The Space Barbie Failure Cascade

Author's note: I am not an EVE player. The month I spent in the game amounted to nothing; I can decipher only about a dozen of the game's billions of acronyms. I've tried to understand this controversy – if only on a superficial level – in an effort to give my EVE-enabled friends a clearer picture of the causes and the consequences of all the turmoil.

Icelandic developer CCP deployed the "Incarna" update to EVE Online a few days ago. The new features include the long-awaited "Captain's Quarters" (CQ) environment which, among other things, allows players to view their avatars in a clickable mirror.

The source of the late unrest is another feature of Incarna: the so-called "Noble Exchange" (NeX). It's a new boutique market from which players can buy vanity gear (at absurd prices) to customize their avatars. CCP created a third currency – dubbed "Aurum" – to drive that market.

To obtain Aurum, players must convert it from PLEX, the "Pilot License Extension" that, until now, could only be used to purchase additional subscription time, or sold for ISK. Technically, PLEX is more of an item than a currency, but it still functions as a medium of exchange in EVE's in-game economy. If player wants something from NeX, there are two options: (1) spend ISK to buy PLEX on the market, and convert the PLEX to Aurum, or (2) use real-world money to buy PLEX from CCP, and convert it to Aurum.

As things currently stand, the introductions of NeX and Aurum shouldn't unbalance the EVE economy. Players have had the ability to use real money to buy virtual money (via PLEX → ISK) since 2009. Although most of the vanity items available are ridiculously expensive in real-world terms – the price of a monocle is about $70 at present – those items have no substantive effect on the game world. Players can buy all the "Precision Boots" they want with ISK (and keep their subscriptions going, besides) without spending a dollar of real money, and it amounts to nothing more than a currency sink in EVE's economy.

The problem is that CCP is considering making other, actually useful, items available through NeX.

Meet the Medic

Genius.

Sega Hacked, 1.3M Accounts Stolen. How Long Before Steam?

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/165499/20110619/sega-hacked-1-3-million-users-information-compromised.htm

And in a show of mass stupidity that explains just how disconnected mass media is from the entire situation - almost every article comments about how LulzSec wants to help track down the hackers. Apparently they all missed the sarcasm in the LulzSec twitter post they are referencing. What's really interesting - the LulzSec twitter post was made two days before Sega announced it was hacked...

How long before our Steam accounts are compromised? I recommend everyone make sure your steam password is NOT the same as your email password. With both logins the same, there's no strength behind the Steam two-factor authentication, because it relies on sending you an email. If your steam password gets hacked, and the password is the same on the email account attached to your steam account, you're done.

And don't think that "encrypting" passwords by the company does any good. I've seen someone demonstrate using four nVidia video cards to crack passwords to the tune of thousands of passwords decrypted per minute. You gotta figure with four nvidia 580 cards, you get 2048 CPU cores that can be used to crack passwords simultaneously - they fall like cards.

Oh, and the password you DO use for steam? I'd recommend at least 12 characters or longer. It's only a matter of time.