So, I’ve still not amanged to get an awful lot of time in-game under my belt this week. However there ahve been some interesting developements in the meta-world surrounding eve which merit some mention.
First off, EBank (which I am a customer of, I tell you this in the interests of full disclosure) has been the victim of embezzlement. It turns out that Ricdic, the main character used for recieving depostis has been involved in some shady dealings including scamming in-game and RMT. EBank has a forum thread here about it which has been getting quite alot of attention and clears up some of the questions which are no-doubt being asked.
This issue raises a bigger question regarding financial services in New Eden; namely should they be based on the same free-market approach as everything esle or should CCP step in and regulate them so that such investements are protected and secure. Personally I don’t think CCP should get involved, these complex financial products should be based on risk, return, trust and all the other factors that such things are based on in the real world if they are to be of any value.
The calls for CCP to step in and regulate are similar in many ways to the calls in the real world for governments to regulate everything that has the slightest risk attached to it. I don’t think that New Eden would benefit from such behaviour on CCP’s part and we would lose some of the sandbox style freedom of the game if every such call was acted upon. ‘Caveat Emptor’ is the watchword here I would think, as are many pother appropriate aphorisms, such as ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ and ‘Trust no-one’.
What people do with their ISK is not CCP’s problem as long as it doesn’t break the EULA, they are not obligated to protect and investment of <em>imaginary</em> money you make, or bail you out if your invesments turn sour. The parallels with the current real world economic situation are striking as many people believe that the cause of the crash (in RL) was excessive gov’t intervention in markets. I can only hope that CCP sees this and is not tempted to give in to the QQ’ing of the people who can’t stand a little risk in their online lives.
Anyway enough about Ebank and dry economic stuff. There have been other things happening in the world of EVE over the last week or so.
The rules for the 7th Alliance tournament have been published and sign-ups are open. The allowed ships list has had some tweaks this year with Logistics Cruisers being allowed back in the tourney and the new Tech 3 ships added (along with haulers, I’m not quite sure what that’s about). For the full lowdown check out the Alliance Tournament Section of the EVE website, along with CCP Claw’s Dev Blog.
Lots of Dev Blogs this week, including this one from CCP Valar (named for a race of godlike beings from Tolkiens middle earth) regarding the latest software and hardware upgrades to the database server. Its quite dry and technical, sure to appeal to the uber-geeks among you, and there are claims that if you read it all you get a cookie (I’m still waiting for mine).
I’m still working on some sort of directory/feed aggregator for the 500 or so EVE blogs that are out there. The EVE Directory Project has been scrapped as it was pointed out that there is already a well established directory website for EVE out there. Check out eve-places.com, for quite a comprehensive list of EVE sites and resources. I’m still looking for some sort of feed aggregation script that will allow me to present categorised feeds of all the blogs that are springing up, if anyone has any ideas, I’m opne to suggestions. In the mean time I’m preparing categorised OPML files for download and will have them up fairly shortly.
I managed to squeeze in a 0.0 inty/frigate roam with the Bastards and Hellcats on Sunday night but haven’t really had the opportunity to log in since. I had a Ju-Jitsu grading on tuesday night and gained my orange belt (and a fair few bruises), and to top it all I’ve quit smoking. RL is still taking priority for the time being, though I will be making an appearance in new eden in the near future, promise 
. I have also been remiss in posting episodes of Vertical Slice, my apologies for that Alphaxion, a catch-up post is imminent.
Till next time, good hunting and don’t let the reds get you down.
3 Comments
I’m always surprised at some of the institutions in eve, as much as I like the idea of a bank, playing a game as a bank teller must get boring pretty quick. Also the temptation, as with what apparently happened with Ricdic, is to enter into gold selling with other people’s gold obviously, must be huge and won’t get missed by those people who run gold selling websites. I’m curious as to how he got into that.
And i’m wondering if the temptation to become infamous in eve is also a temptation, wouldn’t you be tempted if you new you’d be remembered for the biggest bank heist. At least until the next one
I’m not exactly clear on the details of how RMT was involved, whether Ricdic was buying or selling (either is against the EULA, though only selling is bannable afaik)
As far as the temptation to become infamous goes, only the character becomes infamous, and in Ricdic’s case if the player involved was to publicise their involvement they would never be able to play the game again. Infamy has its price, a known scammer will never be trusted and that is the real currency of EVE.
I don’t think I’d want CCP to step in and regulate it, and I am also a customer of EBank. However, it does seem to me that the current tool sets for fraud and scam protection on that level are pretty near non-existent. Again though, I’m not sure that’s really a job for CCP to set up. I’d think we’re probably just missing good insurance companies that can help protect against all of that. After all, the entire player end of the EVE universe is less than 7 years old, it’ll take time to set-up financial institutions that in the real world formed over decades or even centuries.
As to working as a bank teller, well it’s hard to tell how much of the basic telling is being handled by the system. I mean we do know to some extent that someone has to sign off on the actual moves, but I doubt it’s distributed such that any one person is spending all their EVE time doing that.
From what I understand of EBank’s structure, this really doesn’t worry me, or make me want to withdraw all my cash from them. They were structured specifically to prevent any one director from running off with the bank anyways. It’s more just a surprise that it was Ricdic of all people, and kind of a pain since he was the bank’s main guarantor. Overall though, while 200bil is a lot of money, from an organization worth over a trillion, it’s really not a fatal blow. I feel more concerned for those that tried to deposit after the API key got pulled than I do for EBank as a whole.
On the other hand. >.>. I only had a hundred mil and change in the bank and not billions, so I could just be tending towards the side of flippancy.