Hello guys, I am George. A casual eve player from 2010.
As of Dec 10th, 2019, eve introduced the new gambling in-game mechanism known as HyperNet.
And I have already tried it. It looks amazing. The UI is really good and I can see that CCP did put some effort into this new content. I do feel grateful to have it. But I also want to share some concerns about it as well.
I do notice that HyperNet would be creating a legal isk laundry method.
It reminds me of an RMT method call “buying from auctions” in World of Warcraft.
Basically, how it works is as follows, the RMT isk buyer will create a ridiculous sale on the auction like selling one piece of cloth for 500k gold. And through other non-in-game communications that the isk buyer coordinates the isk seller to purchase that “offer” associate with some real money transactions.
And for HyperNet currently, it allows people to create a lottery at any price and uses Hyper Node as a buffer to neglect the profit.
From the image above that, I have tested a sale for a 5m implant for a nearly 100 times profit at 500m. Surprisingly the broker fee and the Hyper Node fee only take around 100m. At this ratio, the risk buyers would simply laundry roughly 80% of the rmt isk. And this is just a for shown case. I think the ratio could definitely go much higher than this.
In conclusion, HyperNet is a great system but it might need some tweaks somewhere to eliminate the rmt potential. And I do hope the CCP would be aware of some of the issues that HyperNet would bring into the game.
Not sure how this “great RMT potential” is any different than putting an overpriced, unusual item up on the market in an out-of-the-way station and having someone else buy it in-station.
Or how it’s different than offering a contract for an item and having someone else buy out the contract.
Or how it’s different than sending a very expensive item to another player and letting them sell that item.
It sounds like your “great new RMT potential” is simply a different version of all the RMT options that EVE has had for 15 years now.
Your are right, but this HyperNet is harder to track. In short, it creats difficulty for CCP to enforce EULA. But it can be done simply by adjusting required Hyper Node to neglect to profit. And for the common users could be the victims of the rmt enforcing by accident. Lets put it in short, if the isk seller buys random node from other people. Could CCP ban those normal non-isk-buyer as well? Where is the leverage. It will make enforcing EULA extremely complicated.
Anything goes to keep the game going at this point, the more blurry and complicated such systems are, the less likely to susceptible lawsuits and regulations, and profit can be allowed to flow, indefinitely …
It’s called Modern Finance in the real world as well.
I think selling a low value item for dang rmt isk is way too obvious for CCP to catch, if they are auditing you. Why not just set the overall ticket price to a little lower (higher?) than whatever it is actually worth? All you are trying to do here is scramble the money trail. You can do that by buying popular items on the market and selling them on the hypernet. Your rmt bots would simply need to participate in the lottery for this to work, along with “normal” participants.
Can you sell plex on the hypernet relay? That would be a popular item, I bet.
The patch/update post said only 1 item per raffle, no stacks of item. So for plex (or things like fancy drones and fancy ammo) it would have to be 1 at a time, not a whole bunch at once, so… limited potential there.
