EVE online is a great sandbox to play with free market economics. Reputation gaming is a nontrivial problem with real world implications.

I wonder if there are any serious academic researchers studying it? There was an economist who did some extensive studies of the EverQuest economy around 2002. It was interesting--he could not get any journals to publish his work, but it was the top download at SSRN (and even now, it remains the #6 download of all time there).

Here's an article about that: http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/info_and_tech/game_theories.ht...

I don't know about independent researchers but CCP, who run Eve, employ a full time economist who publishes quarterly reports on the state of the in-game economy.

Words can't describe such devastation. EVE sounds like an awesome game to try out.

This level of intrigue is honestly kind of exciting. Kind of makes me want to try out EVE.

I renew my subscription every now and again. It's a really interesting concept, but whenever I play it I find that I like the idea of the game far more then I like the game itself. Getting to the point of being able to play at this sort of level feels too much like a job to me, and I already have one of those.

> This article was originally published in the September 2005 issue of PC Gamer (UK edition).

Does anyone know or remember if there were any major follow-ups to this event ?