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by stuhacking 5572 days ago
You mean like Eve Online? :-)

http://www.eveonline.com/

Actually, this response is directed towards shogunmike also. Just in case you haven't heard of Eve, it's a spaced themed MMO very much to the tune of Elite. You can make a living mining, trading, fighting. The factions are split onto two levels: Corporations (companies that employ/hire individual players) and Alliances (gropps of corporations with similar vision/goals)

The ecomony is almost entirely player driven.. the materials are mined by players, the equipment is built by players from those materials. You are free to engage in hostile activity even in controlled space, although the penalty is severe.

It's worth a look. The freedom of play has allowed some players to gain notoriety even in the mass media (Note: exchanging game money for real world currency is a violation of the rules):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7256069.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7256069.stm

4 comments

Yes, I have heard of Eve Online, but didn't realise all of these dynamics had been put in place.

I'm sure I can dig answers out to these questions elsewhere, but I thought I'd ask how the economy is balanced. For instance, mining new materials obviously increases supply. To what extent is this activity capped by the game mechanics in order to keep demand at a reasonable level?

I've heard of space stations being bought and sold, but I think this was a separate MMO. Not far off restoring houses and flipping for profit in the real world!

I'm afraid I can't personally provide a detailed run down - I played the game for about 6 months near the end of university and after that I never really found enough free time to justify continuing the subscription.

The Wikipedia page seems to be comprehensive though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Online#Economy

I would take a look at the development section also. They use a Python variant called Stackless (http://www.stackless.com) which provides lightweight threads and message passing. I actually started using this as an alternative to regular CPython.

I never played Eve Online for fear that I might never emerge from my room again.. ever.

I had enough trouble stopping playing WoW.

I just realised I screwed up the second link - should have been:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8132547.stm

A sadly pretty-my-dead alternative was Jumpgate, quite an early MMO. It had quite poor economy features, but fantastic seeat-of-your-pants physics and joystick control.
Have a look at http://vendetta-online.com - it's pretty much its spiritual successor, and a bunch of players are ex-Jumpgate fans.