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Eve-bay - rambling thoughts on how CCP might be able to stop it

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Xaviar Onassis	Posted - 2005.11.15 11:53:00 - [1] Much as I'd LOVE to be able to make a living out of playing this wonderful game, and much as I can imagine most of the rest of you reading this would also jump at that chance, I think everyone agrees that selling isk for real cash on e-bay just isn't right. Well, I've just had a thought about a way that CCP could stamp it out utterly. I'm not joining into the debate on people selling game time cards for isk, there are enough threads on that topic already, and I'm not going to start another one (I hope! ). From browsing the forums, I understand that the majority of perpretators in this EULA-violating trade use trial accounts, often from affiliate web sites, to do so untraceably. Well, let me ask a question: how many people had over a million isk during their 14-day trial? Of those, how many of you are alts, who transferred that isk from another account of yours and used it to buy skill books and the like, or just kept it "for a rainy day"? I think that CCP could completely destroy the anti-EULA trading of cash simply by limiting trial accounts to a balance of 1 million isk. Most of the e-bay deals are for 50m or 100m or so. If the (sorry, can't resist any longer) eve-bayers have to use 50 or 100 trial accounts to transfer that much isk, I can't see them doing it for long. For those productive souls who do manage to make a million in their first 14 days, the isk would need to be held in escrow somewhere, but consider that an incentive to converting your account from trial to real (and identifying yourself properly at that point.) Admittedly, some thorough thought would need to go into getting rid of loopholes - we don't want people circumventing the whole thing by trading high-value (or high-volume) commodities for the recipient to sell on for isk, even stopping jet-can trading of similar objects, but I can't see that hampering "genuine" triallists at all anyway. Maybe any item collected by a triallist worth over a certain amount goes straight into some form of object-escrow until their account becomes "live"? We could talk some about the size of the limit, of course, and a million is just the first number I thought of, admittedly, but it needs to be high enough to let genuine triallists really get to grips with the game, and of course to let all those hauling/mining alts start to learn Gallente Industrial/Astrogeology, but low enough to stop people being able to readily transfer large amounts of isk in and out. There may be even simpler options - prevent triallist characters from receiving donations that would take their balance above a limit, though again, you'd also need to think carefully about exploits that would get around it. I'm sure that as described above there are a hundred ways round the block, but there'll also be a hundred ways to block those loopholes. What do people think? Is it worth the bother? Do we just accept that there will always be people "farming" the rich rats/nicer complexes full time because they can make a living out of it (and therefore maximise their farming time), regardless of the negative effect this has on people who want to play for "fun"? Is the problem actually that big? Have you ever come across someone camping a rat spawn or complex in a manner you'd consider unfair? That last question being the main reason CCP cite for disliking eve-baying, as I undestand things. Xav
Sovjet	Posted - 2005.11.15 12:48:00 - [2] Edited by: Sovjet on 15/11/2005 12:49:16 That is a pretty sweet idea to be honest. I suppose you would get people screaming about the whole hauling alt thing, but thats just silly. /signed on this one. Wait - There is a way around this. People would start Ebaying '50m isk worth of Zydrine' and explain that they would give you X amount of X mineral to the value of X isk according to the market value at place X. --------------------------------------- Diplomat. Lawyer. Space Employer.
Aeon Fusion	Posted - 2005.11.15 12:54:00 - [3] Edited by: Aeon Fusion on 15/11/2005 12:54:17 CCP has been working on this game for over 2 years.. you don't think they've thought about this? You are wrong.
Ammend	Posted - 2005.11.15 12:56:00 - [4] I believe the point of the trial is to attract new customers. You can't get too far into the game without more than 1mil. If you're gonna do this, i think you might as well do away with the trial completely.
sonofollo	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:00:00 - [5] well reduce the trial to 7 days heck even have another smaller server just for trial accoutns if they like the thing they can get on the pay server that is TQ (free 15k limited trial accoutns to the free server) could be based on a miniture high sec only trial. If that isnt done a 5 million ISK limit as well. And not allowing transfer of funds in or out. The game is very popular as it is so i think if players really want in they will begin to pay straight away as i did. Good ideas though
Sovjet	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:01:00 - [6] Originally by: Ammend I believe the point of the trial is to attract new customers. You can't get too far into the game without more than 1mil. If you're gonna do this, i think you might as well do away with the trial completely. Lets face it man, 50% of trial accounts are alts for hauling and other stuff, not new players. --------------------------------------- Diplomat. Lawyer. Space Employer.
Ammend	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:09:00 - [7] I've only been in the game for about a month so i'm not going to pretend i know anything about alt's or haulers. However i know i wouldn't be playing if it wasn't for the free trial; and from what i've read the games subscribers have increased dramatically because of the trial. I guess the new subscribers are outweighing the problems.
Baldour Ngarr	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:21:00 - [8] Originally by: Ammend I believe the point of the trial is to attract new customers. You can't get too far into the game without more than 1mil. If you're gonna do this, i think you might as well do away with the trial completely. Quote: We could talk some about the size of the limit, of course, and a million is just the first number I thought of, admittedly, but it needs to be high enough to let genuine triallists really get to grips with the game, and of course to let all those hauling/mining alts start to learn Gallente Industrial/Astrogeology, but low enough to stop people being able to readily transfer large amounts of isk in and out. Celt Corp - members of ISS
Eldrad Zamorfran	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:23:00 - [9] All that is needed is for CCP to tell Ebay not to allow EVE related items to be sold on their site. Ebay (using as an example i'm sure there are other sites) will only ban items from sale if the copyright owner tells them to, currently Ebay has no reason to not allow sales(double negative but it works) I would have thought this would have been an obvious solution to, if not all then a great majority of the selling of ingame items for rl cash, so obvious that there has to be a problem with it. But I cant think of a problem?
Corovus	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:27:00 - [10] Originally by: Eldrad Zamorfran All that is needed is for CCP to tell Ebay not to allow EVE related items to be sold on their site. Ebay (using as an example i'm sure there are other sites) will only ban items from sale if the copyright owner tells them to, currently Ebay has no reason to not allow sales(double negative but it works) I would have thought this would have been an obvious solution to, if not all then a great majority of the selling of ingame items for rl cash, so obvious that there has to be a problem with it. But I cant think of a problem? True, if Bob Geldof can do it, maybe CCP can too? (for those that remember the UK LIVE8 concert fuss)

Traxio Nacho	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:34:00 - [11] Originally by: Eldrad Zamorfran All that is needed is for CCP to tell Ebay not to allow EVE related items to be sold on their site. Ebay (using as an example i'm sure there are other sites) will only ban items from sale if the copyright owner tells them to, currently Ebay has no reason to not allow sales(double negative but it works) I would have thought this would have been an obvious solution to, if not all then a great majority of the selling of ingame items for rl cash, so obvious that there has to be a problem with it. But I cant think of a problem? That would be a good start and solve the ebay problem, but if you type Isk sellers into google you get alot!! of sites other than ebay that you can buy isk from.
Teri Ipeh	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:35:00 - [12] Edited by: Teri Ipeh on 15/11/2005 13:38:52 The introduction of trial accounts has made it easier somewhat for the isk-farmers to cover thier tracks but the fact remains that eBayers have been around long before buddy & trialist accounts where available. Lets face it. CCP is a business and the bottom line for them is how much money they make each month. Banning ebayers with multiple accounts does nothing but reduce CCP's monthly income. Don't delude yourselves that a games company has its customers best interests at heart. Sure, they'll ban 30 or 40 accounts every so often and make a big announcement on these boards just to reassure everyone they're "on the case". But for every one they ban, I'd hazard a guess another 3 or 4 macorers/ebayers take their place. Isk-farming for ebay is the biggest industry in Eve now. For a game that has a relatively low number of subscribers (i.e. 70K compared to other MMORGPS that have millions of subscribers), just take a look on those auction sites and compare whats available. There is literally Trillions of isk for sale - TRILLIONS! And god knows how many Billions worth of minerals and modules for sale too. Its sickening. CCP could stamp out the vast majority of ebayers quite easily overnight should they wish to. Simply removing a players ability to hide in an NPC corp would make it open season on macroers. How hard is it to code it so that a new player has to leave their NPC corp when their 30 days trial period is over? CCP make too much real life cash from multiple macroing ebay scum to justify wiping them out in one go. Better to have a nice turn-over in banning the odd account here and their (thus keeping their dumb player base happy) in the knowledge that a least another 2 or 3 will be immediately opened up to take those banned accounts place (thus keeping CCP's monthly bank balance on the up). I'll leave you with this thought... Look at what those extremely talanted programmers at CCP have created. This game is absoultley awe-inspiring when you think of the amount of thought, intelligence, and man-hours that has gone into creating it. You're seruously telling me that those very same programmers that have written millions upon millions lines of code can't come up with a simple solution to prevent isk-farming?
DukDodgerz	Posted - 2005.11.15 13:51:00 - [13] in the past, eve-baying may have been something they could have prevented, and stopped. With their introduction of giving away ingame items for RL cash expenses incurred, will saddly set a presidence that CCP is endorcing it (courts do look at these things). Add their news items that they will allow it for the upcoming China server..and you have eve-bay here to stay. you can not be a little pregnent...
Joshua Foiritain	Posted - 2005.11.15 15:42:00 - [14] Edited by: Joshua Foiritain on 15/11/2005 15:44:54 Originally by: Xaviar Onassis From browsing the forums, I understand that the majority of perpretators in this EULA-violating trade use trial accounts, often from affiliate web sites, to do so untraceably. ITs far from untracable and i cant imagine these people would waste their time with trial accounts. They have to transfert the money from their main account to a player, whether they put 5 alts in between itll still be as easy to track. Putting random limitations on newbies is a great way of increasing the subscribers eve get because surely, in 2 weeks time nobody could gather more then 1 mill isk. Originally by: Sovjet Lets face it man, 50% of trial accounts are alts for hauling and other stuff, not new players. How would making it 7% solve anything? Originally by: sonofollo well reduce the trial to 7 days heck even have another smaller server just for trial accoutns if they like the thing they can get on the pay server that is TQ (free 15k limited trial accoutns to the free server) could be based on a miniture high sec only trial. You cant try eve decently in 14 days, its far to big for that. So take a guess about how much newbies can test out in 7? Edit: Forgot to mention, i always hand class mates/friends/online friends/etc Between 5 and 10 mill isk when they sign up for a trial. Edit2: You should try a world of warcraft guest account, they figured all sorts of easiliy reachable limitations on your trial would be a good idea. Because yeah, someone is just dieing to subscribe when hes being held back by all sorts of limits. ------------------ [Coreli Corporation Mainframe]
Burlock Ironfist	Posted - 2005.11.15 15:45:00 - [15] Why cant they just tell ebay that they arnt allowed to sell it? surely they must be able to do that - there are loads of thigs you cant sell on ebay. Registered Carebear and Mining Barge Enthusiast.
HUGO DRAX	Posted - 2005.11.15 16:01:00 - [16] Edited by: HUGO DRAX on 15/11/2005 16:02:24 I think CCP has a fine line to tread. If they stop ebay isk sales 100% they might cut way too much into the subscription money they make. In the end it is all about making a profit, it is the bottom line. You have an internal shareholders/board of directors who expect a return on investment. CCP probably evaluated and weighed the issues at hand and currently determined (via consultants etc..) the pros and cons of completely stopping iskfarming etc.. Notice Sony first had EBAY ban all ebay sales then went on and did a sony auction site for EQ. They were able to pull this off due to the large customer base and type of customer. Notice CCP is doing this with the China server, why. Large expected customer base and type of customer. $$$$$$
Zamthor	Posted - 2005.11.15 16:05:00 - [17] Did you ever stop to think maybe ccp sells isk and such on ebay too. if i owned this game and saw the oppurtunity to make more cash i would surely take it, after all ccp's overall fuction is a biz to make money.
Baldour Ngarr	Posted - 2005.11.15 16:09:00 - [18] Originally by: Teri Ipeh How hard is it to code it so that a new player has to leave their NPC corp when their 30 days trial period is over? Impossible. Celt Corp - members of ISS
Ralitge boyter	Posted - 2005.11.15 16:35:00 - [19] Ok, there are quite a lot of people offering over 1b ISK on ebay as well as the regular old 50M and 100M and everthing in between. I happen to know that quite a lot of this is done in the following way. User gets an account... plays for a while and then changes his credit card details (to a stolen card) time is paid for and the user changes the credit card details again. By the time CCP gets paid as the credit card company covers the cost. The person whose card it was is not involved as they just did the right thing. So the user gets to play for free CCP gets their money and the credit card company pays the bill. Those are the type of accounts paying doing the gathering of resources, those are the people that use large amounts of accounts as they do not pay for it anyway. They are the users who can mine in a large barge or 10 and have their friends/other accounts protect them while in the belt. These are the people who make lots and lots of real life $$$ by not paying a thing and just playing games. You have to realize that test accounts are of no use if you want to make lots and lots of ISK. The transfer of ISK is not a problem it is the getting of the ISK that is what is the issue here. Attacking poor test accounts that will not in their 2 weeks ever be able to make more than a million or two if they are very lucky does not make sense. CCP might do a lot better looking at where the major ISK making people are sending their ISK. People who have a billion or more and are just sending it out to other players those are the once that need to get killed. ------------------------------------------- Should you disagree with me, well I guess that is because I disagree with you. If you have a problem with that please feel free not to tell me.
Gilgarmesh	Posted - 2005.11.15 16:58:00 - [20] Originally by: Baldour Ngarr Originally by: Teri Ipeh How hard is it to code it so that a new player has to leave their NPC corp when their 30 days trial period is over? Impossible. To you yes... to someone who makes a living coding computer games, hardly

capt	Posted - 2005.11.15 17:00:00 - [21] Edited by: capt on 15/11/2005 17:01:41 Edited by: capt on 15/11/2005 17:01:12 Originally by: Baldour Ngarr Originally by: Teri Ipeh How hard is it to code it so that a new player has to leave their NPC corp when their 30 days trial period is over? Impossible. hmm I think such a thing would be far from impossible. Just a few lines of code that check for trial period and for npc or player corp. They once tried to introduce degrading corp standings. So that every week or something your standing with a certain corp and or faction would drop with a certain percentage. They found out really fast that it didn't quite worked out like on their drawing boards though. But I would think that it could be possible to introduce a degrading security status for example for the trial accounts. The security status would drop every week untill it reached -5 or something when the 31 day trial period is over. Making them free game and forcing them to go macro'ing in 0.0 where people would welcome them with open arms. If the trial account gets upgraded to fullfledged paying account the negative standing changes (only the ones that happened every week, not the ones caused by own actions) could be reversed.
babyblue	Posted - 2005.11.15 17:16:00 - [22] I hope you people realise that buying/selling of Virtual Goods is online games and other places is inevitable. CCP could make a lot of profit from controlling the trade. It's a similar argument to prohibition. Legal control of the market = taxes. Ban it = crime/underworld. Which would you prefer? Virtual Economies are going to grow and grow. I fully expect some legal frameworks to be put into place (making things actual property) at some point in the future. It's scarey but inevitable. The question is whether CCP want to be in at the start or not. My guess is they'd rather just sell mugs and t-shirts.
Roshan longshot	Posted - 2005.11.15 17:29:00 - [23] IMHO anyone willling to pay $45-$60 a month for a game, is also willing to spend $50-$150 on E-Bay for isk. Multiple accounts should be looked at, and checked for Rapid isk increase, with out justification. And if found "Buying" ISK your account should also be baned from the game. CCP has the tools. 9/10 times, its a E-Bay sale. The 1/10 can be justified by some means. Also, If you produce somthing, without mining for the ore, Where do you think your ISK is going? To E-Bay that is where....I am not saying every ore seller out there is an E-Bayer, But with the millions or Trillions of ISK that is for sale on E-Bay, there sure the heck is enough of them. Simple solution? Really isnt one. Lazy people dont want to mine, but are more then willing to buy millions of Trit from the market. Even worse people Want to buy a new character for Billions of ISK. And of course less then 15% of the players base has billions( Would like CCP to correct this if possible.) Free-form Professions, ensure no limetations on professions. Be a trader, fighter, industialist, researcher, hunter [i]pirate[/i] or mixture of them all. [i]As read from the original box.
Xavier Spectre	Posted - 2005.11.15 17:41:00 - [24] CCP is a large corporation with plenty of financial resources to handle this type of thing if they so desired. Its not that they cant shut down the "eve bayers" its just that they choose to spend their resources on other things that are more productive. Its just not a high priority item for them. I dont think they are directly saying its ok to do it, for example if you do something so assinine as to show up on there radar screen you will get banned, and you should. I highly doubt that they are expending the resources it takes to actively pursue or enact a viable solution to the ISK sellers.
Forino Ovoli	Posted - 2005.11.15 17:46:00 - [25] Edited by: Forino Ovoli on 15/11/2005 17:48:38 Originally by: Joshua Foiritain Forgot to mention, i always hand class mates/friends/online friends/etc Between 5 and 10 mill isk when they sign up for a trial. Off topic from original subject, but do you really think you're doing them any favors? Getting something for nothing only devalues what you give them. I've only been playing a week and I've learned to appreciate getting 4K to 10K for pirate bounties. Had I started with a bankroll of 5 to 10 million, as you give your friends that start out, those bounties would be as exciting as finding a penny in the gutter.
Teri Ipeh	Posted - 2005.11.15 17:46:00 - [26] People seem to be missing the point when it comes to ebay and isk-farmers. You can all post your solutions to the 'problem' all day long, but the bottom line is CCP make money from ebayers multiple accounts. If ebaying cost CCP money - you can guarantee it'd be hammered and wiped out in no time. Truth is it doesn't cost them a dime, infact it's quite the opposite. It's a fine balance between keeping the masses happy on the surface, and making sure the profits keep rolling in (by whatever means) behind the scenes. Ebayers are here to stay - not because its hard to get rid of them, but because they're a massive source of income to a games' companies coffers. Wake up!
Sorthus	Posted - 2005.11.15 18:54:00 - [27] I like to mine so I've thought about this a bit. Trit has devalued by about 30% recently, ice is going fast due to macro miners. My income is definetly impacted by macro miners. Three ideas I have had. First no one flies an ore barge unless they are in a non npc corp. No one flies an ity V unless they are in a non npc corp. Final You cannot create a corp unless your account is 30 days old. The macro people have unlimited isk and many accounts waiting in the background so as they are banned they just pick up the next one. Force them into player corps and let the players sort it out. Oh yeah and you can only change corps once a week this is to prevent just moving all your characters when things get hot. This will impact some people but not as much as the unlimited isk for sale is doing now.
Wee Dave	Posted - 2005.11.15 19:23:00 - [28] Firstly, Ebay isn't obliged to stop selling items. Large companies often threaten them but it's the fear of protracted legal battles, not the fact they expect to lose, that defines this. There's no real obligation to stop selling something - Disney can't block people selling old Disney gear on ebay for instance. Secondly, money doesn't need to be the only method of ebaying. You could easily do an 'escrow scam' instead - have the seller trial account waiting looking at ESCROW, put up a 100 mill small item 'accidentally' for nothing, have the alt seller collect it. If you're fast there's almost no chance anyone else will see it. To the gms, it is simply a stupid mistake, indeed people do it all the time. Any method to impose restrictions on trial account property would have to impose a goods limit as well as a money limit, and that's really hard. Triallers often get onto tier 3 cruisers in a trial account period and can accumulate 20-30 mill isk in two weeks. It's hard to implement this sort of thing. Lastly, most people who join trial accounts do so because of a friends recommendation. A separate server would mean they couldn't play with their friends - this would be quite a turn off.
DelBosco	Posted - 2005.11.15 20:17:00 - [29] Originally by: Xaviar Onassis Well, let me ask a question: how many people had over a million isk during their 14-day trial? Of those, how many of you are alts, who transferred that isk from another account of yours and used it to buy skill books and the like, or just kept it "for a rainy day"? I disagree. I'm not even a full week into my 14 day trial, and I have a good 5 mill worth of goods and ships and another 5 in my wallet. Much of the alure of this game for new players is being able to try it out with no commitment and no limitations. The current trial system is probably the main reason for this games continued success, atleast player numbers wise. Why do you think they've continued to increase the cap for trial accounts on the server?
Malthros Zenobia	Posted - 2005.11.15 20:28:00 - [30] Originally by: Wee Dave There's no real obligation to stop selling something - Disney can't block people selling old Disney gear on ebay for instance. It's not against any rules of Dispney's that re-selling their stuff is illegal. It IS against rules of CCP that ISK selling is illegal, eBay would be aiding and abeting. And if you think there's no obligation to stop selling something, why don't you contact eBay and ask them why they aren't allowed to sell rocket launchers or human organs? You might think they can do whatever they want, but they can't. ------------------------------------ Your Civilian Gatling Railgun perfectly strikes Choke Slam [CAIN], wrecking for 6.0 damage.

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