EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

If the idea of social units comprising of thousands of people allied by nationality or shared culture doesn't add enough monkey madness for you, consider that the game has both legal and illegal channels for real world income to bleed into the game. You can spend your hard-earned money on an in-game item called a 'PLEX' which can be used to add two months of in-game subscription time to a character, and then sell these PLEXes on the in-game market for in-game currency (isk). If you're rich in-game and poor in reality, you can play EVE for free by simply purchasing PLEXes; if you're rich in reality and don't have time to make spaceship money, you can sell some PLEXes and buy as many spaceships as you feel like. Of course, many players go outside of the established CCP-sanctioned system and buy and sell both currency and characters on the black market of eBay; a substantial sum of hard currency can be earned by a diligent eBayer, and it is an accepted belief among many EVE players that some people are making a day-to-day living off selling isk.

One galaxy, limited resources, 450,000 players who are all a little odd to begin with, nationalistic alliances, and a porous system of currency trading. Welcome to the asylum, let's take a tour!

Our first patient is SirLordex, an aluminium magnate of Russian extraction. His existence was only a rumor among the English-speaking population of EVE for many months; he was alleged to have bankrolled his own alliance, RED.OVERLORD, in a quest to seize the region of Feythabolis from its previous owner Goonswarm; it was hinted that he was spending thousands of dollars to purchase isk in bulk from eBay, and that with this money he had purchased five Titans, a number of motherships, and innumerable control towers. The money was eventually traced by CCP those Titans and characters vanished in a mass banning, but evidence of the true extent of SirLordex's habit of spending money on EVE only recently came to light- apparently he's started pumping money into the PLEX system and has singlehandedly crashed the market, driving the in-game price down steeply. You too can watch the madness here, keeping in mind that one PLEX is worth $34.99. How many games do you know of where someone spends over $100,000 on spaceships and brags about it? In SerLordex's own words:

"Listen, calm down. Everyone here understands that ROL didn't sell a single isk on Ebay. Originally, I put in about 50K cash (buying isk, chars and 5 titans + a ton of motherships) from your ratting me out to the GM's (RA's directors = rats, admit it). All of this got banned under the pretext of an exploit that we never used (GM's couldn't prove that I bought isk for RL cash, but I couldn't prove that the isk was legal, either). After that, I bought a ton of timecards from legitimate dealers and, at the moment, have sold more than 1 trillion isk's worth (GM's have confirmed that they know about this and decided that I'm not breaking any rules), bought another five titans, two [more? this is unclear] are still building, and I'm also financing new corps that are coming in. I'll have no problems with [continuing to fund] any of this. So let's not have any dirt thrown around, because if anyone is selling isk here, it's you, and since I know all the gray market dealers I'm going to sell you to CCP at the first opportunity - the next ban is on you."

Perhaps he should consider a career in rap.