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Comment by carterschonwald | Hacker News Reader

summary for those who somehow didn't make it through the article: to keep sales of in-game currency for real money under control, the publisher/developer for eve online a while back created the mechanism of redeemable subscription codes that also are in game items. Presumably it also has a secondary effect of having an influence on ingame inflation (theres really cool data available the eve online economy for those who are interested)

over 1000 dollars worth of these items were destroyed.

now the bit at the end of the article just basically mentions how the reported event was verifiable, by way of the authenticated api for viewing player information

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Destroyed because the virtual cargo ship they were being transported in was attacked by other players.

The ship exploded and all cargo (worth a supposed $1000 USD) was lost.

A special note for non-EVE-ers, the stuff in the cargo hold has a chance to either survive or be destroyed.

The players that destroyed the ship (and associated cargo) weren't trying to destroy the cargo, just got unlucky.

Another bit of context: the ship that was carrying the time codes was a lowly frigate, the smallest and weakest class in the game. So whoever was transporting such valuable goods in that eggshell was hoping nobody would care to intercept such a worthless ship, or he was just plain dumb, or probably both.

He didn't even use a Tech 2 frigate, meaning (IMO) he was going for a super low-tech ship hoping nobody would notice.

>to keep sales of in-game currency for real money under control, the publisher/developer for eve online a while back created the mechanism of redeemable subscription codes

Replace the word "keep" with the phrase "cash in on". Eve never really cared about isk farmers/sellers, they are paying subscribers after all. Sure they would ban a few hundred accounts every few months, but it would only be a small percentage of the total farmers.

Once they realized they could be making some of that money themselves did they create PLEX. And the farming continues as they don't want to stoop to the level of selling isk for money.

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