EVE: Inserting business into games?

[Enkidu]

I'm a bit curious about EVE's attempt to integrate financial markets into the game. Anyone have thoughts on this? While fascinating, it strikes me that regulators still haven't managed to balance financial markets in the real world, so how will a developer do so when characters number in the thousands, and participants in the (in-game) financial markets probably will be a fraction of the total players:?:

[Dirt]

It's all about, er, numbers.

[MikeSofaer]

I played EVE for a while, gets tedious fast. Integrating a player crafting based economy with a enemy loot drop economy is deifically difficult at best. In EVE the best items are dropped by pirates and blueprints for high-level items are extremely expensive. Meaning to get a blueprint to build an item on which you can make a profit you have to spend a long time carrying ore back from asteroids. Or killing pirates. Which means you are out of luck if you made your character good at crafting not combat. Gets boring. When I hit the point where I needed 4 million ISK for a skill book on how to fly a battleship (never mind the ship itself) I decided that it wasn't a goal worth my time and I stopped playing. My brother claims that PvP piracy might make the game fun, I'll try it when he does, he may be right.

Financial markets. The EVE ones are silly, they just don't feel right. They're driven by arbitrary NPC pricings on one hand and a bunch of players trying to find something interesting to do and gathering lots of useless stuff on the other hand. It's got a weird market system sort of like SWG's but there's no coherence to it, no way to form a company that, say, does deliveries on demand of objects in other systems. It's an incredibly fragmented market. Almost as fragmented as this post.