The Largest Bank In Eve Begins To Topple

I’m the kind of guy who got excited when a new type of signal was introduced to a virtual transport simulator. I tell you this to allow you to judge this article’s interest to you. I’m a fan -or perhaps more accurately a side-line follower- of the epic space MMO Eve Online. The unfathomable scale of the virtual economy in that game leads to some of the most interesting virtual dynamics in any MMO. Ever.

Recently, the largest player-run bank in Eve, EBANK,  was at the centre of a huge embezzlement scam when one of the players in charge took off with around 250b ISK, which is more than £3,000 (around $4,800) worth of virtual money. The news even made it to the BBC’s technology section. But it seems that wasn’t the last of the problems for the troubled virtual bank.

It turns out the new management have discovered their fortunes are echoing those of their real world counterparts. As well as the theft, due to poor record keeping and a huge number of defaulted loans, the bank found it has a roughly 1.2 trillion ISK deficit. Oops.

Obviously those that have their life savings with the bank rushed to take out their money, creating even more problems. To prevent the whole thing from collapsing, the management have now frozen every single account they hold, until they can get things stable again. With this being the largest bank in Eve (until it implodes) this is in turn having a knock-on effect on the entire Eve economy.

It’s times like this I wish there was cable news for MMOS. Massively have a great article about these unfolding problems.

Via: Ars Tecnica