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So in short, you replaced a mineral faucet with an ISK faucet just before a major player event which suppressed the remaining source of minerals, which quite obviously led to both price inflation and monetary devaluation. Individual player real income went down just as real prices were going through the roof.

But good to know that you're keeping an eye on the overall EVE economy. Just hope we're not going to run into full-on stagflation.

I'd definitely be interested in a breakdown of ISK inflows/outflows, especially broken down by activity and region. I'd be very surprised if the nerf to incursions wasn't more than offset by the addition of rogue drone bounties.

So that's how my mineral investment dropped lol

Why would that be a bad thing for Eve? Please answer taking into account that this is a pretend spaceship game, and unlike in the real world, nobody goes hungry or loses their job when it occurs.

Is that because subscriptions are either stagnant or decrease? I am not following your line of thinking, tbh.

If the in-game economy suffers severe stagflation and RL subscription rates start to suffer, then are there not tools or design tweaks that CCP could use to massage the in-game economy into better health?

Why does stagflation in a virtual spaceship economy cause CCP employees to lose their jobs in real life? Does CCP pay its developers in asteroid minerals now?

You mean the indifferent attitude towards Unified Inventory that has released how many quick patches in the two weeks since release?

Please refer to Wikipedia or any basic Economics text if you do not understand what stagflation is, or if you don't understand basic economic concepts. It is not my job to correct that sort of ignorance.

Stagflation occurs where there is high inflation, low or even negative economic growth, and high unemployment.

As the dev blog quite clearly shows, we've been experiencinng a period of high inflation, driven primarily by the removal of drone alloys, a major source of minerals.

Economic growth, at its most basic and meaningful, is an increase in real individual income. Nominal individual income in EVE has remained static or been reduced for most players. Nominal income from bounties and missions has not changed in years; incursion nominal income has been nerfed; trader and manufacturer margins have gone down slightly due to an increase in the transaction tax. Only the income of miners and Technetium moon holders has increased, and mining has its own problems, which I will not discuss here.

So nominal prices have increased across the board while nominal individual income has remained static or has gone down. Real player income has gone down, aside from a few special cases. In more simple terms, if it took an hour of anomaly running to buy a Drake this time last year, it now might take two hours, so it takes more grinding to get the reward (whether it is PvP or a new shiny module or what have you).

The danger is that we may hit a point where the tedium of the grind exceeds the rewards. And ISK-making in EVE is actrociously boring; EVE is perhaps the only game where players regularly watch movies or do other things during PvE. At that point player activity may decline. For a game like EVE, where players generate most of the game content, a decline in player activity is very dangerous, for obviious reasons. That would be analogous to the "high unemployment" part of stagflation, if we really want to be particular about fulfilling all the elements of that definition.

I am not saying that we are at that point. CCP is watching the game economy, and they should have all the tools necessary to nudge the EVE economy if necessary. We know that the game needs more ISK sinks, but it also probably needs more sources of moon goo and of basic minerals.

Bring back the QEN! What ya scared of?
Also shouldn' graph #3 included the amount of ore processed from alloyes so we get a better picture of the amount of ore in the system?

On the other hand, the easier it is to make money the less rewarding it becomes to do so. If everyone is stupendously rich and has a deadspace tengu and a supercap alt, where's the excitement and sense of achievement in joining that not-so-exclusive club yourself? Decreasing the rewards may actually result in players setting more modest goals for themselves, or making their goals to be something other than grinding isk for months to spend on Flashy Hull X, perhaps they'll make their goal 'learn how to probe' or 'get good at PvP'. The ship balancing efforts that have begun will go a long way to fixing this issue if they succeed in making viable roles for less expensive T1 ships and we don't have to spend 6 months of boredom on getting into T2 fitted battleships or whatever the next flavour of the month is.


Everybody knows that PvE in Eve is a terrible boring grind and has been saying it for years. Even CCP are now looking into ways to make mining and industrial activities both more rewarding and more interesting (and the drone alloy removal was an important first step on this path). The fact that grinding is boring and you have to grind to get into a lot of the viable hulls isn't directly relevant to any sense of impending economic crisis since it was just as true 6 months and 2 years and 5 years ago as now.

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