CCP's War on Bots and Illicit RMT Since Fanfest

Apparently, CCP's War On Botting and Illicit RMT has now moved to the EVE Online sub-Reddit. ISK sellers and botters have long used Reddit as a platform to either create negative feedback against CCP during ban waves or to advertise their wares. For example, in the face of reduced sales due to CCP conducting sales during the holiday season last December, a post went up on 14 December decrying how CCP ignores botting and illicit real money transactions. That post led to a huge spike of sales on Player Auctions, a well-known RMT site, with over 500 billion ISK sold the same day the post appeared.

Last Friday, another post, Confession of a botmaker, went up. The post is a member of a well-worn archetype: a long-term botting/ISK selling insider tells a story of how he made trillions of ISK without getting caught. And on 14-15 July, sales of ISK on Player Auctions increased, with buyers submitting reviews associated with 330 billion ISK in sales, or double the average daily amount sold in July up to that point. But then on the 16th, CCP Falcon posted on r/eve about an upcoming security dev blog. On the 18th, the security team delivered, announcing the following number of bans since February:

• 8771 account bans for RMT related activities since February
• 4250 account bans for botting related activities since February
• 5377 account bans for account hacking since February

Arguing that CCP is not paying any attention to botting and ISK selling is rather difficult when the security team is banning over 4000 accounts every month.

Getting the ban numbers helps fill in the picture of what happened concerning the black market. For example, from the day after Fanfest to 15 July, the 7-day moving average for the price of ISK on Player Auctions rose from $4.32/billion to $6.00/billion, an increase of 38.9%. How much was due to CCP actions vs. the actions of players impacting the activities of bots? The ban numbers suggests the enforcement activity played a large role.

The first major security-related event concerned the implementation of a check of user credentials against the Pwned Passwords database of compromised passwords. The move toward warning players about compromised credentials is part of the efforts, along with encouraging two-factor authentication, to reduce the hacking of accounts.

The first post indicating CCP deletes market bots 

Perhaps the most satisfying news came in late May, as a major ban wave hit Tranquility. What made the ban wave different was the treatment of market bots. The botting forums initially were confused, but CCP Peligro made an announcement on Twitter.

These 60 market bots I just banned won't get to play Into The Abyss, but I guess you could say they were given a one way ticket into the abyss.
Deleted their characters too. Market botting is PVP in EVE Online and we are cracking down. #tweetfleet #eveonline

— CCP Peligro (@CCP_Peligro) May 29, 2018

The last major event I know of possibly is related to the ban wave that began on 23 May. A Reddit post on 13 June revealed several Chinese corporations, including those in Goonswarm Federation, Test Alliance Please Ignore, Ranger Regiment and Fraternity all suffered massive bans. According to the post, one corporation in Goonswarm had over 200 billion ISK removed from its corporation wallet.

Now, I don't believe that the price hike seen on the black market are solely due to the actions of CCP's security team. Widespread warfare targeting rental alliances can keep ISK sellers from restocking their stores with freshly botted money. Also, outside events like Russia's war on the Telegram Messenger service can disrupt players (and bots) from reaching CCP's servers. But CCP has taken significant action against botters, hackers and ISK sellers since the end of Fanfest and I hope the efforts continue under the new executive producer.

Jobs Roundup: EVE Online gets new development leadership as CCP Games promotes Bergur Finnbogason and Sveinbjörn Magnússonhttps://t.co/XchwzcgqSc pic.twitter.com/ET23vVllvS

— GamesIndustry (@GIBiz) July 18, 2018

My Boring EVE Life

One of these days I will start writing about cool stuff again. But for now, I’m just chronicling my EVE-related activities. For some reason, my coding project is taking up quite a bit of my free time, but I think I have the most urgent part complete.

Over the weekend, I managed to figure out how to download market information using the ESI and then storing it into a file. My first query involved downloading all the information for tech 3 subsystems. Since the introduction of the new subsystems in July 2017, I only have a couple of more weeks to play around downloading the entire dataset. For now, the only things I need to do are code in a start and stop date and then I’ll be able to start doing a few other things with the ESI, like maybe trying to figure out how to insert the data directly into a database.

Why collect the data in the first place? Over the last few months I wanted to play with consumer price indexes in EVE. Looking at the PLEX and black market RMT data, I thought creating my own price index points would shed some light on economics in MMORPGs. The subject I am most interested is what does the conversion of a game to a hybrid payment model do to the in-game economy. My only problem was that the tech 3 subsystem data was missing. I just solved that obstacle. I just hope I haven’t forgotten everything I learned about the CPI. Hopefully I took good notes.

In New Eden itself, I have continued my practice of ignoring Abyssal space and so far, the latest live event. I think I will wind up partaking in the event, though, if the SKINs are those Chainbreaker Khumaak SKINs I saw in the shop. Of course, I have so many SKINs from playing Project Discovery and I still haven’t injected a single one. I guess dressing up my ships isn’t a high priority. Which reminds me. I need to wash my Stratios. The ship looks like a slightly toasted marshmallow.

I still haven’t built a CONCORD ship as my factional warfare experiment continues. The new character I created for factional warfare is almost two weeks old and been in the militia since 4 July. I have to say that so far, a new character, at least in the Minmatar (and probably Gallente) militia, can pull in some nice ISK, even only running one or two plexes a night. I started out with 3 Slashers (2 properly fit) and 600,000 ISK on 4 July. Nine days later, I still have my original Slashers plus an additional two I purchased early Thursday morning. With over 52 million ISK still in my wallet, I can afford more. The only reason I haven’t bought them is the pain of moving the ships around. At this point in the experiment, I don’t want to bring in my main characters who can fly Orcas and Mastodons. Let’s just say that transporting mass amounts of cargo in a Wreathe is a pain.
I now have proper fittings for all five Slashers, although I only learned Mechanics IV, the skill required to fit Damage Control IIs, while I was sleeping last night. I was waiting on that skill to complete before trying to fight someone. Besides the improved tank, the self-imposed requirement allowed me time to amass a bankroll.

Did I just suggest I wanted to partake in PvP? While the money is good, plexing sucks. A few times I wondered if I should log into my main mining character because sitting in a complex is so boring and no one was roaming through. I guess I shouldn’t say no one. I saw quite a few Minmatar militia pilots and a few Gallente militia pilots. I even spotted a couple of Amarr pilots. They don’t seem to hang around very long, at least in the nice quiet neighborhood I patrol. I did wind up scooping a corpse in a complex.

I think what I need to do is start paying closer attention to the status of the war zone. I think getting involved in a fight over a structure might be interesting. I watch the militia chat and check the control board in the factional warfare tab to see where the action is. I’m still at the stage of trying to build up a nest egg and a stash of ships so losing a ship or two won’t hurt. But I think I’m almost at the point I can get a little more adventurous.

As for other activities, I don’t think I did any low sec mining over the past week. I’m thinking of doing a little ninja mining in a wormhole. I did run a couple of data and relic sites, but I even have spent the time probing down wormholes as well as combat and gas sites I don’t run just for the practice. Right now, I just need to decide whether I want to enter wormholes that lead into low sec or go for ones I can enter from high sec. The low sec option just feels right for some reason.

I Joined Factional Warfare

I finally did it. I succumbed to the dark side and joined factional warfare. Perhaps I hang out in the wrong places, but I got a little sick of some of what I was hearing. “Factional warfare needs fixing!” “Why doesn’t CCP do more to direct new players to factional warfare?!” Well, duh! But I don’t have direct experience with factional warfare. Sure, I did a lot of PvE activity in factional warfare space until the NPCs drove me out, but apart from joining a factional warfare player corporation in 2010, I didn’t have any hands-on experience. Mostly because I don’t like PvP that doesn’t involve shooting fireworks at bewildered PvP pilots in high security space. That’s hilarious.

So, this past weekend, I decided to start a little experiment. I created a new character on my 3rd Omega account dedicated to factional warfare. I realize that even though I’m horrible at PvP, my almost 9 years of playing EVE give me some advantages that don’t go away with stepping into a new character. I also probably conducted a lot more research into how to start out as a new player in factional warfare than the average new player would perform.

I decided for the experiment I would try to follow the natural path of a new player not associated with an outside group, at least until I entered one of the militias. That meant playing through the voice-acted new player experience. I probably should have selected a different race, but once again I rolled up a Minmatar pilot. While I selected a new bloodline, I also chose Republic University for my education, meaning I entered New Eden in the Embod area.

Selecting Minmatar did allow me to compare the current iteration of the New Player Experience to the last time I played through. The NPE is still a bit slow, but I can see where CCP fixed some of the old areas that caused new players problems. The big improvement was the specific mention of the importance of keeping skills in training and giving the player both the Minmatar Frigate and Minmatar Destroyer skill books to do so. That’s right, characters don’t begin with racial frigate skills anymore.

Characters also don’t leave the beginning tutorial with a lot of materials. After the final battle resulted in the destruction of my Rifter and pod, my ship hanger only held a Reaper-class corvette (aka “the rookie ship”) and a Venture-class mining frigate. The last time I ran the tutorial, I got a new Rifter. This time, a one-run Rifter blueprint copy. I guess if a player really wants to jump the rails, he can go mine a new Rifter.

I also received advice to go to either Resource Wars or the career agents. Sending a new player to Resource Wars in a Venture is just mean. Fortunately, at least in my opinion, the presentation slants players to the career agents, so off I flew to Embod.

I won’t go into the career agent missions except to mention, do all of them. Yes, I know there are 45, but the rewards are worth doing, especially if the plan is not to transfer ISK from another character and not to buy PLEX. I’ll just remind people to do the business agent first, so when items are under construction the player can do one of the other mission lines. After completing the career agent missions, I had 7.5 million ISK in my wallet and the following ships in my hangar:

1 x Rifter
1 x Slasher
1 x Burst
1 x Probe
1 x Reaper
2 x Wreathe
3 x Venture

At this point, the pretending to be a new player ended, as I had to figure out what to do next. First, I took inventory of my skills and decided to purchase 1.2 million ISK worth of skill books. In addition to picking up some of the associated skills to improve my gunnery, I picked up some missile and armor skill books. I figure at one point I will want to fly a Breacher, so why not pick up the books now?

Next came picking out the ship to fly. The Rifter seems like an obvious armor tanking ship and the New Player Experience basically encourages new Minmatar players to shield tank. The Slasher, on the other hand, with a 4-4-2 slot layout, looked more like a shield tanking ship. So off I went looking for a fit.

I did a search of places like YouTube and various forums but didn’t see a fit I liked. Searching for loss mails on zkillboard let me to the Slasher meta. I downgraded a couple of modules due to cost and/or skill requirements and decided I was ready to go shopping.

I was able to buy 2 fully-fitted Slashers to go out and try to earn some ISK so I could afford to lose a ship. I think bought a couple more skill books, bringing the grand total in my wallet down to 600,000 ISK. I could always earn some money playing Project Discovery, but the whole purpose of the exercise is to see if a new player (or at least a new character) can jump into factional warfare and survive. Did I mention preferably without mining?

I knew enough about factional warfare to know one earns loyalty points by staying within proximity of a beacon in a faction warfare complex, usually referred to as a plex. I scouted out a quiet area in which I could run the plexes. I then moved my ships from Embod to my chosen operating area. The move would have gone so much quicker if I had logged in one of my other pilots and loaded up everything in the Orca, but I was trying to relive the new player experience. I’ll just say that I appreciate my Orca and Mastodon a lot more now after my little move op.

Once I finally got everything in place, I clicked on the tab in the station that allowed me to join factional warfare as a member of the Minmatar militia. The actual act of joining was simple, but I spent hours running missions, moving ships, and doing research to get to the point of becoming a member of the Minmatar militia.

I joined on 4 July and in that time I've defensively plexed 5 small complexes and a novice complex. So far I have increased my wallet from 600,000 ISK to 26.9 million ISK in less than 48 hours actual time. I now have enough ISK to afford to lose a couple of ships. The story of how I made my money is a subject for a future post.

Looking Under The Cushions

On Saturday I took the final for my online Python class, meaning that I am free to play video games once again. So, what did I spend a large part of my time doing? Trying to load the historical market data CCP Quant posted back in March into a database on my computer. Based on my years of experience, I can tell from the error messages the file contains some lines concatenated together but still displays visually in a text editor as two separate lines. Given I can’t just dump the entire 250 million plus lines into SQL, I have to come up with another solution. I guess that’s why I’m paid the big ISK.

I tried to play Elder Scrolls Online. ESO has a couple of mechanics designed to get players to log in every day. The first is a daily reward just for logging in. Some of the prizes, like the 2-hour experience and stat boost items, are useful. Others, not so much. The second involves making your mount more powerful. Each day, for a nominal fee in gold, players can buff their mount’s speed, stamina, or strength by 1%, up to a maximum of 60% in each category. I guess that’s one way to get someone to log in everyday for 6 months. Perhaps if I found the game more engaging, I would do so. But I’m at level 17 and don’t really have the desire to adventure in Tameriel. Will I give up my quest to 50?

That returns me to EVE. For some reason, I decided to check the journal on one of my characters Sunday. Looking at the research tab, I had a lot of research points earned on 5 agents. I hadn’t visited those agents to pick up datacores in 623 days. Needless to say, I decided to dig the coins out from between the cushions and away I went. According to the display in my cargohold, I picked up 256 million ISK worth of datacores. I then logged onto another character and found he only had three research agents active but hadn’t picked up any datacores in 5 years. Forty-five minutes later I had another 250 million ISK in datacores sitting in the low sec station I use to perform all my invention activity. I stopped the datacore farming activity when I saw the agents on my third character were 30 jumps away. But I did go and pick them up Monday night. Picking up 3 1/2 years worth of datacores from 3 level 4 research agents generated another 345 million ISK in goods.

With all the travel complete, I now have to take stock of what I have and what I can build. I hear heavy assault cruisers are popular with the Abyssal deadspace set. I still need to build my CONCORD ships, so I may have a ninja mining expedition or two planned for a wormhole coming soon. Or maybe I'll just get sidetracked again and start running data and relic sites. I probably need to get focused on a goal, but for now I'm just flying around taking in the sights.

A Final Look At The CSM 13 Election

Last week, CCP announced the results of the election for the 13th Council of Stellar Management. Real life, in the form of illness, interfered with publishing a timely post, but I still needed to write one to look back upon next year.

The year of the incumbent: In 2018, seven of the ten members of CSM 12 chose to run for re-election. All seven won. Here is a list.

Steve Ronuken (5th term)
Sort Dragon (4th term)
Aryth (3rd term)
Innominate (3rd term)
Jin'taan (3rd term)
The Judge (3rd term)
Suitonia (2nd term)

The Imperium Gets Half: A lot of people are freaking out about the fact that The Imperium managed to place five candidates on the CSM. Although the single-transferrable vote system used in the CSM voting favors the large null sec alliances by making sure they don't "waste" any votes, a lot of other factors contributed to the election result. But the domination does lend a handy hook on which to hang all the other themes of the election.

The power of the GSF ballot: The official ballot put out by Goonswarm Federation is the single most powerful force in CSM voting, and the 2018 election continued the trend. The turnout I was able to track in the voting file rose from 4273 ballots cast that contained some combination of the original six candidate slate in 2017 to 6564 ballots that had some combination of the 10 official candidates in 2018. To put the number into perspective, the official Imperium ballot made up 22.6% of all ballots cast in the CSM 13 election. Contrast that with the 22.3% of all ballots that mentioned Guardians of the Galaxy leader Sort Dragon, who won his fourth term this year.

The growth of the Imperium's share of the vote total was greatly enhanced by the coalition's growth as seen in its largest organization, Goonswarm Federation. In January 2017, two months before voting for CSM 12 began, GSF had approximately 21,000 members. When I looked at the beginning of June 2018, the number had swelled to 30,800. Still, the growth of turnout for the official ballot did increase faster than the size of the coalition.

The Creecher Effect: Even with a dominant share of ballots cast, Goonswarm Federation and The Imperium as a whole should only have won 3 seats at most. So, what explains the other two wins? The first involved the controversy and ultimate removal of Creecher Viprio from the ballot during the voting period.

Creecher, the capital director of Test Alliance Please Ignore, is a vociferous proponent of shield-tanked supercapital-class ships. Members of Pandemic Legion, an alliance heavily invested in armor-tanked supercapitals, moved to block Creecher's almost assured spot on the CSM, from which he could argue for improvements in shield capital and supercapital ships. So members of Pandemic Legion did a little digging and found logs on Pastebin showing Creecher using racial epithats in a private chat in-game, a violation of EVE Online's EULA and Terms of Service. Since the conversation occurred using CCP's communication channels, CCP could verify that the logs were not doctored and Creecher was removed from the voting.

As the STV system used in the election is a form of ranked voting, the computer algorithm used to tally the votes just ignored Creecher's votes and produced a list of the winners. The released voting files show that Creecher would have won a spot on the CSM. The candidate who benefited from Creecher's disqualification was The Judge, thus making four members from Goonswarm Federation on CSM 13.

The Ringer: The official Imperium ballot usually looks more impactful than it actually is with the inclusion of extremely strong candidates in the fourth and fifth slots. This year's candidate came out of one of The Imperium's smaller member alliances, The Initiative.. Brisc Rubal, a real-life politician from Virginia who works as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill for a maritime union, threw his hat into the CSM ring and treated the election like the real thing, including a slick, meme-filled advertisement. When the votes were counted, Brisc had 1990 first place ballots at the start of round 1 of the simulation. While not meeting the quota at the time, Brisc's vote total guaranteed victory as the 11th place candidate, Tikktock Tocktikk, only received 1661 votes when he was eliminated in the final round.

Vote buying: Rumor at Fanfest held that The Judge was attempting to buy his way onto CSM 13 by paying skill point farmers to vote for him. The rumors continued up through the end of the election, as a story emerged of The Judge buying approximately 550 votes. Did people have proof that The Judge bought votes? I don't believe so. And the vote total was suspiciously near the total required to knock The Judge into 11th place and award the final seat to Tikktock Tocktikk by 8 votes. However, even if The Judge did purchase that many votes, the rules allowed it.

A very settled election: Unlike last year when Yukiko Kamo skated at or below 10th place in every round, this year's election was basically settled after the first round. At the beginning of round 1, four candidates: Aryth, Sort Dragon, Jin'taan, and Brisc Rubal, had more votes than Tikktock Tocktikk would up with at elimination, thus securing the victory. Three other candidates, Merkelchen, Innominate, and Killah Bee, had guarenteed victory at the end of round one. The other three eventual winners, Suitonia, Steve Ronuken, and The Judge, rounded out the top 10 at the end of round one.

The lack of major voting slates: Apart from The Imperium, the only other major power that seemed to exert any effort to electing people was Guardians of the Galaxy. Due to their preferred candidate not making it to the final ballot, Pandemic Horde wound up voting for the GotG ticket of Sort Dragon and Killah Bee. Voters placed Sort Dragon and Killah Bee at the top of their ballots 1546 times, with the order reversed an additional 110 times. In contrast, the slate of Northern Coalition. of Killah Bee, Malakai Asamov, Sort Dragon, and Winter duFallen only appears 467 times. That's right, the final trickle that Killah Bee received from Sort Dragon of 1320 votes was nearly three times the support he received from his own coalition's official ballot.

I'll Get To Abyssal Space Eventually

At Fanfest, I had a conversation with CCP Fozzie where I told him I probably wouldn’t participate in the Abyssal space content for the first couple of months. At the time, I though all my attention would focus on building CONCORD ships, with the Marshal at the top of the list. I still haven’t run a site on Tranquility, but not because I’m busy mining in low security space. I’m currently taking an online introductory Python class offered by MIT. I’m getting all the solutions and received a perfect score on the mid-term, but the coursework is taking up more time than expected.

Having real life get in the way of gaming probably will help in the end. I planned for the lack of time, which is one of the reasons I chose to jump into Elder Scrolls Online instead of trying out Bless Online. From all reports, Neowiz tried to copy Funcon’s launch of Anarchy Online. Apparently, the launch of Bless went over so well, Guild Wars 2 experienced a massive influx of new players.

I felt pretty smug about the choice until I heard Zenimax slipped spyware into ESO. The game company claimed they never activated the code, but why was the code in the client in the first place? From what I heard, the code performed a location tracking function. But what else did it do? EVE has had a geo-tracking function based on IP address for years designed to let players know if someone else had accessed their accounts. The IP addresses are available to players in Account Management. I wonder what else was in the spyware.

That returns me to EVE. My EVE related activities have fallen into three main types. The first is updating my CSM Wire site for the election running through downtime next Monday. I wish candidates would stop moving between corps and alliances. After CCP announces the results, I’ll reconfigure the site to reflect the makeup of the CSM and turn my attention towards other things until next year.

The second is the continues monitoring of the black market and botting. The ban wave that began on 23 May was amusing to watch as CCP began deleting the characters involved in market botting. My monitoring activities require recording the price of PLEX, skill injectors, and skill extractors, and that routine changed with the end of the CREST and XML APIs. I had used a third-party site that allowed me to do a quick copy/paste into my spreadsheet, but the site changed and no longer offers the information I need. After asking around, I now just log into a trade alt in The Forge and record the daily market data from the game client. Maybe when I finish my coding class, I’ll play around with the ESI and save myself a few clicks each day.

First recorded deletion of market bots

My final type of EVE activity maybe doesn’t really qualify as a real EVE activity. When I get a block of an hour or so of free time, I hop on Singularity and lose ships running tier 2 Abyssal sites. I’m convinced the sites have gotten harder since I first started running them. I can run the tier 1 sites just fine in a tech 1 cruiser. But I would really like to be able to complete a tier 2 site. I may give up and just borrow a fit or two and see how they do. Those pairs of Triglavian ships are tough.

I eventually will have time to play video games again. I only have two more weeks left in my programming course. I also traditionally take a couple of weeks to a month playing another MMO a lot after the CSM election season. But given what a chore I find playing ESO, I may cancel my sub and just play EVE. The whole spyware drama makes that choice a lot easier. But tonight I don't have any coursework to do, so perhaps I'll finally run some data sites and get some filaments for when I have time to dive into Abyssal deadspace.

CSM 13 Elections - A Collection Of Interviews

The election to populate EVE Online's 13th Council of Stellar Management will take place starting next week on 4 June, ending on 11 June. For those interested, I collected some information about the candidates on a Google site called CSM Wire. Each candidate has a page, with the links running down the left-hand site of the site.

I know that some people enjoy listening to podcasters doing interviews with the candidates. This year, 18 of the 48 candidates appeared on at least one of EVE Online's many podcasts to talk about the election. Since a lot of people like listening to podcasts, I thought I'd also post the list here.

After Hours With Rixx Javix

• Saint Michael's Soul

Declarations of War

• Brisc Rubal, Commander Aze, Suitonia

The Mind Clash Podcast

• Brisc Rubal, Commander Aze, Silver Suspiria
• Jaha Preynar
• Mawderator
• Sullen Decimus
• Xenuria

Talking in Stations

• Afropty
• Brisc Rubal
• Cacique Yuhasz
• Commander Aze
• Creecher Virpio
• Cwittofur Cesaille
• Damian Blackie
• Kalen Tsero
• Malakai Asamov
• Mawderator
• Solar Taranogas
• Sort Dragon
• Xenuria

Edit: And former CSM member Chance Ravinne did an interview with ExookiZ last night.

Punkturis Wins!

I don't normally dive into real world politics on the blog, but an election took place on Saturday I thought might interest EVE Online players. Iceland held its municipal elections, and in the capital city of Reykjavik, the Independence Party led the way by winning 8 seats.

Why should EVE players care? Because in Iceland, the voters vote for a political party's list of candidates, which are then distributed proportionally. And the sixth candidate on the list of the Independence Party was Katrín Atladóttir.

"In their natural habitat, programmers are nocturnal creatures that prefer to be left undisturbed"

Katrín Atladóttir is better known to EVE players as CCP Punkturis. Katrin's last day at CCP was 30 April, or a few weeks before the election. Following on the heels of CCP Seagull announcing she was leaving CCP on 26 April, some decided that CCP was doomed and everyone was leaving a sinking ship. But for Katrin, a new career in politics awaits. Now, her new office is in Reykjavik's city hall.

EVE Online's Unique Selling Point: Inventory Space

CCP did not design EVE Online with the free-to-play business model in mind. Playing other MMORPGs always reminds me of EVE’s unique selling point. The feature that makes EVE unique is not its player-run economy, time-based training system, harsh death penalty, or single-shard nature. No, other games have many, if not all, of those features. Instead, what makes EVE unique is the nearly unlimited inventory space for each character. I don’t know of any game that allows players to hoard as many items as EVE. With the fall of the subscription system for MMORPGs, I doubt we ever will again.

The inspiration for this post is my third attempt to play Elder Scrolls Online. Most level-based games have a dead spot about half-way toward the level cap, as if one team of designers started building the game from level 1 upwards while a second team builds the game from the level cap down. Someplace in the middle is a dead spot where the two teams meet and don’t quite mesh the content together smoothly. A player just must grind through with the hopes the game is not the second coming of Age of Conan and the blight that occurred after leaving Tortage. Unfortunately, in ESO I hit the dead spot around level 8 and have yet to get past level 16. In my current playthrough, I am at level 12 and am ready to throw my keyboard out the window.

Perhaps my biggest pain point in the latest attempt to hit level 50 is lack of inventory space. At level 8, I not only had full bags, but a full bank as well. I desperately needed to make some bags, but I didn’t have the ability. Since I fully intend to hit level 50, even if it kills me, I broke down and spent $40 for a three-month subscription.

Paying money makes life so much easier in ESO. The first benefit is subscribers (called ESO Plus membership) receive double the bank space as those who just choose to buy the game and not subscribe. The difference between 70 and 140 bank slots is huge. On top of that, subscribers get access to a special bag that holds all of a character’s crafting materials. My bank situation went from using all 70 slots to only using 14 out of 140 inventory slots. I’m used to paying for extra bank slots with real money, but I never experienced such a change in a game like I did when I subscribed to ESO on Saturday.

The purchase of inventory space, a staple of games with cash shops, is unneeded in EVE. Players can store 1000 stacks of items in any station. But that is just the beginning. Players can then purchase containers, place them in the station, and then fill up the containers with additional items up to the volume capacity of the containers. Notice I stated items above. Ships do not count as items and have their own storage space. I assume that the capacity is 1000 ships, although I have never run into the cap.

Did I mention that, unlike most games, players in EVE do not access a global inventory system? While inconvenient if the shiny module wanted for a ship fit is 60 systems away, EVE's inventory system means players can store 1000 stacks of items in each stations. As an example of how much inventory space is available to new players, let's use the system of Lustrevik. Located two jumps away from one of the Minmatar starter systems in the Heimatar region, the system is home to 9 NPC-owned stations. Nine stations represents 9000 inventory slots, not including ship storage. And if 9000 inventory slots is not enough, a player can travel to the next door system of Eystur which contains 6 NPC-owned stations and an additional 6000 inventory slots. And did I mention that I have yet to run into a stacking limit for things like ore and minerals? Those used to limits of 100 or 200 item stacks will find the ability to have a stack contain one million items mind blowing.

EVE Online is a pack rat's dream game. While most games force a constant need for inventory management on players, CCP took that worry away. Instead of trying to keep space open for the next shiny drop, players in EVE have the challenge of trying to keep track of all their stuff. I wish I could find another game with the same design mindset, but I don't think modern business models will ever again allow for the discarding of such a basic source of sales from players. Which, to my mind, is a shame.

The Rewards Of Reaching Level 500 In Project Discovery

On Saturday I finally reached level 500 in Project Discovery, EVE Online’s mini-game involving searching for exoplanets in the real universe. I have not used any of the blueprint copies given out as rewards for taking part in the citizen science project, but now is a good time to review if the journey was worth the rewards.

First, how much effort did I put into reaching level 500? I didn’t keep close track of time but looking at my wallet transactions shows I spent approximately 115 hours over the course of 156 days, or an average of 45 minutes a day. Overall, I managed to do over 4 levels an hour. I guess I should add that for at least the last 400 levels I received the maximum reward for each pattern evaluated due to my accuracy rate. When I reached level 500, my accuracy rating was 99%. I would expect the effort to take longer with lower ratings.

The rewards for playing Project Discovery fall in three principal areas. The first type is the ISK reward received for evaluating a pattern. These rewards are based on the player’s accuracy rating, with a maximum payout of 99,000 ISK for a player with a rating a little over 98%. The reward is deposited into the player’s wallet every 5 minutes. At level 500, I had collected a total just over 1.5 billion ISK in Project Discovery rewards.

The second type of reward occurs with the completion of each level. For the first 24 levels, players receive an Exoplanets SKIN, with the reward increasing to 2 SKINs per level at level 26. Exoplanet SKINs exist for each ship built by the four main NPC factions (Amarr, Caldari, Gallente, Minmatar). Overall, I received 975 SKINs (227 unique) worth 560 million ISK at the time I completed level 500 according to the price evaluator in my hanger.

Project Discovery also grants rewards for reaching certain levels. These rewards range from clothing (including a hat) to CONCORD ship skins to 1-run BPCs for the Pacifier, Enforcer, and Marshal. The clothing only was valued at 44 million ISK. The Pacifier and Enforcer SKINs rewarded for reaching levels 75 and 150 only were worth 9 million ISK. The blueprint copies of the Pacifier (125 million ISK) and Enforcer (275 million ISK) brought in more, but weren't amazing. The big money is the Marshal BPC. Looking on the contract market, the blueprint copy brings in a little over 7 billion ISK.

I don't plan on liquidating everything I acquired from playing the Project Discovery mini-game. My next steps are to inject the SKINs into my two main characters and then work on building the CONCORD ships. But I figured that people solely interested in ISK might want to know the possible rewards for reaching level 500.