EVE General Discussion

YEAH GUYS THERE'S NO WAY THIS COULD EVER BE EXPLOITED.
LET'S DO IT.


Anyway, the biggest ISK faucets in the games are likely: bounties and insurance.
The biggest ISK sinks are probably BPOs, followed by skillbooks.

Not that I'm pulling this out of my ass or anything.

As of the last QEN (admittedly 2 years ago) skillbooks were by far the biggest sink then blueprints then LP store. I suspect the ratio will have moved in favour of LP store, sov and war bills (an aging server population don't need to keep on buying skills and bpos) but i would be surprised if skillbooks are not still biggest.

Uhmm ...what?

I'm am by no means suggesting the removal of mission reward.
I am suggesting that the isk generated by mission runners (currently isk faucets) come from somewhere else in the eve economy, from other players, instead out of thin air. The isk will come from market taxes.

You can't just go half way and say "REMOVE FAUCETS/SINKS" then turn around and allow "tax credits" and "taxes" to work as a faucet and a sink.

If you wanted to go extreme, remove all faucets and all sinks period. All money would have to be earned through the market and selling "loot" to other players. Eve has enough isk floating around to where this could be sustainable. However like someone else said, you will run into the issue where there will be a few who will hold all the wealth and hoard everything and the system will collapse and/or players will find a alternative currency and add an artificial value.

Okay, since you asked.

First of all, despite being based on essentially the heat generated by peoples' overpriced ATI cards, bitcoin is still a fiat currency emulator. It has NO real monetary value, despite being valued by some people. For all practical purposes, it's not backed purely by trust, but purely by the pact mentality that stems from the fact that people place value on it. Real currencies like the dollar and euro, on the other hand, are promissory notes printed by governments that back their face value. People only accept bitcoin because they believe they can profit from the transactions.

While you're right that bitcoin is decentralized, right now the SEC is slaughtering all the big players (at least American ones) in the bitcoin arena. Seriously, most of those people run Ponzi ops, and a lot of them are conveniently disappearing after closing and embezzling the funds they manage. I should also add that according to at least American law, bitcoin is illegal.

Also, you said that real-life money lost in fires et cetera amounts to a money sink, which couldn't be further from the truth. In any controlled environment, the destruction of physical money is usually insured by the government, as long as it is registered (think physical bank deposits). Now, for each dollar you personally burn, the government is in theory allowed to reprint. Remember, while the physical paper is your property (technically it isn't), it simply represents debt.

Also the whole idea of there being no "faucet" for quantity-limited but infinitely-divisible currency is flawed to begin with. You have to think of it in terms of wealth, not in terms of quantity. As long as the value of one bitcoin isn't pegged to some other currency (it can't be by it's very nature), the concepts of "faucet" and "sink" have no bearing on bitcoin at all.

If EVE ISK were to be like bitcoin, it would have to be infinitely divisible, there would have to be no taxes, and your redistribution idea wouldn't work because people would just hoard it.

That's exactly what Im suggesting!

Players will vote for their own Eve wde Market tax rate ever certain amount of time.
The MARKET tax will be collected by concord and dumped into a pool.
At the end of the day ALL the money collected by concord will be distributed back to the players (tax credits from misnions, ratting, whatever).
No isk has been created no isk has been destroyed.

From Dev post a while ago:

A freebie, last 24hrs transaction stats for a selection of faucets and sinks -
as you can see, Concord is a very generous organization!

Trade Total

* Market Transaction 5,848,221,406,963

Faucets
* Bounty Prizes 876,039,478,466
* Agent Mission Reward 68,923,141,163
* Agent Mission Time Bonus 63,450,447,585
* Insurance Payouts 111,942,877,603

Sinks
* Sales Tax 6,227,911,218
* Brokers fee 6,733,818,276
* PI Construction Costs 7,575,185,000
* PI Import Tax 290,289,843
* PI Export Tax 3,355,153,925
* Insurance Cost 43,021,823,156
* Clone Activation 20,197,210,000
* Sovereignty Bill 59,332,000,000
* LP Store 135,343,150,000

The LP store is the biggest ISK sink . For many items you need to spend both ISK and LP, and thats a sink.

Now for the idea itself: The economy needs some ISK growth to be healthy. As new players join, the ISK supply should grow. As players age, they tend to need and use more ISK, again best handled by an increase in supply. Failure to have this increase in supply results in whats known as an economic depression. If ISK became in short supply, people would stop spending it. They would hold onto whatever they got, both ISK and items. Industry and trade would suffer, and it would become hard to get any item, both because the price would be silly high compared to the ISK supply, and because they would be in short supply, or just not available at all.

Careful growth of the money supply is needed for a healthy economy. Too much you get run-away inflation (and by that I mean EVERYTHING going up 100% a month, something we do not have). To little and you get a depression.

The easiest way for CCP to implement something like the OPs idea is to simply put a multiplier on all bounty payouts and adjust it from time to time as needed to control the money supply.

It's probably more like Skill books > LP store > BPOs > Insurance fees > Broker fees > Sales tax > Clones, with sov fees somewhere in the same region as the market fees.

…and again, the reason this system is not used is that UO quickly and efficiently proved that fixed-supply economies don't work — they hyper-inflate or hyper-deflate and the actual money ceases to be useful as players turn to stuff that are not limited in such was in order to create a working medium of transaction. Under your scheme, people will quickly grow tired of typing fifteen zeros between the decimal point and the price every time they want to put something on the market as the femto-ISK becomes the normal unit of cost.

It's been tried; it's been tested; it's a disastrously bad suggestion.

Eve has so many trillions of isk circulating I doubt needing less than .01 isk in a limited isk economy (least not anytime soon).
But if that happens to be the case would it be to difficult to just.... move the decimal place over a few? ( .01 would now equal 1000 isk but would be worth exactly the same since it was applied to everything).
Also having the market hyper/hypo inflate would not necessarily be a bad thing. More dynamics to trading.

Anyways it's interesting you said that this idea has already been tested and "quickly and efficiently" proven that it wont work (maybe it needed more time to stabilize or more players?).
UO is Ultima Online?

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