EVE General Discussion

i have not seen a single idea to sink the massive amount of isk from truly ISK flooded wallets.
Almost everyone is aiming to destroy the low/middle class wallets, yet none even said a word about the meaningful isk holders.

i wonder way... oh wait, actually i do not.

-Give probes and drones a max lifespan, similar to mining crystals (that does not effect performance).

-Charge gate-usage tax based on system sec status. It would be nice to have 1.0 space be the highest tax, though I'm not sure how it would allow for newbies to move about. However if that was in place properly, it would be another draw to lower sec systems. Base the tax on goods in the cargohold and encourage smuggling by providing a way for people to hide cargo from customs scans (I'd like to say scans in general, but that's a touchy subject, and isn't mandatory for the smuggling aspect).

-Include hefty fines for being caught smuggling

-Set all refineries to 30% and then offer 50% as a premium price based on volume refined

If there was any actual inflation that problem would resolve itself. The very fact that people are hoarding isk is indicative of the lack of inflation.

The reason is that inflation is a devaluation of a currency, If there was isk inflation then the ISK squirreled away in thees peoples wallets would be losing value and you'd either reach the point where their wealth ceased to be wealth or they'd put their isk back to work.

This is a large part of the problem with the real world economy. Right now as my companies CEO said back at the beginning of the bust "cash is king" so you have all these companies sitting on large piles of cash rather than investing it, get some inflation going however and that would change, suddenly that cash would be losing value while sitting idle and that would act as an incentive to get it to work.

I really don't understand how anyone can say that blowing up ships is not an ISK sink.
And more specifically, war is one of the biggest reducers of wealth in the game.

I will accept that when an insured ship gets blown up, at that precise moment, the loss of that ship is a net injector of ISK into the game.

But the people who are arguing that ship losses are an ISK faucet are looking at ISK with a flawed view.

What ISK truly represents is a perceived value of TIME, gametime to be precise.
When something is blown up, those minerals have to be remined. The modules that did not survive have to be reconstructed, and in most cases, the raw materials have to be harvested.

Whether it is a bot or a human harvesting the raw material, TIME must be burned up to replace that lost ship/module/POS.
That time has an opportunity cost attached to it. That is the loss of wealth in the game.

Look at it from a very simple model. Assume that the PvP'er replaces all his losses with his own industrial alt
The opportunity cost = what the indy alt could have accrued in wealth in the time spent gathering those resources/hauling those resources/refining those resources/building the replacement parts/hauling the replacement parts his PvP alt.

And to take it one step further, a massive war can truly reduce wealth creation in the game because instead of spending time grinding ISK in high sec/low sec/null sec, that person is sitting in a fleet earning nothing. When an alliance wide CTA is called and 800-1000 null sec players are not grinding sites or mining, that is one heluva reduction on the ISK faucets in the game.

PvP, especially wars, are indeed the greatest wealth sink in the game, which eventually translates into ISK.

The ability to put bounties on players, even if they have a positive security standing....
Have you ever been pissed that one guy always keeps underbidding your market orders by 0,01 ISK?
Put bounties on the heads of your bothersome competitors, just for the fun of it......

As a few others have said:

Many of these proposed changes would harm the newest players and do relatively nothing to the old rich folk. Even if isk sinks get put in place that cause the rich industrialists and CEO's to throw away isk, there is risk that the change is too great and they begin to lose money for pushing goods into the market. The market then stagnates, prices shoot through the roof, and we get the same situation everyone is afraid of. On the flip side new taxes could be put in place that do nothing but slightly slow the increasing wallet size.

What everyone has to consider is that Eve doesn't behave like real life in terms of inflation. In real life we have a finite money supply, and inflation kicks in when we print more money to reflect the devaluation of the currency. By contrast in Eve, we have an infinite money supply with no foreign currency to measure ours against. The only measure of the value of isk is the time invested in acquiring that isk. Inflation becomes a non issue because the 99% control the value of almost every market good by determining how much time they're willing to invest to acquire that good. Industrialists want their goods to sell and so they quickly find the equilibrium between cost in time and quantity purchased, assuming a minimal amount of competition to drive prices to a reasonable level. In this way increasing isk does not create inflation as long as the methods of attaining said isk continue to remain stable. The only controlling factor in EVE inflation is the efficiency of common isk printing techniques.

Massive ISK sinks will just cause massive deflation, making the ISK-hoarders' money go even farther - and with no planned end to the deflationary action, this may encourage more ISK generation and hoarding.

Reducing ISK in the economy is more easily addressed by reducing the ISK faucets like rat bounties and mission rewards. The question to ask first is what game performance objective is met by reducing the supply of ISK? As long as most players see their incomes rise along with the cost of goods and services, and they continue to have fun and desire to earn ISK, what is the problem exactly?

Generally when people are talking about inflation in eve, they are talking about the PLEX and high end faction, deadspace, or officer items.

Things that could be changed to lower the faucets and increase sinks:

If someone with a GCC destroys a ship, the insurance payout for the destroyed ship does not come from the game but the player who fires the final blow. (No ISK? CONCORD takes it from you pilot's license time, 15 million per day).

Incursion isk can be reduced by changing the victory conditions to "all ships must be destroyed".

Rat bounties could be a mix of isk and LP. Along with a beefing up of the LP stores, this would reduce a faucet and boost a sink as the LP store is a major sink.

POS anchoring rights can be bought by corps with low standings.

Those with low security status can choose to accept lower bounties and higher sec status gains.

Everytime you make a bad forum post you lose ISK... lol

Because unless you buy your ship from an NPC corporation, getting blown up is not an isk sink at all. In fact since you get an insurance payout, getting blown up is an isk faucet. But that's ok, if economic concepts and numbers make your head hurt, keep hitting F1, F2, F3 and tell everyone what a 'leet piwate you are.