EVE Online: Protests continue over microtransaction row

JITA - There are unprecedented scenes in one of the busiest game areas of EVE Online today, as player protests against game owners CCP continue into a third day.

Players form a ring around the Jita Memorial

Players are angry with CCP following the most recent game expansion, dubbed "Incarna". One of the additions to the game was the "Noble Exchange", where real-life money can be exchanged (via a convoluted route of in-game items and currencies) for in-game items. Most notable amongst these is a monocle, offering no in-game benefit and costing the equivalent of a very real US $80.

But what concerns players most of all is the prospect that items that actually affect gameplay - such as ships, skills and standings with the in-game NPC factions - might be offered for sale. A CCP internal newsletter to that effect was leaked, and later confirmed to be genuine, further adding ammunition to the protester's weapons (not literally, though maybe in a later version of the Noble Exchange).

For some reason, CCP thought that this developer blog would help matters. Entirely predictably, it didn't, and angry threads on the EVE forums have nearly reached one million views and over 10,000 comments. CCP's internal attitude was revealed by another leak to EVE News 24, an internal E-mail from CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson seeming to revel in the anger sown amongst the playerbase.

The view from the hangar of the Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant station, the busiest trading hub in the game

The largest, most visible sign of the unhappiness of a large number of players has been an in-game attack on a monument in the busiest system, Jita. The monument itself bears the inscription "A memorial to the winner of the Ruevo Aram Riddle Competition, Hienky and Shin Ra of Burn Eden". The statue (which is invulnerable in the game) stands as a reminder of times when CCP were actively engaged in promoting the community of EVE Online, making the current protests all the more striking.

Hundreds of players, as well as abandoned ships, protest in Jita

 How this will play out in coming days remains to be seen. Nay-sayers will undoubtedly say nay, while some think the protesters should just leave and let them play the game in peace. Are there any precedents from other MMOs of in-game protests on this scale? The ironic thing is that it's exactly this sort of community spirit that reminds me just why I enjoyed playing EVE for so long anyway.

EVE Markets for 2011

This blog has quite a broad range of topics, including religion, technology, and internet spaceships. Today's post falls into the latter category; so if you have no interest in EVE Online you're excused!

EVE Markets has been online since May 2008, keeping track of price trends in the virtual market of EVE Online - a market complex enough that the game's developers, CCP, have a full-time economist performing analysis and producing quarterly reports with plenty of charts to keep traders informed. It was those charts that gave me the inspiration to start EVE Markets - what if we didn't have to wait for CCP EyjoG (the in-game name of Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson) to release the economic newsletter, but could have up-to-the-minute data displayed in real time, with customisable indices and lists?

So was EVE Markets born, and when I review the figures I'm always shocked at how popular the site is with users. At last count, the site has nearly 3,800 registered users; and over the course of the year the number of daily visitors has doubled, to about 400 a day. Unsurprisingly, the items most viewed are Tritanium and the 30-day PLEX; the most-viewed market group is the fullerenes.

For a site that I work on in my spare time and that started as a hobby, and which (thanks to NearlyFreeSpeech who host it) costs pennies to run, I don't think that's bad at all. During 2010, it even spawned a sister site, EVE Monitor, which tracks various public EVE APIs - sovereignty and outposts, for example - and as well as letting you view the history of a system, region or alliance, also tweets changes via @EVEMonitor. Prime focus of development remains the EVE Markets site though - in fact, some of the technology developed for Monitor is due to be ported back to EVE Markets in the coming year.

In 2010 most of the changes to EVE Markets were behind the scenes. Finally, there is database support for multiple data sources, though it's not currently live; and the underlying refactoring meant that the oldest areas of the codebase received some love and attention. The introduction into the game of Planetary RSI - sorry, Planetary Interaction - led to the addition of PI industry information alongside manufacturing and reprocessing data. The API was expanded to include a JSON-format option. And, of course, with each new expansion there were random breaking changes to the CCP data dump needing to be taken into account!

What lies ahead for EVE Markets in 2011, then?

Multiple data sources
It's been a long time coming! Sadly this will not include EVE Metrics data, since that site was closed last week. However, I'm keeping an eye on both Jitonomic and Eve-MarketData (though the former seems to be struggling at the moment). A side effect of multi-source support is that it will also be possible to track regional or even system prices - for example, comparing Jita local prices to global ones.

API improvements
It's been bugging me for a while that the API is pretty limited in what you can get from it. I'm hoping to stick to the principle that any of the data you see on the site will also be available over the API. I'd also like to be able to collect figures on API usage, since I don't have any idea how many people this affects!

UI improvements
Someone rightly pointed out that it's a pain to add a load of individual items to a list. It could be a lot easier to choose which of your lists are displayed on your summary screen, as well. These things, and other UI improvements, are on the cards for this year.

Oh - and just like so many other third-party developers, I don't actually play EVE all that much any more ;-)