Smart player nearly collapsed EVE Online economy

The executive director of CCP told how, last year, for the sake of his own benefit, one player nearly brought down the entire economy of the EVE Online space multiplayer strategy.

The story happened after the update Inferno . Among other things, this update added new “loyalty points” to the game, which were accrued to players in proportion to the cost of the destroyed enemy ships. For these loyalty points you can buy special items. It was assumed that the game will become more aggressive and more interesting.

One of the players did a very strange, at first glance, thing. He found on the market a practically useless item with a price of just 1 ISK (this is the virtual currency of EVE Online). The player bought absolutely all the items on the market. After that, he put one of the items up for auction at the price of 1 billion ISK - and he bought it from himself.
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As a result of such a fraud, the average market value of an absolutely useless item increased millions of times, and the player himself became the owner of fabulous wealth. Of course, wealth was purely virtual, because the owner could never sell all useless items at such a price. Nevertheless, the system calculated the value of the property based on the average market price.

Then the player stuffed the holds of cheap cargo ships with goods, the cost of which allegedly amounted to billions of ISKs - and exhibited them for destruction. Other players received countless loyalty points, which could be exchanged for something really valuable, and the smart player probably earned a lot of real dollars for their services.

Player frauds have reached such proportions that they began to reflect on the gaming economy. It was clear that the market was being manipulated, but no one understood the reasons for this. The company-developer has set the task of staff economists to figure out what is going on. In the end, they still managed to calculate the scammer and close the loophole.

This is not the first time that fraudsters manage to do their dark business in the game EVE Online. Old-timers still remember the scam with the fictitious bank in 2006.

CCP's executive director says that players often come up with interesting schemes for enrichment, although the developers themselves are not aware of what is happening. In case the new scheme threatens to destabilize the game, then the loophole is closed. "Fun" usually leave the earned state as a kind of reward for the found bug and intelligence.