Greedy Goblin

Friday, March 16, 2012

Oh noes we must produce all that we spend!

Vast majority of the comments were negative on my idea to remove baddie-friendly carebear features, the ones that reward players only for spending time in the game. They agreed that the game would then be unplayable for new players or those who are not in a nullsec alliance. The same old WoW bullshit: players need to be carried or they can't make it.

The people are so used to this bullshit that they don't even recognize how bizarre it is when they write it to a one-month newbie who made almost 2 PLEX worth of ISK (gifts not included) in a month, without using the "must-be" carebear features (I use them for increasing standing, my income from them is a joke). Hell, my very first post, the one I made after a few days in the game shown me making ISK via hauling and trading. I'm not some "bittervet" with the "you must do it uphill in the snow like I did 5 years ago" speech! I'm doing it now and there is no hill or snow here at all, I'm actually surprised how easy it is.

I don't need welfare. No one needs it! They just prefer it, because working is incompatible with being a lazy idiot. They don't want to think, they don't want to make effort and especially they don't want to take risks. They don't have capital either as they spend everything on some stupid shiny as soon as they get some cash. They want rewards, preferably for nothing, in the worst case for spending some time doing repetitive stuff like flipping burgers or running missions.

However the most hilarious (and in the same time frightening) comment said: "[the idea] devastate the economy and it will drop from capitalism to medieval `we produce all that we spend` model".

You idiot! In the real world who produces all that we spend? Fairies? Kobolds? NPCs? Producing and distributing things is the economy.

However I can't just dismiss him as an idiot. His thinking isn't all uncommon. Unless you live in a rock, you heard about the economic crisis. It came from exactly this nonsense. Not just 12 years old kiddies but economy professors and billion dollar investment firm managers believed that everyone can make money only by tossing papers around, without anyone producing anything. The motto "let your money work for you" is still not laughed on, despite the dollar bills are just as good in work as the brokers who worship them. Of course one can make money off others by selling them stupid papers. But a world where everyone is a scammer won't work.

The games (even the "harsh" EVE) very well mimic the thinking of social people: items come from other people, we obtain them either by getting in their good graces or taking from them. The social people find it obvious that they do some silly task for an NPC and it rewards them with items or that they kill some NPC and loot the item. Where did the item come from? Why do they have them in indefinite amounts? If they are so powerful, why do they need you for their trivial tasks? They don't ask because they find it "normal" that items just appear somewhere from thin air and all we have to do to get them is kissing or kicking the right ass.

EVE, compared to most games has a huge economic system. Players can (or with little changes, could) create practically anything. But they prefer to just line up for welfare. I understand that PvP is hard, understanding market is hard, politics (= scamming) is hard, but then go out and mine Veldspar, damn you, tritanium prices went from 4.2 to 5.0 in two weeks!


PS: the post with the carebear ideas is updated, I recognized that mining should be high-sec, since it's an industrial work and shouldn't be mixed with direct PvP. It should have it's own industrial challenge and competition with other miners.

Business report: 1.19B (500M gift), the reason for the decrease is 65M used (post Monday), and 90M given to my newly created second account alt. I can't go scam M&S corporations with a name which can be googled to lead to my less than nice&sweet blog, and I'll need skillpoints to effectively scam (mainly to haul away the loot).

40 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm glad that you took a piece of my post and made it a title for you current :).

But you misunderstood the meaning of it. I wasn't really going to explain but now I feel you need to be "pointed" in the right direction.

First - it is not a nice thing to call someone with - in my opinion - well structured and informational post an idiot. I'm a company owner for 10 years, my company is one of the leading in my area of expertise. What may seem idiotic to you could be explained with your lack of experience both ingame and IRL.

"we must produce all that we spend" is actually a part of a longer sentence:

"If we force mining in low sec it will become several times more expensive to get those materials and all the prices will go up with a significant amount. This, combined with reduced income flow will devastate the economy and it will drop from capitalism to medieval "we produce all that we spend" model"

Key words: medieval. In medieval economy each village produces everything it spends (should I really explain that to you?). It is closed ecosystem and there is no capitalism. Capitalism comes later when the land and the labor became goods that can be traded freely in larger markets than regional town or village.

As you admit - "I recognized that mining should be high-sec" - so you basically adopted my point of view.

As a final - understanding EvE market is not that hard as you did it pretty well in one month (for a newbie that is). And for the PvP - it is not that hard either, it is just expensive to start and impossible to start alone.

Azuriel said...

I know this is a difficult concept to grasp, but think about why you are playing EVE at all.

Now compare that to why the average person plays (and pays for) these games.

For as intelligent as you may be, it boggles my mind as to why you cannot A) grasp the discrepancy, or B) acknowledge the legitimacy of the difference. Have you had any moments of fun that did not involve the AH? Is there any reason why you would play EVE if there were an iOS app that simulated the same economic system (and included AFK time)?

It is NOT "carebear bullshit" any more than your arbitrary accumulation of ISK (to spend on...?) is bullshit.

Anonymous said...

1) It's not many of those M&S can't adapt; it's that they won't. Unlike jobs or family, there is a limit to the amount of hassle that people will put up with in a game they are paying for. My thesis is the amount of hassle that people will put up with is a lot less now than 18 months ago. There will soon be SWTOR, Skyrim, KoA, D3, GW2, SW, ...In addition, CCP is on the wrong side of trends with subscription instead of P2W. If it boils down to just Eve, WoW and TOR in the $15/month, then they will need to work harder to please customers as competition increases, not try to drive them away.

2) How does your idea benefit CCP shareholders? I understand you would like it. One could argue it makes for a "better" game - Empire space is not EVE-like; the only reason for Empire to exist is merely because CCP prefers to make money. Whether removing Empire means 50,000 or 250,000 customers leave, I fail to see the benefit to CCP shareholders.

3) EVE is much more P2W than WoW, there are no BoP or titles or achievements. so the 1B ISK that a M&S got for working dumb or buying PLEX is no different than your 1B. So you really should mention how much time you spent. Four or five hours working in a burger joint could buy you the two plexus you have earned. If you spent more than 5 hours earning that ISK, someone else might prefer to spend a couple of hours more flipping burgers and several hours less hauling in a badger.

Gevlon said...

@Azuriel: actually you are saying something?

@Anonymous: you are as wrong as one can be. If mining would be low-sec, a "village" couldn't support itself at all, a few random miners would be massacred by pirates and griefers.

Only specialized mining mega-corporations could successfully mine with large scale operations, with enough escort to defeat random roaming morons and enough miners to make the escort worthwhile. These few corporations would support the whole economy.

I changed my idea exactly because I recognized that it's TOO capitalist and don't leave place for "villages" to exist, and most players want to be in "friendly helpful" villages.

Cenira said...

An example that backs your thesis on this and the previous post is arena in WoW.

None use bots for arena because they have no chance to win. If they can't win they don't earn anything for the player.

This does not restrict new players from playing arena though. They wont get gladiator tittle in their first week of playing of course, but they can start with capping their conquest points without any problem.

So new players are not affected by the existence of "carebear" activities.

Peter Petermann said...

let me introduce a small thesis: you wouldn't have made so much iskies of others, if they did not have such easy ways of making isk.

your claim that you avoid all those easy-isk is kinda bogus, since this is a complete system, not closed single systems.

i totally agree that low-risk-high-profit things should be changed, actually i've been saying "level 4 missions should be lowsec only" for ages, but you cant take away all ways to make easy isk at once, you would kill the economy

Gevlon said...

@Peter: The features that give ISK are welfare and not economy. They introduce nothing to the playerbase, just inflation. Removing features that give some items could turn the economy upside down.

Buggrit said...

1st of all, allow me to apologize for the wall of text. I have been reading your writings, and there is a lot I agree with, but there are some extreme positions you take that I believe turn out to be wrong. Not because of incorrect logic, but because they fail to account for the people they’re supposed to apply to. All the people.
Though not clearly, Azuriel made a point: a large proportion of those who play internet spaceships do not see it as serious business. They can't, or they won't. They want to shoot things, either other people or moving red squares. They want to loot stuff. Your proposals were directed to people like you. There's plenty, but not enough to make a universe.
A “true” universe would have 80% peons (of different stripes, but peons), 18% aristocracy (the nullsecs, FCs, and the top 2% elite. Which is what we got in RL. But in real world, the peons remain peons all their life and stay there. In EVE, people leave. The ones that return are usually those that have had success, or accumulated in-game riches and experience. The “ever broke” guys who didn’t get into pvp will tend to stay away.
To break such an economy, you just need to have a greater % of dropouts among peons to break the economy.
Say you got 40 000 people. Its stable, say 1000 go in and out each month. However, each month you get 800 aristocracy hopefuls and 200 who think they’re taking over the universe, and the ones that leave are 950 peons, 49 aristos and say 1 elite (through burnout)
Very soon your economy is unbalanced, with a lot of peons wondering why the hell they’re WORKING and never go anywhere. This is different from ratting and following and stuff, you’re making them WORK. They’ll also KNOW they are peons. Unsatisfied, young – they drop out constantly, so the average is pretty bad – the basis of your economy does not work.
To create the illusion, you provide an outside economy – the NPCs – who generate minerals, mods, ships and so on that are regularly blown apart and mined. They are your moving asteroids, and in the drone regions this is even more true because they drop mins. So the plebs continue being plebs, but they do not know it. They scavenge the products of that other invisible and fictitious economy, and pump them into the player base, becoming wealthier than just through working, and better yet under the illusion they do not work. It’s a sort of slave-based economy, with slaves being the NPCs. They’re still peons, they just have someone to clean their boots.
Now they see the shinies, and believe they’re someone. They go to the market and get fleeced, but they do not know it. They see progression, they eventually go into incursions or join a null corp that caters to their kind and gets regularly kicked out with 95% property loss, but they can say its not their fault, bad goons, and return to the grind.
I would LIKE there to be a sort of NPC economy alongside ours (sanshas, guristas everyone?) that would have moon mining and such which could be disrupted, limited resources of ships and men, that would allow players to actually impact them. Too much preying on them, less ships and so on. Missions could be roams and counter-roams in npc space, for example. Well, they’d need enough titans to one-shot supercap fleets, or they'd be gone in a month, but that’s a detail.

Buggrit said...

There is not that economy, therefore anoms, belts, l4s, incursions, sleepers, is what the plebs who do not mine have instead of a retriever and an overseer.
And we need those plebs, we really do. They make up the numbers, the lolmails, the raw produce and mods and stuff that we, as traders, take from them. Your harder world is more enjoyable in a way, and less in another – it makes it harder to get the riches. Because, in the end, trading is not my endgame but a way to it, and the less I must spend on it the better.
The basic flaw with your model is that it implies that a lot more people take up production for the game to work - which does not seem to be what people want, or they'd be there already. If I want to be a trader, and I’m running a real job there just to milk a few mills out of an efficient market without M&S to exploit, damn, that’s real work for little gain. Why am I there? Worse yet if I’m a M&S who thought I’d be a paladin of the stars, and they throw a shovel my way. WTF man, lol, there’s no fus roh dah here lol, I’m not treated as the l33t I deserve to be, fuck this, lol (hope I got the lols in the right place)
Ok, the dread pirate can always make ends meet, right? But no – even he needs a constant stream of lols to come along to pay for the real battles. Fighting is a negative sum game in eve – on average, all lose always. Only a few very good ones break even, and the stars get a profit. The nullsec warrior – the mainstay of fleets – also needs to be kept in ships, shinies and killmails. You can’t avoid him, you need him or all your carefully built infrastructure will die. You can’t even replace him with pure capital and huge quantities of money, because skill and a bloody minded attitude matter. So how do you keep them happy and working?
Who do you think runs incursions in lowsec and high, anoms, and chain-blitzes l4s? A LOT of veterans and fighters have their ratting alts to keep them in ships and mods.
The LOLs and plebs and ratters and l4 runners change the equation. A lot of these are M&S, not all.
Enough of these leave, you cause CCP economic damage. They do not wish it. There's even no extra "hardcore rep" in it for them, as they already ARE the hardcore MMO. Worse yet, they make the game experience harder for those who can no longer rely on fleecing them.
So shoot me, but I want to see the Jita scammer live. He can’t without plebs. (Would like it that they couldn’t catch and fleece them before they’re fat, but its an imperfect world)
I want to see the suicide griefers remain – but make it less profitable, so they do not destroy small commerce but still can gank the stupid fool who goes with too much $$ on too little hull.
And I want my little sheep to remain happy, blind and dumb, so I can sell my overpriced crap that I got off some idiot who doesn’t know prices.
So – though not perfect, and certainly possible to improve, the current model is more forgiving of human foibles, flaws and percentile distribution. Your model is too hardcore for an opt-in world. It doesn’t account for what real people are like and want.

Gevlon said...

@Buggrit: I see your point, but there is a problem with this "peon but don't see it" scheme.

They don't farm items from the rats and missions, they farm ISK. ISK don't make ships, materials do.

The ships that the lolkids lose is made by miners, industrialists and haulers. The lolkids give NOTHING in return, just ISK which is EXACTLY as much as needed to offset the inflation created by the introduction of the ISK to the playerbase.

Simple example: I'm alone in EVE, having all the ISK of the game (as there is no one else) and I have 2 ships.

Lolkid runs missions until he has enough to buy one of my ships.

Now I still have 100% of the ISK (which is a larger ISK number than before due to inflation) but only ONE ship.

The "hidden peon" scheme would work if the missions would provide items that we could use.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon,

We're talking about the EvE economy, right? The economy will be devastated and will drop from capitalism to medieval. In medieval times there is local baron that is guarding the local workers. He owns the land and the market and the workers pay him tax and sell him most of their production.

This is what will hapeen with EvE if you forbid high sec mining. The villages will be in 0.0 and low sec and the local barons will be the corps guarding / governing the place (exactly as it is now - you can rent a 0.0 system with your corp, mine there and pay monthly rent to the owner)

There is no independent "village" of 5 people in medieval times. It can't survive both economically - there is no free market and military - there is no defense.

Your idea is not too capitalistic, it is too medieval. Mining will cease to exist as a solo/small group career, yes. But there will be no mining megacorps, there will be locally owned corp mining squads, providing all the materials needed. It is so much more efficient than being a megacorp and pay for escort and organize logistics of large fleets.

Kobeathris said...

Gevlon, if missions were changed in the following way, would that be acceptable to you?

1 - Remove all bounties from NPCs

2 - Increase loot/salvage from NPCs

3 - Change mission rewards to LP only

In this scenario, mission runners are not producing isk, they are producing material, just like miners. You may say that the mission rats are produced out of nowhere, but so are the rocks in belts, so I don't see much difference there. This allows people to have a "grinding" job that isn't mining.

Gevlon said...

@Kobeathris: yes, that would work. Only salvage and item loot via LP, this way it would be a different form of item farming

Anonymous said...

@Kobeathris/Gevlon

The problem with that idea is that you've just turned off two of the small number of faucets for isk. It's kind of a big deal in a game where everything produced can and most likely will be destroyed at some point in time. The only two isk faucets I know of is buy orders for sleeper parts (which are only accessible in Wormhole space), bounty rewards from killing NPCs, and mission rewards. You'll end up with a severe contraction of the economy as isk liquidity drops.

Caramael said...

Missions and ratting are EVE's major money supply sources, right? So where would the ISK come from when you remove the ISK rewards from these two activities? Are you suggesting market liquidity won't suffer if you do this?

Gevlon said...

@Caramael: the ISK is mostly used for player-player transactions. So if you'd remove half of the ISK overnight, everything would go on the same way, just at half price.

The only place where significant player-NPC ISK transfer happens is skillbook selling, which mostly affects newbies, the ones who are the original targets of missions. See the obvious solution for that?

Dangphat said...

It depends on PLEX/ISK market, as if more ISK is being destroyed by this market then ISK will dry up unless there is a ISK source like missions and bounties.

Gevlon said...

@Dangphat: wrong, Plex don't destroy ISK.

Plex is created when you pay money to CPP. Then you trade Plex for ISK. The ISK remains in the playerbase, just in the hand of other player.

Caramael said...

Right. Let players produce the skillbooks.
I do think that would force a huge part of new players back towards mining though. And iirc this used to be a major complaint ("booooring") about EVE by new players.

Michael said...

Always a little amused that so many people think that the way to 'fix' games with pvp-aspects is to force pve players out of their preferred gameplay so the pvp players have more victims to abuse. :o

Absolutely agree that mining could use some more interactivity.

I find pvp boring because it has such fixed outcomes. Either I die and go replace my stuff, or I win and someone I don't know and couldn't care less about has to go replace his stuff. Boring.

While much of the pve content can be so exciting! Every time I kill a guristas, will it drop just 100 hybrid ammo or maybe some rare meta 3-4 item I haven't seen before! XD Every time I scan down a radar or mag site, it can yield just crap or really neat stuff. Every wormhole I find could send me somewhere I can explore and find more stuff to search for. Combat sites have the potential to escalate and send you across the galaxy, to a rare and unique reward. PvE allows for a much greater range of outcomes, so gives a much greater sense of motivation to seek those outcomes and reward when you achieve them.

Gevlon, in your trading the best outcome available is that you make a lot of isk. For what purpose? Do you want to buy a big player owned structure and live in a wormhole? Do you want to own one of every item and ship? Do you want to bribe people to participate in odd social experiments?

Having money by itself is a boring goal. Like you said, anyone can get money by doing pretty much anything. I understand you want to 'fix' that so that it's harder to get money, so your efforts feel more rewarding, but perhaps instead you should simply expand your goals to something that isn't the easiest and simplest thing to do in the game.

Asmiroth said...

The first and only question is, where does the money people spend come from? It doesn't come from selling stuff, since those people got money from somewhere else.

Find the true source of the ISK and then figure out what systems need to stick around for you to continue your travels making money. Is it the carebear stuff putting money into the system or is it nullsec?

Using WoW, since most people are familiar with it. Daily quests both caused and "solved" the problem of inflation. Solved in the sense that people are able to game the system and "catch up" to the stupidly high bar of prices.

Goodmongo said...

But what business would say; Gee I want to limit my potential sales by restricting it"?

Your ideas might work in a non-business world but companies are in business to make money. There are more M&S dollars then dolalrs from goblins who don't want to spend money anyway.

IO said...

Gevlon, 2 corrections:

1) 2 major NPC ISK sinks are skillbooks are BPOs. BPOs are usually bought not by newbies.
2) PLEX sometimes destroys ISK, when PLEX is destroyed. http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/08/08/eve-player-destroys-over-1000-worth-of-game-time/

Gevlon said...

@IO: BPO is true
Plex is NOT. When plex is destroyed, a plex is destroyed and not ISK. If I buy a plex for 500M and I get shot down, my 500M is still at the sellers wallet.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon

Isk Faucets:
NPC Buy Orders for Sleeper Components
Mission Rewards (Isk or items)
NPC Bounties
Insurance
Faction Warfare Rewards (Isk or items)

Isk Sinks:
NPC Sold Skillbooks
Market Transaction Taxes
Market Broker Fees
BPOs
Items Bought via License Points
Manufacturing slot rental fees
Insurance
Clone purchases

Anonymous said...

Another isk sink is holding sov

Casares said...

I must admit I don't realy know anymore what you really want and what exactly your post today and the once preceeding it (carebears and bots) is about to tell me.

Do you just want the isk reward removed from missions?
Do you want all missions removed (bar some newbie missions)?
Do you want all isk faucets removed?
Do you want all activities removed that reward time spend more than anything else?
Do you want high-sec to be removed entirely?

There are so many things I disagree with you or that I think are outright false, I really don't know where to start.

Plus: if you _really_ don't understand what Azuriel is saying then I kinda doubt it's even worth argueing.

Anonymous said...

You say "The social people find it obvious that they do some silly task for an NPC and it rewards them with items or that they kill some NPC and loot the item. Where did the item come from?"

It comes from work life. The NPC is their boss. They do their silly task and loot their pay checks. Most people aren't asked or expected to come up with ways to make money in their day-to-day work. They're just asked to kiss or kick the right ass. They don't care about creating value because they have no direct link to it.

Casares said...

To get started:

EVE is about spaceship combat. Period.

Anything else is side activity. Be that trading, hauling, mining, industry or research. It speaks for EVE's complexity that those branches are interesting enough for a minority to make it the main game. But at its heart it's about space combat.

That alone makes your approach already non-viable for the vast majority of players.

Now about combat pilots: there are two kinds:

1. Those who like pvp.
2. Those who do not like pvp.

If you accept player type 2 in this game, then there must be pve content. And it must be more than starter missions. Yet Pvp players will _always_ label pve content as "welfare, no matter how hard it is.

You seem so proud of The Pug's pve achivement ... yet, from a 2600 rating arena player your epics are nothing more than welfare.

You can of course with good arguments claim that EVE is about pvp space combat and that pve players have no place in this game. So why should you accept them as part of this game?

a. Business. The pve players make up a large portion of the playerbase (> 50% by all I know). Removing the pve content will _not_ push them to do pvp (bar a neglible minorty) but to leave the game. CCP won't do that. Nor do I really think the pvp players want that, as it means half the money for CCP too maintain this game.

b. They do not harm you! I have said this before: if interaction with with pve players annoys you so much that you rather remove high-sec altogether, then simply move to low/null sec. And if the mere existance of pve players (even though you have zero contact with them) still annoys you, then I'd question who the social person is here.

Gevlon said...

@Casares: I want all activities removed that give reward for just spending time with no skill or competition. It's not so much to ask, mining, is pretty simple yet it's competitive with other miners and pirates.

Also, the mission runners harm me by inflating my ISK away. My dream ship, the Charon freighter increased its price by 150M in the last month. The mission runners took away 150M from me in one month.

P.A. said...

Wait just a sec. You got over 500 million ISK from gifts, which I presume you, as a good goblin, reinvested in the market, making more money in the process.

I'm not doubting that you are able to make a lot of ISK in very short time, but you must acknoledge that a part of this billion ISK in 1 month as a newbie is due to those gifts, gifts that the vast majority of newbies don't usually get.

Unless you let that 1/2 billion ISK gathering mold in your wallet. If that is the case, your financial feat is even more impressive.

Casares said...

"My dream ship, the Charon freighter increased its price by 150M in the last month. The mission runners took away 150M from me in one month."

Have you actually bothered to check the 1 year chart? Charon prize is rising since early dec 2011 while it was basically constant before. I have no idea what causes the sudden prize increase, but blaiming mission runners on it sounds really stupid.

I have created my main char in dec 2004 (!!). And while I have only played a fraction of that time (I have sp worth roughly 2 years training) I can gurantee you that the inflation in EVE is NOT 15% per month. You are really blowing the impact mission runners have out of propotion.

Also: your own comment to Caramael applies: if the total amount of isk increases, then all prizes go up and you should make more money from your own activities as well.

Buggrit said...

Gevlon,

Its not the mission runners, well, there's more money with the incursions but not just that. There's a real imbalance in the drone regions due to war, which were supplying the game with minerals.
Also the current huge production of supercaps, new (glass-hulled) BCs and the carnage of war drove up demand. They are less expensive so a lot more get shot up than with T2.
Trouble in drone regions = bots have problems = less production of minerals = ship prices raise.
When low-level mods started to appear less, their recycling ended - so less minerals.

Something much like that will happen when drones start giving money, as CCP said. Less minerals AND more money is a recipe for inflation.

Regarding the plebs: they supply the market with salvage (for rigs), and mods taken from missions.

There really should be some more money sinks, though, its unbalanced, and a long term problem. Plexes have gone up steadily.

buggrit said...

Another point I'd like to raise:

It is very true that in WoW M&S made life harder on everyone, as you so amply described.

In EVE, though, besides inflation, do you find them offensive? I find them amusing.

Well, except when the alliance is full with them and you can't get a station with 50 people to turn out 10 ships to scare off a roam band of 5-6.

Cyras DeValera said...

Also, please realize that a large chunk of new ISK comes from 0.0 welfare faucets like ratting, mining in equivalent high sec, plexing. All of which are done in almost perfect safety. Lowsec is not nullsec, it's frequently safer than highsec.

Anonymous said...

@Buggrit CCP is quite good about being open. The last numbers I saw is that the average time in game was 7 to 8 months. So a stable population of 375k people would mean about 50k are leaving every month; on average one player leaves EVE every minute.

----

Back before the hard times hit, CCP could afford to spend more $ on their QEN.

http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/QEN/QEN_Q4-2010.pdf
on page 19 shows the ISK faucets and sinks with numbers.

Obviously, if skill books and BPOs are going to be sold in unlimited quantity, there will need to be something artifically creating ISK that will pump new currency into the game. Since LP is an ISK sink, your and Kobeathris plan would further disrupt the economy without something, somewhere creating ISK from thin air.

---------

How does your "I want all activities removed that give reward for just spending time with no skill or competition." benefit CCP? You want them to spend development resources to lower their income and profits?

Yaggle said...

I hear people go the other way, also, that our economy will collapse so badly that we will not be able to live indoors, will not have any food, etc. Maybe this is possible whose economy only depends on trade and not production. Even in a country like the U.S. where much is imported, there is also much production. What I am saying, is where there is farming, construction, mining, trees to make wood out of, etc. and there is technologies to make factories, and workers, there will always be a base for a decent standard of living with food, shelter, running water, etc. Of course people are brainwashed into thinking they need much more than that. Already economic conditions show people you don't need 2 cellphones with internet, 200 television channels, and air conditioning running all day. One thing I cannot stand is people running around saying 'the sky is falling' type of comments. But this should not be excuse for accumulating large debt either.

Gevlon said...

My gift ISK rots in my wallet and will going to gift away (probably to my girlfriend if she hooks up on the game), exactly because I want to prove that one can trade himself up.


@Casares: that's exactly what I'm planning, read Tuesday post. It will also post evidence (not ideas but data) that proves both that we have high inflation and it's the mission runners doing.

However it's a threadmill, I have to trade not to get more rich but to stay the same rich because they constantly get welfare.

Anonymous said...

Misson runners are not the main ISK pump in game. Ratting in 0.0 is. Here is the math:

If you look at the link provided by one of your readers - http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/QEN/QEN_Q4-2010.pdf on page 19 you see that the biggest isk pump in the game is Bounty prizes. This include misson bounty and ratting bounty. Let's try to separate them.

Look what a lvl 4 misson gives you - Intercept The Saboteurs, level 4. Some numbers:

- 1.5 million in reward (with the time bonus included)
- 3.3 million in bounties
- 3700 LP
- 2-3 million in loot (rough approximation)
- 1-2 million in salvage (rough approximation)

The ratio bounties to reward is 3.3/1.5 = 2.2 . But there are missions with better ratio so let's put some margin and claim that the medium ratio is much higher - 3 or 3.5 maybe. This means that you get three to three and a half times more ISK from bounties in mission than from the reward.

Now look back to the graph on page 19. Green+Pink block gives mission reward+time reward and it is 4 trillion, more or less. Bounties are from 24 at the start to 28 at the end of the period with NO INCREASE in mission rewards.

So the ratio bounties to rewards in the CCP graph is 24/4 = 6. All the difference comes from 0.0 ratters, the "hardcore" players. And most interestingly, the December graph shows that Bounties rise dramatically with almost zero increase in mission+time reward.

Conclusion is simple - in order to reduce ISK generated in the game you must reduce (or remove) bounties in 0.0 and missions, nothing more! If the bar that represents bounty prizes is the same as the commodity bar you will have a very stable ISK flow with minimal inflation.

Anonymous said...

If there's to be a discussion of ISK sources/sinks, knowing the magnitudes may help


Item Source/Sink Monthly Amount
Wormhole blue books Source $10,430,000,000,000
Incursions Rewards Source $8,566,015,400,900
Mission Rewards Source $2,470,815,985,076
Misson Bonuses Source $2,346,410,541,970
Insurance Payouts Source $3,366,455,121,035
Insurance Costs Sink -$1,618,888,782,680
NPC Bounties Source $32,083,329,999,805
NPC Sell Orders Sink -$13,000,000,000,000
Transaction Taxes* Sink -$2,375,100,000,000
Broker Fees* Sink -$2,607,100,000,000
LP Store* Sink -$6,331,570,000,000
PI Construction* Sink -$627,850,000,000
Clones* Sink -$910,600,000,000
Office Rental* Sink -$488,650,000,000
War Fees* Sink -$149,350,000,000
Repair Bills* Sink -$287,100,000,000
PI NPC Taxes* Sink -$741,820,000,000
Sov Bills* Sink -$809,100,000,000
Contract Brokers Fee* Sink -$301,600,000,000
Contract Sales Tax* Sink -$324,800,000,000

the formatting is likely terrible, here is the source http://twostep4csm.blogspot.com/2012/03/its-econmony-stupid.html