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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Intrade For Eve?

Sometimes CCP Soundwave comes up with some wild ideas (like NPCs podding players) but this quote from Eve Vegas about in-game gamboling on wars made me smile:
"We don't have anything planned right now but what I'd like to do is I'd like to make a stock market that basically depends on how your alliance is doing.  So there would be some formula that says that if you have X number of systems your stock would be worth that much.  And I kind of want to do that so you'd be like, "I kind of think that alliance is going to do well in the future." And you can buy some stock and they take like five constellations and it basically goes up and you can sell it to someone else.  And then of course hopefully someone will find a way to game the system. That they make some alliance and have people invest in it and then it would basically be a fake thing and everyone's going to be like really mad and send petitions and then I'm just going to sit there and be really happy."
When I heard CCP Soundwave say this I immediately thought of Intrade.  Intrade is a prediction market in which you can make (or lose) money by predicting events.  I think of them like futures trading on commodities.  You basically place a bet on whether an event will occur, but you can trade your bet to someone else if you want to cash out early before the deadline or event occurs.  With Intrade, if you hold shares when the event occurs and it comes true, you receive $10 a share.  If you hold the shares and the event did not occur, you get nothing.

Of course, trading of shares is possible.  Here is an example from the Intrade site.
"If you buy shares and the price increases, you can sell these shares for a profit. For example:

"You buy shares at a price of $6.00. The next day the price has increased to $7.50. You can sell these shares and take a profit of $1.50 per share.

"If however you sell your shares for a lower price you will make a loss. For example:

"You buy shares at a price of $6.00. The next day the price has dropped to $4.90. If you sell these shares you will suffer a loss of $1.10 per share.

"(Why would you sell for a loss? You may want to sell your shares if you think the market will drop further, to help minimise your potential loss.)"
I don't know how CCP would set up such a system in game.  Perhaps automatically set up markets for the possibility of each side winning the isk war, plus the possibility of each side surrendering.  Maybe make another automatic market for how long the war will last.

I'm not sure how popular this feature would be considering the massive potential for fixing fights, but I'm sure lots of people who have too much isk in their wallets might start betting on wars.  And if such a market became popular, then it could turn into an isk sink, because CONCORD would impose a transaction fee on each purchase, right?

1 comment:

  1. The man has interesting ideas. Maybe some day we will see this. Make bets on wars would be great but if they do so we would need "0.0 Wars" as separate category.
    With current war dec system no coalition declares longtime war against their enemy. If there would be a feature to declare war without cost and just as symbol for 0.0 and no change to highsec and no extra cost, we might get very good war reports right in game.
    That would be awesome and a really nice place to set a bet on it.

    Also you could gamble the system by betting for X as winner and placing a good bounty on there opponent Y. ;-)

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