By Jim Rossignol on September 13th, 2007 at 12:39 pm.
I should have mentioned this yesterday, but CCP’s full time economist, Dr. Eyjo “DrEyoG” Gudmundsson, has published Eve Online’s first financial report. In it he examines the mineral trade, which is the backbone of all Eve’s production and manufacturing stuff. The Doc explains:
This first Econ Dev Blog (EDB) has given a descriptive overview of the major trends for the market of minerals in EVE. Overall trade quantity and volume has increased dramatically over the last 3 years and the price of minerals has fallen considerably due to increased mining efficiency through better tactics and improved technology. The price formation has also improved showing that price difference between regions is becoming minimal in Empire space and reflects only the time value of moving minerals in low sec. However, smaller population and the risk of piracy in zero-zero space results in less efficient markets with low volumes and great fluctuations in prices given an arbitrage trade opportunity for the brave entrepreneur.
Needless to say, money means graphs:
We here at RPS are enormous fans of graphs, and the more they are seen in relation to games, the better. I should stress at this point that Eve itself has built-in graphs (take that, World of Warcraft), although none of them relate to blowing people up, which is all I do in the game these days. Hopefully a future patch will correlate time over death-mongering, as well as the price of techno-whistles and space-bells.
Meanwhile the economic reports will continue to stress Eve’s complexity as a business-focused game. It’s good for learning how to deal with business problems in the real world, apparently.
13/09/2007 at 12:55 Del Boy says:
I *think* I’ve spotted a trend there.
13/09/2007 at 14:07 Andrew Farrell says:
Has the number of inhabitants really doubled in the last year? For god’s sake, why? Or is this like Blizzard’s “everyone who has every had an account” figure?
13/09/2007 at 14:19 Jim Rossignol says:
It’s quite possible the fact that most hardcore Eve players have more than one account. The actual number of players is probably 60% of the number of accounts.
13/09/2007 at 14:25 arqueturus says:
These are active accounts only, not including 2 week trial accounts but what Jim says is right, most veteran players have 2+ accounts. This is due to the fact you can buy game time cards for ingame currency, so if you’re rich, you can play for free.
13/09/2007 at 18:56 John P says:
I loved eve when I played it, but I never got very far. I think the reason i’m awful at maths was part of it. Mining with a mate in a 0.7 sec is soooo relaxing though. Can’t really justify the monthly fee just for that tho
13/09/2007 at 20:25 David says:
That’s why I blow other people up for money. Not the most relaxing way to play the game, but the regular adrenaline spike keeps me paying my subscription charge!
13/09/2007 at 21:32 Janek says:
I’m looking forward to the analysis of the tech 2 market: such high-demand low-supply items lead to a wonderfully volatile market, particularly when planned changes are announced. It was fascinating watching, say, the Sacrilege’s price spike ahead of the recent Rev 2.2 patch, and slowly stabilise again.
14/09/2007 at 00:44 josh g. says:
Eve *does* let you visualize recent podkills on the galactic map, though. Not a graph, but still a nice violence-related data visualization.
14/09/2007 at 09:18 Jamie says:
I loved eve. I played it for a year when it was released…. but alas I almost lost my real life due to the fact that I could do nothing but play eve with every spare second I had.
I split with my girlfriend and so was without internet for 2 weeks, resulting in some cold turkey eve style. Probably for the best.
I can’t touch MMORPGs anymore for fear that they will be as good as eve. Only if I win the lottery and have an insane amount of time on my hands, will I ever venture back down that road.
But I really do miss eve, I miss my corp and I miss the insane strip mining sessions, I miss the space battles…..
I don’t miss my RL friends taking the piss out of me for not coming out because of a “corp mining session”, and destroying my cruiser by sccidently settting a smart bomb off next to a station.
30/09/2007 at 20:15 Janek says:
For those that are interested, the next economics devblog is up: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=505
(Although of course you can only read that with an active account I think. Still, graphs.)
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