“You know, the meta system doesn’t account for any real sustainability in the marketplace,” he quietly chided, much to the collective scowls and distasteful glares of the five native Icelandic economists he was overseeing. “Jogan, there’s no such thing as medium missiles” he stated, loudly whipping an obnoxiously bright laser-pointer from one economist’s face to the nearby graph on the wall. “It goes straight from Rockets to Heavy Assault Missiles, which are classified as Medium Missiles only in the skill training queue, but are really Heavy missiles because Cruise Missiles and Torpedoes are Large. For some reason, you clowns have made missiles a more complicated system than hybrid guns which go small, medium, large, x-large, despite missiles being a self-contained package. Rocket, Heavy Assault, Cruise, XL Cruise…bah! X up if you caused this headache. Oh wait, I’m not playing Eve Online, I’m just here to fix your idiotic choices.”
You could cut the tension with a knife. All five collectively seethed uncomfortably in their large leather-backed chairs, glancing nervously towards the clock as if counting down the seconds before they could escape their new comrade’s unceasing tirade of EVE facts. Where did he come from? I had to dig deeper.
It seems sitting down with developers in small coffeehausen in Iceland is just the way things go around here, though my new space economist friend insisted on not drinking this early in the day. “I joined CCP because they didn’t have any idea what they were doing, despite having five college educated men overseeing every facet of the economy. I was only eight or nine when I started playing Eve Online back in the early 2000s, not that I remember much back then. But really, everyone was super young when the game came out and now they’re all married with kids.”
Boy, this guy really knew how to hit where it hurt. Even I was uncomfortable at this point. Then he continued: “So after a decade of cornering the market and calling CCP out on their outlandish design choices in regard to materials and supply-and-demand in an artificial vacuum where products never truly lose their viability, I was hired on the spot. Well, years later after I had dropped out of school to focus on Eve Online. Earth & Beyond was the original reason, but that didn’t work out so well…” He paused. Thank the maker. “You know, I’ve never gotten a decent explanation as to why the naming scheme for meta equipment is all over the map.” Personally, I had no idea myself and just seemed to contemplate the question for a minute before nodding in full agreement. Who was I to argue with a man who works there? Did anyone at CCP know what they were doing? “Obviously not” he answered the moment the question left my lips. “Tech Two ships cost four hundred times the cost of Tech One and do thirty percent more damage or otherwise compared to their base model.”
It was around this point that I knew nothing good would really come from this meeting and obviously our new economist friend was desperately needed back at CCP to fix what was secretly broken for fourteen plus years. This time I was drinking; slurring my speech and stumbling home in the dark.
