Dr. Eyjolfur Gudmundsson is CCP's lead economist. Ten Ton
Hammer caught up with him at the 2010 Game Developers Conference, where
he was on-hand to deliver a great talk about CCP's initiative to rid
style="font-style: italic;">EVE Online
of illicit currency, item, and account sellers. We spoke with Dr. EyjoG
about these topics, and though he wasn't able to speak directly about
the design and implementation of the Tyrannis expectation, we were able
to hear his comments on his vision for
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economy during and after the May expansion.
Ten
Ton Hammer: First, I think this is the first time we've interviewed a
PhD at Ten Ton Hammer. How did you first become involved with
style="font-style: italic;">EVE?
Gudmundsson:
The university that I used to work at had a small seminar on
experimental economics in 2004, which was lucky enough to have
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_L._Smith"
target="_blank">Dr. Vernon Smith,
who had received the Nobel Prize for basically creating experimental
economics. We discussed how we could use experimental economics to
enhance our research in Iceland.
We also had this guy come from a computer company called CCP. He
introduced us to this game that they had just published that had a lot
to do with economics, and thought it would be exciting for us to
experiment with. When I saw his presentation, I realized
style="font-style: italic;">EVE Online
would be the first online economy that functions on the same basic
principles that real life economies do. We can learn a lot about real
economics though
style="font-style: italic;">EVE
because we have a lot of data.
Economists never have high quality data, but in this case, we actually
do. So that's how I was introduced to the game. When CCP started to
look for an economist two and a half years later, I said I'd try it.
It's such a unique thing that if I didn't try it, I knew I would always
regret it.
TTH:
Have you been approached by universities that want to use your data?
Gudmundsson:
Absolutely. We have agreements with a Finnish university that we've
done research with. We have some cooperation with Icelandic
universities, including a philosophy department studying online
democracies like the Council of Stellar Management. Here at GDC I've
been talking with an American research group, the same group that has
been looking at
style="font-style: italic;">Everquest
data. Hopefully, we'll be able to do something with them in the future.
There's a lot of academic interest in getting into our world and
understanding it.
To be absolutely clear, though, we do not allow direct research on the
Tranquility server, or anything like that. This is all old data that we
share, though it's anonymized, encrypted, and so forth. It's all about
trying to understand behavior, rather than trying to figure out what
individuals are doing.
TTH:
Tell us what you do during a typical week at CCP.
Gudmundsson:
I don't think I've had a typical week since I started. We have ongoing
projects. I am the lead economist, but I am also the director of
research and statistics. We have a unit of eleven people that is split
into four groups. One group deals solely with the in-game economics,
they help with the quarterly economic report, and help the development
team to gather, interpret and give feedback on information during the
development process.
TTH:
They keep their findings relatively secret.
Gudmundsson:
Yes, that's all internal
communication for the company. But then, we also have external
communication like this. We want to have as much of that as possible.
The information in our quarterly economic newspaper, you won't find
that kind of information about any other MMO. Another group deals with
subscribers and market research. They look at trends in subscriptions,
where players are coming into and leaving the game, and try to match
them with in-game behavior. That's interesting and fun research.
Then we have the Council of Stellar Management, they visit twice a
year. Their recent visit in February was really productive. It was a
good meeting. We changed the format to talk about larger issues. To
talk about where
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should be heading in the future, rather than what we should fix now.
Everybody liked the new format. We also talked about little issues, but
more was spent on the bigger issues. We are also thinking of changing
the format of the quarterly economic newsletter. Our development cycles
are getting longer. We plan a year and half into the future. So we're
thinking of making the CSM cycles longer, as well.
The last group is the internal affairs unit. They do nothing but
monitor CCP and their in-game behavior to make sure that everybody is
playing according to the rules. We put a very high standard on our
employees. They can play, of course, but they not in the same ways as
the regular players. We monitor that quite extensively. As the company
is growing and we now have more than 470 people, it becomes more
important that everybody is clear on why it is a crucial factor for our
community to understand that we take it very seriously that nobody at
CCP should have an advantage over anyone else.
TTH:
Were you heavily involved with setting up internal affairs?
Gudmundsson:
Basically, I was focused on
the processes used rather than the unit itself. It works very
independently. I am there only as support.
TTH:
Let's talk a bit about the game, starting with the PLEX initiative.
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is one of the first games to allow a form of legalized currency
conversion...
Gudmundsson:
Well, I wouldn't say
legalized currency conversion. Once you decide that you want to spend
fifteen dollars on a PLEX, you cannot redeem that and get it back. All
you can do is put more time codes into the game.
So it's not legalizing the sale of currency. What we are doing is
facilitating the exchange between time and currency, allowing players
that otherwise couldn't have played because of their real life
situations. Like, a player that doesn't have a credit card but has
plenty of time to play, will have lots of in-game currency. If he
doesn't
have money to pay for the subscription, perhaps because he
doesn't have a credit, he would be out of the game. Another guy, who
has a lot of money but little time in real life, might not have much
ISK. So these guys are actually trading. All we do is facilitate the
exchange though the in-game market. That's what I think is so brilliant
about all this. It's just like any other item in the game. The players
are buying and selling it, and there's a market price for it completely
controlled by supply and demand.
TTH:
In addition to the obvious benefits to the players from the PLEX
system, are there also economic reasons to do it for the game?
style="font-weight: bold;">
Gudmundsson:
Not really. This goes a little more deeply into the philosophy of money
being used in the system. If people have a lot of money but no stuff to
buy, the money just accumulates in the system. You're not earning
interest, and the money just sits there. Money doesn't give you
anything. It's the stuff you get with money that gives you fun,
utility, and happiness. PLEXs help money to flow faster. In economies,
it's called the philosophy of money. It increases trade and production
because you are buying something that somebody else is producing. In
short, it helps the economy.
TTH:
Why hasn't CCP gone down the path of opening banks that give out
interest and so forth?
Gudmundsson:
I think there's a very good reason for that, and we're seeing it in
real life. You don't want to have a government-sanctioned banking
system because then CCP becomes responsible if something goes wrong.
For us to take your money and put interest on it, all that we are doing
from an economic standpoint is putting more money into the game. This
is because the interest that we would be paying would not be based on
economic value within the game.
So, interest in the economy would have to be paid based on other
economic activity that is actually profitable. Otherwise you're just
printing money. That's basically what governments do: they print money
and pay interest by printing money, which is not a good idea. Any
economist will tell you that the current stimulus packages [in America]
are not a long-term viable solution. It can help in the short term, but
not as a long term solution.
TTH:
So creating a bank would necessitate having a lending arm and all the
complexity associated with that. I take it that if CCP started making
those kinds of decisions for corporations it would be way too involved
with gameplay.
Gudmundsson:
Absolutely. That's one of the core design features of
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that it's a player-driven economy. We are just the janitors for the
game world. We create the tool chest, clean it up, and try to make it
as fun as possible. In terms of content and having an immersive
experience, we put that into the hands of the players. Of course, we
provide the content like missions, but that is mostly so that players
can earn money. That's how money comes into the game. It's activity
from the players that we pay for, basically.
TTH:
We recently talked with CCP Senior Designer Torfi Frans Olafsson about
the upcoming Tyrannis expansion (click
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/81709" target="_blank">here
for the interview), and he confirmed the speculation that players would
be taking over creating products that right now are being automatically
sold by NPCs. How do you view that?
Gudmundsson:
When I joined the company in 2007, one of the first things I did was
recommend was that we take the shackles off the NPC market. We would
much rather have that supply be player driven because it's the core of
the economy. The NPC trade goods were always put in there to help low
level players understand arbitrage. That they can buy low in one place,
go to another place, and sell high. And you actually have to search for
the information needed to do that. It's basically a training tool.
Without commenting on the design of Tyrannis, as a general comment I'll
say that anything that makes
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more player driven is something that I really like.
TTH:
We know you can't talk about the design of Tyrannis in these early
stages, but how do you facilitate that change from NPC-seeded products
to player-seeded products? You need to always have a certain inventory
of skill training books and items like that, so players won't run out.
Gudmundsson:
If players really need it, there should be somebody willing to fulfill
that demand. When you take an economy of 300,000 people, I am not
worried about shortages of production. As soon as somebody offers
higher prices for something, somebody else will jump in and start
producing. We saw that happening when we abandoned the NPC-seeded
shuttles. A lot of people worried that shuttles wouldn't be available.
What has happened is that they are available in all the major places.
In all the medium-sized places they are still available, but for a
little bit higher price.
In some of the less condensed spaces they might or might not be
available, and are usually more expensive. That is exactly as it should
be. Where there's a less robust marketplace, it's less efficient, and
it's expected to have higher prices. But it is generally available when
you want it. If it isn't available, you can always buy a cheap
blueprint, and build it yourself.
TTH:
I guess Jita is the clearest example of an efficient
market. But you
still get players flying a couple jumps out to buy things like
skillbooks, since they cost more, there.
Gudmundsson:
That's how markets work. If they're being sold for a higher price in
Jita, that means that there are a lot of people coming into Jita and
buying them up.
TTH:
And players will pay for the convenience of not having to go somewhere
else.
Gudmundsson:
Exactly. A price signals many things. It signals distance, quality,
your preference. At any given time, with 300,000 people, they will all
have different reasons for buying stuff. Some will be willing to pay a
higher price. Others will be willing to travel to pay a lower price.
TTH:
You delivered a talk at GDC based heavily on CCP's "Unholy Rage"
campaign against the real money traders
style="font-style: italic;">in EVE Online.
What are CCP's primary motivations for getting rid of these illicit
players?
Gudmundsson:
If farmers are using a lot of bots, it sends a lot more information to
the servers from the clients, meaning a higher CPU load. We saw a 30%
drop in the average CPU used by each user, even though we banned less
than 2% of the players. If you're using 30% of your computing power to
support only 2% of the players, right there it's telling you that
you're will save money by stopping the bots, which the system is not
designed to handle.
Also, bots are not humans, and MMOs are about human interaction. If
there are a lot of people that are farming in your system, it means
that you are not experiencing an MMO, you're experiencing something
else. Taking these elements out from the game enhances the player
experience. Farmers can also have a significant impact on the economy.
They are especially good at finding exploits, and of course instead of
reporting them they used them to the fullest extent. That can change
the relative scarcity of something, overnight which can basically
destroy your game.
So whether you have an economist on your developer team or not, be sure
that you always monitor the relative scarcity of resources, so that you
know what is going into the game. By removing the real money trade
elements from the game, you are actually able to minimize the risk of
people using these exploits.
The last reason to get rid of farmers is probably the most important:
it's very unfortunate, but in our experience and the experience of
other companies that we've been talking to, real money traders use
illegal methods such as hacking, credit card fraud, and social
engineering, in order to get access to peoples' accounts. They break
into the accounts, they take the stuff, and they sell it. So there's
this illegal activity that is not only damaging your game experience,
but is also having a real life impact on customers. You have to keep
them at arms' length if you want to have good customer service.
Now, even though we know that they are there, and that we can fight
them, we also know that it's going to be difficult to get completely
rid of them. You have to constantly assume that they're there in order
to minimize the impact that they have on the game.
TTH:
The EVE
universe is famously unregulated. Some players might ask how you can
toss these players out, and where you start to define their actions as
exploitive?
Gudmundsson:
That is a difficult point. When we're searching for this, we set our
criteria high enough so that you are obviously using bots and obviously
selling the ISK for real currency. We see how the transactions go back
and forth. In many cases we hear from our own players. Things like "We
bought ISK from this guy and he didn't deliver." We know what is going
on in that regard, and are very careful to have as few false positives
as possible. Luckily, we have had very few during this entire campaign.
With regard to the regulations, it's true that within
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there are only very limited rules. But it's very clear that as soon as
you take it into real life -like if you threaten to go to somebody's
house- you are banned from the game. Then, of course, there's the
simple fact that
by having this PLEX system, we get away from the RMT. It allows
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to become a more enjoyable system. People that aren't as hardcore
because they don't have the time can enjoy
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much more, and in so doing help people that don't have the real life
means, such as credit cards, to also play. So both of them enjoy the
game more. The entire playerbase also has a better experience because
there are more people in the game that are not bots.
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