Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Unless I'm mistaken, mission rewards and NPC pirate bounties are currently fixed amounts (the base amount that is) and have been for quite some time. However, the economy in EVE and the cost of living (tied to the inflation rate and the offer and demand of the market) has increased drastically since those amounts were set many years ago.

This has for effect to render missioning insignificant as a direct source income, at least at lower levels wher ethe loot is not worth much. You'll say the loot is what is worth something, but that's not always true. Point is, missions rewards used to be much more profitable (ISK reward and bonus reward alone) before, and is becoming more and more insignificant.

For example... I can make 5,000,000 ISK or more selling the loot I salvage form a Level III mission, but the reward will be less than 500,000 ISK if I'm lucky, and that's if I solo the mission.

I think instead of being of a fixed amount, mission rewards and NPC bounties should follow the cost of living and the inflation rate of the EVE economy so they are always worth the same thing in proportion.

To be more precise, "inflation adjusting" isk sources would accelerate any inflationary or deflationary effects rather than mitigating them.

The best way to reduce inflation is to increase isk sinks, and if the sinking can be made voluntary, so much the better.

Increasing the base LP rewards of missions would be deflationary, for instance, and few people would complain (some would, I could probably name a few already). Increasing the base NPC station trading tax would also be deflationary.


If mission and incursion isk are free, I suppose you have a preferred source that isn't?

nope :) nerf it all into the ground.

im assuming u want bounties to go up with inflation

trouble is, bounties are allegedly the main reason for the ridiculous inflation we have. if bounty rewards went up then everyone would have even more cash and inflation would happen at an even faster rate.

u could try doing indy. inflation is ur friend.

What you're all saying is just like saying that we should never get a raise in real life to compensate for inflation despite our buying power getting lower and lower with years? You know salary increases is only ONE of the many potential factors that contribute (indirectly I might add) to inflation?

I suggest you guys read on inflation a bit more... The value of 1 ISK has changed greatly in EVE online since 2003, but the amount of ISK given as mission ISK reward has not increased at the same time, so basically... Missions used to be worth something, and now they are worth nothing in comparison.

My point is to bring that back to where CCP originally intended it to be, all that inconsideration to other changes that have occurred in the economy since. And if this means adjusting the level 1,2,3 mission difficulty a bit more, I'm also fine with that. They are boring enough as it is (yet required to grind standing).

I see agent missions as a "job" in the world of EVE Online. Agents pay me for doing what they ask me for, whether it's killing enemies, manufacturing something or hauling items. I don't see why some of you say it's "free ISK", as if I didn't have to work for it. I don't call spending hours doing mission doing nothing... Just because it can be easier than hard labor in nullsec

Inflation in EvE is different to the real world. When your boss pays you, the money comes from somewhere, he doesn't just wave his hands and a pile of money turns up out of thin air. (If he can then please let me know, I want in on that.) In EvE, when you get an NPC bounty payout, that isk comes from nowhere. It is generated by the game from nothing. This is called an ISK FAUCET. This is what some refer to as 'free isk', because it comes from nowhere.

When you buy from an NPC sell order, (skill books and BPO's for instance,) that isk is destroyed, it ceases to exist. This is called an ISK SINK.

When you buy something from someone else, your isk in moved from your account to theirs, this is called an ISK TRANSEFR. (That said, a small percentage is taken as a tax, making a small potion an isk sink.)

We have inflation because the amount of isk being generated by the faucets out weighs the amount being destroyed by the sinks. So if we increase rat bounties, we will end up with worse inflation, which will mean higher bounties, higher inflation, higher bounties, higher inflation... You see where this is going.

The way to reduce inflation is to reduce the faucet effect and increase the sink effect.


Oh, and a couple of problems with an ISK cap would be hording and player number fluctuations. There is no sensible way you can cap the quantity of isk.

Printing isk and adding it to the economy is no different to what our governments are doing today with quantitative easing. It's all virtual money and as such valueless. When miners mine, they too are getting free money, the process may be different but the result is the same.

More sinks are needed though such as higher taxes in npc corps.

Eh, this has pretty much been covered already, but here goes in one shot.

In the Eve economy, the total amount of money is dictated by how much ISK is created (ISK faucets) and how much ISK is removed (ISK sinks). This has absolutely no real life parallel and trying to make one isn't going to do anyone any favors.

Now, making money in Eve comes in many different forms and shapes. Some of them add to the total amount of money in the economy and some of them don't. For instance, rat bounties create money out of nowhere and deposit it in a player's account, whereas selling off exploration loot transfers money from one player to another, enriching the player who found the loot.

In the case of missions, bounties and mission reward payouts (except for the occasional item reward) are inflationary because they fall into the first category: things that create money out of nowhere. On the other hand, LP rewards are actually deflationary because they require a payment to an NPC entity in order to cash out that LP, which removes money from the economy.

So in this case, asking for higher ISK rewards from missions does indeed run entirely counter to the idea of keeping inflation in check. It's not a wage, because there's no real entity paying it; the money literally gets created out of nowhere. However, an increase to LP rewards... would have an entirely different effect on the economy that wouldn't strictly be deflationary because it would dramatically change the relative value of LP and probably wouldn't be desirable either.

Increasing mission rewards and bounties will only increase the problem, just like bad governments increase the problems in their countries economies by printing more money.

I tell you this from the experiences of my own country and the bad governments we have almost always had.

They love to print money to cover their mistakes and make everything worst.

Personally, I think replacing the insurance isk payout with a voucher system, (npc 'swap' order for minerals,) would help better. It would help lower the value of minerals as well as reduce the influx of isk into the EvE economy. It would actually become an isk sink, due to isk being required to take out the insurance.