Every six months, CCP releases a free expansion to the game, introducing a major new mechanic. The last expansion, Dominion, refreshed the 0.0 sovereignty mechanics. Apocrypha, the expansion before that, added wormholes and Tech 3 cruisers. The next expansion, Tyrannis, is adding something called (dryly) “Planetary Interaction.”

Thus far, planets in EVE have had pretty much no role. In the fiction, they house billions of people and drive the interstellar economies and politics. In practice, though, players never interact with them. They’re beautiful (as of the latest expansion, which refreshed their graphics), but almost entirely useless. This expansion changes that. Players will be able to extract, refine, combine, and ship all kinds of new resources around the surface of planets. Players will design and manage networks of these new buildings based on planets’ surfaces. Eventually, this will all plug in with DUST 514, CCP’s upcoming team FPS game. Eventually, players of the console-based game will be able to serve as ground troops for corporations in EVE, attacking enemy ground installations.

We’re still three months out from Tyrannis’ launch, but CCP has been releasing a stream of details about it. They started off with a Dev Blog post – the primary channel for EVE’s designers and developers to interact with the EVE community. At that point, we got a very high level view of the goals of the project, plus an awesome MS Paint diagram of what the UI looks like.

Relatively soon after that, CCP’s current development version of this feature was released to Singularity – the EVE test server. This means anyone can log into this alternate reality version of EVE and play with upcoming features. This includes the first drafts of planetary interaction. A pilot in EVE University (my alma mater!) put together a wonderful video demonstrating the UI (embedded below).

This kicked off a process as old as MMOs – deconstructing new game mechanics. For some people, this is the game. Being the first person to figure out how to build effective planetary mining and manufacturing systems is really satisfying for some kinds of players. For these people, EVE is giving them the experience of doing what amounts to original research. Early adopters will figure out the optimal ways to do this process and then write guides and make videos explaining it to the rest of us. After a few months, I’m sure these groups of early adopters will have worked it all out, collaborating across forums and in-game chat channels and the whole system will be as well understood as wormholes are now. We’re seeing the beginnings of that now, on blog posts like this excellent one. (If you want to read more posts like that, this post by CrazyKinux has links to all the major posts on the subject.)

But those heady first days of confusion and frustration are an experience that you won’t find in other genres in quite the same way. Plus, if you figure this stuff out quickly you can be making a mint while the rest of the galaxy catches up. I’m sorely tempted to make an industrial character to give this a shot…

Map of military development indices in Tribute.

I mentioned in passing in the last article about ratting that some systems are better for it than others. All 0.0 systems in EVE are characterized by “development indices” on three axes: military, industrial, and strategic. The first two indices directly effect how well you can farm in the system. The higher the military index, the more cosmic anomalies will spawn in the system. The higher the industrial index, the more high value mining sites will spawn.

You can’t just pay to upgrade the development indices in your systems, though. You have to actively raise the development level in the system by farming. Each NPC pirate you kill in a system raises its military development level slightly. If you have enough people killing enough pirates, you can level up the quality of that system for that kind of farming. You have to work to keep it up, though — over time, the development level will fade.

There are two big implications of this system. The first is that a 0.0 system can now support many more simultaneous farmers than it used to. If you only have an average of 2-3 people online over the course of the day, they won’t be able to maintain a well developed military system. The development level will decay faster than they can kill rats to increase it. This encourages people to clump up. Better to max out the development level in one system than spread out across a bunch of systems with poor development levels.

There’s a subtle tradeoff here, though. Every system your alliance owns costs quite a bit of ISK: 180M ISK/month just to own it, plus a bunch of other costs to upgrade it. So you don’t want to have a bunch of systems you’re not actively making money from. And since everyone is clumping up in fewer systems now, all those extra systems you own are burning a big hole in your wallet.

The solution? The farming metaphor shows up again: serfdom! With all these expensive (and fertile) fields, it makes a lot of sense for the owners of the space to install serfs. Serfs pay a monthly fee back to the alliance that owns the territory (a fee substantially higher than the upkeep costs for that system) and moves in its own farmers. This makes sense for the serfs because they get a system that they can efficiently farm. It makes sense for the alliance because they don’t have enough pilots of their own to farm the systems effectively. As with feudal serfs, these space-serfs tend to have some similar obligations to their lord. If the area comes under attack, they’re generally expected to take up arms and help with the defense. They tend not to be as large or well organized as the major alliances that own space, but every ship counts. These serf-corporations are usually referred to as “renters” or “pets” (although pets often has a slightly different connotation).

The other big implication is for long-term warfare. Because un-farmed systems lose their development levels, a concerted campaign of disruption and harassment can scare away all the farmers. If this is sustained, the development level of the effected systems will fall, harming the incomes of all the pilots based there. This can be a super effective tactic for smaller groups trying to weaken larger groups without resorting to all-out combat. Star Fraction, a long-lived major alliance announced just such an operation:

Therefore, Operation Black Lustrum, in which the Star Fraction will wage war against the economic and industrial base of our targets. … In particular, the development indices pertaining to military and industrial activity serve as keen and acute indicators of the economic health of a territory and the alliance that administers it.

There’s a longer overview article about how this campaign is progressing that describes a bit more about how this works. So far, it looks like this kind of guerilla warfare is pretty damn effective at decreasing development levels and choking off income streams. The North is thankfully clear of these kinds of tactics so far, but it may just be a matter of time before our farming gets shut down in favor of serious combat.

Ratting at an anomaly in 0.0. Note bounty value in the upper right hand corner.

Virtual worlds are driven by metaphor. In these new kinds of worlds, we need something to grab on to that helps us make sense of the world in terms of ideas we understand. From this we get notions like “tanking” (having lots of armor that lets you take lots of damage), “pulling” (attracting the attention of computer-controlled ships so they move towards you), and “farming” (doing some task repetitively to gain resources). I’ve been doing a lot of that last one recently, and it’s a surprisingly apt metaphor that I want to dig into a little bit.

After the panic and chaos of fighting Triumverate in Pure Blind, Morsus Mihi has settled back into Tribute, intent on rebuilding our coffers of ISK so we can fund our next big conflict. There are two basic ways that people extract value from 0.0 space: mining and ratting. In both cases, each solar system periodically generates stuff that has value. For miners, this means asteroids that can be mined for ore, which turns into minerals for item construction. For ratters, this means computer-controlled pirate ships (rats) that generate a “bounty” when you kill them (and sometimes drop valuable items). I’m going to focus on how the ratting side of things works, but it’s broadly similar for miners.

The first consideration is where to farm. For some complicated reasons I’ll go into this weekend, there are better and worse systems to do this. Some systems are better tended farms than others. These systems generate more rats per hour. These rats appear in asteroid belts (where asteroids appear, too) and cosmic anomalies (where asteroids are rarer / less valuable). The better the system is for farming, the more anomalies you have to choose from, and the higher value rats you’ll find in them. Battleship rats tend to be worth about 1M ISK in bounties each, battlecruisers are about 200k ISK, and cruisers are about 125k ISK. After you clear out an anomaly by killing all these rats, you have to wait for it to respawn with new pirates. Returning to the farming analogy, each anomaly is like a field on a farm. After you harvest it, you have to wait a little while for it to grow back. Plus, having more fields means more farmers can work simultaneously. A system being actively farmed at capacity can only support maybe 3-4 farmers simultaneously.

Map of Tribute, with darker green / yellow / red systems the site of large number of rats killed.

This is not a super fun process, but it’s an extremely reliable way to make money. I log on pretty much every night and run one or two of these and make about 30-50M ISK/hour. I could make more if I had a nicer ship and better weapon skills which would let me deal more damage to kill pirates faster.

From a macro-economic perspective, farming is a big way that CCP injects money into the world. While miners have to sell their products to other players, money is basically created for me out of thin air. No other player cares if these pirates are alive or dead, CCP just invented this system to give combat-trained players a way to farm in 0.0 space where there aren’t (with some complicated exceptions) agents to give you missions to run. This is also part of how corporations make their money. Every time I blow up one of these rats, my corporation (The Graduates) takes 15% of the bounty in a tax. This goes directly into the corporation’s coffers and funds various corporation expenses, like reimbursing me when I lose my ships doing stupid things in fleet ops.

My transaction history after ratting. Note corporate taxation entries

Farming also requires a certain amount of geopolitical stability. I’ll write more about that side of things over the weekend, but suffice to say that having lots of enemy fleets moving through the systems you’re farming in drastically disrupts the process. (Tribute is pretty quiet these days, but you can still kinda see this in the player-deaths map compared to the npc-deaths map.) So while we have a few moments of peace before the rumored upcoming hostilities between the North and the South, I need to build up a nice reserve of ISK to fund my increasingly expensive war habits. Swords to plough-shares and back again.

This topic is continued in Part 2 of this article. Check it out to see how this mechanic forms the foundation for economic warfare in 0.0 territorial fights!

Market prices for Megacyte across different regions.

Large-scale market economics in EVE are endlessly fascinating to me, but I have very little experience playing those games. I mostly make my money from killing computer-controlled pirates, not mining. People who mine are (understandably) obsessed with the market prices for their minerals because they have to sell their mined minerals to other players; there’s no CCP-controlled way to get paid a fixed rate for their basic ISK-making activity. As with any market item, the price of minerals can fluctuate quite significantly. This makes the process of figuring out how best to make money as a miner much more complicated than my life as a pirate-killer (“ratter”, colloquially).

Over at k162, there’s a really fantastic article about the options facing miners. They have to choose where and what kinds of ore to mine, focusing both on what’s worth the most right now and what they can safely acquire. With market prices fluctuating, this makes for a really complicated decision space. That article does a great job of breaking it down.

Some quick vocabulary will help you make sense of it. He talks a lot about “ABC” ores. The way mining works is you find asteroids that generate different kinds of ore. A given asteroid type, say, “Arkanor” (the ‘A’ in ABC) can be converted into its constituent minerals at a refining station. This grid shows the mapping between asteroid/ore types and the minerals they will refine down to. Minerals are the basic building blocks of all items in EVE. To build anything, you need buckets and buckets of these different minerals in different relative amounts.

The so-called ABC ores — Arkanor, Bistot, and Crokite — are much coveted because they refine down to Zydrine and Megacyte (you can see this in the grid linked above), and they could (historically) be found only in 0.0 space. In the next to last expansion, CCP added wormholes to the game (pretty much always abbreviated as WH), which also contained the ABC ores, without the same risks and overhead of operating in 0.0.

The un-asked question here is if CCP is going to do anything to adjust these market dynamics. They’ve historically tried to maintain a balance of risk/reward where taking more risks meant you could make more money. The appearance of ABC ores in WH-space fundamentally threatens that balance, giving the rewards of 0.0 to the somewhat-less-risk-taking wormhole residents. Will they rebalance this? If you really think they’re going to, we’re approaching the time to put your money where your mouth is. Anyone can throw a few hundred million ISK into buying currently-cheap minerals on the markets and hope that the price rises in the coming months. If it does, they’ll be rewarded handsomely. If not, you could be stuck holding the bag on a hangar full of devalued minerals.

Comparing the value of player donations to Haiti relief efforts to the cost of a titan. (Based on this visualization of relative ship prices.)

Late last month, EVE players were witness to a fascinating economic situation: since January 29th, more than 606 billion ISK worth of items was donated to Haiti from the players of EVE. Of course, Haiti has no use for ISK, so CCP converted that ISK back into USD and donated the money to the Red Cross. As far as I can tell, this is the first time people could use their virtual wealth to better the condition of people outside that world.

This is not the only program of its kind – Massively pointed out that Sony Online Entertainment ran a program where the revenue from the sale of in-game items would go towards aid for Haiti. But there’s a really critical difference between those programs; the items people bought from Sony were bought with USD. Sony was basically making virtual items for people for free, and passing the money along (plus a matching donation on their part). This is certainly laudable, but is essentially the benefit-concert model – they provide a service that people are willing to pay for, and donate the proceeds of that service to a worthy cause. CCP also did something a bit like this back in 2004 – making it easy for people to make donations from their account pages. (Thanks to Kári for pointing this out in the comments!)

In EVE’s case, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but this complexity is why I think what happened is so interesting. It’s not simply that CCP set some arbitrary exchange rate for ISK and made the virtual currency disappear. This is going to seem a bit elaborate, but bear with me for a quick diversion into how EVE subscriptions work and we’ll end up back at Haiti in the end.

If you have an EVE account, there are two ways to pay for it each month. You can either pay a regular subscription fee in USD to CCP or you can buy a “timecard” each month and enter the code on that card into your account to credit the account with a month of play time. Historically, these timecards were created for people who didn’t have credit cards – you can buy these physical cards with cash or use PayPal to buy them from an online retailer. Lots of games do this, especially games aimed at younger players who don’t have credit cards. You’ll see tons of these cards in convenience stores everywhere for worlds like Club Penguin and Gaia Online.

The clever realization CCP had was that they could set up an exchange where players could trade these timecards like an in-game item. The way it works now is that when you buy a time card, it doesn’t get directly applied to your account. Instead, if I bought one, I would receive an item representing that timecard called a “Pilot’s License Extension” (PLEX). This PLEX behaves like any other item in the world. It can be bought or sold on the open market (check out its price history here – about 1800 of these exchanges happened on a recent day).

How PLEXes are created, traded, and help convert currencies.

In practice, what usually happens is that people who want more ISK in the game buy PLEXes and then sell them to players who have lots of ISK, but don’t want to pay normal subscription rates. So when I sell another player the PLEX I bought, he gives me ISK and then consumes the PLEX to keep his account going. This is basically a one way exchange rate. I could buy as many PLEXes I want and sell them to other players who are willing to pay me ISK for them. The reverse isn’t true, though – if you had billions of ISK, it just means you can pay your monthly $15 subscription fee in ISK instead of USD. You could save yourself $15 USD by buying a PLEX with ISK each month, but buying more PLEXes than you can use will do you no good. There’s no way to just convert huge amounts of ISK to USD. It’s subject to market forces, too. If there are substantially more players who want to buy PLEXes with ISK, their price will rise. If there are more players trying to sell PLEXes for ISK, the price will fall. This essentially sets the exchange rate between ISK and USD and is how I calculated my USD prices of EVE ships.

So, back to Haiti. All CCP did is let players donate these PLEXes back to CCP. The vast majority of donated PLEXes were bought with ISK. CCP then makes the donated PLEXes disappear, and applies the dollar value equivalent those PLEXes (recall all of them were bought for USD by someone, and sold for ISK to the person who donated them) to the aid fund. This dance is important, because it means that CCP isn’t spending money on this (beyond administrative costs). All accounts in the system get paid for every month, either by time cards or subscription fees, no matter what. They’re just acting as intermediaries, doing the conversion of PLEX back into USD.

All this means that in a very real sense, the industrial barons of EVE who made their fortunes mining virtual asteroids and moons are turning their virtual wealth into physical life-saving supplies in Haiti.

Truly, we live in strange times.

Ship outlines adapted from Davik Rendar’s . The Haiti outline is adapted from this SVG map of Haiti, produced by Rémi Kaupp. An editable, print quality version of the visualization is available here.

Many thanks to Kimble for copy-editing and accounting knowledge, and Jon for graphical editing suggestions and the inspiration for the post.

Hopefully this diagram will answer some of those questions. It’s a really huge image, and I suggest you view it first at a high level to get a sense of the scale, and then zoom in and check out each individual ship. If you want to buy a copy of your own, or tinker with the source graphics yourself, you can find details here.

I’ve also tried to explain a bit about what all those different kinds of ships are for. Hopefully this will be a good reference for when I talk more about blowing up enemy ships, and what the economic implications are for players.

The Ships of EVE Online / Click through for full size, zoomable version.

There are a lot of assumptions behind this image. It’s actually quite hard to get definitive ship price values, both because prices fluctuate and vary substantially by where in the universe you buy something, and because there is no one way to equip a ship. This makes my values hardly exact, and I’ve tried to use the complete lack of significant figures to show how fuzzy they are. In the end, the values are basically the market value for each hull at Jita, plus the price of the fittings off the TGRADS killboard. I felt like this was as accurate as I could reasonably get, without doing a really deep survey of average fittings and fitting costs, or a close look at the contract market for fitted ships.

Producing this image has been a much larger project than I expected when I started. I’ve leaned a lot on my house-mate Jon Chambers for editorial and graphical advice. I’ve also made extensive use of Davik Rendar’s wonderful renders of EVE ships from the side.

Goons Losing Sovereignty Throughout Delve

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

When the history of GoonSwarm is written, it will be a delicious irony that their lust for Delve led to their downfall as a space-holding 0.0 Alliance.

For most of EVE’s history, GoonSwarm has been one of the major power blocs. They have a lengthy, storied history. Most of their pilots come from the Something Awful forums, and they are famous for bringing in hordes of new, inexperienced pilots and overwhelming alliances that no one expected them to have a chance against. This article about their history with the Red Alliance is a really great start, and it links to other EVE articles by the wonderful Nick Breckon.

Most recently, GoonSwarm was in the news for disassembling “Fortress Delve” – a famously un-conquerable region in EVE owned by GoonSwarm’s long-time nemeses Band of Brothers. The history between these alliances is a very long story, but there are some summaries of mixed quality on various EVE wikis. The Mittani, GoonSwarm’s famous spy-master, arranged for a defecting member of BoB to disband the alliance from the inside. When the alliance disbanded, BoB lost “sovereignty” on all their systems in Delve. This is essentially like losing your electricity – all the infrastructure that makes it easy for an alliance to secure their borders, move quickly through their space, store their assets, and construct capital ships instantly shuts off. This triggered a dog pile, in which all nearby alliances descended on BoB and tore them apart. The Goons came out on top, claiming Delve as their new impregnable home.

Today, the exact same cascade hit GoonSwarm. The culprit this time? Goon leadership was a combination of on vacation and not logging in frequently, and forgot to pay the upkeep costs for claiming sovereignty over Delve. The due date passed this morning, and the shit hit the fan.

The Alliance forums exploded with topics like “Karma is a *****” (From SirMolle, BoB’s former leader), We didn’t want that space anyways, “Goons have the most dangerous logistics team EVE has ever seen.”, “Sins of a Solar Paymaster” (a spoof on The Mittani’s regular excellent column on EVE intrigue and politics), “death2goonswarm” (which is populated largely by GoonSwarm members mocking predictions of their own death).

My favorite thing to come out of this whole disaster is a State of the Goon address. I’m not sure if it was leaked or intentionally released, but it was given to over four hundred GoonSwarm members on teamspeak, and describes exactly what happened, why, and what’s happening next. It’s shockingly similar to a speech any other leader could give to their semi-defeated and demoralized team – part call to action, part apology, and part blame-shifting. It’s clearly a prepared statement that’s the result of deliberation among the directorate of GoonSwarm. It’s a great (but a little long) listen.

Some quick vocab that might help you – any letter/number combinations are systems in 0.0 . So when he says “A2”, “JL”, and “NOL”, those are systems. “Caps” is short for capital ships – dreadnaughts, carriers, and titans. “Sov” is short for sovereignty. ISK is EVE’s in-game currency. Most of the rest of the words you won’t recognize are player names. They’re not important for getting the general gist.

Plus, if you make it six minutes into the speech, you get a very questionable comparison of Delve to Haiti.

Enjoy! No doubt there will be lots of great coverage of this, and I’ll try to keep up with it.

State of the Goon, Dealing with Delve Meltdown Redux

We’re in the midst of an organized pirate campaign of miner destruction called “Hulkageddon II“. There’s a running competition among pirates to see who can suicide gank the most miners. This is predictably causing major consternation among the carebear community, since this seems to becoming a more frequent thing. GoonSwarm ran their own mini-campaign last year named “JihadSwarm” (which produced this totally fantastic video), plus the previous Hulkageddon.

My absolute favorite thing to come out of this campaign is a Downfall dubbing of Hitler learning about Hulkageddon (if you’ve never seen this kind of thing, this is a good background):

There’s tons of EVE-vocab loaded fast and furious in the vid, but really all you need to know to appreciate this is that Hulks are the best mining ships (Retrievers kinda suck in comparison) and macroing is to use a program to mine for you without your intervention, which is the height of lame carebearing.

I’m particularly interested in the rhetoric of both sides in these conflicts. Part of miners’ frustration is that their identity is wrapped up in providing the necessary resources to support the mischief of pirates; if they didn’t mine, the cost of pirates’ (as well as everyone else, too) ships and modules would go up. They conceive of their role as supporting everyone else, and getting paid relatively low wages for their hard work compared to other similarly complicated jobs like running missions. Pirates, on the other hand, are much more concerned with talent – from their perspective, mining is too easy and safe, while their chosen profession involves substantial risk. In their minds, EVE is all about risk/reward tradeoffs, and miners are doing something so low risk and low talent that a bot can do it. In some significant ways, the pirates are right – EVE is not designed to create truly safe places, and they proved it by sending a 278B ISK reminder to high sec miners.

The core problem is that for every trade, there has to be another person on the other side. Unlike a world like World of Warcraft, there are no NPC (ie computer controlled) venders that will pay standard rates for items you don’t want.

The main mechanism for finding people to make a trade with is the Market Browser. Lets find an item that I want to sell. For instance, the best item I had in this haul was this Internal Force Field Array. Here’s what the market for that item in my region looks like.

There are two types of orders on the market. In the top pane, we have people who also have this item and are looking to sell their items for the listed price. We’ll call these people sellers. In this scenario, I’m a seller.

On the bottom we have people who would like to buy this item for some specified price. These prices are always lower than the sellers prices. This makes sense – if the buyers were willing to pay the sellers prices, they would just buy from them directly.

The difference in price between the highest buy order and the lowest sell order is known as arbitrage, and it’s where lots of so-called “Station Traders” make their money. You find items that have a nice big gap between the buy and sell prices, put up a buy order, and hope to find someone who will sell you the item. Then you turn around and sell the item back to someone else at the prevailing (higher) sell prices.

In the example item above, current selling prices at this station seems to be 10.41M, but the highest buy price is 9.8M. That’s a decent margin – enough to be worth placing a sell order on it. Luckily there’s quite a bit of demand for this particular item, and it sold pretty much instantly.

So why does anyone ever sell their items to these buyers for less than than the prevailing market value? It’s all about time. Buyers are willing to give you money right now for your item. No waiting. You hit sell, and the money is in your wallet. Sell orders, on the other hand, mean that you have to wait for someone else to come along and pay you for the item. You also have to hope that someone else doesn’t come along and try to sell another copy of your item for less than you’re selling it for. How long you have to wait is more or less a function of the volume of trades on that item. High volume items turn over quickly, so you probably won’t have to wait long for yours to sell.

Station traders get paid because they’re willing to wait. You sell them your item for somewhat under its fair price to not have to spend time babysitting it and making sure it’s well priced as the market values adjust around you.

Every station in EVE has its own market. This means there are many thousands of places to sell your item at. Unsurprisingly, prices vary substantially across the galaxy. In general, the more remote (ie towards low-sec and 0.0) you go, the higher the prices and the lower the volume. So if you’re like me, and you’re looking to offload lots of items as quickly as possible and for the best prices, you want to go someplace that has low arbitrage and high trading volumes. That place is Jita.

The Caldari Navy station at Planet 4, Moon 4 in the Jita system is the biggest trading hub in EVE. It’s the NYSE, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Walmart all rolled into one. When people talk about going shopping in EVE, Jita is usually their destination. There are rarely fewer than 300 people in the system, and 1000 people is not uncommon during peak times. Something like 8% of all market activity in the galaxy happens on this station.

So when I show up in Jita with a hauler’s worth of mission loot to sell, I have to make a decision for each item in my hold. Do I sell it directly to another buyer for instant cash, or do I place my own buy order and wait for someone else to come pay me? To do this, I check the arbitrage rates. If I’m losing less than ~250k ISK by selling it immediately, I’ll do it. It’s not worth my time to squeeze that extra ISK out of it. But if the sell orders are substantially higher than the buy orders, I’ll place a sell order and wait. In Jita, I didn’t have to wait long – all my sell orders were fulfilled within a few hours, and I was flush with cash.

In the end, I probably could have squeezed out another 5-10M out of these items if I’d dutifully placed sell orders on every single one and waited them out. But instead, I effectively indirectly paid a commission to some faceless trader to do the selling for me so I could finish my trading quickly.

Starting Cash: 384M

Ending Cash: 487M

• Ships
• Stuff you equip on a ship to change its abilities (“fittings” or “equipment”)
• Stuff you use to build ships + equipment that goes on ships
• Ammo

Within each of these categories there is quite a bit of structure. There are items for making your ship go faster (afterburners or microwarpdrives), recharge your shields (shield boosters), increase the amount of energy your ship has for using its abilities (capacitor batteries and boosters), and so on. Within each of those categories there are variants on each item type. For each item type (in order of increasing power / effectiveness), there is a Tech 1 version, a bunch of “named” versions, a Tech 2 version, and “faction” versions. (Faction items contain the name of one of the in-game factions in the item name, eg Caldari Navy Cruise Missile Launcher is a faction version of the Cruise Missile Launcher item.)

These items come from different places. Named items and faction items come from the wrecks of computer-controlled ships. Items acquired in this way are called “drops”, and have an associated “drop rate”. For instance, a particular afterburner item might drop .005% of the time you kill a particular ship. This is a vanishingly small number, but there are hundreds of items – the chances you get something valuable aren’t that terrible. These items can also be rewards for missions, or paid for with loyalty-points – think airline frequently flyer miles, except for completing missions for a particular in-game corporation.

Unlike the real world, virtual world economies are pretty much all what are known now as source-sink economies. Economic value is injected into the world at a rate controlled by the game designers, and sucked out of the world at what should be a pretty similar rate. Think of it like a bathtub – if there’s more water flowing in than out, then the amount of money in the world increases. As in the real world, an increasing money supply leads to inflation. Because of this, EVE’s economic overlords have to be careful about how often these valuable items drop.

Vanilla Tech 1 and Tech 2 items come from players. This manufacturing process is detailed (and I’m not that well versed in high-end manufacturing), but it basically works like this. First, you get a blueprint for the item you want to make. The blueprint will specify the materials you need to make the item. To actually make the item, you need to find a production line at a space station that’s not being used. Serious manufacturing oriented players will build their own mini stations dedicated for production. Plug in the blueprint, provide the necessary raw materials, and hit go. Fresh new items will pop out the other side. Building Tech 2 items is more complicated, and I haven’t actually done it yet, so I’m not super fluent on that process, but it’s substantially more skill, capital, and material intensive.

This process sets EVE apart from other MMOs you might have read about or played. Often, items in the world come only from the bodies of computer-controlled enemies. Making the most important and common items (Tech 2 equipment) completely player-generated adds a layer of complexity to the world. Changes in value of the materials to make those items ripple through the supply chain, making substantial amounts of money for people savvy enough to see them coming. It also has big implications for the logistics of players who live in 0.0. It’s essentially impossible to survive off items you find in the world, so major corporations need to either set up their own manufacturing or fly in supplies from high sec space. Either of these choices have their own implications and impact for how wars are fought.