EVE General Discussion

Welcome to a game that actually requires intellingence. :)

As for your question, unlike WoW, where once you have an item, it's yours forever until you throw it away,
in Eve, when your ship goes kaboom, it's gone, you get an insurance payout to lessen the loss, but otherwise, poof. no more ship, and all rigs, and 50% of the mods/cargo are also gone.
Now add to this, that people love to kill eachother in this game, and blow up/take other people's stuff by any means legal to the Eula, and you get a neverendign cycle of creation, marketting and destruction. Thousands of ships are destroyed across new eden in silly, stupid and spectacular fashions of all stripes, so thousands of replacements for those lost ships, rigs, modules etc. are needed.

This is the beauty of Eve... almost everything you see for sale in the game has been made/aquired by a player. Every ship, module, bullet, missile, implant.. all of those on the market originate from other players, who make their living in Eve aquiring/manufacturing these goods.

CCP also has several economists on their staff who monitor the markets of Eve to see if there's imbalances in it, or bottlenecks etc, and when they arise, they alter the game to fix these.

A good example of this: a long time ago, shuttles were not made by players, but were sold by NPCs, these could be purchased and recycled into 2000 trit or somesuch amount, because of this, and the fixed NPC price, the ceiling of the price of trit was dependent on this. More demand for trit, thus higher prices, would be blocked by people buying shuttles and recycling them to obtain trit at a fixed price, so the price of trit would not rise above this. To counter this behaviour, shuttles were no longer available from NPCs but were made by players, removing this problem with trit.
A similar thing was done with 'Pax Amarria' and noxcium a while ago.

Also whenever the price of Plex spikes/rises too much in their opinion compared to other things, they tend to hold plex sales so people buy more and introduce them to the game.

Many, many ships get blown up in PvP.

In the case of rigs, whenever you fit a rig to a ship, those rigs are removed permanently from the market. 50% (on average) of everything else is destroyed as well, with a potential of everything being lost if no one manages to loot the wreck before it dissapears.

There is inflation of EVE.

But if the market is flooded the prices go down.
Until players with lots of ISK buy up the market and raise it back up again.

Some items like Trit have gone up.
2006 Trit = 1.98 isk
2012 Trit = 5.97 isk

Others have gone down.
Items with low demand tend to go down as the market get flooded.
High demand items go up and continue to go up.

There are tons of factors that effect prices and no easy fix.
But perhaps the main reason that EVE economy is a little better then other games is that everything is produced by the players and are needed.

Some other games the items crafted by players are never the best and hence as people don't really need or want them there is low demand and players charge whatever they want.
Also those others games have a vast majority of the items on a drop table that can't be produced by players which also does nasty things to a economy.

On and on it goes to many factors and reasons to put in a reply.

If I had to guess, I"d say that there is a rather large number of people playing EVE that are just like the OP. The fact that players don't just make what you buy, but also destroy it, is the very backbone of the game economy.

Other players blowing you up is the very heart of the game.

Thanks for the replies. Very insightful. Forgot to like your replies so there ya go! :)

People also like to pay for their subscription with ISK (via PLEX), so that takes 500 million ISK / month * thousands of players, out of the economy. Probably trillions of ISK each month.

ya and its 600-650 isk now :)

for a plex :(

The answer is simple. Players have the ability ot make choices on which activity they do, mine or mission.

For years, mass loot drop and drone harvesting was leading to massive mineral injection via means other than mining. The result was depressed mining rate of return. Why mine with 3 accounts for 20 million ISK an hour (2 hulks and an orca) when I can mission with 2 accounts (mach and noctis) for 50 million iSK an hour?

The result of the mineral injection via npc drop was lots of people running missions, and still depressed prices do to too much supply.

With the nerfing of loot and virtual removal of drone drops, the artificial supply was removed from market. Initially, this resulted in inflation. However, as mineral prices reached break even point with missioning, people switched from missioning to mining.

Now that I can make 50 million iSK an hour mining or missioning, we've reached a new level of market stability. If mineral prices (and everything manufactured from them) goes up, I mine. If mineral prices go down, I mission.

Perhaps Merouk mistakenly thinks people are buying the PLEX from CCP.

Merouk, players buy PLEX for real world money, then sell them in game to other players for ISK. Those other players earn ISK, then buy the PLEX from another player. CCP does not directly buy and sell PLEX for ISK.


ISK leaves the game when people buy things from NPCs. Skill books, clone upgrades, implants from LP stores, corp office rental, rent for holding sovereignty in 0.0, insurance that you do not later collect on, market taxes, NPC factory/research slots, ship repairs at NPC stations with repair facility, contract costs, fees to start convo with newbs that haven't set the fee to 0, etc.

ISK enters the game when players receive money from NPCs. Bounties (and the equivalent "overseer's effects" or sleeper drops) , mission rewards, insurance payouts, etc.

ISK does not enter or leave the game, simply changes hands, when players buy from/sell to each other (other than the small market tax or contract fees).

There used to be more sinks, like POS fuel and POS structures, but with PI, those are now manufactured by other players, turnig them from a sink that drains ISK from the game, into just another player/player transaction that moves ISK but does not remove it.

Don't forget all the named meta 2 -4 modules that aren't manufactured by players. I'm not sure if all the ones in the market are sold by players who looted them from missions, or if they are sold by NPCs.