In all MMOs there are organized player groups, guilds, clans, corporations. However they are all “armies”, groups created to fight together as a unit against a raidboss or other group of players. Of course there are also dysfunctional groups where people just hang out and share porn links or childish jokes without progressing in the game. Despite there is industry (moneymaking) in all MMOs, I’ve yet to see a group that is formed with the goal to make members rich. This is surprising because the real world is full of corporations with this very goal: owners get rich from profit, employees from salary (at least more rich than with other options). Why not in MMOs?
To see this, we first have to see the reason of existence of real-world profit oriented corporations. I mean why does someone join a corporation instead of starting his own small business? The answer is not “specialization” as “miner and hauler join up to get minerals out of the ground and transported to the refinery”. Specialization is handled by the market. The miner could hire the hauler for a fee or the hauler could buy the minerals in the mine and sell for higher in the refinery. That not only doesn’t need them to be in a fixed group but it’s actually counter-productive as one of them is always limited by the other (the miner could mine more but the hauler can’t move more). There is no such limitation if you buy services in the free market.
Corporations have two real purposes. The first is concentration of resources. You can’t just open a mine in the middle of the nowhere if you are a miner with all skills and equipment to mine. There are no roads, electricity and you can’t hire services in the middle of the forest, neither for your business (no truckers or repairman available) nor for your personal existence (no food to buy). A corporation has the size to build the infrastructure, hire services and have enough main-line members (miners in a mining corporation) to share the costs (one miner can’t keep a coffee shop alive, thousands can). In MMOs such concentration is not needed because infrastructure exists everywhere and the world is very small. In most MMOs you can instant-travel, but even in the “realistic” EVE Online you can get to a market hub in an hour with a freighter to get anything you need. The only reason for EVE to stock a market is the warzone where you can’t just move around in a freighter. In highsec no amount of miners could make a shop alive that sells crystals, ships and such. If it’s not profitable as a free business, it’s even less profitable as an in-corp service.
Now we get to the nastier purpose: exploitation. Marx was right, production creates surplus value and it’s distributed between workers and capital owners very unequally. However his followers failed to create a productive alternative, the socialist economy based on common ownership created poverty. How can he be right and yet his solution wrong? Because exploitation isn’t a problem in the system, it’s the purpose. The reason for it is the dumbness and laziness of most people. They fail to properly utilize their assets, so if they are left on their own devices, they make very inefficient production. The perfect example is the guy with the credit card loan. Everyone knows that credit card loans are very expensive and they aren’t big enough to be used on big, productive purchases. Everyone with a credit card loan is making a dumb mistake just because he can’t wait to buy something that he probably doesn’t need anyway until he can afford it.
The purpose of both corporations and government is to protect the morons and slackers from themselves, taking away their freedom and force them to do something productive. Since the worker is perpetually broke and lacks perspective, his best option is to just do as told and settle with a little part of the surplus value. Similarly he is forced to pay tax and various mandatory insurances to protect himself from his inability to save the same money for his elderly age and his medical cost. Of course both kind of management have costs and the managers also take as much as they can, so the worker/taxpayer ends up much worse than he would if he would manage the resources himself, hence the name exploitation.
What Marx and his followers failed to notice is that the exploited workers are unlike to themselves (Marx had university degree unlike the blue collars he fought for) and unable to manage themselves. With as much simplification as possible, capitalism is like a pig farm. The pigs are controlled, locked in and finally slain. Yet the pigs are still much better off than wild boars, have much better health and much less stress and even higher life expectancy despite the “finally slain” part. Would the pigs be liberated from the farm, most of them would starve to death soon since one acre of properly handled farmland creates much more biomass than an acre of grazing land or foraging forest, but the pigs can’t operate a farm and limited to grazing and foraging.
Such exploiting corporations cannot exist in most games as the game developers take on the task and create quest givers as “business owners” . They hire the player and pay him for a simple task. This is done exactly because most of them would fail to act for themselves. Theoretically EVE Online could be a great place for exploitive corporations where the smart businessmen creates hourly paid jobs to dumb players who wouldn’t have to bother about production methods or save money to buy tools, just do as told and get paid.
I see lot of EVE miners working in an obviously suboptimal way (if you have no Orca boost, you are doing it wrong, if you warp to the station with the barge instead of filling an Orca or Freighter, you are doing it wrong…), so they – like the pigs – could benefit from being exploited. Even if 90% of the extra yield coming from the boosts and the no warps would go to the capitalist, they would still be better off. Such systems would be great content creators and places for new players to start and get involved.
Yet in EVE there aren’t any successful highsec business corporations besides Red Frog and clones, but they are much rather Franchise systems than real corps, every pilot does the job alone, just share the marketing. The reason of the lack of industrial corporations is the wardec and awox systems. The costs of protecting your corporation simply cannot be gained from exploiting dumb and lazy players. You are better off mining with your own alts in an NPC corp out of sight than getting employees and exploiting them. The income coming from one extra casual miner working for you is much less than the risk he poses as awoxer and the attention he can get for a wardeccer.
I think neither the ability to shoot corpmates nor the highsec wardecs give nothing to EVE but take a lot away. They take away the creation of corporations where a content creating businessmen keep lot of dumb, average players busy. Now everyone has to create his content, and most are unable to. Why do wardecs and awox give nothing to the game? Exactly because there is no one left to wardec or awox: there are no real corporations to attack, you can only find some idiots who formed a dysfunctional social corp where they do nothing but chat. They will simply stay docked for a week and their impoverished state means that an awoxer or wardeccer will have much less kills than a suicide ganker. Before you’d ask, I point out the fundamental difference between wardec/awox and suicide ganking. The first can be avoided by simply not being in a real player corp, while the second affects everyone regardless of corp status. Removing wardecs/awoxes wouldn’t make EVE safer or “less harsh” as any somewhat competent player is already completely safe from them. They are only affecting newbie players who don’t know that EVE isn’t WoW, where being in a guild have benefits or at worst neutral. I think only corps who own space assets should be open to wardecs so players wouldn’t be worse off just for being in a group. This would allow experienced players to mesh with newbies and dumb players, exploit them financially while teaching them some basic stuff.
Another soul saved from the tankless gank-food state:
To see this, we first have to see the reason of existence of real-world profit oriented corporations. I mean why does someone join a corporation instead of starting his own small business? The answer is not “specialization” as “miner and hauler join up to get minerals out of the ground and transported to the refinery”. Specialization is handled by the market. The miner could hire the hauler for a fee or the hauler could buy the minerals in the mine and sell for higher in the refinery. That not only doesn’t need them to be in a fixed group but it’s actually counter-productive as one of them is always limited by the other (the miner could mine more but the hauler can’t move more). There is no such limitation if you buy services in the free market.
Corporations have two real purposes. The first is concentration of resources. You can’t just open a mine in the middle of the nowhere if you are a miner with all skills and equipment to mine. There are no roads, electricity and you can’t hire services in the middle of the forest, neither for your business (no truckers or repairman available) nor for your personal existence (no food to buy). A corporation has the size to build the infrastructure, hire services and have enough main-line members (miners in a mining corporation) to share the costs (one miner can’t keep a coffee shop alive, thousands can). In MMOs such concentration is not needed because infrastructure exists everywhere and the world is very small. In most MMOs you can instant-travel, but even in the “realistic” EVE Online you can get to a market hub in an hour with a freighter to get anything you need. The only reason for EVE to stock a market is the warzone where you can’t just move around in a freighter. In highsec no amount of miners could make a shop alive that sells crystals, ships and such. If it’s not profitable as a free business, it’s even less profitable as an in-corp service.
Now we get to the nastier purpose: exploitation. Marx was right, production creates surplus value and it’s distributed between workers and capital owners very unequally. However his followers failed to create a productive alternative, the socialist economy based on common ownership created poverty. How can he be right and yet his solution wrong? Because exploitation isn’t a problem in the system, it’s the purpose. The reason for it is the dumbness and laziness of most people. They fail to properly utilize their assets, so if they are left on their own devices, they make very inefficient production. The perfect example is the guy with the credit card loan. Everyone knows that credit card loans are very expensive and they aren’t big enough to be used on big, productive purchases. Everyone with a credit card loan is making a dumb mistake just because he can’t wait to buy something that he probably doesn’t need anyway until he can afford it.
The purpose of both corporations and government is to protect the morons and slackers from themselves, taking away their freedom and force them to do something productive. Since the worker is perpetually broke and lacks perspective, his best option is to just do as told and settle with a little part of the surplus value. Similarly he is forced to pay tax and various mandatory insurances to protect himself from his inability to save the same money for his elderly age and his medical cost. Of course both kind of management have costs and the managers also take as much as they can, so the worker/taxpayer ends up much worse than he would if he would manage the resources himself, hence the name exploitation.
What Marx and his followers failed to notice is that the exploited workers are unlike to themselves (Marx had university degree unlike the blue collars he fought for) and unable to manage themselves. With as much simplification as possible, capitalism is like a pig farm. The pigs are controlled, locked in and finally slain. Yet the pigs are still much better off than wild boars, have much better health and much less stress and even higher life expectancy despite the “finally slain” part. Would the pigs be liberated from the farm, most of them would starve to death soon since one acre of properly handled farmland creates much more biomass than an acre of grazing land or foraging forest, but the pigs can’t operate a farm and limited to grazing and foraging.
Such exploiting corporations cannot exist in most games as the game developers take on the task and create quest givers as “business owners” . They hire the player and pay him for a simple task. This is done exactly because most of them would fail to act for themselves. Theoretically EVE Online could be a great place for exploitive corporations where the smart businessmen creates hourly paid jobs to dumb players who wouldn’t have to bother about production methods or save money to buy tools, just do as told and get paid.
I see lot of EVE miners working in an obviously suboptimal way (if you have no Orca boost, you are doing it wrong, if you warp to the station with the barge instead of filling an Orca or Freighter, you are doing it wrong…), so they – like the pigs – could benefit from being exploited. Even if 90% of the extra yield coming from the boosts and the no warps would go to the capitalist, they would still be better off. Such systems would be great content creators and places for new players to start and get involved.
Yet in EVE there aren’t any successful highsec business corporations besides Red Frog and clones, but they are much rather Franchise systems than real corps, every pilot does the job alone, just share the marketing. The reason of the lack of industrial corporations is the wardec and awox systems. The costs of protecting your corporation simply cannot be gained from exploiting dumb and lazy players. You are better off mining with your own alts in an NPC corp out of sight than getting employees and exploiting them. The income coming from one extra casual miner working for you is much less than the risk he poses as awoxer and the attention he can get for a wardeccer.
I think neither the ability to shoot corpmates nor the highsec wardecs give nothing to EVE but take a lot away. They take away the creation of corporations where a content creating businessmen keep lot of dumb, average players busy. Now everyone has to create his content, and most are unable to. Why do wardecs and awox give nothing to the game? Exactly because there is no one left to wardec or awox: there are no real corporations to attack, you can only find some idiots who formed a dysfunctional social corp where they do nothing but chat. They will simply stay docked for a week and their impoverished state means that an awoxer or wardeccer will have much less kills than a suicide ganker. Before you’d ask, I point out the fundamental difference between wardec/awox and suicide ganking. The first can be avoided by simply not being in a real player corp, while the second affects everyone regardless of corp status. Removing wardecs/awoxes wouldn’t make EVE safer or “less harsh” as any somewhat competent player is already completely safe from them. They are only affecting newbie players who don’t know that EVE isn’t WoW, where being in a guild have benefits or at worst neutral. I think only corps who own space assets should be open to wardecs so players wouldn’t be worse off just for being in a group. This would allow experienced players to mesh with newbies and dumb players, exploit them financially while teaching them some basic stuff.
Another soul saved from the tankless gank-food state:
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