EVE Online

[excal]

...who plays this game?

I just got into it...lol. Great timing too, just because of exams.

[RD]

lol i used to play this game!

[excal]

I think coblin might like this game; it's a perfect example of an unregulated market (there is only sales taxes).

[Collin Li]

Runescape has an alright unregulated market. It has price caps and price floors to prevent people from making absurdly high or low offers, which is a bit annoying, but it is understandable, if they don't want excess baggage in the queues.

Most multi-skill games have a very good market economy. I'm not sure what EVE Online has, but I'd expect WoW, which has a similarly large array of skills, to have a similar market economy to the one I experience on Runescape.

[excal]

Well, they hire ecomonists to design the in-game economics apparently (interesting place for economists to work?): http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=481

An article:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/11624

An actual analysis:
http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/pdf/QEN_Q4-2007.pdf

I think this line in the Wikipedia article was the clincher: "Such dangers are an intricate part of Eve Online's virtual economy and thus are purposely not dealt with by the developers.[81] Players are expected to make financial decisions based (among other factors) on the possibility of other players' financial malpractice, much like in real-life economics." (this was in the context of several corporate spies assassinating the CEO and making off with several billion [it was valued at USD$100,000] ISK)