BBC thinks Eve Online could give lessons on how to deal with Economic Crises

[Morat20]

Just in passing: Just because EVE is a funky economy, doesn't mean it can't be an excellent way to study the real-world economy. All an economist has to do (and yes, it's a big 'all') is work out the ways in which EVE deviates from the real world economy, and why.

Looking at why, for instance, people might choose to earn their money ratting rather than mining might yield useful information about how people see immediate and delayed gratification, especially if you factor in the folks that will just sell to the highest bid at their home station in high-sec versus more sophisticated operations employing dozens of people in low-sec.

For instance: Are people really making good cost/benefit choices? If you have the data on the results, on where the money and ore flows, you can see how rational people are and see the prices they're implicitly charging for convienence.

Most of EVE's usefullness is probably in the widely distributed player market, where you can not only see supply and demand, but people gaming the markets and speculation. And you have detailed microtransactions kept for posterity. It's a dataset worth drooling over, once you make the adjustments for a different economic environment.

As for ratting, mining, and infinite resources -- to a large extent that's balanced by destruction of assets.

[Brolan]

Whatever happened to your EVE empire, Mahrin?  I can't recall having heard anything about your business endeavors in several months.

I quite playing for a while, went to re-activate right after the Haargoth Event, but found I had been hacked (2 out of my 3 accounts, and the third was just spy/market alts).  Finally got that straightened out, but most of my stuff was gone, give or a take a few billion and a capital ship or two (mostly stuff so inconveniently placed in contested space the hijacker hadn't bothered to retrieve or sell it, plus the proceeds of some sales that were left up after they were through looting my hangars and stopped logging in), and all things considered I just didn't bother.  At my peak, I had around 50B isk, there's maybe 5B or so left of that (mostly in the form of the carrier and freighter they didn't/couldn't steal).

--Dave

Wow, that sucks to a grand degree.  I'm sorry you got burned that way.

I thought CCP helped with hacked accounts?

[Goumindong]

Most of EVE's usefullness is probably in the widely distributed player market, where you can not only see supply and demand, but people gaming the markets and speculation. And you have detailed microtransactions kept for posterity. It's a dataset worth drooling over, once you make the adjustments for a different economic environment.

As for ratting, mining, and infinite resources -- to a large extent that's balanced by destruction of assets.

The detailed microtransaction data is great. But i think you underestimate the effect that the "different economic environment" has. To keep it short, behavioral studies are telling us that peoples values are not consistent and that this changes within different contexts. Before the data can be really useful we have to determine exactly how they are inconsistent within the context on Eve.

With regards to ratting/mining/infinite resources. Its balanced by other two factors as well. One is the opportunity cost of labor(I.E doing those activities we could be doing other things), yadda yadda, yadda upward sloping supply curve. Even if demand is infinite, since supply is not infinite you still get a quantity produced. The second balancing factor is hoarding. A lot of people get money, stick it in their bank account and never touch it again. Since the accounts we hold aren't adding back to the economy this money and stuff that gets hoarded might as well not be there.(yes, its wealth and so affects other variables, but we don't have to worry about it in terms of prices)

Welp, there goes anyone thinking you're smart.

U Mad?

[tgr]

U Mad?

Oh. That's brilliant.

[MahrinSkel]

I thought CCP helped with hacked accounts?

All they would tell me is that the investigation indicated the theft was by someone they believed had gotten my log-in information from me.  They told me that they make that conclusion when either the geo-location or the corp history data matches up with mine.  So it was either somebody in Austin, or someone from my old corp.  I usually tried to keep different login information for everything other than the game, but I may have slipped up somewhere, some forum or database login that duplicated my game accounts.

--Dave