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.

NThraller, Morsus Mihi pilot, wins a silver medal. He's the guy on the left.

Think you know who plays MMOs? Pasty-faced teenagers in their parents’ basements, right? Or maybe disaffected college students looking for lulz? How does Olympic Medalist fit into your picture?

NThraller, a Norwegian pilot in hirr (a corporation in Morsus Mihi, my alliance) took home a silver medal from the Vancouver Olympics in the Giant Slalom last week. Don’t let his sparse killboard history fool you. He’s been super active in the RAWR forums for the last few years, even when Olympic training and competition have taken over most of his time. He even provided support on a Vagabond kill the day after he placed second in the world. Now he just needs a matching medal in-game.

Contrary to the stereotype, most MMO players are older. The data’s old, but the last time CCP talked about their player base, they claimed that the average age was 27 and most players had “some kind of degree”. This is broadly similar to World of Warcraft’s demograhpics (although that data is quite old and I suspect skews older now). The one big way that EVE diverges from other MMOs is gender: 95% of EVE players are men, compared to less than 85% (depending on who you ask and when the data was taken) for WoW.

I’ve also been taken with this recent EVE-Space campaign started at Chocolate Heaven. EVE Bloggers have started posting lots of pictures of the spaces in which they play EVE. There’s a huge amount of variety (and I’ve posted a bunch of them below), and I think you can get a bit of a window into the way that EVE pilots live and play. I think they might not look how you expect.

You can find a full list back at CrazyKinux’s blog.

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.

There’s been a bit of a firestorm in the EVE blogging community today about the way the community is organized. This is not very EVE-related, but there are a few points I want to make about it, and this seems as good a venue as any. If you really want the background on this issue, skip to the bottom.

There seem to be a few core issues here that I want to tease apart. First, the issue of the Capsuleer user experience seems to be Roc’s main concern. He doesn’t want to deprive his users of their easy connection to the blogs they love. If, when the block pack updates people all of a sudden lose their connection to blogs they’ve been enthusiastically reading, it looks like Capsuleer isn’t doing its job properly. I’m really sensitive to this issue, but I don’t know that it’s CK’s responsibility to keep Capsuleer’s users happy. Capsuleer pulls the blog pack because it’s a great set of blogs that are interesting to a wide audience. If they want to maintain their own list, they totally can. In fact, I would say that Capsuleer probably should decouple its headlines feature from the blog pack. Letting someone else control the content of your app is always a risky bet. Maybe Capsuleer defaults to showing the blog pack, but can consume other OPML files and create other folders of blogs so other people can curate their own sets.

There are also some arguments (in Roc’s comments, in particular) about the utility of having this kind of list at all. I’m firmly in the pro-blog-pack camp. Pretty much regardless of how they’re selected, having a listing of “top blogs” is really useful for people new to both the EVE community and new to EVE blogging in general. It serves as an incentive for new bloggers to get engaged, provides examples of what effective EVE blogs do, and provide clear venues to engage in discussions with other bloggers that will get your blog noticed. Focusing attention and traffic on some blogs is a totally reasonable and effective way to promote a sense of community. If it feels a little bit exclusive, that’s the point.

There are inclusive alternatives – evebloggers.com syndicates pretty much everyone, but as a result, there isn’t really much of an effect. I’ve only gotten about 50 hits from eve bloggers this month so far, fewer than I received from one mention on Mynxee’s blog (which is in the current blog pack). By comparison, I’ve gotten more than 700 hits this month from Google, out of about 25,000 visits this month. I imagine blogs in the blog pack see quite a bit more daily traffic from their inclusion, and a much broader readership. So a totally non-selective approach makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but doesn’t actually accomplish any of the things that a blog pack is supposed to accomplish. Indeed, diluting the blog pack to include even more blogs decreases its efficacy pretty substantially, and I would urge CrazyKinux to avoid doing that. Twenty to thirty strikes me as a really good balance between size and focus.

But beyond arguing over whether CK should pick the blogs himself versus some sort of popularity contest (which I think is kind of a red herring, anyway – I bet both lists would look reasonably similar in the end, with perhaps a more diverse set if CK curates manually) I think there are a few concrete things CK can do to make the blog pack a more effective community tool. I know he’s a busy guy and this shouldn’t be too much work, so I’ve tried to limit this to stuff that’s not too much extra continuing work:

• Organize the list better. EVE blogs tend to fall into certain categories – newbie, 0.0, pirate, industrialist, fiction, politics, etc. It would be great to show those tags on the blogs themselves. You could even let blog authors choose which tags they want associated with their blog. This would help a lot with the discovery, especially if the list stays long. As it is, the names of blogs are totally not helpful for figuring out what blogs are about. This process might reveal some blind spots in the blog pack lineup, too.
• More religiously police inactivity. There should be a hard upper limit on how long a blog can go inactive before getting pulled increases the turnover in included blogs. This helps new bloggers feel like getting included in the blog pack is something they might attain. I think seeing lots of inactive blogs on the list breeds some of the frustration – you might be a really active engaging blogger but know you’ll never make it on the list because it’s not frequently cleaned out. Administering this is tricky, but perhaps CK could deputize some helpers to check once a month if blogs in the pack are sufficiently active. Adding replacements would be tricky, but since CK has stepped up the curate the list, we probably just have to trust his instincts.
• Have 1-3 monthly guest-spots. It can be really hard to start a new blog, and it would be great if the pack had a monthly focus on a new blog. Maybe it’s open only to blogs that have started in the last month or two. So instead of asking to be in the blog pack, new bloggers can get in the new-blog queue by just emailing CK. There might be a bit of a need for filtering here, but if you limited it to recently created blogs that have posted regularly for a few weeks, there probably wouldn’t be many more eligible blogs than there are spots. This would really help new blogs get noticed and build an audience. (this suggestion inspired from a comment on CK’s post)

I hope this moves the conversation a bit more towards what the blog pack’s role actually is, instead of focusing just on how it’s chosen. I think it can be a really powerful force for fostering a great community if it’s tended well and we think about how it can be more than just a list of links.

Background

For people who aren’t following the debate here’s the situation: CrazyKinux created and has managed the EVE Blog Pack, a list of 40 EVE blogs that are nominally active and which are supposed to form the backbone of the EVE blogging community. They get a lot of attention because CrazyKinux’s blog is the most widely read blog in the EVE world, and is at the top of a google search for “eve blog”. So when you’re on the list, you’re guaranteed a certain amount of traffic, attention, and prestige. The other component to this system is Capsuleer – an iPhone app that, among other things, provides an easy way to read blogs that are in the blog pack (but no mechanism for reading/finding non-blog-pack blogs). All in all, being on the blog roll is great for the people who are on it, but jealousy-inducing for people who aren’t.

So when CrazyKinux proposed a remake of the blog pack that contains only 20 blogs, and opened his comments for suggestions about which 20 they should be, the stakes are clearly high. The main opposition to his proposal comes from Roc’s Ramblings, who is incidentally one of the developers on Capsuleer.