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Comment by cremnob | Hacker News Reader

I'd just like to add that this is why people from Wall Street end up working for regulators and government in the real world. Despite the populist narrative that has emerged post-financial crisis, the real reason for the "revolving door" is that you need market experience if you're trying to make effective regulatory and policy decisions.

In the case of EVE, you have players who have a better grasp of game mechanics outsmarting the developers.

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Unfortunately, the opposite is much more common: people who start out as regulators move to the other side. Sure, high level positions like the Treasury Secretary and his staff will often have people from industry. But rank-and-file regulators are, as I understand it, often not from industry.

Harry Markopolous has an excellent book, "No One Would Listen" (http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Would-Listen-Financial/dp/04705...) about how he warned regulators multiple times about Madoff. In the book, he explains how good regulators often end up going to industry because the pay and prestige is much, much better. So, what you're left with are the people who couldn't hack it in industry, which means the regulators are continually going to be outgunned.

You'd probably find Harry Markopolous's No One Would Listen interesting. He's a bit of a nut, but he's the one who dobbed Madoff in repeatedly, to no effect, and he goes into great detail about the brokenness which makes this possible. For starters, there is no "revolving door." The salaries for regulatory work make it very much the booby prize on Wall St, and every one doing regulatory work is looking to move out of it. So you get the worst of the industry supposedly regulating what amount to their prospective employers. As a result, Wall St regulation is impeded by laziness, ignorance and incompetence.

Or because then the banks have an insider who knows what 'features' of the legislation are coming out next so they can exploit them the fastest.

Oh, so that's why the SEC caught Bernie Madoff after being tipped off to his activities and before he could do major harm. Market experience.

The revolving door was well in place before the recent financial crises.

I'm not sure if the conclusion follows here though. How are the developers of the game not aware of the game mechanics? Are they not playing heavily themselves, or does the company not monitor these types of things to understand exactly what the community is doing, how the mechanics work, etc?

No, you have thousands upon thousands of players banging away looking for exploits vs tens to hundreds of devs/qa who only spend a fraction of their time looking for exploits.

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