Thoughts on economies (EVE vs. Warcraft), oh, and bias.

I have been doing a little musing on the subject of in game economies - and while I’m not prepared to publish a white paper or anything like that on this topic, I did have some observations that leapt out at me when I juxtaposed the World of Warcraft auction house vs. the EVE Online market.

Unfortunately, any discussion of this type will necessarily be colored by the fact that the auction house in WoW is entirely closed - there is no information you can reliably glean regarding volume of sales, average prices, etc - unless you spend the time to obtain a 3rd party add-on, and then manually scan the AH perhaps once an hour for a month - that would give you a semblance of the amount of information necessary to track average prices and so forth. EVE on the other hand features a running 3 month window of average price, daily median price, and quantity sold for every item in the game - with one caveat:

Unlike WoW, there are actually several distinct markets with “auction houses”. Each region of space (and I don’t know how many there are, other than “several”. Based on the map I just downloaded, it would look to be on the order of 50). Thus there are 50 distinct markets, as opposed to the two you find on a WoW server (one horde, one alliance). Thus, unless you get jiggy with various online databases and player side modifications, you cannot know a priori what the market value of a given item is in one of the other regions.

Similar to WoW, there’s a sort of “auction house linking”. In Warcraft you can hit the ‘house in Elf lands, Dwarf lands, whatever - and the item on sale that someone put up for sale in one place will be purchasable in another - and when you buy it goes straight to your mailbox, which you can run over to and snag as it’s usually all of 20 feet from the auction house.

But in EVE, it’s not your mailbox it goes into - it goes into your hangar - at the station it was put up for sale at. There is no “magical transport”.

Thus, if you are sitting in Todaki and see a nice ship you’d like to buy but it’s over in Karakela, well, you can buy it - but then you’ve got to fly over to Karakela to pick it up.

So the buying of goods carries with it an inherent opportunity cost, and sometimes a practical cost. Opportunity cost stems from the time you have to spend to get from Point A to Point B to collect whatever it was that caught your fancy, and a practical cost that comes from two vectors: a) you may get shot at and blown up, which costs money, and b) if you are buying a ship, you either have to be prepared to leave your current ship at the destination or you have to buy a shuttle so you can leave the shuttle there.

Shuttles, fortunately, are ass cheap. I recently realized I would need to start just buying shuttles particularly when it comes to new ship acquisition - but I can earn enough money for two or three shuttles in about 5-10 minutes, so it’s not that big of a deal.

The market itself has a different set of forces that act on it as well:

Warcraft:
1) Completely player driven. If nobody sells anything, there’s nothing to buy.

2) Commodities market: the lower level commodities (linen, wool, copper, strange dust, etc) are “worthless” in game terms - the market for these items only exists because players are either rolling a new character or swapping professions and are power leveling up the new profession.

3) There are no “mandatory costs”, at all. You never have to fly on a griffon, you don’t have to buy a mount, and you can wear only dropped armor. Your overall game efficiency will drop, but you can still complete most quests and be a part of the world (although your ability to contribute to a dungeon run is reduced of course). You don’t even have to repair your armor, just let it break and replace it with some other low quality stuff you find somewhere.

4) Some items are “soul bound”, such that once they are picked up or put on, they cannot ever be given or sold to anyone else in the game, including your own alts. They can be destroyed for raw materials for one of the professions, or sold for chump change to a vendor. Once ‘outgrown’ as it were, the item is pretty much worthless trash.

5) Death is largely free. The most you lose is about 5 to 10 minutes running back to your corpse, and a trivial amount of money to repair your armor (while higher quality armor costs more to repair - if you’re playing cheaply then you have crap gear on which is very cheap to repair). Thus, other than annoyance, there is no financial disincentive to perishing - at worst case, you lose 7 minutes of mining opportunity.

6) The only way to gain experience and thus add to your character’s skill set (“advance your character”) is to physically sit at the keyboard and kill things, or do quests.

EVE:
1) Mostly player driven. There are NPC sellers and buyers as well. I am not clear on how the buyers work. I have seen the sellers though - generally NPC corporations or related selling, among other things, skill books so that you can learn new skills. These are not common, but they do exist - albeit with limited stock of very specific items only.

2) Commodities: never become worthless. The lowest quality ore is refined into a mineral called Tritanium. Tritanium, in turn, is used in building almost EVERYTHING - including the big huge multi-billion isk (equivalent of “gold piece”) capital ships - which require millions of pieces of tritanium to construct. Even with the fact that asteroids “respawn” almost daily, there is still enough demand out there to keep the price of the raw ore high enough to make it worth mining for a good while. While I suspect that after a longer career in the game the amount of money made mining this low ore is trivial - the ore itself still serves a function beyond someone power leveling blacksmithing. Furthermore since the ore itself is useful folks always need it to build new ships, replacement ships, etc.

3) There exist certain mandatory costs which put the player in the mode of actually needing money to function in the game. While it is absolutely free to travel, you must have a ship. The starter ship is crap, of course, but at least it’s free. However, as soon as you buy a ship, you really ought to insure it - if you do not, and it gets blown up, you’ll be back in the free starter ship until such time as you earn enough money to a) replace the ship you lost and b) replace all the weapons and modules on it you lost. If you don’t do this, and ever let your money get to zero - you are completely stuck, and someone will have to loan you some cash so you can buy a mining laser so you can go mine again.

Of course every ship needs a pilot - you. If you die, and you didn’t buy yourself a clone, you are immediately reverted to the lowest possible level of clone. Which will mean loss of skills that have to be re-learned. And clones cost money.

Running out of money is a very bad thing.

4) Nothing is soul bound. If you are done with something, you can box it up and sell it on the market, give it to a friend, or one of your alts. Or just leave it - one other aside is the phrase “unlimited bank slots”.

5) As you might expect from #3, death is far from free. You lose:
a) the difference in cost between your insurance policy and the replacement cost of the ship + all modifications and weapons
b) the cost of your clone - since you will want to buy another one
c) the time spent repurchasing a comparable ship and equipping it

‘b’ only applies if you are actually fully killed by a player or NPC mob, but if your ship blows up you’ve got ‘a’ and ‘c’ to deal with. In either case you’ve still got time spent on getting to whatever station you want to get to besides. And if you were dumb, and didn’t have the right size clone, you are going to lose skill points too.

6) Advancing your character (gaining new skills, or improving old ones) does not require you to be present, at all. In fact, generally, if you’re at keys you’re either off PVPing, making money, or doing missions (which not only make you money and give you stuff, but raise your standing/faction with various NPC corporations, which in turn gives you access to various upgrades and potentially access to research - which is how you create new recipes/blueprints for things from nearly thin air). The only thing you do have to worry about, if you wish to be efficient, is keep track of when skills will be “complete” (skills are learned in the background, whether or not you are online) so you can bounce in and start the next skill training. This takes approximately 1 minute. While I have managed to annoy my wife with this sort of thing, from a gameplay perspective it sure is nice. My character gets better and all I have to do is hop in for a minute or two once or twice a day - eventually less, since as you grow skills start taking days to complete.

The only reason to play is to make money, really. That you do have to be online for - at least until you run some massively powerful corporation that has a player owned station - once set up they also make money for you, whether or not you’re online.


While I apologize for bias that crept in there from time to time, in general I just wanted to keep this to market discussions, at least in the above set of paragraphs.

Now for the bias hardcore: I prefer the style of this MMORPG to Warcraft. In warcraft, to be competitive in the PVP arena or to participate in high end raids, you MUST play. You must farm money, you must buy consumables, you must gain reputation with factions, you must harvest gear from dungeons that you must do over and over and over again - just so that you can have the “fun” a couple days a week - and after that, you can only reach the higher end stuff if you have a sufficient amount of friends. A loner in WoW will never get a nice set of top end gear - it’s largely impossible, really.

In EVE, I have to make enough money to make ends meet. That’s it. Once that’s out of the way (thus far, this takes me approximately 20 minutes a week at most), all that’s left is the fun. Running missions, following story lines, PVPing. Granted, group work is nice too - but I’ve not gotten a chance at that as yet. But since everything, and I do mean everything, is available on the open market, if you have enough money you can buy whatever you want. You don’t have to do shit outside of the cash factor - which, while huge, is sufficiently easy to do that you can watch TV or read a book while you do it. Not having to farm for experience points is a huge benefit - all your game time can be directed at things that interest you more than grinding out the next level.

Now, what is still out there for me to determine: are the “must” parts of EVE more or less tedious than the “must” parts of WoW, and are the “fun” parts of EVE more fun than the “fun” parts of WoW. Just because they have a lower cost in terms of time and tedium does not necessarily mean they are “more fun”, after all.

First Day (night, really) in EVE

I say “Night” because I have to play on my daughter’s computer since she has the only Intel Mac in the house - so in order to not take away her things while she’s conscious, I’m in the 9pm-bedtime timeframe for exploration ;) So, I was up till 4 . ..

I've played about 7 hours thus far:

My initial thoughts are cautiously positive - the basic game play is still boiling down to "go do the same thing a bunch, then profit", but the community is radically different, and there are a tremendous amount of variables to worry about. Nevertheless, in some ways the game has already been "solved", at least presently, due to the existence of skill planning applications and suggested training paths to maximize your character potential - or at least minimize the time it takes you to reach that maximum.

On the other hand, there is no 'class role'. Everyone can learn everything - but doing so takes a tremendously long amount of time (which, even though you can still learn your skills while not logged in, we're looking at years worth of real time to learn it all) so you still end up picking a set of things that interest you, broken down into the axes of corporate control (setting up trades, alliances, contracts, etc), business (playing the auction house equivalent with the added complexity of moving between place to place without getting your ass shot off from under you), or industry (either harvesting raw materials and refining them, or producing blue prints and/or the products made thereby).

Combat is not twitch based, but does require you to swap targets as you fight and adjust your orbit radius to increase weapon efficiency. Thus, there at least initially appears some set of real time tactics that will need to be employed, although likely it will end up being pretty bare bones. There are various minmaxing paths ahead of me with respect to ship energy management, damage control, and damage output, as well as mining and refining efficiency.

The look and feel of the game is fantastic - highly detailed, gorgeous graphics, and a vast wealth of information available via an ingame web browser that links to all the help files online.

From what I understand, you can reach the point of creating your own space station, which satisfies the Brian "gee, what can I DO that will last forever (or at least until someone blows it up)" question - but doing so apparently takes a crapton of time and friends.

Things are not as immediately obvious as they are in Wow - I was confused quite a bit off and on while trying to figure out how to find asteroids that can be mined for a specific mineral, for example, and I still don't know how to set up a custom filter list for the map - so that delta is still a little daunting. There's just so much I don't know how to do as yet, but I expect things will clear up as I keep fiddling. There is also built in voice chat, which I haven't actually bothered to look at yet. In game chat is a windowed IM-client like affair, similar to what Wow provides, but with much greater control on private channel access. Overall seems a very polished product with an appropriately sci-fi look and feel.

I'm currently about 3/4 of the way done with a "storyline" quest sequence that has featured a combination of running around, mining, shooting, refining, and building - basically a raw summary of the sorts of things you can do in the game. For my first character I went "less aggressive", choosing the path of a scientist/engineer type, because the thought of researching blueprints and making things appealed to me.

On that note - and this is based off of very high level understanding at this point - while you can make things like ships and weapons and ship upgrades, there are two limitations: 1) the blueprints you make them from can only be used a set number of times before you have to create a new blueprint, and 2) you cannot "create" anything new - the list of possible blueprints you can research or find is deterministic. So I see that as a negative.

I haven't delved into the forums much yet, nor explored the reaches of the online community built up around the game. I am immediately impressed however with some technology they've incorporated - there's a published API protocol for application developers to write programs that directly access your characters. For example I have a widget on my dashboard now that provides a running clock of when my currently training skill will be done. Authentication is handled by a pseudorandom user id/API key pair (I do not have the details as yet on what level of security their algorithm provides) and the player has a choice of just choosing a "limited access" key that allows access to the wallet and currently training skills, or a "full access" key that lets you see everything. You can regenerate a new UID/Key pair whenever you like, for the paranoid.

One nice enhancement I'd like to see added is the ability to train skills without having to even log in - but I suppose that would sort of defeat the purpose of it being a MMORPG at that point.