Scandal Case Study Essay
Pick one documented market-manipulation incident from a real virtual economy and explain the mechanism it exploited well enough that a reader could see how to design against it.
Due: 26 April 2027 · Weight: 25%
The brief#
Every player-run market eventually meets someone willing to break it on purpose. Explain how, and what would have stopped them.
Week 8’s lecture covered the Guiding Hand Social Club heist in EVE Online — a real, decade-old incident where a ten-month espionage operation ended in the destruction of a player corporation’s assets worth tens of billions of ISK, reported at the time as somewhere north of $16,000 in real-world value. That’s one option. Comparative Market Teardown (Week 9) will have had you dig into specific mechanics across EVE Online, World of Warcraft, and Old School RuneScape; you may use that research to choose a different documented incident from any of the course’s three case-study games, or another virtual economy, provided it is real and citable.
The essay is not a retelling. A market-manipulation story is interesting; the mechanism behind it is what this course has spent nine weeks giving you the tools to name.
What you submit#
A single essay (roughly 1200–1800 words) that:
- identifies the incident by name, date (where known), and source
- explains the specific market or economic mechanism it exploited — what rule, gap, or incentive made the exploit possible
- proposes one plausible design change that would have closed that gap, reasoned from the course’s mechanism-design and market-design material
This is marked holistically rather than against a weighted checklist: the mark reflects the essay as a whole, not a sum of separately-scored parts.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- names a real, documented market-manipulation or exploit incident from a virtual economy, with a citation to a source describing it
- explains the specific economic mechanism the incident exploited, not just a narrative summary of events
- proposes one plausible design change that would have prevented or limited the exploit
How it is marked
Judged as a whole on whether the essay identifies a real, specific incident, correctly explains the economic mechanism it exploited (not just what happened, but why the system allowed it), and proposes a plausible design change that would have closed the gap --- with enough specificity that a reader unfamiliar with the incident could follow the argument end to end.