Yeah EVE is too much of "Mine that asteroid" for it to have any significant appeal to me, economically.

My brain hurts.

EVE is kind of like Second Life, but in space, and with combat. It's cool. Very beautiful environments. I've been playing for a week or so and I enjoy it.

This is actually pretty awesome. Because I CALLED IT. Way back when WoW was just going live, I was having a discussion with my roommate who is just as interested in MMO's as I am.

I said, "So FFXI's crappy economy is killing the game, huh? They need to hire an economist to manage that and make it tick over like clockwork. When will the devs learn that engineers don't know jack about money flow and market access?"

Since those prehistoric days, the need for stable game economies has only grown more evident with each new MMO that comes out.

Although the game itself leaves me dry, it's cool that CCP recognizes how important this aspect is.

Yeah no big surprise here.
This game is really complex.
I wonder why Michael Fahey feels he can't enjoy it? This game seems to be every sci-fi geek's wet dream.

Hmmm, comments are actually disappearing from this post. Just a minute ago I saw three comments, now I only see one.

Yeah I used to be the CEO of a Rabbit Hide farming company in that game....
Economy screwed me over...

MMO's are the reason I'm going for my MBA in MIS. MMO economies are going to be the next big thing after e-commerse. You have all the elements of a real market, at the touch of your finger tips.

From 'exporting/importing' with server transfers, to currency 'farmers', to 'sports' in actual 'pro' gamers.

Only makes sense this is the next step. Every market needs it's Alan Greenspan

wow...this is VERY interesting...and I'm surprised that Bliz wasn't the first to do this

I'm not surprised that CCP is the first on the field with this. With the exception of SWG, I've never seen a game with as much dedication to finance as EVE.

And it hardly has any instruments besides shares! It'd be nice if Corps could issue bonds or use some other financial instruments.

Hmm, I'm about to graduate with an econ degree. Maybe I can use this type of setup to get my foot in the door of the game industry /ideabulb

@mangaijin:
Because wow's economy and binding make the economy relativly pointless compared to EVE which is a near economic sim w/ combat added on?

Yeah, thats probably it.

@snowferret:

Because the combat and flight suck. Oh, and no landing on planets and stations.

@Ethereus: nngh... i covered this in my last post. my last post. im coming to conclude something: either the people that say what you just did have not actually played eve, at all, thus making themselves bullshitting assholes, or else they have played it and were so incapable and dumb they got stuck at the mining guide section of the tutorial and thought that was it, making them very stupid. take your pick, asshole, or stupid.

if im wrong, please tell me, someone, how you can play eve and think its all about mining. i mined once when i played, one time, with a group, and i said this is boring, and continued doing the many other things instead.

i dont even defend eve against someone who has a clue about whats wrong with it, because there are things wrong, but people who jump in and say 'mining lol' cant have played the actual game, because they dont make any sense. what they are saying is not what happens. they may as well post and say 'the sky is pink'.

I'm very surprised by this. Not that an MMO has hired a full time economist, but that it has apparently taken this long for it to happen. IMHO game development teams need economists, architects, sociologists and other specialists in their fields, similar to the way movies use these people. That said, the economic models in games have so far not been very complex, as compared with the models of say ballistics, tactical warfare, football management or basketball playbooks. Hopefully the years of academic and professional experience of these specialists can be useful in enriching game experiences.

@aestheticity: Just out of sheer sick curiousity, because so far I've had a very bad impression of EVE, what else is there to do?

@PratzStrike: You can run missions endlessly. The same missions, over and over and over again. It's actually pretty good money, but mind numbingly boring.

You can buy and sell from the various marketplaces, trying to get some money through arbitrage (buy low, sell high). But if you go into low-sec territory you're likely to get ganked and then kaboom, there goes your working capital.

Or you can try killing other people for money. This involves a lot of time invested into a character to get the skills to become even remotely lethal against other players. Who mostly have battleships and WAAAAY more money than you do. They will kill you over and over and over again, and when they get tired of it, they will call their friends, who will do the same and laugh at you too.

Or you can join a corp, suck a few p#n()r's and get the ships and weapons handed to you to be able to do some ganking of your own. Once you find some sufficiently weak and helpless people to murder, of course.

So I hope you're the patient type who doesn't mind the taste of p#n()r.

I love how the EVE devs will do anything for a bit more publicity. If they made a better game, they wouldn't need it.

Newsflash!! This just in.. Boring.

The whole reason they call economics the 'dismal science' is because it tries to work out just how much incentives influence the behaviour of the market, and of the agents.

That is, economists do game design for reals.

If you laid all the economists of the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

The game is too boring to care.

his name is actually Eyjólfur Guðmundsson.