Eve Online is a fairly long-lived and popular MMORPG-RTS, which has over half a million players in its 12 active years. Eve Online is more than an MMORPG, it is a galaxy-wide simulator where players will have to explore trade and fight in galactic battles to survive. Among all the unique features of this game, the one that stands out the most is undoubtedly the fact that in Eve Online it is your own players who establish and control the entire economy within this game. The developer of Eve Online (CCP Games) simply provided the rules, the universe and its proper maintenance. From this point on, players have taken care of everything else: managing solar systems, building fleets, creating alliances and fighting each other for control of resources.
After all this, Eve Online has become a massive utopia full of huge virtual corporations that are dedicated to control various areas, which end up affecting the entire economy within the game. EVE Online has achieved such a large economic development that its virtual money called ISK (Inter-Stellar Kredits) has a value in the real economy.
This MMORPG has a system that allows you to convert everything into dollars, where each item or ship in this game can be paid in ISK or its equivalent value in dollars. For this reason, gaming marketplaces that are dedicated to buy Eve Online ISK are considerably requested, since players who work inside the game and earn ISK; usually want to sell them to get real money.
Eve Online has become quite popular thanks to the enormous amount of achievements and events that have originated their players, for example: Eve Online holds the record of the biggest battle perpetrated in a videogame, which had 20,000 players fighting each other in different groups and clans for 24 hours, this event ended up generating damage that reached thousands of dollars. But in addition to that case, Eve Online also has another rather curious anecdote, which is currently known as the biggest scam ever perpetrated in the history of videogames.
This curious story begins when a player called “Cally”, began to realize that players had to make a lot of effort trying to get resources and ISK in order to build ships, and also observed that companies became more powerful with the work of the players who work for them. For this reason, Cally decided to create a themed clan with the goal of becoming a bank within Eve Online, which ended up being called “EVE Intergalactic Bank”.
The function of this virtual bank was very similar to that of any other bank, this one was dedicated to give loans to the players and could also collect them. The loans offered by this bank helped the players who wanted to get enough resources and build their ships, taking into account that they had to work to pay their debts. Cally was the manager of this bank for months, and its success was so great that it generated incredible amounts of money.
All this was going pretty well until Cally suddenly decided to withdraw all the money from the bank, which was 790 billion ISK (equivalent to about $175,000), then fired all her employees and disappeared completely.
Subsequently, it became known that Cally had spent the money on the following: he first bought the most powerful ship in the entire game, and then offered the rest of the money as a reward to whoever managed to kill him in the game. After many attempts by the players, nothing was achieved, and then Cally uploaded a video on the internet where he made fun of all those who believed in him.
This big scam was a terrible event at Eve Online and not only demonstrated the results of an unworthy, but meticulous plan made by a scammer, but also demonstrated the problems that can arise when players control the entire economy of an MMORPG without much intervention from its developers.