Leaks, riots, and monocles: How a $60 in-game item almost destroyed EVE Online

Controversy was expected, but not virtual riots.

On June 21, developer CCP updated its popular space-opera-slash-MMO EVE Online so that players could take their avatars outside their ships and walk around the game world. With this new ability came a store that sold vanity items—in-game clothing and accessories that alter an avatar’s looks but don’t change an avatar’s abilities. The price for these items was much higher than most people expected for vanity in-game items which did absolutely nothing, and it made players nervous. The EVE playerbase didn’t want their game turning to microtransactions to increase the cost of playing.

That fear seemed to be legitimate when an internal CCP communication leaked online. Called “Greed is Good?,” it provided a detailed argument between members of the development team over whether to sell items that could change the way the game is played. Nervousness in some players gave way to rage.

“I would like virtual goods sales in EVE. In fact, I’d like to sell a lot more than vanity items,” CCP’s Kristoffer Touborg wrote in one article. “Does this mean I’m an evil capitalist that, unless stopped, will cause the entire company to catch fire and be buried at sea by a secret team of Navy SEALs?”

He knew how badly the players would react if they heard him say that, and he went on to discuss that issue in the article itself. “There is a pretty overwhelming perception amongst EVE players that these changes are bad,” he added. “I think they’re brilliant, but our players don’t. We’re going to face an uphill struggle, and the reason many of us never talk about this publicly is that we’d be burned at the stake by the players.”

CCP’s John Tubefield argued the other way. “To me, virtual goods sales are far less appealing when the gameplay is affected and they aren’t replacing a black market,” he wrote. “When we’re adding additional things into the game that enable users to gain an advantage over other people for real money in a way they simply wouldn’t be able to if we hadn’t done so, then it becomes an issue.”

Tubefield doesn’t want players to feel like they’re being charged twice to play the game. “I feel that if people have already paid a subscription fee then unless there is a good reason for the overall community to introduce a gameplay-affecting virtual goods sales (such as with PLEX), then gaining an in-game advantage isn’t justifiable,” he wrote.

The debate goes on like this for pages. No decisions are made, no roadmaps laid out, and both sides make their points well. In context, there’s nothing incendiary here; CCP’s media relations staff even sent me a copy of the document when I began working on this story. But with that red cover and the tone of some of the arguments inside, the magazine looked bad to gamers.

And some of those gamers had an unexpected reaction: they rioted.

How much is that monocle?

To understand the special appeal of EVE, you have to understand the game’s intricate economy—and how the new in-game items altered it.

EVE has two kinds of currency. The first is called “ISK,” and it’s what players use to buy items within the game. The second is called “PLEX,” and it’s used to buy gameplay time. (Think of it as your monthly subscription fee transformed into an in-game item.) Players can buy PLEX in two ways: by trading in ISK earned playing the game or by purchasing it directly from CCP with real-world money.

To buy the vanity items offered in late June, CCP introduced a third form of currency. Called “Aurum,” this currency is created in the game by breaking down PLEX. The resulting Aurum is used to buy everything from an avatar’s clothes to his… monocle.

“We developed Aurum with two major considerations in mind. First, PLEX are too large to use as units of currency,” said Rick Reynolds, EVE Market Senior Director, when I asked about the new currency. “Each PLEX is worth approximately $17.50 on average, which doesn’t provide enough granularity for purchases of small items. It’s just too awkward. We needed some form of micro-PLEX.”

Such decisions aren’t made lightly; CCP employs two full-time economists to keep the economy running as smoothly as possible and to deal with changes such as the introduction of Aurum.

Aurum’s impact should be light, at first. At the moment, Aurum can only be held by players, not by the larger player-run corporations in the game. Aurum can not be traded among players, but that’s coming.

The currency cycle was illustrated on the game’s official blog, and should help to illustrate all of this.

Since your subscription fee is an in-game item, players can buy PLEX with real currency. Instead of using PLEX to play the game, though, they can break it down into Aurum and use that to buy items, which can then be sold in the marketplace for ISK, which can then be used to buy PLEX. Players can move money into the game by buying PLEX, but they can’t easily get it out by converting it back into real-world cash (at least not officially).

“We have customers with billing addresses in more than 200 countries, and some of those countries have financial regulations that might have come into play if we had used real-world currencies like dollars or euros,” Reynolds explained when I asked about the wisdom of adding yet another virtual currency.

“Some governments might have required us to report player ‘earnings.’ Others might look at certain in-game activities and decide we needed to be treated like a bank or an insurance company. We’re a game company. It’s what we do best. We didn’t want to support the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork real-world currencies would involve.”

So what does this mean for the new vanity items? For one thing, it means that we can calculate their price in real-world amounts. With a fixed price for PLEX, we can do some conversions and learn that CCP was selling the monocle—a merely decorative item—for more than $60 worth of in-game currency.

Here’s a nice breakdown of how these currencies work together in the game and what it all means for vanity item pricing. (This is based on the ability to sell one unit of PLEX for 3,500 Aurum, CCP’s price of $17.50 per unit of PLEX, and an in-game value of 400,000,000 ISK. The value of the PLEX in ISK fluctuates, but this is a good starting point to look at the real-world value of these items.)

• Looking Glass Ocular implant – 12k AUR -> 3.5 PLEX -> US$61.25 ->1.4 Bil ISK
• Men’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Shirt – 3.6k AUR -> 0.97 PLEX -> US$16.97 -> 388 Mil ISK
• Women’s ‘Sterling’ Dress Blouse – 3.2K AUR -> .91 PLEX -> US$16.00 -> 364 Mil ISK
• Men’s ‘Commando’ Pants – 3k AUR -> .85 PLEX -> US$15 -> 340 Mil ISK

By giving players the ability to buy in-game time as an item with real-world money, EVE has created an internal economy that’s stable and that encourages trade. Players can buy more Aurum and ISK any time they’d like, simply by buying and then converting PLEX via the in-game trading posts or through CCP itself in the case of Aurum.

If new in-game items began conferring real and immediate advantages (items purchased with ISK require training and time to use) for cash, a player’s years of work could be overtaken by a newcomer with deep pockets. Cue the riots.

Just like boutique jeans

Players began to riot in the game, attacking trading posts and popular in-game destinations. Rioters hoped to negatively impact the game’s economy, and players began signing petitions pledging to ditch their subscriptions if microtransactions became a part of the game’s experience.

CCP started to take the matter seriously, but the company also posted a surreal message on the official blog. It’s worth quoting in full, because… well, because it’s a head-scratcher.

People have been shocked by the price range in the NeX store, but you should remember that we are talking about clothes. Look at the clothes you are currently wearing in real life. Do you have any specific brands? Did you choose it because it was better quality than a no-name brand? Assume for a short while that you are wearing a pair of $1,000 jeans from some exclusive Japanese boutique shop. Why would you want to wear a pair of $1,000 jeans when you can get perfectly similar jeans for under $50? What do other people think about you when they see you wearing them? For some you will look like the sad culmination of vainness while others will admire you and think you are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Whichever it is, it is clear that by wearing clothes you are expressing yourself and that the price is one of the many dimensions that clothes possess to do that in addition to style and fit. You don’t need to buy expensive clothes. In fact you don’t need to buy any clothes. Whatever you choose to do reflects what you are and what you want others to think you are.

We will gradually introduce items at other price points, definitely lower and probably higher than what’s in the store today. We hope you enjoy them and are as passionate about them as you are of the current items that are for sale.

The post also explained that the leaked document was designed to get people talking about the issue from both sides, and thus it “exaggerated purposefully.” None of this made angry people feel better about the situation.

Still, demonstrations like this are part of the charm of EVE’s passionate community, and Reynolds explained that aspect of the controversy to Ars. “Players surprise us all the time. At this point we don’t really feel like we’re building a planned world that people will visit…. Yes, it can be a little scary in that we don’t know what’s coming next, and it can be challenging in that we constantly need to tweak and rebalance the game,” he explained. “But players are supposed to find new ways to affect the EVE universe—and each other. Their emergent behavior is what makes the game so interesting and exciting.”

Another CCP email was then leaked, claiming that the player reaction was “very predictable feedback” and it was important to look at what players were doing, not what they were saying. “Innovation takes time to set in and the predictable reaction is always to resist change,” the email stated.

In response, many players cancelled their subscriptions; they were done “talking” and wanted to start “doing.”

Bring in the council!

EVE Online is one of the few games which has a formal player organization to speak for the customers of the game, called the Council of Stellar Management. The members of the CSM are democratically elected, and they present the concerns of players to CCP in order to keep everything running smoothly. As players continued to disrupt the game and CCP began to take a beating in the court of public opinion, the CSM was flown to the company’s offices in Iceland in order to discuss the issue of microtransactions.

“We are convinced that CCP has no plans to introduce any game-affecting virtual goods, only pure vanity items such as clothing and ship skins. We have been repeatedly assured that there are no plans for ‘gold ammo,’ ships which have different statistics from existing common hulls, or any other feared ‘game destroying’ virtual goods or services,” said the Council in a statement after the meeting. “We have expressed our deep concern about potential grey areas that the introduction of virtual goods permits, and CCP has made a commitment to discuss any proposals that might fall into these grey areas in detail with CSM at the earliest possible stage.”

Reynolds agreed with the CSM statement, and he stressed to Ars that this was a tempest in a tea pot… a space tea pot. “The players’ biggest concern was that we might be on a slippery slope with virtual goods,” he said. “They worried we would eventually offer not just vanity items, but ones that would give the Haves an unfair advantage over the Have-Nots. Once they got a closer look at our plans and saw that we literally had no plans for non-vanity items, everything calmed down a lot.”