The Economy of EVE Online (Part 2): The Robot Problem
Oct 9, 2026 · 9 min · 9 segments
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Oct 9, 2026 · 9 min · 9 segments
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the last video we looked at this amazing document produced by the developers of EVE Online called the Monthly Economic Report.
In this document there is a section that lists how all money is created and destroyed in the game.
This is commonly referred to as a currency faucet and a currency sink respectively.
The largest source of ISK, the in-game currency, is from this section here, bounty prizes.
For non-EVE players what this means is that a player will fly their spaceship to a group of hostile NPCs, kill them and get a cash prize directly debited into their in-game wallet every 20 minutes.
Now there are certainly players that will hunt these bounty prizes themselves by actually playing the game, but it is incredibly easy to instead just write a program that will fly to these groups of NPCs, kill them, and then move on to the next group while keeping an eye out for anybody who might want to hunt them.
This issue of botting or using robots to play a video game is actually forbidden by the game developers and anybody found doing it will be banned from the game.
But it is incredibly hard to police and even if the account does get banned it is easy to set up a new one and just start botting all over again.
What this means is that at any time in the EVE Online universe, there are teams of robots printing money 24 hours a day, 365 days a year through these bounty prizes.
Unsurprisingly, this has caused inflation in the EVE economy.
And while it is not at an alarming level to the point where it is ruining gameplay just yet, it is well beyond what you want to be seeing in your economy, running at about a 10% inflation rate per year over the last 5 years.
For reference, most modern nations try to keep their inflation rate between 2 and 3%.
A quick side note is that these downticks in the cash supply here in EVE Online were caused by the closing of player-run casinos.
Yep, that's right.
But anyway...
The game developer has actually taken some pretty serious steps within the last few weeks to address the issue of botting in this game, making changes that will make it a lot harder for these robots to detect hostile ships coming to attack them.
This is likely to see a large scale reduction in the amount of botting taking place, but at the end of the day it's an arms race of the botters versus the game developers.
In the last video we looked at this amazing document produced by the developers of EVE Online called the Monthly Economic Report.
In this document there is a section that lists how all money is created and destroyed in the game.
This is commonly referred to as a currency faucet and a currency sink respectively.
The largest source of ISK, the in-game currency, is from this section here, bounty prizes.
For non-EVE players what this means is that a player will fly their spaceship to a group of hostile NPCs, kill them and get a cash prize directly debited into their in-game wallet every 20 minutes.
Now there are certainly players that will hunt these bounty prizes themselves by actually playing the game, but it is incredibly easy to instead just write a program that will fly to these groups of NPCs, kill them, and then move on to the next group while keeping an eye out for anybody who might want to hunt them.
This issue of botting or using robots to play a video game is actually forbidden by the game developers and anybody found doing it will be banned from the game.
But it is incredibly hard to police and even if the account does get banned it is easy to set up a new one and just start botting all over again.
What this means is that at any time in the EVE Online universe, there are teams of robots printing money 24 hours a day, 365 days a year through these bounty prizes.
Unsurprisingly, this has caused inflation in the EVE economy.
And while it is not at an alarming level to the point where it is ruining gameplay just yet, it is well beyond what you want to be seeing in your economy, running at about a 10% inflation rate per year over the last 5 years.
For reference, most modern nations try to keep their inflation rate between 2 and 3%.
A quick side note is that these downticks in the cash supply here in EVE Online were caused by the closing of player-run casinos.
Yep, that's right.
But anyway...
The game developer has actually taken some pretty serious steps within the last few weeks to address the issue of botting in this game, making changes that will make it a lot harder for these robots to detect hostile ships coming to attack them.
This is likely to see a large scale reduction in the amount of botting taking place, but at the end of the day it's an arms race of the botters versus the game developers.
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