The Russian Tycoon & EVE RMT/GTCs

[Endie]

It needs to be stressed that the ROL tycoon just openly admitted in that post to spending rather more than 100,000 dollars on ISK, motherships, titans and charons.  And he stresses that he will be spending more cash on allies to fill the space he bought.  Maybe the few people who still thought that it was silly to believe the stories of him spending a few thousand dollars in cash buying people like Evil Thug will reconsider in the light of his admissions.

CCP have a bit of a choice to make: I am glad they did, indeed, ban all those ebayed characters and isk, but now they have to wonder about whether the short-term gains from his timecarding will really be worth the time-bomb when this sort of thing gets into the wider press.

[Fmar]

At least $100,000 dollars spent on eve.
Dam.  Just dam.

[Comstar]

I don't understand all the laughter at spending 100K on the game- the Time card forums on goonfleet.com and eve-o are proof that most...serious players, or those that don't have 20 hours a day to rat for 500mil (like say, me) are willing to spend real life cash on the game. Granted 99.999% aren't rich enough in real life to to do it the full way, but there had to be one billionaire (or perhaps, the son of one who doesn't care what the children spend the money on) somewhere on the planet playing EvE, and we seem to have found him.

Now, sure it's like buying an expensive car*, but effectively the guy spent his entertainment budget on something else. The rest of us might spend $100 on single player game to conquer Europe. That guy spent the same percentage of money to do the same thing.


Still, I expect to see a SF novel or movie soon about a lone hero fighting the evil mastermind over internet spacebuxs. If Philip K. Dick was around today, I'm sure he'd be writing a story about it, to made into a movie later.


------
* I watch Top Gear, and a lot of those cars they review are as useful as a Titan in real life.

[Predator Irl]

At least $100,000 dollars spent on eve.
Dam.  Just dam.

I guess we know now where CCP got the money for the new SAN Blade server!

[Sir T]

This has been waiting to happen. BOB survived the great war in part because its members could not be run out of resources as they were willing to spend unlimited amounts of real life cash to keep themselves afloat. This is literally someone with the real life resources to literally create millions of assets from effectively nothing.the great weakness of the timecarding is that it means you can never break an alliance as there is no way to get at their sources of income. There is nothing in game you can do to break them. NOTHING. This is why isk sales are bad, but CCP has just decided to take a cut rather than ban it. And it will break their game apart. It will turn, if it has not already that they more money you spend the better off you are. Its already a game where you have to gave more than one account to succeed. From that the ultimate step is simply to make it a pay to win game. CCP is cleaning up from these isk sales so they have no real incentive to stop it, but basically it has turned all pretense that this is a GAME about ship to ship combat to ash.

Its invisible and insidious and will work.

[Endie]

Actually, probably CCP do not really gain much this way.  They will make only a small amount of those $110,000 as "bonus money": probably a few thousand at most, and possibly even a loss.

CCP have shown (and stated) that they want to encourage people to use credit card transactions for billing, and have made timecards less attractive.  I suspect that part of this is because people on subscriptions tend to have an additional barrier to leaving the game.

The question of whether they are making enough extra from the ROL guy to compensate for the reasons that they prefer subscription income depends on how elastic the subscriber levels are, and how sensitive they are to a few million ISK change in the in-game price of timecards.  If this guy spent the sixty thousand on timecards that he did after his initial banning and every single card was sold to someone who would not otherwise play, then CCP are delighted, and make plenty of money even after the resellers take their cut.

At the opposite end, if he is selling entirely to people who would have been playing anyway, then CCP makes no extra cash at all from this.  In fact they may even make a loss, if GTCs really do make them less after transaction costs and failures to keep resubscribing.

The truth is probably somewhere in-between, with a few people using the ability to buy at 640 (where he sold 100 cards, for instance) instead of 670 or 690, say, to re-up an alt that they might not have played on, otherwise.  But I doubt if the extra income is significant, even with the Icelandic Kroner trading at parity with the parsnip.

In other words, this dude buying shitloads of GTCs will tend to displace other sellers who see the new prices as unattractive, or cause a glut which stops people buying GTCs to sell til the last one shifts, etc.  It is not anything like 100k free money for CCP.

[Trebes]

I am really surprised the ROL Millionaire thing isn't causing more excitement since it was something that large portions of the English-speaking Eve population didn't believe when the initial accusations were made. I presume that the general AAA membership were aware of the truth of the matter the whole time? I'm asking because I seem to recall a lot of posts disputing GoonSwarm's claims in the past and am curious whether it was just propaganda and trolling or the posters honestly didn't know.

[Jayce]

I think Endie said this, but I got a little lost in there, so I'll say it too.

CCP don't make any extra money from someone buying a bunch of timecards to resell.  The isk was already in the economy, and to be worth anything to Mr Tycoon someone has to buy it.  He is effectively paying for a bunch of peoples' subs.  This isk is just now flowing to ROL.

But isk doesn't win Eve.  It helps, but what wins Eve is warm bodies flying ships. Unless this guy is literally going to pay people to play, it won't work.  Even if it does, those people's motivations will be for cold hard cash, and if it dries up so do they.

tl;dr you can't buy esprit de corps.

[Ratadm]

Careful, Imagine how many Chinese people he could hire.  His own alliance of farmers paid to pvp.

[WindupAtheist]

A Russian billionaire conquering EVE with legions of Chinese mercenaries would be fucking hilarious and awesome.

[MahrinSkel]

I can't remember which one of us the question was aimed at, but me and Scott were once asked a hypothetical: Would we make a PvP game that was free to play except for one guy who paid $1M a month to completely dominate all the free players like a god.  Our simultaneous answers were "Of course" and "Do you know somebody like that?"

If this guy can sell that many timecards that quickly without making a significant impact on the isk price for GTC's, there are a lot of people playing for free in exchange for someone else getting an in-game boost.  It's not so much that CCP can't afford to lose his money, it's that he's only the highly visible tip of a very large iceberg.  How many of you are actually *paying* for all of your own accounts? 

--Dave

[Quinton]

Interesting question.  I pay for two EVE accounts and occasionally will buy a GTC to sell for ISK (though I fly pretty cheap and well insured ships, so 500-600M ISK lasts quite a long while).

[palmer_eldritch]

There's clearly a qualitative difference between spending $50,000 dollars on time cards and $50, not just quantitive. Buying seven titans for an alliance changes the game world in a way which buying a single t2-fitted battleship for a player does not. Obviously we all have to accept it.

[Gets]

Original thread in original Moonspeak mentioned in OP.

[Sparky]

I, too, am surprised Eve-o isn't making more of this.  Especially the "it's not fair :(" crowd who're always bitching about T2 BPO or whatever.  Guess everyone has drama fatigue.

[schild]

Can he prove it?

[Gets]

There have been legitimate threads on the eve-o Timecode Bazaar forum of people selling like a hundred or two hundred GTCs in bulk. I don't see a way anyone could fake such a thread and not have it get noticed.

[schild]

I'm just saying, spending $100k on virtual shit, getting all that money thrown away and then doing it again is so beyond fucking stupid that I'm simply not buying it.

[Gets]

I'm with you, believe me. But I also play the game and somewhat know the people we're talking about, and in cases of ludicrous lengths gone to in the name of virtua world honor I just remind myself of the Asian kid who stabbed his friend to death after he didn't give his Magic Red Ruby Sword back. Hopefully someone from the outside will take wind of this and gives us more info, an interview perhaps, on who this person is, and why do they name alliances with stupid names like Red.Overlord and Shadow of xXXDeathXXx, as many can't help but feel curious.

[Reg]

Hmm. I think I better stock up on time cards. I get the feeling that CCP might stop selling them for isk over this.

[Furiously]

I would imagine the fraud ratio of people using stolen credit cards to pay for timecards is extremely high. Maybe grimwell could say what it was for the eq rl money server. I was shocked when ccp started selling them themselves.

[Thrawn]

The first time I sold my WoW account I got $600 for it easily.  I have no trouble believing someone with a lot of money could spend that much on an MMO.

[apocrypha]

I believe there's no great fuss being made about this on the official EVE-O forums because most of the RMT-haters have already left EVE. It's been an openly RMT game for a long time now and I know several people, myself included, for whom that was a contributing factor to them not resubbing.

If you detest RMT then you're not going to carry on playing in an RMT game for long, and if you don't detest it then you're not likely to make a fuss about it on the official forums.

[Miasma]

Can he prove it?

Internet detectives, while trying to prove this was going on before he admitted it, linked his account to threads on the official eve forums where he was selling thousands of game time cards.  I mean actual threads like "WTS 600 GTC @ 550,000,000", since it's a secure system and he did sell them he had to have bought them somewhere, they cost about 35$ each.

People also put known titan pilots on their friends list to see when they log in and the bunch he got banned haven't logged on for months so they're probably toast.

[trevorreznik]

This has been waiting to happen. BOB survived the great war in part because its members could not be run out of resources as they were willing to spend unlimited amounts of real life cash to keep themselves afloat.

Can you shoot some links to the BoB references my way?  I haven't seen much on that. 

How many of you are actually *paying* for all of your own accounts? 

I'm one of the rare single account guys, and pay for it with credit card and then unsub each month.  It's not worth it to me to spend hours in game making isk versus not buying an extra 2-3 beers at a bar.

There's clearly a qualitative difference between spending $50,000 dollars on time cards and $50, not just quantitive. Buying seven titans for an alliance changes the game world in a way which buying a single t2-fitted battleship for a player does not. Obviously we all have to accept it.

While that's definitely true, the more important the person in game, the more it makes sense for them to timecard or whatever.  To toot my own horn-when I was running most goon fleets for several months, I simply didn't have the time to rat, because all my in game time was spent herding goons around.  I had to pay for my own sub, and if I hadn't gotten free ships from specops, I would've had to timecard ships.  If I'd ratted instead, ops wouldn't have happened, moons wouldn't have been taken, all that kind of stuff trickles down.  You're correct that the scale of what this guy is doing is nuts, but this could just be some form of funny money laundering he's trying to do.

The first time I sold my WoW account I got $600 for it easily.  I have no trouble believing someone with a lot of money could spend that much on an MMO.

Heck, I sold a guild wars account for $550 a year after it launched, I have no idea why someone would spend that in game where you couldn't really 'achieve' anything.

I honestly don't mind this too much-his shit can still get blown up, and there's so many insane advantages for older players that I just can't care about another one.  The problem with buying 7 titans is that titans are hideously broken, not that you can buy 7.  If he bought 7 MS no one would give a shit.  The same would go on if this guy was buying up T2 BPOs-the problem isn't that he can buy them, it's that t2 bpos shouldn't be in the game.

I'm guessing this is the guy who got banned last year around this time and lost most of the Russian titans during the delve invasion.  I'd love for him to confirm which titans/accts got the hammer.

[Fordel]

I want to say the first level 50 on my DaoC server was sold for a few grand, but it was so long ago.



Always people with more money then sense. Always.

[Miasma]

I want to say the first level 50 on my DaoC server was sold for a few grand, but it was so long ago.



Always people with more money then sense. Always.

I think the first jedi sold for that in swg too.

[Pax]

I want to say the first level 50 on my DaoC server was sold for a few grand, but it was so long ago.



Always people with more money then sense. Always.

I think the first jedi sold for that in swg too.

SWG...

SWG!

Paging schild to this thread. 

[Amarr HM]

 

[Murgos]

I sold my EQ 1 warrior for 1500, and then a necro for 800.

Not nearly enough to make up for the years of pain I endured because I didn't know better.

[eldaec]

ROL's space makes them pets of AAA for offensive purposes and for access to the rest of the game.

ROL's manpower makes them pets of AAA for defensive purposes.



Basically, ROL have paid ET a bundle of IRL cash for the honour of running some of AAA's internal logistics.

This is pure epeen with little to no impact on anyone outside of the AAA pet community.

I wouldn't be surprised if AAA turn around and resell ROLspace to Ken or whomever any time now, it's not as if ROL brings anything of value to the party, and AAA can't keep adding to the list of regions they have to defend indefinitely.

[Endie]

ROL's space makes them pets of AAA for offensive purposes and for access to the rest of the game.

ROL's manpower makes them pets of AAA for defensive purposes.

Basically, ROL have paid ET a bundle of IRL cash for the honour of running some of AAA's internal logistics.

This is pure epeen with little to no impact on anyone outside of the AAA pet community.

I wouldn't be surprised if AAA turn around and resell ROLspace to Ken or whomever any time now, it's not as if ROL brings anything of value to the party, and AAA can't keep adding to the list of regions they have to defend indefinitely.

Normally, I would agree that your analysis is spot-on here.  After all, even after they started furiously recruiting some extremely dubious-looking corps recently, ROL have only about 430 members for 13 stations and a large region, and their useful contribution since November has been limited to providing POS-based speed-bumps.  But the ROL situation is a bit different.

For one thing, ROL have an owner (I use the word advisedly) who is handing out in-game and out-of-game cash to his allies (as he confirmed recently), and that matters to some people (Evil Thug being the obvious example).

Also, McAAA has the problem that it has only really involved itself in five campaigns in the last few years.  One was from self-interest (stopping Bob from blocking them from Empire by taking Catch).  Two were removing those PvP powerhouses Axiom Empire and KOS from their space.  And the others were backstabs against their allies IAC and Goonfleet.  Hardly a glorious few years, especially when you consider what happened in each of the four last mentioned.

So, even if he hadn't received cash and in-game funds, Evil Thug knows he really needs to (a) not backstab an ally for a period of time, lest the rest of his allies wake up and smell the coffee, and (b) put up a decent showing against real pvp opposition.  All his side's propaganda about "the blob" aside, he has lined up a massive power bloc of allies: at the moment the McAAA alliance is aligned with 15,230 pilots who are attacking us in Delve and have pilots appearing in their battles.  The coalition nominally has 15,782 (although I have included UNL in that).  Until about ten days ago, Kenny/McAAA's bloc outnumbered us substantially, but at a rough tally they are something like a couple of thousand members off their peak numbers in the last month, from Kenny and their various pets, and while AAA, Systematic Chaos and ROL in particular have been recruiting madly, this has not been sufficient to offset the decline.

When one counts the fact that TCF, MM and Razor are operating long distances from their bases, the nominal number of pilots involved on our side is far larger than those actually engaged.

tl;dr kenny and McAAA have no excuse not to steamroll us, except that they chose shitty pets instead of PvPing allies.  And AAA will only boot ROL if the prima donnas involved on each side fall out so badly that Evil Thug decides cash isn't worth his pride any longer.

[Phildo]

It shouldn't be forgotten that ROL also has an extremely large capfleet for an alliance of their size.  Practically every pilot in RUS-1-UKR appears to be able to fly either a carrier or a dreadnaught.

[Pax]

It shouldn't be forgotten that ROL also has an extremely large capfleet for an alliance of their size.  Practically every pilot in RUS-1-UKR appears to be able to fly either a carrier or a dreadnaught.

Which is bliss and curse at the same time, because they can never do anything on their own - their caps would be unsupported, or supported, but few.

[Gets]

The Mittani wrote a truly must read article on TenTonHammer about our tycoon and other madness, but I have to be pretentious about it and say that you heard it here first or definitely second. Most likely second.

"We've got to pack up everything and move the babies to Delve!" and "Don't open the refrigerator! The spy is in the refrigerator!" are my new way-too-much-time-in-eve benchmarks