but it's their llittle private dominion, just the same. There is a great deal of value there. Large value divided by small population equals great riches for a few people. That's something worth fighting over.

And CCP of course wants to give people something to fight about. The question is then, why aren't these POSes attacked more? Most of them were small, it wouldn't take that long, or that much effort to put several of them in reinforced mode in one night. However, the mobility that titan bridges provide make the defense able to mount a mobile response. Hence, it's all about who can field the biggest fleet at any given time.

Now there's something very EVE about the rich getting richer. However, nobody should be getting a free ride, and nothing should be safe. I applaud CCP's efforts to spread the wealth around. PI certainly does that, and I'm looking for more.

I Know I'm Wierd, But I Can't Help Myself - EVE Q1 2010 Economic Report Edition

Yes, I play a game so that I can do stuff that many people get paid to do, and go home and play something sane and relaxing like Everquest 2 or even WoW. And I call it fun. Maybe Raph Koster can explain this to me.

The EVE Quarterly Report for Q1 2010, edited by Dr. Eyjolfur Guomundsson, Ph.D., is out.

Some juicy tidbits:

The price of Pyerite started to rise quite rapidly last November, climbing by 8.5%. In December it rose by almost 15%, and this January the rise is over 25%. Two primary factors contributed to this increase: increased Tritanium supply through changes in asteroid reseeding and respawning last June, and insurance fraud.

I didn't realize that the Eve recession was caused by an increase in mineral supply. There was another such increase.

High-end minerals fell significantly in price throughout the quarter. From December to March the prices of Zydrine and Megacyte dropped by over 30%, while Morphite decreased by 39% over the same period. This is attributed to Dominion’s introduction of hidden asteroid belts in null security space, which increased the supply of these valuable minerals.

My corp has been mining the crap out of these guys. Upgrades to 0.0 systems have the unusual effect of making increased mining activity result in more minerals to be mined spawn. It's not surprising that this would increase mineral supply. And of course, people are going to focus their efforts on the minerals that will bring the greatest return. The report goes on to say:

The volume of Morphite traded in Q1 2010 was 27% above the traded volume in Q4 2009. On the other hand, the quantity of Morphite used in ship construction in Q1 2010 was only 2.5% higher than in Q4 2009. The story is the same for Zydrine and Megacyte, which grew in traded volume by 34% and 29% respectively between the quarters, while the quantity of these minerals used in ship production remained almost unchanged. This would indicate lively speculative trading with these high-end minerals as the market adjusts to the increased supply. We anticipate more volatility in this market in the coming months.

Translation of that last line from economicese: We expect prices to drop a lot more, and some poor slobs are going to take a big hurt!

Wow, I'm glad I didn't speculate on any high-end minerals. Somehow, suddenly, I just saw a vision of blue yeti fur.

Overall, the story was one of growth in the number of accounts and number of players online, but deflation across most markets. PVP guys, you have work to do! Blow more ships up, please!

Accounting for EVE

I spent some time looking over EVE business/manufacturing tools, and came up with a few interesting items.

• EVE Income Analyzer is a free download Windows desktop app that downloads your wallet and produces lots of interesting reports on sales and trade. It has nothing useful for manufacturing other than sales reports.
  


• Manufacturers might do well to start with the Manufacturing Profit tool at EVE Industry, and a forum thread about it is here. This seems a really good tool to figure out "how much is training skill x to skill y going to be worth?" How much is broker relations or better standing at the station worth? And how much is manufacturing research going to be worth?
  


• For automatic import of data, Dedaf's Production Spreadsheet can import both character skill data and Eve Central price data. If you are running Excel 2003 or later. Probably a later version is better, Excel 2003 xml support is still shaky.
  


• EVE-Online Multiuse Economic Efficiency Planner, or EVE-MEEP will download and store your wallet data, price data from a variety of places (Eve-metrics and Eve-Central). You can do filters on your wallet transactions, I only wish it would then perform a summary. It has tools to help planning production efficiency, scheduling, research probability, skills, even a reprocessing calculator. I've tried it and it has a few bumps, but worth a look. Windows only.


• EVE Central data is a little bit like Wikipedia. Full of lots of interesting and useful data, but maybe not completely reliable. So an ingame corp named Arcelor Capital publishes both a manufacturing cost tool, and regular price data updates. It isn't free, it costs 10m ISK. In the forum thread introducing it, lots of people say they are signing up.

Nowhere did I find the tool that I really wanted. I want to be able to be able to figure out not how much money do I think I will make, but how much money *did* I make with product X. Because I want to know whether it was worth my time or not. Unfortunately, there isn't quite enough data in the cash journal xml to let this be automated. It's hard to match up sales, tax payments and broker fees. That's accounting.

So here I am, a game blogger writing about accounting, which to many is the spokesperson for boring. The truly beautiful thing about EVE is that if you don't like this kind of thing, you can pretty much ignore it and fly around doing something else, like pirating, or running missions. There's such a rich ecology in EVE, there's a niche for you. Maybe you become a contract hauler, a researcher, an explorer. Whatever. And you're never locked in to that job, you can always learn some new skills and do something else.

Big aside: I understand now why some capsuleers are reluctant to leave their station. As Tipa documents, we just got wardecced by a corp that appears to typically blockade an important hub world, Dodixie, for money. Several corps seem to be on their list. So if you want to do business there, you need to contract with someone else to do your shipping. It's dangerous out there in space.

On the other hand, those who do like this stuff engage in conversations about what the right way to do accounting for EVE is, and what are the tools that are needed, and whether banks are smart or dumb to ask for the kind of data they ask for.

READ THIS ONLY IF YOU ARE A FINANCE/ACCOUNTING GEEK
The discussion in the above mentioned thread has a lot of energy over whether to use LIFO, average cost or item selection. I find myself firmly on the side of LIFO, with the addition that if raw material prices drop significantly, I would be inclined to take a charge off, and revalue my raw material inventory lower. Take the bad news up front, that's how I feel. Otherwise, you are living in denial.

This stuff is incredibly engaging.

UPDATE: Added reference to EVE-MEEP

New Race Coming For EQ2: Patent Troll?

From The Escapist:

Worlds.com CEO Thom Kidrin is getting ready to sue the pants off every MMOG in existence, including World of Warcraft and Second Life, for infringing on what he claims is his company's patented intellectual property: Scalable virtual worlds with thousands of users.

Worlds.com claims to hold a patent for the idea of virtual worlds that dates back to 1995 and that could quite literally apply to every 3-D online world currently in existence. In fact, Worlds.com has already taken one MMOG heavyweight to court: Korea-based NCsoft, the company behind games like Lineage and Guild Wars. And while legal expert Ben Buranske, contacted by Business Insider, says the wealth of "prior art" will make the case tough to prove, World.com's court of choice, the Eastern District of Texas, is notorious for handing heavy damage awards to plaintiffs in cases like this. Nintendo was recently ordered to pay $21 million in damages after a jury in the district found the company had violated 12 patents relating to its controllers held by a small Texas company called Anascape.

Honestly, all I can imagine is a troll in a 3-piece suit, with a cell phone to his ear, saying, "Murray, do you want to do lunch or BE lunch?" Or is this going to be a new addition to The League of Cruelty

Seriously, how is it that plaintiffs get to pick the exact court in which to sue? No, no, we're not going to fight you out in Antonica, you'll have to come fight us in our swamp!

Mudflats, Hun?

Tipa's been having fun in LOTRO. I was surprised, were you surprised? She complains about one thing though:

I switched Ettie to Historian when I took a look at the Auction House and found absolutely nothing I could afford for dyes. There were very, very few on the market and almost all of them sold for far more than 100 silver.

Mudflation has clearly taken hold in LotRO. When I played before, the Auction House had plenty of items for characters of all levels, a nice selection, but now even the first thing a crafter might make to skill up is being sold on the Auction House for many, many times more than it’s worth.

Boy did you get that right. I'll tell you why this is, too. Putting an item up for sale costs you money up front, and more money when it sells. I feel this is a very bad idea. My favorite off-line selling system is (no surprise here) Everquest 2's. EQ has bazaar selling, but you have to stay logged in, but its still second best.

The problem with auctions is that you can't just toss up stuff and leave it there for a while. Stuff that maybe doesn't have a big market, but someone would find useful.

Third favorite is WoW's AH. There, at least if you didn't sell something, it didn't cost you anything. So you might toss it right back up. There's always stuff out there for lower levels, some of it pretty reasonable in price.

The upfront charge for AH chases people away, and I think that's a very bad thing. I've had some luck selling dyes, but my wife hasn't, and now she doesn't want to put any up for sale, because her money is tight, and she doesn't want to lose more if they don't sell. See how that works?

As for myself, I've made tons of stuff while leveling up that would be decent leveling gear. Last summer I managed to sell some on the AH, but there are so few people leveling right now, putting things on the AH would likely just cost me money. This is what we call market failure.

To make things worse, the posting fee depends on the length of time and on the item itself (in some mysterious way). It's as if the Turbine people are trying to discourage some things from being posted. I think someone had the bright idea that a high posting fee would encourage lower prices. They were wrong.

I say that they need to get rid of the AH posting fee in LOTRO. I'm ok with them taking a cut when you actually sell something. I would prefer a system more like EQ2, but that would be a huge change, and probably too costly to develop now. But at least it would allow more people to post things that might sell at the lower levels.