The Last Content Space Marine

So, I saw a news post concerning an attack in 0.0 on EVE online. The attacks destroyed over 300 billion isk (isk being EVE’s in game currency) in hardware, materials and capital ships under construction. The interesting part of the news post though, was that the isk lost was valued at $15,000. Basically, if they’d sold those materials for the isk value and then sold the isk for dollars, someone would be $15k richer.

That’s a sobering thought. A potential $15,000 up in smoke. That got me thinking, how much ‘real money’ is lost in EVE by people playing? I mean this was a huge chunk but there are wars raging in EVE all the time.

To date, I’ve taken out 1,922,994,235 isk of hardware. That’s a really small figure, but I’ve only flirted with PvP, so it’s not expected to be that high. Still, using the above figure as a rough guide:

15 000 / 300 000 000 000 = 5X10^-08.

(Anyone know if that 300 billion is metric or imperial? I’m assuming metric but may be wrong.)

This means that, assuming one isk = 0.00000005 dollars, I’ve destroyed a hair over $96 of hardware. That’s pretty pathetic, especially when the head of my corp is responsible for about $5,000 – personally.

Imagine what we could do with that money of it was actually sold? How long can you feed a family for on that money?

Of course, the reality is that selling isk is illegal under the games ToS. A legal alternative for people looking to buy isk was introduced a while back, the plex system whereby people can sell subscriptions for in game money, thus allowing people who can’t afford to play the game to play the game, and giving people who want a quick pile of cash a means to indirectly buy isk in a way that CCP (the company who built and run EVE) can monitor. Directly selling isk for money though, is still forbidden.

Still, it’s something to think about.