Something MUST be done about non-wardeccable corps

Bloggers and armchair developers often argue over designs they want. They "know" what is the best of the game, which is surprisingly the best for their playstyle, ignoring everyone else. Telling that "CCP must allow players to make corporations that are immune to wardecs" would be such post. But it's not about that.

The problem is that non-deccable corporations already exist. They are the NPC corporations. Of course they are far from perfect: members can't own sov or erect structures and you have to pay 11% tax from mission rewards. However not everyone want (or reasonably can) own sov. Many players don't run missions, or consider 11% a fair price for the safety. For them being in an NPC corp is the optimal move. No, it does not force you to play alone. Mining or incursion fleets aren't restricted to corpmates. Also, you can have a friend list and can form fleets or chat with them.

"Can" is OK for someone who is good in opening conversations. "Can" is perfect for someone who prefers to be left alone. But most computer game players are socials but not the most sociable. While I reject the "sits in the mothers basement alone" picture, we have to accept that "geeks" are much less proficient in making friends and engaging in casual conversations than the average population from the same sex/age/country/income group. If you are an a-social or anti-social, this isn't a problem. My ability to engage in casual conversations is irrelevant when I don't want to. When a random "o/" in the chat annoys me. For me, the School of Applied Knowledge is the best corp out there.

For others, not so much. They are there because they know that it's the optimal way. Joining to a player corp is sub-optimal if you play in high-sec, where the new players start their EVE life. Where most of the players spend their whole EVE life. I repeat: If you join with other players, you are doing it wrong!

This is clearly and unquestionably bad design. I mean there isn't a single player group that is rewarded by this. "Carebears" are forced to play alone, not knowing anyone except random players they join for a single incursion or other op. "Griefers" still don't have war targets. To make it worst, the smartest players are those who are staying away from highsec player corps. The less smart fall for the corp invite spam and join a "friendly corp accepting new players" where he meets fellow not-so-smart players, learns nothing and gets ganked. Those who are smart enough to teach him something are smart enough to not be there.

There are two ways out of it. Both are "good design" in the sense of making a certain demographics happy. Which one to make happy is a choice of game philosophy. But to make none happy is simply bad:

1. Allow wardecs on secondary NPC corps. The newbies are booted from the school-corp after a month into the secondary NPC corps. As NPC corps would be the easiest way to get farmable targets for gankers, they would be decced by everyone. Players would get into much better situation by joining a player corp. Fellow players could at least teach them how to avoid being caught. Smaller corps would not be wardecced by everyone, simply because they are too small for anyone to care. Players would meet fellow players. Could learn from each other. They could also socialize. It's important for them (don't ask me why, I can't fathom).
2. Allow creation of safe corporations. These can't own sov or towers and must have tax rate over 11%, where the 11% is not paid to the corp wallet but to the CONCORD. In turn they wouldn't be deccable. They would be like NPC corps, but with people you can talk to. People who know your name.

I'm sure that fixing this either way would greatly increase the new player retention, and the overall enjoyment of the game for people who live in highsec.


Friday morning report: 33.8B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

PS: Commenters warned me that while a Rorqual is only a few weeks of training if you go for carrier (both are capitals), I would only get a big piece of useless debris. Rorqual needs Mining foreman link and Industrial reconfiguration module to be any useful and mercoxite (and other top ore) processing 4 to be able to compress ore which is its top quality. Also, it's shield tanked, while my other ships are armor, another bunch of skills. Learning all these to rank 4 only would take 8 months, which is clearly not acceptable delay in my carrier plans. So I have to say goodbye to the Rorqual.

No way! I started another account for the Rorqual. This ship is top priority for me, since it's the key for nullsec industry. I mean you can only trade where the people are (highsec), hauling profit is everywhere, I don't need to leave highsec for these. To seek profit in null/WH, I must do something that makes null/WH so special that overcompensate the risks of going there. And that's mercoxite and other top ores. I have a fear that many low/null dwellers are making their ISK in highsec (by alts) and only spend in low/null. This would explain why so many people ignore sov and just roam: no point controlling space if it doesn't give you much. I must find out if there is profit in controlling and protecting space. Also, jump freighters fit low/null much better than high, so my main will not learn jump freighters, saving months from his training plan. The Rorqual pilot will be JF pilot too, which is perfect support for null/WH industry.

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May business report

A month ago I posted my first report. It was ambitious as I grew from 3 to 16 B in a month. 460M/day for a 3 months old character is pretty great. At the end there was a chart predicting that I'll be a trillionaire in a year.

Here I am again with much less ambitious report. The daily income grew to 580M/day. Not bad at all. But it won't make me a trillionaire in a year for sure. Also, the linear fit is almost as good as the second-order, saying that probably I flatted out: However there are two things that suggest that it's not the case. The first is the missing points in the middle, that was a weekend holiday when I did not log in for two days (the third point is missing because I updated on Monday afternoon and I always save the morning results). If we cut out these two days from the chart, both the linear and the second-order fit become better, but the second-order improves much more: Secondly the last points are significantly above the fits. My newest, yet experimental business is starting up, and I also started trading in Hek. While it can turn out to be a bump, I have every reason to believe that it's a trend. Anyway, I plotted the predictions with both first and second order (black and red) fit, with or without (thin and thick) 2-days correction, up to my first birthday: Let me point out how perfectly these charts show the No1 rule of investment: little differences in the start make huge differences at the end. Those two days of slacking can mean 20B+ difference in a year.

How much will I actually have? Like with every prediction, only time can tell. What can surely be claimed is that the last month I made 17.5B which is about the price of a supercarrier. If I wanted to get the same ISK by PLEX, I had to pay 1.5x the minimal wage of my country. Maybe not stellar, but nothing to be ashamed of either. After all I doubled my assets in the last month. A clear proof that trading works and provides very good returns. If we add that I started to post the detailed results of what I was doing, we can clearly see that I'm not a single special snowflake doing something extraordinary. I'm doing something that any of you can do: even with the lowest prediction, have the cost of a titan in a year.

Of course if you love ratting, keep doing it. But if it's just a "must be" activity for getting ISK, start trading already!


PS: someone on the goblinworks channel suggested me that if I want to fly logi, triage carrier and Rorqual, maybe I should start my nullsec life in WH and not K. A WH corp could use a Rorqual much more and WH is less likely to get dropped by someone who just want a random capital kill. What do you think? Shall I consider that route?

The business report of today is not included in the chart, 33.0B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

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You can barely find battles in EVE

"EVE is unique" and "EVE is not for all" they say. Many people (like Rohan just now) leave EVE without criticizing it. Just finding it "not for their taste". The pro-EVE players claim that EVE is PvP and PvP is not for everyone. They might even hint that the leavers are carebears who just can't stand competition.

It's not true. There are many-many successful PvP games like Counterstrike, League of Legends, World of Tanks and all the real life sports. People play that, despite they have only PvP content and the average player loses half of the time. Many of these games have consequences for losing, like dropping in ladder position, repair costs, or just being defeated front of thousands of spectators including their whole family. Still they keep playing.

Jester pointed me to the right direction. In his post he practically calls a player idiot for trying to fight back. In another post he ridicules another one for not staying docked for a month (which is funny since he criticized a CSM member for suggesting the same).

The solution is that in the mentioned PvP games there are battles between (approximately or on average) equal opponents. You can win by playing better. Obviously you'll lose several times, but you are rarely obliterated. In EVE it's the norm. I'd say that besides battles that take place at reinforced stations and the recent Nulli-PL battles there aren't any battles in EVE. There are only ganks: fights where one side has absolutely no chance to win. This is so obvious to veteran players that they openly call someone idiot who tries to fight. The proper action is watching intel channels, D-scan, watching local or simply staying docked: run and hide.

I'd say this is what makes players feel uneasy about EVE. Not the defeats, they have that in much larger quantities in other games. The hopelessness of their situation that gets to them. There was nothing they could do to win. They could only run.

To make it worse, there isn't even a power-ranking which would give them the hope that they can get out of the ganked situation if they play good enough or long enough. PL titan was killed by "FW noobs". Goonswarm was wardecced by "highsec bears" during Burn Jita. Garmon was ganked by a PL squad when he was exploiting with webs. Not even the largest, most experienced, rich or famed is safe.

If everyone is ganked, who ganks them? The answer is surprisingly: "everyone who cares to". In EVE the players take turns. When they farm ISK by mining, hauling, doing missions or ratting, they are victims. They can only run and hide. When they are out with a PvP ship, preferably in a large fleet, they are the gankers. Granted, they can bump into an even larger gankfleet but otherwise they are the top predators: all the farmers are their prey. Due to the large power difference of PvP and PvE ships, combined with the no limits on fleet size, even the dumbest "carebears" can massacre the best player when their roam catches him ratting.

This is the unique charm of EVE too. No matter how much you suck, if you go out on a roam, you'll get kills. The difference between the best and the worst PvP-er is merely in their ISK efficiency.

It's not a bug to be fixed, it is the unique EVE. Play it if you like it and don't if you don't. There are two kinds of personalities that can like EVE: one is the lolganker who just wants kills and tears at any cost (even if he is ganked more than he gank or if he can only sustain his play by PLEX). The other is the strategist who plays the big picture, considers being ganked merely and ISK loss and enjoys the growth. Of course I'm not saying that every player belong to these groups. There are many others, but they are like the competitive arena PvP-ers in WoW. Their money is welcomed by the developers, but they aren't the focus and won't get much support.

For the above reasons I have doubts now that The One Empire can be made. I'm afraid that CCP would somehow sabotate it, just like Blizzard did when I started winning Wintergrasp by kicking bad players. While neither one was impossible or against the current rules, they were against the will of the target audience. In WoW it's the "casual player" who want to "have fun" without doing any effort. Kicking him for sucking was telling him: "make effort or no fun for you". Most of them would go away from WoW PvP if my model would become widespread. In EVE, I'm afraid there aren't 400K strategists. Most of the players are lolgankers who just want to experience beating a helpless, chance-less human being. The One Empire would tell them "act as a disciplined soldier or go back to highsec", which would make them leave. CCP would do something about it to protect the bottom line.

Does it mean that you can't do anything to be safer? Of course not. To be relatively safe, all you have to do is playing better than the average target, and it's not hard. For haulers simply "don't autopilot" is enough, as my transport interceptors proved it. Not because it would be hard for a good pirate team to catch them, but because no one will bother to do so when they can gank two dozen autopiloting untanked T1 industrials with 500M+ on the Perimiter gate in the same time.

I think this is the reason nullsec is so deserted. The optimal gameplay for getting and keeping sov is simply incompatible with the will of the target audience. They don't want fleet battles against a prepared enemy, they want gank-roams. Maybe CCP should change the sov mechanics to something like this:

• All mining towers and stations are NPC operated and indestructible.
• The system starts with no sov holder, the system is NPC null and the moon goo belongs to no one, no cyno jammer is present.
• In "NPC null" state, the sov-number is calculated as the ratio of ISK destroyed (not looted) in kills by your alliance. If your alliance destroyed 32% of ISK in the system in the last 30 days, you have 32% sov points.
• (after 30 days of data available) if your alliance is over 30% and has 10% more than the second highest you become the sov holder. You get the moon goo, you control the station and can erect a cyno jammer. The sov number resets.
• If the sov is held by an alliance, the sov number is calculated as "ISK destroyed by owners vs ISK destroyed by everyone else against the owners (not on randoms) in the system in the last 30 days".
• (after the 30 days grace period) if the sov number goes below 50%, you lose sov and NPC null state returns.

EVE Business report: Wednesday morning 32.5B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

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Cosmos agents: money for fighters, standing for traders

The COSMOS agents are living in the space, in their ships and habitation modules. They can be found by their beacon which is yellow in the overview, unlike the white beacon of the "Giisti Depot" and similar farming sites. Each faction has a constellation where there are lot of them. You can check the detailed guides for them, for example here is the Minmatar.

These agents are very useful for traders: they provide faction standings which greatly decrease broker fees. They have only a few steps, so can be completed fast. They can be completed only once. However they have combat parts. Some of them are in a deadspace pocket with ship restrictions. It's impossible to do them without good combat ship. It's slow and annoying to find someone to do it for you.

However, the point is that you don't have to find anyone for these missions. Most of them are not encounter missions, they are trade missions that require a specific item from the combat (like the insignia or DNA signal of a pirate). You can buy these items. Some are available on the market, others only from contracts. You can right-click on the item in the mission description and see "view market details" and "find in contracts". These items are in the 1-10M range. You buy them, turn them in and receive the rewards.

This isn't just an opportunity for traders to get faction standings. It's also great for combat pilots to make money. Those items on the market must have been placed there by someone. There are two kind of missions. One is in a complex that is marked by a beacon. You go there and farm the locals for their items. They are moderately cheap.

The other part is trickier: they belong to mission deadspace pockets. You have to be on the mission to get in. If you sell the item, you can't complete the mission, so you lose standing. How can you get these items for sale? You start an alt who gets the mission and jump there in a capsule. You follow the alt and kill the mission NPC, sell the loot, the alt loses the standing for failing the mission.


PS: Ekdit Spitek is designed by some really evil developer. Just decline his mission. Doesn't worth it

EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 31.6B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).
 

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The smaller hubs

Jita, the capital of New Eden, a place where trillions are moved every day.
Amarr, capital of the Amarr empire, 9 jumps away from Jita. Less busy, but never without hundreds on the station.
Dodixie, 15 jumps away, deep in the Gallente Federation. Much less busy but still a great place to trade
Rens, 25 jumps from the capital. Sort of "last place of civilization" feeling. Ships come and go all the time.

These are the trade hubs of New Eden, the places where we work. The rest are "rural areas". Places of great emptiness, where only those go who make their income from regional buy orders. And of course those who fill these buy orders: mission runners, miners. People you'd expect in distant areas. You can be rich only in these hubs. You can treat the rest as rural area and pick up only regionals, hauling them to the next hub. But I'm not sure this is the best move.

Let me introduce you Hek VIII - Moon 12 - Boundless Creation Factory. Hek is right on the Jita-Rens "highway", 19 Jumps from Jita, 6 from Rens, 8 from Dodixie, 20 from Amarr. It is in Minmatar space in the Metropolis region, not Heimatar like Rens. It's not just a random station. The statistics that shows pilots active in the system is way above the noise level of the "rural areas". 50+ people on the station. If you open up the market window in the region, you can see most of the buy and sell orders coming from here. It's a hub. Smaller than the big 4. But still.

I chose to give this place a chance. I had an empty slot on my main account (next to the main and his hauler alt). After some hesitation, I paused the training of my main and started the trader alt protocol. Last Friday I started trading on Hek. Last Monday I had 25.0B, Now it's 30.8. It's my highest weekly profit, over 800M/day, which is great even if we consider that some of my new sell orders will need significant decreasing before they sell. Moving to Hek was a really profitable move. Of course the profit will decrease later as others will start to use this place. This post is kind of "blogging my profit away", as I'll surely draw competition to Hek.

There can be other hubs. Even smaller but still. If you operate in a region, you can look around and notice them. You can choose to trade there, making it a bit bigger. These places deserve your support and rewards it with nice profit. These hubs make sense. People don't want to travel 15+ jumps to get some random stuff. They prefer to pay more to get it locally. Of course the smart will get a long shopping list and go to Jita once a week. But most will want to buy and sell stuff now. They need a place to do so. You can find such places. You can make such place. Here is a list based on the number of trades active.

A small tip if you choose to come to Hek. The trader alt protocol suggest to elevate faction and station standings by running distribution missions, making sure to make the 16th next to the storyline agent of the corporation owning your station. Boundless Creations doesn't have storyline agent in highsec. They don't even have distribution agents in highsec. Actually their only station in highsec is Hek itself. So you can do two things: go to lowsec to do the 16th distribution mission or use the security agents in Hek. There is a lvl 1 and a lvl 2 there. They can't be done on autopilot like distribution missions. But the lvl 1 can easily completed by the destroyer of the trader alt. Especially if trained Caldari ships, as a Cormorant can snipe the incoming enemies before they could open fire. However, remember that broker fees are most affected by faction standing and not corporation standing, so I wouldn't bother boosting that up too high. You shall also visit this agent as he gives 1.9 standing increase with the corp (and 0.4 with the faction) which definitely worth the money you'll pay the guy who does the kill part.

Little help needed: in the wallet transaction interface you can give the name of an item and you get the buys and sales of that item, instead of the complete list. Is there an API function to do the same?


EVE Business report: Saturday morning 28.1B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
EVE Business report: Sunday morning 29.3B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
EVE Business report: Monday morning 30.8B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

PS: I wrote that my Carrier/Titan alt will be ready for nullsec life as Guardian pilot in 70 days. Well, I have to postpone it with 10 as I have to learn the int/mem prerequisites of another ship before I remap perc/will. I just have to fly this. It was love at first sight.
 

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Would I welcome the IMMORTAL module?

Rohan figured out how could the "I just skip the boring part" argument for PLEX turned back: let's introduce the IMMORTAL module. It is made of PLEX and has one effect: making someone immune to PvP. Of course it's not God mode module, it only works in high sec (so you can't even scout with it) and make one unable to use smartbombs or target other players (so can't repair or scramble either). You can't use it if your corp is in war either, be in an NPC corp if it bothers you.

This module is the perfect counter-argument against those who think PLEX trading is an OK way to play and not just an alien element that CCP uses to limit illegal RMT and keep bad players in the game. The logic is simple: if one is allowed to skip one part of the game for real money, why shouldn't one be allowed to skip another part. Please note that this module doesn't help at all with PvP, it just make you avoid it.

I doubt anyone can come up with an idea why IMMORTAL module is not OK while buying ISK via PLEX is OK.

However the real value of the IMMORTAL module is to make the main point of the PLEX discussion clear: who would benefit from the module? On the first sight, everyone who don't enjoy blowing up random strangers. For example my main will clearly never attack anyone, so if I ever participate in PvP, it can only happen as gank victim. The module takes that out, I should love it. And indeed if it would be introduced, I would buy one as not having one would be serious disadvantage. However would I be happy about it? Not at all. My money comes from proper risk assessment. I know when it's safe to fly and when it's not. This is what separates me from my competitors who lose cargo to pirates or stay away from hauling. This is why I got 1B extra on the weekend of "Burn Jita". The IMMORTAL module would get rid of that. Any random guy could effectively compete with me autopiloting in a shuttle. Hauling would become another fixed ISK/hour grind without the risk of pirates.

So the IMMORTAL module would help the bad haulers, bad miners, bad missioners to get away with being bad and keep competing with the good ones. It would be dumbing down the game by letting people skip competitive content. Now it's easy to see who is the good and who is the bad trader: the one who gets the cargo where it sells highest is the good one, the one who runs with cheap crap or gets blown up is the bad one. For this reason I actually wish as many gankers, griefers and troublemakers in highsec as possible (I mean, as a player who wants to win. I still think it's preventing EVE from growing.)

Now I wish someone could tell me how the same doesn't apply to PLEX? Because I'm sure that PLEX is the IMMORTAL module for those who are stupid to the economy. Without it the good pirate would be separated from the bad as the good one could keep flying as he has lot of loot and little losses, while the bad one gets his hardly farmed ship blown up and back in a Rifter. With PLEX it's just like autopiloting with IMMORTAL: every living body can afford PvP ships and have easy kills. A good pirate should wish for as harsh economy as I wish for more griefers for the same reason: the harder the conditions are, the bigger the gap between skilled and M&S.

Finally one more question: would IMMORTAL make the game unplayable? Probably not. Since it's made of PLEX, it would seriously increase the demand for PLEX, increasing its price so probably wouldn't be that popular as you'd guess. However it would clearly make the game worse and less enjoyable for everyone, except those who are currently farmed by griefers because they are too dumb to learn some really basic moves like "don't use an untanked Hulk during Hulkageddon".

EVE Business report: Friday morning 27.8B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

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A market I won't miss

One of the things I tried out in the last week was trading +5 implants. Any time you check on them, you find the average price somewhere around 115M and the difference between buy and sell orders to be 8-10M. After broker fees and (old) taxes you could make 8M on a sale on average. The quantity is huge, in Jita 100+ sold every day, 50+ in the other hubs. That's a perfect item to get really rich, right?

Surprisingly the answer is "yes, but not for me". The problem is that the prices fluctuate a lot within the same day and there are 20M humps on the price history graph. So your plan is to log in, see that Cybernetic implant is for 120M sell, 110M buy, you set up a buy order, log out, next time list the item for 120? Forget it. Next time you either find the market at 120/130, with your buy order is unfilled of course, or you got the implant and find the prices to be 100/110.

The reason is simple: both the buyers and the sellers are individuals with no market knowledge and even less patience. He got the implant from the LP store and want to cash it. Now. Or, he wants to pull a new alt and fit it with full +5 set. Now.

The 2-3 week long "humps" are made by those who find the item good for cashing LP. Then the item becomes the "LP-cashier of the week", everyone start using it, dumping the price, moving to the next.

Since the margin between buys and sells is there, you can make the profit. There are two ways and neither one fits mine. The first is that you decide that you'll buy on 110, sell on 120 and invest in 5 items. You set up the buy order at 110, regardless price and wait. Some time it will fill. Maybe in a minute, maybe a week from now, but the price will swing to that number. Then you set the sell for 120 and wait. It will sell. Again, maybe in a minute, maybe a week from now. "Maybe" isn't my favorite word and if I assume that the distance between buy and sell is 5 days on average, with (old) taxes I make 49% profit on the capital every month. No thanks, that's veldspar money (not mining you silly, buying via regional orders and courier contract them to Jita).

The other way to make money here is sitting by the market window and updating the orders, keeping like 100K distance from the second highest. If you buy, instantly sell and make sure you are the lowest seller. This way you can farm OK-ish money every hour. I could get up to 90M/hour with only 1B investment (one is in buy, one in sale, 5 implants), if we translate this to profit/capital/month we get some stellar number, but we can't as it's not investment profit but farming. No doubt that 90M/hour farming totally safely is good money. But I hate farming and hate nothing more than being bound to the computer. My business ways are all designed to allow me to AFK or log out any time I want.

Before you'd have ideas about grabbing 10B+ capital and enforce monopolistic prices by buying out everything below your price and relisting above, I remind you that since it's an LP item, it can be produced in near-infinite quantities, so if you rise the price, you'll be flooded with thousands.

So here is a field with lot of money and surely no competition from me. If you have large unused capital or don't mind updating prices every 5 mins, +5 implants are your best pick.

The more general advice today: ISK/capital/month and ISK/hour isn't the only metric. The business must fit your schedule and taste. There are so many fields and items, there is one for everyone. With real life example: just because plastic surgeons make good money, you don't have to be one to be rich. There is money in finance, industry, agriculture, everywhere. You don't have to stick to anything or "trade X or doing it wrong". Find your own items and get rich without doing anything annoying.


EVE Business report: Thursday morning 26.6B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

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Hey guys come and play with me!

When I wrote the post detailing what I'm doing, I really did so in the intent to let others find these fields. I expected the competition to rise and the profits go down. I considered it a cost I must pay to make the blog more useful.

What happened was a complete surprise: my profits increased on these fields. Last week report was "Wednesday morning 21.8B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt)" while the most recent is "Tuesday morning 25.7B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on carrier/titan alt) ". 4.1B in 6 days, that's 680M/day.

I guess I could try to make it look like an evil scheme working out, but it's completely unexpected to me. I really believed that competitors show up instead of disappearing. But no one wants to play with me! I asked around on the goblinworks channel for explanation and got some first-hand ones.

They found this market after my vague and generic statements. They were simply looking for a field where they can be best applied. And - go figure - it was the field where I applied it. They were surprised on the level of competition but made OK money. Now that I came clean that I'm on these field, they simply found it's easier to apply the market ideas on a less competed field than keep undercutting with me. After all there are so many markets in EVE.

So the result of the "blogging my profit away" series is much better than I expected:

• You can speak up about your business, giving details. You won't lose money on it. Actually you can gain money as others might choose to look for maybe less green, but much less grazed pastures. It's great to inspire more industrialists and traders to start to blog and comment
• There are many untaken fields in EVE. Part of the "a newbie can never catch up with vets in eve" myth is "every market is taken, leaving only mining veldspar to newbies". It's completely untrue. Even a newbie with no skills or capital can make good money on a field no one cares about. The EVE economy is huge due to every region has its own markets and there are price differences even between systems of the same region. There is place for you.
• Another proof that M&S isn't in short supply in EVE. The above myth is based on the "common sense" that if it's profitable, someone must have taken it. Yet many-many fields are untaken, because the amount of people who sell to a ridiculously underpriced buy order is too high compared to those who create those buy orders.
• You aren't bound to a few "large" fields like it was the case in WoW. There you were selling glyphs or doing it wrong. Here you can trade items related to whatever you do anyway and get hundreds of millions for it. You don't have to go out of your way to make money, you can make money on anything.

So come, play EVE, get rich, blog and comment about it! EVE is full of positive surprises. OK, considering how bad name it has, it isn't hard to surprise one positively.

PS: and don't worry about the tax increase in the patch, it increases the taxes of everyone else too, so the margins will open. It's a VAT so it will ultimately hit the consumer not us (after the prices equalize).

The moron of the day is CCP:
No, not for having a queue as I could log in in a minute and there were only 24K players online, so it was a temporary login server overload. Why would such thing on major patch day make them morons? Remember this?
EVE Business report: Wednesday morning 26.2B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

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Blizzard Confirms a Rise in Diablo 3 Hacks

Diablo 3 account compromises are currently happening and there are a string of accusations kicking around from the victims of these attacks.  Fingers are being pointed at Blizzard and at each other.

The vast majority of these incidents, in fact close to 100%, are occurring where the victim not having an authenticator attached to their battle.net account.

Blizzard has published a lengthy statement on the issue and have confirmed that they are seeing an increase in account compromises:

LYLIRRA: We'd like to take a moment to address the recent reports that suggested that Battle.net® and Diablo® III may have been compromised. Historically, the release of a new game -- such as a World of Warcraft® expansion -- will result in an increase in reports of individual account compromises, and that's exactly what we're seeing now with Diablo III. 

While they don't explicitly say that they have not had their own systems compromised, they go on to say that their authenticator is the best form of defense against these attacks and that everyone should go and pick up either the hardware token or one of the (free) mobile authenticator apps.

While I can't comment on Blizzard's internal security status, I can certainly comment on the value of the authenticator. For those that may be new to the concept of authenticators, let me take a quick moment to explain how they work.

The authenticator is a device (either a hardware token or a mobile application) that has a built-in clock and algorithm that generates codes every 30 seconds. These codes are in a unique sequence that is tied to a "seed" that is contained in the device/application.  This seed is paired to the serial number of the device.   When you attach it to your battle.net account, you tell battle.net what the device's serial number is and the battle.net server can then derive your unique "seed" and generate it's own stream of codes that should match yours.

When you login to battle.net via Diablo 3 or WoW you will need to grab your authenticator/mobile app, generate the code and enter it in. Meanwhile the battle.net server is doing the same code generation on its end to validate your code.

This adds an extra layer of security by requiring you to be in physical possession of the authenticator - in the security world we call this 2 factor authentication and the authenticator becomes "something that you have".  (You are also required to enter your battle.net password - we call this "something that you know")

In asking for a code, the authenticator virtually eliminates the effectiveness of a dictionary attack on your password.  Additionally, with its rolling number sequence, the authenticator also drastically limits the opportunity to brute-force the authenticator code itself. Phishing attacks become useless unless they capture the authenticator code as well - and even if they do - they have a very limited time in which to use it before it expires.

I have worked with around 30-40 people that have had their battle.net accounts hacked over the years and all of them had no authenticator.  I am yet to find someone that has been hacked when they have had an authenticator attached to their account.  Now, I am not saying that it can't happen - it can - but I would estimate that having an authenticator will improve your security and reduce your chance of getting hacked by a factor of 50 to 100.  It is not 100% safe - no security mechanism is - but it will add a very solid security layer to your gaming account.

Here are my ten simple steps you can do to reduce the chance of your battle.net account being compromised:

1. Don't share your game password with anyone and pick a password that is not easily guessed 
2. Don't use the same password for subscribing to fan sites 
3. Keep your operating system, browser and other software fully patched - start with Windows Update 
4. Run a reputable antivirus product, preferably a full internet security suite with a firewall and keystroke encryption 
5. Don't click on email attachments, especially when you don't know the sender 
6. Don't download and run executable files from web pages 
7. Don't enter your game password into any web site other than the official game sites 
8. Don't enter your game password to a legitimate Blizzard web site from a PC that may be compromised 
9. Be very suspicious if an addon requires some form of install package to be run 
10. Invest in a Blizzard authenticator or install the Battlenet authenticator application on your phone

Follow these steps to help protect your most valuable asset - your gaming account.  There are a lot of bad people out there trying to get into your account so make it hard for them and don't become a statistic.

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The Diablo 3 "game over" issue

You might noticed that the Diablo 3 related blogs are removed from my bloglist. It's not because of the quality of the individual sites, I simply don't consider the whole Diablo 3 topic interesting anymore, as the final endboss was already killed, proving that gathering gear (therefore playing the AH) is pointless. Diablo 3 cannot be "played", which means competitive actions in a simulated environment. Of course one can "consume" Diablo 3, the same way you consume a movie. We will surely as the world created by the developers is really nice. However - just like WoW leveling - Diablo 3 is an interactive movie and not a game.

Many things had been messed up in designing Diablo 3, much much before they coded the popup that informs the player about Error #37. Actually they messed it up on the first meeting when they decided what kind of game they want.

If you'd want to know an exact moment when WoW started to downfall, it would be when one of the devs replied to angry customers over the issue that Malygos, the endboss of the unpatched WotLK expansion was killed 3 days after launch. He said "so you say that WoW is too easy since other people who are not you have finished it?" The problem isn't the arrogance that no corporation can have towards customers they want to keep. The problem is the total ignorance of the problem of the customers. "Corporations sell solutions to the problems of customers" is a cliché repeated million times. Blizzard clearly don't understand their customers.

I wrote a post half year ago that didn't get enough attention. I believe if someone at the Blizzard leadership have read and understood it, they wouldn't lose the millions of dollars they expected to get on the RMAH cuts. Because I doubt if there will be significant trading there.

I wrote that a good game focuses on one of the skills of the players. Let them hone it, compete with other players in it and have fun being proficient, effective and productive with it. Below I list skills that can be used in games aimed at 14+, with some clear example in parenthesis.

• Physical strength and endurace (marathon running)
• Dexterity, reaction time, hand-eye coordination (tennis, Super Mario)
• Thinking (chess, Civ4)
• Social skills (Black Jack, Poker played at a table)
• "Work ethic", "hamstering", "completionalism" (Everquest, vanilla WoW)

A game must focus on one and only one. The worst thing a developer can do is creating a game where you can advance using different skills. The player who is playing for skill #1 will feel either cheated by those who beat him using skill #2, or disgruntled for being forced to do #2 which he don't enjoy. Imagine a variation of chess where you can save your piece from being beaten if you can pick it up fast enough when the opponent touches his piece in order to kick yours. I'm sure chess players would be less than happy if fast reacting but otherwise terrible chess players would start to beat them by being invincible to losing pieces. The same thing is not just OK, but it is the gameplay in a Mortal Kombat.

What would FPS players say to a feature that allow opponents to "grind up" skills by shooting NPCs, making their guns much stronger? This was the gameplay in original WoW, and raiders AoE-ing randoms in Alterac Valley was considered well-deserved reward for their superior progression.

Finally imagine the reaction of poker players if you would simply stand up and punch them into the nose to distract them. Everyone would consider that not even cheating but a criminal activity, despite it's the gameplay of boxing and countless other martial arts.

When the players of WoW went to the forums outraged that Malygos is already dead, they couldn't properly tell what their problem is. Customers almost never can. It's the job of the company to find what exactly the problem is and find the solution. The perfect example is the medical industry. The patient comes in with the problem "my tooth hurts". Isn't really scientific right? They pay exactly for the knowledge of the dentist to be able to identify the exact problem and use specialized equipment to solve it. On the side of the customer the process is "I sit in the chair and don't move my head". Similarly from a player the "I'm not having fun" or "I'm not happy that they could already kill Malygos" should be enough. The developer is paid to figure out what the problem is.

They failed and attributed it to trolling or l'art pour l'art forum crying. Let me help. The correct interpretation would be "The customers who expect the game to be a hamstering game are unhappy that they were beaten by high-dexterity players and now consider further hamstering pointless. They don't want to learn dexterity-moves, they rather leave the game". The opposite also happened. When someone "whined" about "no lifers playing 20 hours a day beating him", he meant "I'm unhappy that low-dexterity players can beat me simply by grinding gear".

The problem is unsolvable in the sense of satisfying both of them. The designer must make a choice what kind of game he is making and communicate it explicitly.

In Diablo 3 it wasn't decided what kind of game it should be. It could be a Super Mario like jumping game, which can be completed in 5 minutes with perfect movement - just as a developer of Diablo 3 told in response to the customers outraged over Inferno Diablo being killed in 4 days. Super Mario wasn't a bad game and no one completed it in 5 minutes. I guess the guy who completed one run in 5 minutes must have practiced the moves for hundreds of hours, and I have no doubt that he had fun watching his dexterity improving and seeing how much more control he had over his body than other people.

It could also be a hamstering game where bossfights are gear checks and the challenge is to find the optimal way of gearing up. Those who'd progress in that game would be very happy seeing their character becoming stronger, being able to kill larger and larger monsters due to their busy and properly planned work.

From the fact that they planned the RMAH to be the permanent income source, we can assume that they wanted gear to be meaningful. "Don't stand in the fire!" is incompatible with that approach but perfectly fit to the "hamster all the gear" approach. The bosses must have been tank and spank (and unavoidable AoE) that depend only on gear, and trivial on the clicking speed.

Alternatively the bosses could be "dancy" and every level the appropriate gear is provided by vendors and merely a cosmetic signal of ones progress which solely depend on fast reactions, jumping away from boss attacks.

Since the current Diablo (and WoW) mixes skills, it's unfit for competitive, "serious" playing, so there is no point talking about it. Consume the content and move on!

On the same basis we can see why EVE is holding its customers. It's a thinking game where the outcome depends on calculated decisions. Shall I fit this or that? Due to the long module cycles, reaction times have little effect and one can gank away what you mindlessly farmed for days. Mining is the odd-one-out activity as it's grinding, so everyone avoid it as much as he can. It should be fixed to be similar to PI where you set it up and let it run. Mining ships should be able to automatically fill cans and Orcas, and switch to the next targeted asteroid if the old one is done. By running AFK, mining would be a decision-making thinking game "how to fit my ships, what ships shall I use, jetcan or Orca, leave them totally AFK or guard them in a combat ship" and so on. Strategical decisions with no known optimal solution (I mean if no one comes, guarding was waste of time, but if pirates come it saved you a billion).


EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 25.7B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on carrier/titan alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss business ideas with 60-80 fellow traders. 

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Implants and remaps

In EVE you learn skills in real time, online or not. The amount of points you get depend on your attributes that can be modified by implants and remapping. The question is how far should you go, how much should you sacrifice to advance faster?

At first let me show the numeric values, the chart shows learning time vs implant level for three remaps. The worst means you have zero points in the relevant attributes. The average means 2.666 pt in each attribute (which is impossible as it must be full number, but if we average for various skills, we get that). The best means perfect remap for that skill, 10 pt in its primary and 4 in its secondary. 100% is the time you can get with average remap and +3 implants, something that more or less can be considered baseline: There is a booster called Cerebral Accelerator, that you can buy for about 200M. It gives +3 to all attributes and stack with implants. You can use it until your 35th day. During this time the implant provides 4.5 pt/minute = 227K skillpoints free. On an average remap (+2.666) and +3 implants, you generate 2040 pt/hour, so you save 4.6 days training. If you just train, that's 4.6/30 = 0.153 PLEX which is around 73M. So you shall factor 130M vs 4.6 days. This item can only be purchased on contracts and when used EVEMon provides incorrect training time predictions.

There can be an extra reason however to use this booster or an implant higher than otherwise optimal: if you sometimes have to train skills that don't fit into your remap. Let me give a simple example: you train with 50K SP/day usually, but a must-be skill comes up for 400K SP that you can only train at 40K/day. You will train that skill for 10 days, losing 100K SP in the process. However if you have a booster/implant that increases your SP/day by 5K (to 55K and 45K), the training time decreases to 8.88 days, decreasing your total SP loss to 88.8K.

This situation is typical when you start a new character and learn Cybernetics first. You obviously can't have the implants that demand high level Cybernetics before you'd learn the skill. Cybernetics 5 is 768K SP and it allows the +5 implants. If you learn it on the normal 3int/3mem remap (1800 pt/hour), that will take 17.78 days. After you'll use +5 implants, your production will be 450pt/hour higher, so you lost 192K pt. If you plug in +3 implants after Cybernetics 1 (2070 pt/hour), you'll be done in 15.45 days, so your loss will be only 66.7K, saving you 126K SP, which clearly worth the 20M investment in terms of PLEX. Using the booster saves you 8K more on the top of the 227K bonus it gives.

What is the price? For implants it's simply ISK. A set of 1 cost about 1M, a set of 2 15M, a set of 3 50M, a set of 4 100M (now as 2 parts of it is in the gift package), and a set of 5 is about 550M. Of course you can lose it by being podded. Also you must dedicate time first. To have +1-3 implants, Cybernetics 1 is enough, but to use +4, you must have it rank 4 which is about 3 days and to have +5 you need rank 5, which take about two more weeks. Since the time gain between 4 and 5 is about 5%, it will take almost a year for this investment to repay. Also, it will make you vulnerable to grief-ganking, as being podded means losing these expensive implants.

For remaps the price is much less obvious: you lose your ability to ad-hoc learn skills. For example I'm now in my P-W remap, learning ships, being unable to learn industrial or trade skills for months.

So the question is before making a change in your attribute is "would I be fine sticking with my skill plan for months?". If the answer is no or even "I don't know", stay with the default remap. With +3 implants the perfect remap would be just 18% faster. With +4 implants, 16%. That's not that much. Of course it means 6/5 days in a month, 65/58 days in a year. It's not something that someone can call "better". So you aren't doing it wrong if you run around in the starter remap. But you should think about the alternative.

I'm an organized guy who is fine with long term plans. While I curse sometimes for my remap, I'm generally fine with it and did not regret having it. My main and trader alts are having just +4 implants though as I couldn't justify the 500M/pilot investment.

My Carrier/Titan alt is obviously in +5 implants, they were easier to get as I am in a 10 Int, 4 Mem remap since day one, learning necessary support skills first. When I finished, I'll do a P-W remap for ship skills. 70 days from now I'll be able to properly fly an Amarr Guardian and I'll start looking for a nullsec home to learn nullsec first hand. My main will remain in highsec forever, trading, maybe helping out now and then with a jump freighter.

Jester wrote a guide about implants, worth reading: part 1, part2.

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EVE Business report: Sunday morning 24.2B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on carrier/titan alt)
Monday morning 25.0B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on carrier/titan alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss business ideas with 60-80 fellow traders.

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Diablo 3 market is "37"

One could think Blizzard can't mess the market system up better than the start servers. Well, they either managed, or my girlfriend is the biggest market genius:
As you can see practically all of her items are yellow (it's the "epic" of Diablo 3, act end bosses throw it). Also she has a bunch of yellows in her stash that she flips. I don't do business in Diablo 3, simply because it's a joke.

The reason for the messup: no items are destroyed (in EVE we have explosions, in WoW we have soulbinding that forces the owner to vendor his old items). So in Diablo3, no matter how slow the item generation is (about 1 yellow/2 hours), soon we'll be drown in them.

Diablo 3 tip: every 5 levels (preferably 10, 15, 20 ... ) go to the AH and buy a new set of yellows. Don't pay more than lvl*100 gold for an item. Sell your old yellows. Don't be greedy, rather sell two items cheap than one high and one unsold, because you only have 10 selling slots and can't cancel auctions. Vendor the blues for gold, except the really well itemized ones. The best stat in the game is the +experience until you get to inferno.

And for God's sake, don't take the game any seriously! It's not even WoW with endgame raiding and arenas. Enjoy the scenery, kill Diablo, don't miss out on the pony level and come back to EVE!


EVE Business report: Saturday morning 23.4B, (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on triage carrier alt) Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss business ideas.

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Why socials can never be rich?

Syncaine is considered a troll, but I always thought differently. However I couldn't see his post about me anything but trolling for links, which he got from Evenews24.

However I felt his post somehow horribly wrong. The trolls are deliberately making posts that are wrong in obvious points and his weren't like that. Took a few days figuring out how: he accuses me with doing honest work. His proof of my utter failure is that I don't do anything that other people couldn't do. Since the purpose of the blog is to teach moneymaking tips, goblinish ideas and to prove that anyone who is poor is a moron or slacker who deserves nothing but a kick in the butt, my "failure" was inevitable. However he was hoping that I'm actually getting my money in some evil scheme, manipulating people into their doom or stealing from them. Because taking money from people is "owning them" while getting the same money from work is "sucking". Getting much more money is still sucking.

Well, he is safe from failure in real life, asking readers to help him find a job.

Syncaine is not a troll. He is a social. And this is the point when talking about M&S and market rules are not enough. A social can know economics inside out, can have 150 IQ and able to focus for 8 hours, he still be broke as he considers working a failure in life. You can tell that "work isn't a shame", but it's a lie. People really think getting a 10M worth of modules in two hours killing people in lowsec is "awesome fun" while spending the same 2 hours hauling and sorting skillbooks needs "inhuman tolerance for mind-numbing activities". The fact that it nets 40-50x more ISK with practically no risk means nothing to them. ISK means nothing to them until they can't repair their Rifter. Then they go to whine about "the grind" or ask "freindly heplfull peepz" to carry them.

A social is unable to find any fun in any technical activity, as his definition of fun is "receiving positive feedback from peers (real or imaginary)". Optimizing a distribution chain, finding out different way of doing it, finding weak links isn't something that he would try. He grinds, doing the activity mindlessly, repetitively, counting the minutes until it ends and he can finally do some "fun". No wonder that the quality of his work is terrible.

This feeds back to the "nolifer" idea, since if he can't earn more than 20M/hour, I must be playing 22 hours to get 440M a day. He can't care less that I gave exact details what I buy and sell so he could check the margins himself. I must be a nolifer and it needs no verification (just like the uselessness of a perpetuum mobile plan), since the lowly act working cannot provide great results. Only "awesome ownage" can provide billions.

As long as you wish for "the people" like and respect you, you'll be poor. You can't be rich and liked. You can't be rich and respected. Rich people are despicable in the eyes of socials, not because "they exploit people" (socials actually find that "awesome skillz" as long as the victim is not from their in-group), but because "they do and force others to do the ultimate suck: working".

To be rich in EVE (and RL) needs nothing more than saying "I don't care if everyone think I'm the biggest loser". Easy isn't it?

I remain a loser who miss on the awesome fun of roaming in 50M cruisers, blow up total strangers until podded, instead I'll do the horrors of exploring new fields of industry, making at least 15B/month (hopefully much more) and will first fly a logi, then a triage carrier, finally the titan. I never said I give up on it, I just said triage carrier first. Carrier - unlike poor titans - will surely be fielded. If it's lost, I'll just reship to another one, and jump back. In one thing he is right: I won't make anything "remarkable" in EVE.

Hopefully my ideas will. I planned and will prove that anyone who isn't a moron or slacker can make more money than he spend. I hope I can show as many people as possible the fun of creating something for themselves. To show them how enjoyable it is to set out a plan, work on it, and see it succeed. To understand how a system works and be able to predict or even control it, instead of just suffering its actions. I really hope that people would gain the real life skill of finding flow in creative work. I love my real life job and the reason why I have so much time blogging and playing is exactly that I'm very successful in it. My boss can't care less that I'm typing this from my office. The tasks he wanted from me are already done, way before they were due, with some more projects no one asked me to do, I just started them because I was interested in the problem. I can do all this not because I'm better than the average guy. Anyone can do this who can look at his work as a challenge to be overcome, a task to be completed, puzzles to be solved.

Which field could be better to learn this than a game which was designed to be fun?! A place where nothing smells, requires hard labor or demands you to perform in a noisy, hot/cold, small environment. A place where the competition is fair, where everyone starts in the same noobship or lvl 1 orc. Too bad that a social can't even find working with dragons or spaceships fun if it doesn't provide (preferably immediate) peer respect or liking.


EVE Business report: Friday morning 23.0B, that's 600M more than yesterday, I farmed 30 hours today. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to be with 60-80 fellow no-lifer losers who just can't have fun. 

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Dealing with game server overloads

Diablo 3 start wasn't good for us at all. Blizzard choose a "hands off, God will separate them" approach to handle server over load: players spammed the login screen, some were lucky, some were not. I was lucky, got in in 10 minutes. My girlfriend, who logged in the same minute from the same router was not, and couldn't log in Tuesday at all. So I was walking around in Tristram waiting for her while reading blogs and collecting Cynosural Theory skillbooks in EVE (not bad profit for Alt-Tab once a minute and press one button). In the meantime I was thinking how could one handle the server overload more properly.

The obvious idea: "buy bigger servers" is obviously stupid. As a comparison, EVE has 350K subscription and I've never seen Tranquility population above 45K, while EVE is typically a hardcore game, unlike Diablo 3 that someone can play with much less time without missing out on events or stories. So I'd say after the first 1-2 months the ratio of concurrent logins during peak time vs total games sold will be below 10%. Of course on launch week people want to play much more, so it's expected to rent some extra servers to support the extra population for the first two months, but to rent enough servers for everyone would be some serious waste of money. We are talking about tens of millions of $.

The second obvious idea is waiting in queue instead of randomly getting in and out. It's even worse as it motivates players to make more server load. The best way to get in is to log in earlier and to not log out unless you really must, since you might can't come back. The result is even more server load, on the top of being very unfriendly to casual gamers who don't know such tricks.

Then I figured out the solution and I hope that it somehow reaches the ears of future game developers. I know that some Blizzard guys must read me as they responded very fast for the WGClean idea. At first it needs a login queue, which alone would be 6+ hours and I've just written that queues are bad. The idea is whenever the server is above 90% capacity, a timer starts to roll for every player logged in. This timer measures how much time you spent playing during "peak hours". On launch day probably every time is peak time. When the "approximated wait time in queue" reaches 10 minutes, the server starts to make room by sending a message to the players who has the longest timer: "You played [timer] time while others couldn't log in, it's fair to let them play. You'll be removed from the game in 5 minutes, place your hero out of harms way." A countdown starts and if the player don't log out in 5 minutes, he is kicked, making room for someone who played less. Regardless timer, the game shall always provide one hour uninterrupted play, so if you could log in, you can only get this message 55 minutes after that. The timer is counting of course.

The timer never resets, but it's irrelevant when there is enough server capacity. If someone with timer tries to log in during peak hours (which he can do instantly after being kicked to make room), he is placed to the queue but the queue is sorted according to the timer, with one trick: time spent in the queue decreases the timer.

Example: the game starts at midnight, with 10 slots, 19 players want to play. They are called P1,P2....P19
00:00 the game starts P1-10 get in, P11-19 wait in queue. Since the server is above 90% load, P1-10 all gather timer.
00:55 P1-9 get the "you'll be kicked in 5 minutes" message
01:00 P1-9 are removed, P11-19 gets in.
01:01 P1, P2, P3, P4 and P5 requeued. Since there is queue, P10 gets the message.
01:06 P10 is removed, P1 is back
02:30 P20-29, new players enters the queue. Since they have no timer while P1-5 still have 31 minutes left, they get to the top of the queue
01:55 P11-19 gets the message
02:00 P11-19 removed, P20-28 enters
02:01 P1 gets the message
02:06 P1 is out, P29 is in.

Why is this system optimal? Not only because it distributes the limited resource fairly, but because it motivates people to play in off-hours when they gather no timer. It also motivates them to log off during overload when they don't really want to play.

As a bonus, this system would allows the game company to sell one time timer nullifier service and premium accounts that don't gather timer.


PS: the EVE developers welcomed the terrible start of Diablo 3 with the following joke:

Diablo 3 business report: none. I see no point doing business yet, time best spent growing up. Buy gear in the AH, it's cheap like crap. From the gold a zone provides, you can buy better gear to every slot than the pieces you can find in the same zone. Sell everything at the vendors except really-really good items. Essences are cheap too.

EVE Business report: Thursday morning 22.4B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt) Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

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You must station trade what you haul

Well, actually you don't if you are fine with hauling for buy orders. This case you lose serious profit. If you are the station trader of your own item, you skip the sales tax and the broker fee for the transaction between the two. However your profit won't just be haul_profit + station_trade_profit + fees, if we assume that the item is currently not "properly" station traded.

Let's talk about the generic X which cannot be mass-produced but created by many individual sellers. Its also not mass-bought by industrialists but individual consumers. Perfect example is an implant. Its equilibrium value is 75, meaning that if all the buyers and sellers would be gathered together in an open bidding auction, the bid would stop at 75.

The buy orders therefore must be below 75 since if they would be above, the buyer would be flooded by X that he can't sell. The sell prices must be above 75 or the seller is bought out and his order disappears. How far they are from 75 depends on the competition or the brain of the monopolist. I mean if you are the lone station trader and set up buy orders at 5, you probably won't get a single item as sellers will rather make their own sell order or haul it to other hub.

But what is really interesting is that the prices are usually not symmetrical. I mean they are not 65-85, rather 50-80. The reason is that sellers are usually more patient than buyers. The one who sells X is more likely sets up a sell order, than a wannabe consumer setting up a buy order.

To make it more strange, the average price, the one listed in the price history window is usually also not 75 but higher. The reason is the same: the consumers are more likely to buy an overpriced sell order than the sellers to sell to an underpriced buy order. You can sell X for 149 but you can't buy it for 1.

Why is it important for you? Because as a hauler if you don't station trade you are bound to sell to the underpriced buy orders. If you just set up a sell order but don't station trade, you'll end up undercut since the sell price of an "unproperly" station traded item is usually way above the equilibrium, so the 0.01 punks can keep up undercutting you for long and still be with profit, while your profit is limited by your buy price in the place you haul from. You can easily end up at a loss, buying for 80 since you see they sell for 110 but when the undercutting ends, your item sells for 78 and for this -2 you hauled, updated prices for days and kept your capital locked.

How to "properly" station trade an item? By setting up buy orders in a way to ensure that the average sell price is 75 and the buy-sell region is symmetrical. How to do it? The safe but slow way, that involves no guessing is to make 2% steps. So if the buy orders (several 0.01 things) are at 40 and the sells are at 100, then the step size shall be 2. You buy at 42 and sell your first haul at 98. The exception is if the buy order is already below your hauling pickup price. So if you buy the item for 50 somewhere, you shall set the buy price to 50. It would be stupid to haul if you can buy it locally for the same price, right?

After that every day you update your prices if undercut. Since the distance is 60 and you make 2x2 step every day, in two weeks you'd reach zero profit, which will not happen as the 0.01s will give up and the individual buyers-sellers will accept your actual price before it happens. For example at 60 buy 80 sell the individual sellers will accept your buy order, supplying you with items. Whenever you have enough items to sell, don't haul. As the sell price keep dropping, more and more 0.01 punks give it up and go away. After their stocks are liquidated, they are removed from the sell side, so the sell price go up a bit. Finally you reach something like 70 buy 80 sell.

If you are happy hauling for your own buy order price, do, if not, don't. Please note that if you are busy hauling, the price will decrease due to the increased local supply. Whenever your buy price is below your hauling margin, stop hauling, just station trade. Calculating hauling profit with your sell price is a mistake. Imagine that you can buy for 70 and sell for 80 saying "I made 10 by hauling", while you could buy for 70 on the same station, making the same profit without any movement.


Moron of the day: I went to bring some Electrolytes to my coolant producing planet. I warped to the customs office and switched planet mode to make adjustments on the planet. Soon I heard the shield warning sound. Switched off the planet mode, and just in that second I was in the pod. Warped away and started checking who was the idiot who shot me for mere 8M cargo and 2M fittings. His name was Ammatar Navy Admiral. Since my last visit to that planet I was busy increasing Minmatar standing, therefore decreased my Ammatar standing below -5. Also did not notice that my planet is not in Minmatar space. Anyway, I got a diplomacy book and after rank 2 I could go back to loot my wreck and manage the planet.

Still, I'm not the moron of the day. While my action was really dumb, I'm nowhere near these two idiots who shown up when I was creating new bookmarks in Jita in an empty shuttle: EVE Business report: Wednesday morning 21.8B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.9B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas and laugh on the morons of the day (50-80 people on peak hours).

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Blogging my profit away

On April 30 I had 16,7B. 2 weeks later, May 14 22,7 + 0,8 spent on the Orca. That's lame 6.8B in two weeks, 480M/day. What happened? Did I forget to trade or my skillpoints started to decrease? Neither, nor I made some epic fail losing billions in a minute. I simply started to get competitors. Especially after my post on transport interceptors. Also I kept talking too much on the goblinworks channel, so the profit margin on my favorite items dropped significantly.

To prevent that I must be much less concrete on the blog, must not tell anything that reveals my items and restrict myself to talk only about general economic theories that you could read on wikipedia. This way I can prove that only a few people can be rich and you must born into their circles to be told the golden secrets. After I proved that there is nothing left than getting a Guy Fawkes mask and squat on the Wall Street as it's clearly the only way to stop the chosen few to exploit the unlucky 99%.

Screw that! From now on, every month 15th will be the "blogging my profit away" day. I will give detailed info on the field I was working on the previous month. This way I not only give direct and clear examples how the economy works, but also prove that I can keep being rich without the secrets. The source of wealth is hard work, knowing the laws of economy and not wasting money on lols. I will prove that anyone and everyone can be rich. The world (of New Eden) can be full of billionaires! True, it will come at a cost. I can't be dirty rich. Probably I won't be a trillonaire in a year as I can't optimize any business, I must always enter new fields. This price I'm ready pay, so I postpone my titanic plans, my alt will train for triage carrier.

So this is my first blogging my profit away post:
On the left you see NPC-sold books. There are two kind: one is limited stock like Logi and Cyno. The NPC station has 5-6 of them and if you buy them out, the next batch will cost much more and it take time for the price to decrease back. So these are "farmable" books. You can't just pick 20 of them 2 jumps away, you must find a station that has a low price on them. The other bunch is faction sold. I hope you can figure it out which regions sell Amarr Freighter skillbooks. You buy them, put them to your interceptor and fly them to the other regions.

On the right side you can see station traded books. They are random drops from NPCs or LP rewards. Some are sold by NPCs too, but the running price is below the NPC price so people buy in the hubs from other people. With these you just set up buy orders in the hubs, sell what you bought. Of course you should mind the other hubs and if X is bought for 5M in Jita and sold for 6 while bought for 5.5 and sold for 8 in Rens, you should just send your Jita pack to Rens instead of selling.

That's more or less what makes my almost PLEX-a-day. I do some PI but that's about 7M/day profit and the baby phases of my new fields. I'll work on them now, so my old field is yours! ... You believed that? If so, I can tell that I'm a Pandemic Legion recruiter and you can join by sending me a billion! In business you must take everything. Good luck! And don't miss the post tomorrow which will be an economic analysis with important results on this field.


EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 21.6B. The reason of the drop is buying 3 PLEXes. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 0.8B spent on triage carrier alt)
Don't forget to join the goblinworks channel to discuss trading and industrial ideas. (50-80 people on peak hours)

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Miners, manufacturers, refine!

Now that I have my Orca, I checked out the business that helped me get my starter funds. Considering that now I found it slow and low ISK/hour, the memories of doing the same with a Badger II lost a lot of their golden nostalgic status, despite I still consider my newbie steps enjoyable exploration. But I won't return to this business. Maybe with a Charon. But what is the business?

I typed the Jita mineral prices into an Excel table that calculated the breakeven ore prices. Then I opened the market window and checked for ores that are way below them. Flied out, bought them, refined to minerals to compress them with 96%-100% efficiency as I had all the refining skills and the "we take" part was 0-4% depending on my status (with Connection 3, 4% is the minimum). Then I flied the minerals to Jita and sold them. Now I repeated it. 8 jumps away from Jita I found some underpriced ore. Spent 129M buying them out before my ship filled and in Jita I gained 135M for them. I was unlucky as I had the minimum standing with the station, providing 96% yield. If I'd be lucky and get a 6.66+ standing station, the sell price would have been 140.5M. So in ideal case my profit rate was 8%, which isn't bad for no-risk flying of 2*8 jumps. Actually I could skip the flying as the ores would fit into a freighter, I could just buy them remotely, set them into a courier contract and Red Frog would have delivered it for 4M to Jita where I could have perfect refine. Oops, sorry, I have to go...

OK, I'm back from Sobaseki, checked the Lonetrek ore prices, found a moron who sold various ores 5-10% below Jita mineral price, bought them, they will be in Jita by tomorrow, thanks to the frogmen.

Anyway, that's not the point, besides the business idea of fishing for underpriced ore and freight them to Jita. The point is the stupidity of the miner for not doing it himself. He is always "lucky" with the stations as he can choose which system he mines, so he can always pick a place close to a station where he gets perfect refine. Please note that there is absolutely no reason to not refine it. The ores cannot be used for any other purpose than refining them. Every ore will be refined. By doing it himself, the miner cuts the middle man with a single click. Unlike a third party refiner, he doesn't have to fly to pick it up as he already has the ore in his hangar, nor he have to pay sales tax and broker fee for selling it to himself.

If you are a miner and you sell ore, you are doing it wrong. You shall sell refined minerals, even if you don't want to haul them yourself to a hub. Minerals are smaller and more advanced products so they can be picked up by generic haulers or even producer buyers, not just refiners.

If you are a producer who uses lot of minerals, you can exploit the stupidity of the miners who don't know the above: you learn refining skills and set up buy orders for ores on the station you manufacture. The dumb miners will be happy to fill your station with cheap ores that you can refine and use without moving them. If they don't send you enough, you can find them yourself and courier contract them to your base.

Finally if you are a hauler with a freighter looking for something to carry that surely won't be shot down, pick up ores and carry them to the station where you can refine it. Then carry the minerals to Jita and sell them!


The UI suggestions page has been turned into a permanent page, feel free to discuss and add.
EVE Business report: Saturday morning 21.0B. (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Sunday morning 21.9B. (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Monday morning 22.7B. (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time)


PS: moron of the day is #1 in the comment section.

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The caveman bias and the IQ of EVE vs WoW players

If you ask anyone where did our prehistoric ancestors lived, he'd answer "in a cave". Most of what we know of them is from cave painting, fireplaces and graves found in caves. However caves are in short supply and completely non-existent in plains areas. The available caves simply couldn't support significant amount of population. Therefore only a small percentage of the prehistoric men could live in caves. Yet we call them cavemen, because we found nothing about the non-cavemen, their remnants were washed away by the tens of thousands of years, while the caves preserved the relics of the tiny minority who actually used caves.

Why is it important in an MMO? Because of the long-standing stereotype of player "intelligence" in different games. "Intelligence" rather mean to being informed and prepared than actual IQ. The consensus is that players of hardcore games like EVE are much smarter than of player-friendly games, especially WoW, which is dubbed as a collection of retards.

The above consensus cannot be explained by self-magnifying group bias ("the players of my game are awesome, so I'm awesome too"), as it extends to all players. I mean a skilled WoW player would accept without question that he is a rare breed and most WoW players are dumb like a piece of rock.

Most would ignore the question itself, claiming that the explanation is simply "this is the truth". Maybe would add that even a medically declared retard could level up in WoW if he is capable to press buttons without breaking the keyboard, while only a smart and well-informed person can survive in EVE.

I believed that too, but the "Burn Jita" event forced me to rethink. This was a ganking event when several players - lead by the player group Goonswarm - went to the "capital city" of EVE, the Jita star system and killed everyone they found there if he was in a weak ship or carried worthy cargo. More than 10000 players were killed during the event, granted it includes gankers killed by the NPC police. But still thousands were slaughtered. The event was all over the EVE forums and blogs for a month, so everyone with more than one brain cell could avoid Jita.

Who were killed then? People with one brain cell maybe? But how can be so many idiots in the "game of highest IQ"? Similarly how can anyone gank a Hulk in a small destroyer? With the fits and advices available, no destroyer-ganker should kill anyone. Actually a solo Tornado-ganker shouldn't kill anyone. The fact that people in throwaway ships can effectively gank means that there are lot of idiots in the game. And unlike in "Burn Jita" you can't even pull the newbie-card. Learning to drive a Hulk takes more than a month.

I believe that the average knowledge of players in EVE is one of the lowest while in WoW one of the highest! The reason while people believe the direct opposite is the caveman bias. In WoW, due to the random group finding and the fact that people of your faction cannot harm you in any way, people are mixed very much, pugging missing people or the whole group. They are exposed to large amount of players which include terrible idiots.

This has two effects: at first the bad players are often called on their mistakes, therefore given a chance to learn. If you are a fire mage spamming nothing but ice lance, I'm 100% sure that within an hour someone will tell you that you are doing it wrong. Maybe he won't use nice and friendly terms but you will be told to stop it. In EVE you can fly an Amarr ship equipped with railguns and nothing but warp stabilizers in low slots for years without anyone telling you to stop it. Therefore the average player in WoW, while mediocre (by definition), isn't so terrible. "Bad" in WoW is defined as 50-60% effective. I don't say they aren't bad, considering the amount of resources available, but they aren't 5-10% effective like in EVE.

However the second effect of mixing players of different skill is that you are often exposed to the failures of other players. You regularly see yourself on the top of the damage meter, followed by the tank and 2 "idiots" who do half of your damage. To make it worse, they can't be removed after exposing themselves, you can't even kick them from your group, let alone blowing them up like you would in EVE after their first line in the chat. While a semi-competent player makes no impression, an epic moron is remembered. Therefore you come to the conclusion "this game is full of idiots".

In EVE and other "hardcore" games players avoid each other. They play solo or with their known friend group, considering every stranger a possible ganker or spy. This means that informed, intelligent players (who are the opinion leaders on blogs and forums), are surrounded by other good players and even their enemies are similarly good ones otherwise they couldn't even play against them. The swarm of idiots are invisible as they live in high-sec, doing solo missions or mine. This also means that the idiots are not called on their idiocy, they keep remaining idiots while being sure they are great.

This is exactly the utopia I mentioned as perfect design of MMOs. This is the recipe for the ever-growing happy MMO: players stay with their own kind, everyone in your sphere is someone like you. Why EVE is not the #1 on the market?

Enters the ganker. A good player, who for some out of game reason (mostly because he is a slaving underdog in real life), choose to spend his time harming other players, despite the game punishes that. And he is terribly successful. He can devastate targets with 100x more expensive gear and could do it endlessly if the NPC Police wouldn't take him out after every gank for a some time. Ganking is the living example of the utter stupidity of the average EVE player. I mean how many times have you seen a WoW-player with no combat gear, equipped only with a fishing pole or mining pick farming semi-AFK in the middle of a PvP area? And how many times you see Hulks with no combat fitting, semi-AFK mining during Hulkageddon? Any more question which playerbase is dumber? As a general rule, as long as grief-ganking is not a sporadic event, we can surely say that the average EVE-player is dumb like a piece of rock.

Another evidence: I did pretty well in WoW, making 5-10K gold/week. That's about 2.5-5 Euro at the goldsellers. And I reached this peak after years of playing. In EVE, only after three months I can get 3B ISK/week, that's 90 Euro. OK, official shop prices are higher, but even if we half it, I still make 10x more ingame currency in EVE than I did in WoW. That tells a lot about the ratio of smart competitors vs mindless grinders in the two games.

This is the reason why CCP should make high-sec (or rather part of it, the 1-0.8 systems) totally safe. It would soon be populated by swarms of happy morons, skyrocketing the subscriber count. Just don't make low-null safer or the people will start to mix and the magic goes away!


The UI suggestions page has been turned into a permanent page, feel free to discuss and add.
EVE Business report: Friday morning 20.6B. Oops! I either made an accounting error and tomorow I'll have a peak, or I made some epic fail that you can soon laugh on. (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time)

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Fails are fails

If I had to call one ability that separates effective people from the ordinary Joes it would be "recognizing his own non-fatal fails".

Besides the obnoxious idiots everyone is capable to recognize a slap in the face. When he loses something valuable. When his house burn down because of letting candles unattended. When he crashes his car. They might even learn from them. After all - again, except for obnoxious idiots - most people manage to avoid the Darwin award. Hell, they might even learn from the fate of less "lucky" fellows and avoid doing Darwin-class fails.

Since games have no real consequences and most games have no ingame consequences either, most fails are acknowledged with the usual "lol" statement and the M&S specimen moves on his epic quest to get the next shiny the developers placed into the current content patch. However some games have consequences. In EVE you can lose the product of weeks of grinding if you do it wrong. Between such circumstances the previous paragraph applies: most players learn from the idiotic mistakes of themselves and others and don't make really bad moves.

However avoiding mining in a 0.5 system connected to lowsec in an untanked Hulk makes no one rich. It merely make him not totally broke. Not being an epic idiot isn't winning, it's merely ... not being an epic idiot. The difference between the mediocre, dime of a dozen moron or slacker and the effective, rich person isn't handling huge mistakes. It's about handling small, merely relevant mistakes. Because there are lot of them and their combined force is enough to keep one being "constantly out of luck".

You probably don't remember the moron from a month ago. He bought 46 pieces of books for 70K higher than vendor price. Many have defended him that "he could afford it" and "when I'll have hos much ISK I'll do the same". Well, I just did. I bought 30 books for 21.65M instead of 21.60. That's practically rounding error. It's nothing compared to the profit I make with that (they sell around 24M). Still, I miss that 30*0.05 = 1.5M, despite that's just 0.0075% of my total wealth. I know that I made something silly and it's not "lol", it's something to fix. I also know that time is money, so I have to figure out a path that allow me to buy these from the 21.60 vendor while not putting too many extra jumps to my path.

Another "honest mistake". By the way, I hate the term itself. Accepting these and ignoring them is the best way to make them by the dozens every day, making sure that we remain averagely poor. This time I was updating the price of an item and noticed that a nice bunch is sitting in my hangar, thanks to the buy orders. They were selling for 24.99999 M, so I typed in 249 and started pressing the zero key until the above/under regional price counter moved to the +-50% region and hit enter. No new line appeared but my money count jumped up. I checked transactions and recognized my "honest mistake": I misclicked, so sold another item that I wanted. I sold it for 249M while the running price was 330M. Nice way to say goodbye to 80M. But hey, it's not so bad when I make 500M a day. And it's a "game lol", who cares?

I do, because I don't want to make such fails. I kept thinking until I figured out a protocol to avoid that happening again: every time I sell something, I press the magnifier icon on the sell window. This will update the market window for the item. If it's a wrong item, the update will show its own market details, so I'll sell it for the proper price.

I'm also notorious for leaving the items I meant to haul on the stations. "my ship iz empty lulz" - the M&S would say, along with "i turn back lol". Except I know that time is money and I don't want to turn back. So I created the protocol of having the assets window open while hauling. If it has more than one line, I left something, so I can turn back after one jump instead of a dozen. It's not perfect as it doesn't protect me from leaving stuff on my home station (as I always have something there, so it always has an asset line), but it's better than nothing. I just double-check before leaving that station.

Finally when I was capital-limited I prioritized Orca over Retail 5. Now I'm sitting over 5B cash, unable to invest it as I have 53/53 market orders. Is it so terrible to have "only" 4-500M/day income because the 5B makes no profit? Of course not. But it's still a fail. I should have planned better, especially as my second account alts would take 3x more time to all learn it.

So the way to get rich to take your small fails seriously instead of finding excuses like "I can afford them" or "others do more". Both are true. But you have to decide if you want to be just like the "others", who are mediocre by definition. Also, you have to decide what you want to afford: mistakes or a titan? You can't have both.


EVE Business report: Thursday morning 20.5B(2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project) Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

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The secret EVE and Diablo 3 power item shop

There is few things that players hate more in a game than an item shop where they can buy power. These games are called "pay to win" where playing and becoming better in playing is usually seriously sub-optimal way of winning. World of Tanks is an infamous example: you can be the best player in the game, if I have gold ammo (and I'm not a total idiot) you don't have a chance. These games are making their income from short-playing casuals who spend in the shop for a time to "be awsom lol" and then move away to the next shiny after they got bored of oneshotting anyone. MMO and power item shop don't match as the main selling point of MMOs is the community which can't exist if people rotate in an out in a month.

However there is a clear demand to buy cheats which is usually filled by illegal goldsellers. There is a way for the company to harness this: the PLEX-trade of EVE and the RMAH of Diablo 3 are good examples. In these no powerful items are created, they are traded between players. From your point of view player A buying currency or item from player B for game time or real money is no different from B gifting it to A who is his buddy. While living on charity of others is by definition being a leech and a loser, it doesn't change the fact that such RMT between A and B did not damage your game. Actually made it easier as the power moved from the good playing B to A who sucks therefore will be an easy target for you.

This would be a pointless repost if World of Tanks wouldn't turn me into a paranoid. You know, they probably rig the matchmaking and the random generator calculating penetration to keep even the most atrocious players over 40% winrate. What if they aren't the only shady players on the scene? What if CCP and Blizzard are secretly running the most hated thing in a game: a power item shop.

How could they do it? By placing server-side characters to the marketplace who get resources from nothing and trade it "legitimately". For example a legit-looking EVE char having trillions of ISK and buying up all the PLEX in Jita below 490M. Or a Diablo 3 character that sells extremely powerful items by dozens and "giving" the real money coming in to the developers. These simply can't be catched by players without extreme amount of third-party data collection, which is impossible because the system is benefiting the bad players who will obviously won't submit data. And even if they somehow could collect representative data, the developer can always point finger towards illegal RMT bots.

Using the secret item shop in Diablo 3 the bad player can buy top gear that wouldn't be available yet because legitimate players have not farmed enough for him to sell and the few they did are extremely overpriced. The infinite supply coming from the developer push down the price to the level the developer finds optimal, which is by definition something that is accessible for most. In EVE server-bot prevents the PLEX price to drop to the level where one had to convert a dozen to fit a semi-decent ship. Also, by constantly removing PLEX from the playerbase they limit the multiboxing that makes the life of the bad players harder.

If it exists - and I'm not even sure if I believe it does - this system would be very profitable to gaming companies as they have a good item shop without the negative consequences. Just like in World of Tanks, players live under the assumption that they could do better if they would be better players, instead of recognizing the truth: you must pay in the item shop. Granted the system is not so blatant as "The One Ring for $10" as every power the shop sell is something that some players do reach legitimately, so it is (at least theoretically) possible to outperform someone who pays a lot in the shop. In EVE it isn't a high barrier. I mean, with the current price a bad player has to spend 500 Euros a month to outdo me in making ISK.

What to do then? I stopped playing World of Tanks after figuring out that it's probably a cheat. Shall I stop playing EVE and Diablo 3 too unless the companies don't prove that they are free of cheats? (for example by getting a third-party audit, or in Diablo publish a complete item database by telling that Ubersword has 1854 pieces ingame, followed by a list of telling every items unique ID and a complete ownership history of it) No. There are two questions to ask. The first is: "do I enjoy the game as it is now, as I am in it now?"

While playing World of Tanks, we very often did not enjoy the game. We were upset about our performance, or even worse, blamed each other with my girlfriend for sucking to the point of recording and replaying practically all the matches to figure out how could we suck less. We kept on playing under the assumption that if we become really good in the game we'll enjoy it greatly. The cheat destroyed that hope and we stopped playing. The important lesson is to never have hopes about a game because there can very easily be a cheat somewhere making it impossible to fulfill your hopes, even if they were otherwise modest and reachable.

I'm enjoying playing EVE and find the current PLEX price acceptable. I don't think it breaks my plans in EVE. If the price would jump to 2B where I could no longer reliably claim "learn to trade and you can be competitive even with the PLEX-buying losers", I'd stop playing since I couldn't hope that with better trading strategies it can be turned. The point is that may be I could come up with strategies that allow my readers to keep competitive at 2B (after all, I'm making nearly 20/month), but the possibility of cheating on CCPs side makes it irrelevant as they can rise the price to 5B overnight. For the same reason I play Diablo 3 only as a content-game for fun with my girlfriend: we play to complete the game, to kill Inferno Diablo. I won't use the RMAH in the first month until the prices settle and I can see if the prices worth serious attention. I can still post some Diablo 3 goldmaking tips using the gold AH.

The second criteria is "equal playfield". Even if CCP really buying up PLEX and pour ISK in its place, that affects everyone alike. The inflation doesn't hurt you more than the next guy and this applies to PLEX buyers too. So competition can exist and a better player will win over the worse (even if the RMT-er is better off assuming equal playskill). Such games can be played for win. The other kind is unfair, helps the bad players (and those who can effectively game the system). World of Tanks punished you for being good, being better just increased the unfairness towards you and not your winrate. If you have even the suspicion that your game is doing that, you should uninstall that in that moment. You won't have fun playing that game because you don't receive feedback for your actions (which is necessary for the flow), as the response of the program depends on a the cheat and not your actions (simple example: imagine an FPS where the bullets hit totally randomly regardless where you aim).


The moron of the day was sent without signature. The sender is buying skillbooks from NPCs and sell them in other regions where no NPC sell them. The competitor came up with the "great" idea to buy them all out and relist higher. Well, let us wish him good luck to buy out the Science and Trade Institute:
 

EVE Business report: Wdnesday morning 19.9B(2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

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