Date Posted:	Friday 25th August, 2006	Author:	cheese-cube
Subject:	Gamer's Thoughts	Views:	10397
Comments:	6 Make a comment
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You need an extra big ship to carry around all that ISK!

One interesting thing regarding the ramifications of the scam was brought up in a thread on the official EVE Online forum where people were discussing what they would do with 700 billion ISK (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=381421). From many of the posts in that thread it would seem that many people have a fetish for destroying virtual economies, which is actually quite an interesting idea.

Whenever you have a game that involves a system where goods can be traded for either money or other goods you have a virtual economy. These virtual economies are pretty much identical to their real-life counterparts where the price of an item depends on its abundance. Of course one can influence or "play the market" and this is where the whole economic destruction idea comes into being. One interesting suggestion regarding economy destruction brought up in the thread was from a player called Fortior who put forward the idea of setting up a simple monopoly.

His idea was to go to a low end sector and completely buy up a certain valuable resource, such as Tritanium, and then use alternate characters to sell it at heavily inflated prices. Effectively you would have a monopoly and using the profits you could work your way to other sectors. This would effectively rebalance the entire game to the extreme detriment of other players. Is this sounding all too familiar to you? It should be because this is exactly what the oil companies are suspected of doing today. See children, learning can be fun!

With most large online multiplayer games that involves virtual currency a lot of hard work is usually involved in obtaining it, so I can understand how it can make people feel when they lose most or all of it from something such as account hacking or exploits (Believe me I know; I used to play WoW). But with a situation like the EIB scam I have absolutely no sympathy for those who lost their money.

Unlike most game scams that utilise specific exploits in the game, this one preyed on people's stupidity, so it's entirely their fault and the EVE Online administrators are not liable in any way because their terms and policies were not breached. Additionally I also have this to say to anyone who whines about being hard-done by a game: get a life. Seriously when a game starts to upset or anger you its time to stop playing. Sure I've gotten pissed off by games in the past but I'm an adult now and therefore I'm entitled to talk down to people (At least thats my theory and I'm sticking by it).

Speaking of punk kids I wish they'd get off my damn lawn and stop skating on the sidewalk! So yes what Cally did was terribly evil but it pales in comparison to even simple things like going shopping or getting the mail. The best solution to the whole situation is to just move on. Hopefully this incident will have wizened people up so they'll be able to avoid scams like this in the future.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed here do not reflect those of Gamestah or its affiliates.

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