EVE General Discussion

OMG this is the stupid that will not die

There is no inflation problem. The spike that you saw in December was a material supply shortage due to some changes that happened in the drone lands.

Inflation is not, has not and never ******* will be a problem in this MMO.

People have been crying "OMG TEH inflation!!" for as long as I've played this game and so far except for some material supply issues caused by CCP tinkering with various resource inputs and manufacturing requirements prices have remained stable or dropped.

Don't you think it's kind of strange that prices remained flat for the entire rest of the year? People have been running incursions that entire friggin time but somehow we're supposed to think that some magical ******* tipping point was finally reached in December

Really? Don't you think that if there were an inflation problem due to isk inputs that you would have seen a steady increase in prices as that isk accumulated in the economy

ISK is not a fiat currency! It is a highly portable commodity that is harvested by shooting NPCs. If that commodity is devalued by over supply you'll see people moving to other activities and things will balance out. As isk levels increase demand for other products will increase which will bump prices which will encourage people to activate idle production assets. Hell prices on minerals or Ice get bumped enough and I've got 4 toons that could be out mining tomorrow.

Remember the only reason inflation is a problem in the real world is sticky wages, if wages adjusted automatically with inflation it would never be an issue. They don't which is why it causes pain in the real economy. I'm not going to spend forever explaining this read through my posting history and you'll see multiple explanations of this.

Wages are not sticky in EVE people can increase their wages simply by moving to the more lucrative activities or baring that into supplying resources for those who do engage in those activities. They don't have to talk their boss into a raise they don't have to interview for a new job or go take a certification course or convince someone to give them a chance because the position requires experience but the only way to get experience is to get a position

No you inject a skill book or two invest in some capital assets and set to making your fortune.

Also it's generally better for the isk to flow easily and freely. It's mainly psychological but people tend to be more optimistic and less risk adverse when they feel like they are making more money. Higher bounties means bears who are more willing to buy those fancy faction modules that the Null sec crowd sell to buy their fancy PVP ships. And it's just a fact that a person making 100mil an hour is going to be looser with their money than someone making 10mil an hour or 1 mil an hour

Finally never forget that isk supply is not the sole determiner of inflation, Inflation is a factor of currency supply relative to the production of the economy. Just because your currency supply is increasing does not automatically equal inflation. If your productivity is increasing faster you'll actually end up with deflation. And unlike the real world the only limit on production in EVE is time. Belts replenish, rats respawn, and you can always find new planets to PI on. So as isk increases it simply increases the insentive to go out and harvest/create other resouces

The level of inflation in the game is getting kind of silly. At this rate it will cost as much for a porno holoreel as it cost for a Battleship a year ago.

delete

And this, my fellow Eve players, is the WISDOM THAT MUST NOT DIE!

You both missed his point. If what you are currently doing steadily loses value relative to the overall economy, what you are supposed to do is change what you are doing, not do more of the same.

If everyone and their dog did only belt ratting, mining would suddenly be quite profitable etc.

There is one. It's more of an area then a point, tho. I'm pretty sure you will come up with the right answer yourself. There is a complex interaction between PLEX, ISK, minerals/sleeper goo and the number of active accounts. There are sort-of-tipping points and I believe we have hit one.

In 0.0 your available time to NPC scales with the distance to empire. Paragon is a nice place to chill out. :) With incursions you don't have that.

On the notion that it's easier to change profession in EVE then on Earth I do not agree. Well, for us 100M+SP folk it is. For the waste majority of active accounts it's not. They have to skill for a few month to be competitive.

Allot of people think they are entertaining. So they would continue to do them even if they didn't pay several times what every other income source paid.

PLEX prices have more to do with the real economy than the EVE economy. The reason being that the less real money people have due to real economic hardship will result in a greater demand from people trying to pay for their play in ISK rather than real world currency putting upward pressure on the ISK price of a plex, this also results in fewer people trying to sell plex for isk reducing the supply of plex and putting upward pressure on price.
The fact that the cost of plex is influenced by the real world economy means that it's a useless metric for measuring monetary inflation in game.

Oh and it's much easier to change professions in EVE compared to real life. or are you really going to pretend that injecting some skills and waiting out the training is harder than going back to school to learn a new profession? As to the argument that newbies and low skilled characters can't avail themselves of other opportunities the simple fact that those 100m sp vets can will balance matters out for those who remain in a given profession because they lack the skills.

CCP are developing an MMO, not remodeling bathrooms, so the endless mention of faucets and sinks is mederately useless

1. Are you implying that mineral collection through mining is also damaging to the economy? That wouldn't make much sense as it's commonly known that mining only accounts for 25-30% of minerals that are injected into the game. If that's not what you're implying, then please clarify the purpose..

2. Yes, ratting in anomolies does add isk and minerals to the game. Interesting thing is that if you take away these things then players would have no way of producing income other than missions, which are not for everyone. Again, your statement seems to lack a purpose

3. Yes, it is a smaller percentage of minerals and income flow into the game... Not hard to determine that

Thanks for agreeing with the coolness of my numbers :) As far as my isk, as I stated earlier I am primarily a builder, making ships to earn isk, which as you know is not a way of introducing new isk or minerals into the game, but instead actively removes both through the purchase of BPO's and skillbooks from NPC corps, the cost of researching in stations, and the loss of minerals in the process of construction (small as it may be once proper research has been done).

Of everything in your reply, all I gather is that we agree about incursions being excessive in the amount of new isk that they introduce. Not that this would be a problem if they fell in line with the risk=reward factor that everything in eve is supposed to have.

Actually if you stop ratting to loot/salvage, your ISK/hr drops significantly. You earn nothing while in warp, and most of the modules from anomalies wind up getting melted down and turned into PVP ships (and modules) in nullsec.

You're right that a Tengu isn't the be-all-end-all. But it isn't far from it, either.

I like how you presume that the corp tax is because the poster doesn't PVP. Can you explain the causal relationship between corp taxes and a failure of an individual to engage in PVP activity?

I'm literally on the edge of my seat. Maybe I can use corp taxes as a type of index to see if my victims know what they're doing?