Well, was on my daily trawl through the various web comics I amuse myself with, when I decided (for some rather bizzare reason) to have a quick peek at what nonsense Tim B was spouting from his soapbox today.


Only today he was rambling about goldselling, specifically within WoW - which has "plagued" the game for a number of years. Or at least the spam from the sellers is more the problem, given Blizzard's attitude towards this seems to be simply making money near-useless within the game for most players.

However, it seems 1 company is making a stand. Quite a stand. Tim posted a link (here) to the E.V.E. Online pages. Seems they've gotten quite annoyed at the real-money-game-money-traders hogging all the systems and inflating prices and screwing with the economy. (*See below for delicious irony)

So they banned 6200 account late in June. (roughly 2% of their paying player base)

What they saw, well I'd recommend you read the article - it makes for a stark reading and an impressive show of what can be done with a concerted effort against those trying to cheat the system.

Right, on a slightly lighter note (which is why this is in another post).

A few months ago, I was having lunch with a few of my colleagues, and one happened to mention an amazing story (amazing in itself, compounded further a week or so later when something occurred to me) - just going to show that art (or gaming) really does imitate life.

Basically, within E.V.E. online there are your "Corporations" - your guilds/ outfits / alliances of E.V.E. - only some of these are more serious (in business sense, rather than "hardcore gaming").

1 in particular was based around an elaborate banking system for quite possible hundreds or maybe thousands of players. People would pay their money in, earn their interest etc. All the things you'd expect from an actual bank.

It was all very complex, and an impressive showing of what can be done within an online game.

But stories surfaced of one of the high-up members of this corporation was embezzling money from the bank. People lost confidence in the banks. Players rushed to the bank to withdraw their ISK. The banking system collapsed.

While all this was going on, the Lehmman brothers were going into Meltdown, The Royal Bank of Scotland was being bailed out by the UK government. British councils were finding their investments in Iceland were worthless. And yet, an online game was going through the same turmoil.

The most amazing thing about this only occurred to me about a week later after hearing this story. As any player of EVE will tell you, the currency is "ISK". What many may not know, is in fact this stands for "Icelandic Krona"