EVE Online lets you destroy real-world money

And I don’t mean in the “time is money” sense.

To get around the shady gray market of buying in-game money with real money, makers of the popular MMO EVE Online, CCP, have introduced a way for players to pick up time codes and convert them into in-game items. Those, in turn, can be traded to other players for in-game cash.

At first, the creation of this new market was an innovative fix for a problem that commonly plagues MMOs. That was until CCP decided the time code items could be transported along with all the other items in the game, making them both steal-able, and destroyable.

Last week, two players, slickdog and Viktor Vegas, proved that CCP’s little innovation could turn out to be pretty profitable for the company. They went after a ship carrying $1 295 worth of time codes. Unfortunately for the players, they ended up destroying the items in the process of the looting. That’s $1 295 CCP now gets without providing any kind of service to any players.

Source: Massively
Image: Adapted from Eve Online – Empyrean Age screenshot by CCP Games under a CC-BY-SA license. Yes, you can use this image if you similarly Share Alike!