EVE General Discussion

3

FW is an ISK faucet (or any LP store)

4.

Carebears are necessary / beneficial for the ecosystem of the game (People who create content are the limiting factor, not the people who build the stuff)

An ISK sink can be many things, it depends on your point of view.

If you only look at the entire economy as a whole and the underlying game mechanics then taxes and fees are ISK sinks.

If you are a corporation and have your own little economy going then your ship replacement program can be an ISK sink.

It is a matter of what you define as an ISK sink for yourself and what it means to you.

Personally, anyone who only ever bases their arguments on the entirety of the economy cannot be taken serious. It is like talking to a dev's parrot.

Choice of perspective doesn't really come into it. When you use words like sinks and faucets in an MMO it's commonly understood, that you're talking about the entire economy. They aren't EVE specific terms, but common words understood by everyone discussing MMO economies. On any other level within the game words like income and expenses are common to describe loss and gain of currency.

For most, practical, purposes the nomenclature is incorrect.

Of all of the capsuleer professions only mission running/ratting actually generate real ISK for the one putting in the effort - however almost everything we do can generate value (on the primary level for mining, salvaging, certain types of exploration...etc; the secondary or even tertiary level for such things as trading).

In most cases this value can be translated directly into ISK, which leads to the confusion.

If, instead of ISK Sinks/Faucets, we were to discuss things in terms of Value Sinks/Faucets and abandon the idea that ISK is the only thing we needed to think about then things would become a lot more instinctive, much easier for people to understand.

Take, for example, the (currently) problem of ship destruction:
In a purely ISK generation sense it is indeed a faucet (though the insurance itself should be considered an inefficient sink) but the player experiences it in terms that they had a ship worth thirty million ISK and now they have a fraction of that in liquid ISK, a net loss.
Considered in value instead the ship loss is indeed a net sink (excepting cases like the old insurance fraud, where the value is defined purely by the insurance value and therefore the destruction is precisely equal to the insurance payout).
Considered in value mining is, indeed a faucet. Things enter the economy from nowhere (and if we were to delete all ISK and move to a barter economy, mining (including moon mining) would almost certainly be the largest faucets we'd have to consider).

Talking in terms of value rather than ISK means that any time any item (including ISK) enters the game from nowhere, we have a faucet. Dupe exploits like the POS one and so forth are also a faucet and thinking in those terms can be helpful.
Meanwhile, at any time an item is deleted from the game, disappearing into nowhere, we have a sink. If i park a Hurricane near an asteroid and shoot it then each round of ammunition (representing small units of value) is sunk out of the game (while in terms of ISK there is absolutely no effect - the only ISK sunk or generated in the entire lifetime of the ammunition is lost to the original blueprint purchase, the research (if any) and the sales taxes (again, if any)).

But PLEX IS an isk sink. You buy it, then when it's converted to game time, the value is taken out of the market.

The value isn't removed from the market, its just moved to someone else. That's why it's not a sink.

PLEX is a Stirling, or a Dollar, or a Euro, Yen, Yuan, Dong or Icelandic Krona sink - and only in that last example is it an ISK sink. (though, of course, not in the conventional sense).

Real world money funds PLEX, real world money which we give to CCP or real world money which they give "us" in the case of tournament prizes...etc.
The PLEX, once created, simply moves ISK around the game economy and when it is destroyed or used to fund someone's game time or monocle habit, CCP provide the service which was originally paid for.