The Black Market in EVE - Making ALL items player-made

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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I’ve been checking out Albion Online recently and I’ve been quite impressed by how they handled the content in their world, they managed to create mobs, events, and treasures that make you want to get out there.

But what I’ve been most impressed by is their kept promise of making every single item in the game be crafted by a player.

Anyone who has seen a wolf drop a sword in a MMO knows how big of a deal it is. MMOs injecting items in the world and putting them in the hands of players out of the nether is a classic trope of the genre, one that has ineffably led the likes of WoW and co into either making them your choice of untradeable or uncraftable, or simply inflation-prone.

So now, when you have a game that promises that every single one of his items will be player-made, you wonder how they will handle the classic mob-dropping-loot case.

Enter the Black Market in Albion. An auction house where NPCs buy the items made by players for them to be dropped when a NPC is killed. Depending on supply and demand models, the game puts buy orders for items, and increase or decrease their prices depending on much of those items need to drop.

This allows you to both have mobs dropping items without them coming from the nether.

This could be useful to EVE, especially considering the long-term goal CCP (Fozzie cough) stated of making most items craftable by player instead of what we have right now with 100% of the Meta Tier 1 items coming from NPCs drop and competing with Industry.

Plus EVE has a distinct advantage in that we have Corporations. The NPCs are Corporations, they are entities with which we can actually engage. If we were to sell items to NPCs, we could do it through those Corporations and actually influence the strength and supply of those.

I definitely think this is something EVE MUST have. Not only to make Capsuleers more relevant in the story of EVE, and thus making it more significant, but also to make them have more of a weight on both what Capsuleers have and the world they are in.

What do you think? Could EVE benefit from something like the Black Market?

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It is not 100% any more as all the meta version capital modules come from player production. The modules also do not compete with industry because you cannot produce them in the first place.

Personally, I do not think highly of having everything produced by players. This only creates unnecessary shortages and annoying manipulation of which we already have more than enough as it is.

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I’m going to agree with you here. As great as the idea may sound, with all greatness comes great evil, too. Besides, I’d personally would like to see less NPC drops and more player production than to tie in NPCs.

This also should have been posted into Features & Ideas.

2 Likes
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More manipulations seems very EVE-like to me. More manipulations create more stories, and stories are very much what EVE craves for.

So I don’t see that as something unnecessary. Annoying? Yes.
But an engaged and intertwined playerbase, either through manipulations or conflicts, seem necessary to the game.

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Yes, conflict is fun … most of the time. It’s not fun when some market shortage inhibits conflict because you can’t fit your ships or suddenly your ships cost 5x more just because someone bought out essential goods. Again.

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It is EVE like, but players will most likely produce and sell whatever gives the highest profits. So one week you’ll have one type of item drop until some form of saturation sets in, and the next you’ll have a different item drop.

What this idea is lacking is a proper feedback loop, from those who need items to those who produce them. When the items drop with every kill does one not have any form of feedback. You pick it up and sell it or you store it away. And most will sell what they don’t need and not care for how much it is worth. So the items might just iterate back into the black market over and over again until it finds someone who actually has a use for it. This seems very unnecessary and tedious for a system.

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Agree, that is very wrong section of the forum.
IIRC CCP plans to remove module drop from wrecks, even meta modules. Player will get materials instead. So he will be able to build the meta modules. Interesting feature would be to remove any dead space modules as well and replace them with Abyss modificated modules…

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I feel like the current system works, it would make sense that pirates would have modified versions of the base modules.

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You don’t understand ■■■■, do you?

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As far as CCP is concerned this kind of thing is actually a desirable outcome; that someone can ruin your day, at any time, and in a multitude of ways, is one of the foundation stones of Eve.

Those things you consider to be unfun because they affect you personally are a feature, not a misuse of mechanics. The market being some of the most brutal PvP in the game.

Deal with it, or contract me your stuff.

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Actually, I like this. I mean… I don’t like it. But it has a meaningful impact and that impact was interesting.

I recall one point in the past, we had decided upon a doctrine that sourced some less common items… and although we’re certainly by no means a huge group, we crashed the market on those modules. It recovered, as it always does, but 500 dudes buying things up really made an impact on the modules.

It was annoying as ■■■■, but at the same token, it made me say “hum… that’s interesting and kind of cool”.

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As you explained, we can have that already. There is no need for more. But that opinion is futile anyway, because CCP will eventually do it and put out an at best half-finished, half-hearted system for this so that we can have a lot of fun fighting the UI instead of fighting ships. That’s the most important reason why I am not a fan of more player control: CCP just keeps screwing up the UI and mechanics and then does not fix them for years.

2 Likes
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The only “problem” with putting 100% of the module production in players hands is that people just won’t bother making most of the modules, in terms of meta mods why would you waste materials making anything other than the arbalest or malkuth launchers, the other 2 variations server no real purpose but they have value because that may be all someone can afford at the time, in this case you actually just end up filtering out the less used in favour of making the mods that will actually sell, not to mention it takes out the “surprise” factor from loot drops, and thats actually not something that should be underestimated, can you imagine how terrible it would feel to get a PvP kill only to have the wreck filled with random module parts instead of actual useful modules? because thats pretty much the same feeling for PvE, that little random factor to see what module you actually got, people want to be able to go out and kill a deadspace NPC and get some awesome loot they can fit to their ships right now, not some random industry parts they might not even have the skills to make use of

Thats not something people want to overlook when changing systems like these, the only “solution” to part of this issue would be to have specific meta drops for each module, so you might get an arbalest trigger or a malkuth trigger, which could only be used to build those specific modules, but then you have issues where you would need to hope for the right sets of items to be able to build anything at all, which would still be less than ideal for items that are still very widely used

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so what story would you get from market manipulation?

“we used to have missile launchers for 100k but someone bough every missile launcher and now we have the same launchers that 10m ea”

one of the reasons I hate null sec, my alpha has to buy destroyers for 5-10m for the hull in immeansea area

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Right now they have exact same value, as minerals, you will get from their reprocessing. Nothing more.

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A while back someone posted if you could add something to eve or change it what would it be.

I said I would like to see 4x research brought to the game to add actual science to the “research” process which is just really a bad misnomer for refits with better alloys. If the game added 4x research and corps could make their own ships, equipment, ammo etc. Then sell all the corp designed gear in corp stores It would change the game for the better in so many ways.

  1. Breath new life into the monotonous mine print repeat we currently have
  2. Add new chances for conflict(especially if they add research missions that can be countered)
  3. reduce itemization of old bpo’s and bpc’s by making them useless or convert them to rp points
  4. Give industrialists and Carebears a reason to feel invested(making the same crap for 15 yrs is boring)
  5. They’ve already started the changes necessary with the new market/contracts to handle triglavian equipment and the triglavian mods to augment stats. Same thing takes longer with positive results not gambling.

Anyway my 2 cents. Games getting too same old same old for me off to slumber till something stirs me.
Sleep…

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What if instead of meta modules dropping, “Tuners” drop that can be applied to Tech I modules (like mutaplasmids, but with a pre-determined outcome) to create the equivalent of the meta module. Thus the base item was made by a player using minerals, but the variants are made using loot drops. This could also consolidate some drops, for example a Propulsion Jammer Capacitor Tuner to make the equivalent of the Enduring web, point or scram out of a Tech I web, point or scram.

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Id get rid of loot and have them drop meta bpcs instead. 1, 2. 5 and 10 run bpcs for various modules that combined with minerals to build the meta modules. The bpcs would be worthless unless there was worth. So much paper in many cases like much of the T2 worthless rig bpcs but not the modules themselves anymore.

So no reprocessing and no more gun mining at all period.

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I see no problem with NPCs dropping items that were made by noone. Effort was still spent to get those items, its not like they entered the market with no work.

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The problem would still remain, in order to get those items someone would still need to do the construction and players will only build the items worth money, this means that people who just keep the mods as a backup would still have to build those mods instead of throwing the mod in their hangar ready to use at a moments notice