Eve Mining Guide

Here’s the trailer from the upcoming Dominion release!

The following video of a Dust 514 demo for XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 followed by CCP explaining how it will interact with Eve Online was obtained from Golem.de.

Ars Technica reports a virtual run on the virtual player-run Ebank in Eve Online. Accounts are frozen until the virtual bank regains adequate capitalization. Apparently things started going wrong when a player in the game known as “Ricdic” embezzled 200 Billion Interstellar Kredits (ISK) and sold it in the real world. Current auctions show 200 billion ISK is worth about $40-$50/billion or somewhere between US$ 8,000-10,000. In addition there have been some defaults on loans made by Ebank for an additional 380 Billion ISK in losses for the virtual bank. Ebank’s in game directors revealed that the bank has a current deficit (annual loss?) of 1.2 trillion ISK and that the amount is increasing 12 billion ISK per month.
How this will affect the in-game economy is unknown. Perhaps there will be a virtual recession or depression as players unable to borrow to finance their exploits play less or scale back to a leaner, meaner operation.
Also unknown is whether the June 22nd crackdown on RMT (robotic mining) known as “Unholy Rage” by the game’s real-world creators, CCP, triggered the financial crisis.

“Unholy Rage” is the term for the June 22nd clampdown on real money traders (RMTs) that recently saw 6200 player accounts terminated by Eve Online’s developer CCP. RMTs make real world money by selling in-game currency they create with bot-driven players. As a result, many resources in the game had been overrun with bot-players making life more difficult for normal players. An example from EVE’s blog is the player population for Ingunn over time showing that almost all of the activity was RMTs grinding away 23/7.

So mining for legitimate players just got a whole lot easier, which will make the game a lot more fun for players prepared to work at it rather than buy in. During mid August 2009, online auction prices for in game ISK are holding steady around US$46/Billion.