REVIEW OF EVE ONLINE

A long time ago I did some research about the amount of virtual deaths that occur per minute in just one counter-strike server... on average (conservative estimate) 10 per minute.

PWNING IN SLOW MOTION

In Eve Online these sorts of stats are available in real time.* Ships destroyed in the last Hour? Escape pods destroyed in last hour?

When you don't want to get busted up by some higher upper guy you tend to stray away from systems where the death stats are climbing. In counter-strike, on most servers, the bodies stay on the ground until the round is over so you can count them. In eve online the bodies float around in space so you can collect them. Each body is labeled so you will always be able to get a reference to they guy that died... who has been reborn again in some clone vat somewhere.

Of course i got as many as I could of course. Many people ask what eve online is all about. I always tell them wait and see. What ever it is will be happening sometime. That time is approaching.

When I play, no matter what I always end up on local giving away money. Its sort of like committing suicide as the only thing with any real value is game currency as it what you use to buy your extra lives. The idea of surprising people while devaluing the only thing of value got me thinking.

In game, I am ctrlcctrlvctrlx. A mean looking black man from the future with a name that no one can pronounce or even parse for that matter. They call me ctrl. Ok thats enough of that.

It started like this:

someguyonlocal: Hey guys how do i tell the difference between the NPC and Player driven economy?
ctrlcctrlvctrlx: *snicker* its easy.
ctrlcctrlvctrlx: the people are the ones who want something for nothing.

Its true.

There was certainly a lot of in game market manipulation going on. All the economy geeks were there doing their imaginary trading talking like real brokers on vent and what ever.

THE CORPSE ECONOMY

There is one item in the eve item world which is not tracked by the eve market: Frozen Corpses. Its the one thing I could produce alone and potentially turn a profit. If you disconnect yourself form the potential loss of skills(omg my skills!) and just go with it the corpse economy just flows. Clone yourself. Kill yourself. Get your old corpse. Sell your corpse. $.

It seemed so simple. But no one wanted my product. What the corpse economy was missing was: Demand. I had to supply the demand.

On local I started offering people game currency for corpses. My starting price was 250 thousand game currency. I quickly escalated my offers to 500 thousand. 2 for a million. In stead of insurance, I sold them assurance that their body was worth something to me.

THE STRANGEST THING

Some people actually traded their dead to me for game currency. This I expected. I wanted to get the attention of the economy geeks who watch the market. I wanted them to start talking about me on vent. But then the strangest viral intuition spread through their minds. They suddenly found reason to keep their bodies around. They were afraid that the were worth something. That perhaps something could be harvested from them... something. But you can make as many copies as you want! People are the mode of production in the corpse economy. You can have copies of me. I can have copies of you. We'll be rich!

It was ... sort of working but it was more like everyone suddenly found out they had some sort of secret economic weapon.
I dunno. I stopped generating corpses.

To this day the Eve Online game economy refuses to track the value of the FROZEN CORPSE.

The great thing about eve is that you don't have to play to play. But you do have to pay to not play. Dumb.



* Actually that wasn't the first thing I noticed.
This was the first thing that I noticed:

Customer (paul pettipas) - 11/02/2005 05:06 AM
I am having a great deal of difficulty imagining how it is exactly that my space ship is slowing down. Space is broken. And what I mean is that ...its fundamental emptiness has been compromised and I can tell you that what ever is out there is quite dense.

Despite that I have been able to pass through large objects with little to no resistance. This I also find odd. Although...this ability is quite advantageous and I don't really want to tell the other space travelers about it as it might compromise what could eventually prove a significant tactical advantage.

EVE ONLINE:

NOT APPROVED