EVE General Discussion

I came across a few posts on the forums referencing the concept of resource scarcity and thought it deserved a serious discussion. As it stands now, ISK, minerals and basic materials are limited only by the amount of time you are willing to invest gathering them. It may very well be a good system design considering this is a spaceships game, but I would like to raise a few observations concerning this. But first, let me ask you this:

What do you fight over When you PVP?

If resources are limitless, it makes perfect sense to see the emergence of the "sea of blues" phenomenon in 0.0. It also explains why most people would remain in highsec where they can endlessly ball so hard and farm with very little risk. In other words, the bigger the area filled with non-hostiles, the better. Considering most major conflicts in real life are about resources and that PVP-fuel seems to be personal pride (e-peen) or killmails, I think CCP could consider the following options (with examples):

Option 1:
Make over-farmed resources decrease rewards/availability gradually, but never to complete depletion.
This would change the resource distribution dynamically as high-profit hotspots would change across the universe. It would favour exploration to maintain the highest ISK/hour in highsec/lowsec. It would also favour 0.0/wormholes alliances to control as much territory as possible with the least amount of people. This would actually make it possible to be "too big" unless you colonize new areas of space under your banner.
Example using rats: Let's assume the North/Caldari space is the most farmed region of space and Guristas are the number one prey. Guristas pirates would gradually "lose influence" in the world, making them less dangerous and less rewarding to hunt (lower CONCORD bounties). On the other hand, The Angel Cartel could be gaining influence by a lack of significant capsuleer activity in their space and thus slowly becoming the highest bounty rats of the game.

Option 2:
All resources can eventually be depleted.
A general guideline in my opinion should be that grinding 24/7, the entire EVE community could be able to completely deplete the universe's resources - assuming CCP introduces no new content - in 100 years. Moons/belts could be drained and entire pirate factions completely erased. Some planets could take decades to be fully stripped.
The key point about such a feature is that CCP would have to keep introducing new factions or resources as old ones get depleted (Such as Sleepers, PI, Incursions, etc.). Eventually we may be looking at doors to a completely new galaxy (or galaxies).

As a final note, I believe a mix of options 1 and 2 would suite EVE well, but I think it would be great to hear the community's thoughts on the subject.

----- EDIT 1 -----
Skip to page 4 for an update on pros/cons raised so far. Posts 61, 62, 63. Keep it going; we got some good arguments being thrown on the table.

What about a player run event that targets a specific group? Let's say.... miners. Should make ice a more contested resource

I've even said that there should be an absolute cap on the amount of currency that can be generated so that prices can't be inflated anymore than they already have but people were claiming without much of an argument that it would be a terrible idea because people would be having fights against people who have the most.

It baffles me that for a game community that claims to enjoy PvP so much they are extremely against anything that would increase how much they have to fight for what they have. I just hope CCP doesn't listen to them and puts the changes through anyway so EVE becomes a much more entertaining game.

Even CCP, whose grasp of economics can be likened to that of a two-year-old holding on to a sippy cup, would never implement an idea as stupid as hard-capping monetary wealth generation in a sandbox-style MMO.

That is a bad idea and you should be ashamed for posting it here. But you won't be, for the same reason you think it's good: you're dumb.

Ah there is criticism to the point of a cap, that I agree with, but not nearly on the mark as to why that's not a good idea.

Take the RL money supplies: governments can turn up printing presses to their hearts desire and print money to pay for whatever they want (usually guns and butter).

But this devalues the currency and leads to inflation.

But then, before fiat currency, when gold and silver were used, there was not enough gold and silver. Nature created a cap on the currency because gold and silver could not be mined fast enough to meet the expansion of the markets.

What happened?

Commodities.

Not all that was used for currency was metals. Whiskey, for example, at one time in the United States, was used as currency. This as one of the reasons for what is known in the books as The Whiskey Rebellion.

Now keep in mind that commodities can be as limited as precious metals, but there are simply more.

But here's a big fat rub: trade-worthy commodities were EXPENDABLE. We are talking food, textiles, leather goods, spices, ore.

All things of the environment, and hence the materials of which in limited supply (eventually).

So putting an arbitrary cap on ISK might seem dumb, but limiting the raw materials, as per the idea of this thread, would have that effect without looking arbitrarily dumb.

That you can farm rats and rack up endless ISK, or suck roids and rack up endless ISK, is like an ISK printing machine. Limit the resources and you limit the ISK.

You just listed a bunch of commodities whose only limits are time and effort. Eve's Ore (in fact every resource in Eve) is only limited in time and effort. Sounds fine to me.

Given infinite time and infinite effort, I can produce infinite amounts of food, textiles, leather goods, and spices. Ore I will admit is finite at the moment (though given the infinite nature of the universe, not really).

Food: Grow a sustainable yield every year for infinite years = infinite food
Textiles: See above
Leather goods: See above
Spices: See above.

By the way, CCP tried making a closed economy early in the game's history. They found that when new people joined, they got fucked. Even moreso than now.

There already is resource scarcity.

Moon mineral production is limited to a fixed number of moons and a fixed rate of minerals per hour. This is a number that cannot be changed no matter how many people are available/willing to harvest it. The technetium moons are all spoken for.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, oh geez.

No we understand this just fine, what we are arguing is that time as a limiting factor isn't enough.