The Auction House and The Marketplace

I’ve played World of Warcraft since vanilla days and this summer I branched out and played some Eve Online. I thought some of you might like to see a Eve vs WOW post. I’m going to focus on the trading and crafting aspects of both game.


For those who don’t know, EVE is a pvp oriented space game. The best way to get an idea of what EVE feels like, watch this video.

If you heard the statement “the real PvP happens on the AH”, that statement definitely applies to EVE. Every item in the game was created from scratch by players in the game. The ships you fly, the ammo, the equipment, even some of the stations were all created by other players or sold on the market. In fact, the games trading system is so advanced that there are player companies, IPOs, banks. Probably the most striking aspect of EVE is the attitude of the GMs towards what is considered legal and what is banable. In WoW you will quickly get banned if you get reported for being a scammer, a ninja etc. In EVE on the other hand, scams, harassment, piracy and assassinations are the norm. If you die in WOW, your items still stay in your bags. In EVE, if your ship gets destroyed, everything you had in your cargo bay is free to take. In fact, some of the scandals were so big there were reports written about them in real newspapers. Here is a story about an eve guild scam that rocked the game world. The estimated value of items lost in game would be around $16000.

“The perpetrator of the heist was the Guiding Hand Social Club (GHSC) corporation (a corporation being similar to a clan in Eve); a freelance mercenary outfit that offers their services (which usually involves corp infiltration, theft and assassination) to the highest bidder. Over a year in planning, the GHSC infilitrated their target's corp with their own members and gained their trust, as well as access to the corp hangers, with time. It all concluded in a perfectly timed climax, with a massive theft in multiple corp hangars synchronized with the in-game killing of the corporation's CEO, the primary target of the contract.”

This is another very well written story about an EVE scam. If anything it is very entertaining.

Another aspect of EVE is that there is only one server. There are around 25,000 players on at any given time. The game world is very big as well. Here is a map of EVE to give you an idea. Every dot is a separate system (a zone you warp into). Empire Space is the relatively safe area run by NPCs and the rest is player space. In player space different alliances control each region, and you are very likely to get killed the second you step in there.

Now that I gave you a brief description of what EVE feels like, I’ll briefly describe the trading.
WoW has an Auction House in every major city, but in fact they are all just one Auction House. In EVE, the market place is different in each region. In addition, you cannot mail items, they have to be transported from station to station in player ships. This creates a variety of trading opportunities. Some players make their money on studying the price differences for items in different regions and buying cheap in one place to resell in another.

Here is a screenshot of what the EVE Auction House looks like.

You will immediately notice that buying and selling are separated. You can place a ‘buy order’ for an item at the price you’re willing to pay for and if someone wants to sell their items right away, they can sell to you for that price. You can also place a ‘sell order’ where you put an item for sale at the price you want (the way you do in WOW AH). The most popular way to make money in EVE is to just sit in station, find items where the difference between buy and sell orders is large and just trade those items.

Another awesome aspect of EVE is the graphs!

You can look at an item’s price history up to a a full year back to see how much the market fluctuates and whether it is a good time to buy or sell. As you can see it not only features average high and lows, but also includes the amount that gets sold and a Donchian Channel graph. Anyone who is new and wants to evaluate a market can easily do so.

As you might have already guessed, EVE is a heaven for someone interested in trading, it even has areal economist on staff and features a Quarterly Economic Newsletter.

I’d encourage everyone to try EVE at some point. It might not be the game for you, or it could be something you immediately fall in love with. My little summary of The Marketplace does not even begin to scratch the surface of this game's depth.