Originally by: duckmonster

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Actually you bring a potentially interesting point up.

One of the reasons I don't like macromining, but I probably couldn't bring myself to pop them ( unless they come to lower syndicate ) is that the macrominer is quite likely somewhat exploited himself. One of the legends in MMORPG's is that of the 'developing world' macrominer. Some guy who for 2 dollars an hour minds twenty terminals all slurping veldspar in ships named 'qmr0003' and 'qmr0004' etc.

Now, nobody likes this situation. For a start it distorts the game dynamics by pushing the economy out into the real world, but more importantly, said macrominer is getting ripped off too. For the amount of isk my newbie character can make an hour, say 3mil isk, if I translated it into the rate of pay I'd charge a RL client for a programming job, that'd be $20 per mil isk. Now this macrominer is making say 60mil isk on his 15 terminals, or heck more if they are trained to barges or whatever, and he's maybe getting 10c an mil isk. Furthermore, lets say he was making nike shoes for $3 an hour, we'd be still likely to say "hey this guy is kind of getting ripped off", and perhaps badger our governments to try and push for international trade laws to give this guy a better paycheck for his hard work.

Now. Lets say we accept that $3 an hour is a sort of real or virtual "organised crime" exploitation of labor laws, we'd then say "how do we fix it"?. Well, we can look at history for this one , and specifically the prohibition of alcohol in the US, in the 20's or 30's or whenever it was. The govt said "this stuff is bad bad bad" and banned it. Didn't work and ended up spawning the types of Al Capone.

So CCP has instead turned to allowing timecodes, which brings it 'tax', and shazam! You have instant market regulation, and the market for macrominer exploitation disapears. The burden of Mining goes onto the RL player, and he has to decide if he wants to put a bunch of days mining , ratting or pirating or whatever his gig is, to get free pay. Pretty much everyone wins, and yes , it does distort the market, but in a funny way, its really just rich players nemploying poor players, with the transaction being time <-> isk.

And yeah, time really is money.

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