Market Discussions

IMO, the arguments are essentially correct, my disagreement would be with the idea that the economy is not "player-driven". Perhaps the author of the comments can define player-driven. If the players did not exist, the economy would not function at all, of course the same could be said about any economy.

What does player-driven mean? Perhaps the argument would be better framed with regards to how much of the economy is in the hands of the players versus CCP.

Using the author's comments, we could make the same claim that the US, Europe, Japan, Russia, etc are not 'player-driven' economies since government and central banks also make arbitrary decisions with their assumptions about interest rates, reserve ratios and the restrictive influences of over bearing regulations, many of which set arbitrary limits.

If I had to guess, the author comes from a libertarian, perhaps even Rothbardian perspective, which I understand and appreciate, though would suggest to the author to keep in mind, Eve is a game, and as such is forced to exist within the limits of what it is.

"player driven" is a relative term.

CCP has to seed asteroids to mine after all, so barter with ore/minerals would still have a 'source' and be arbitrary (and blueprints are CCP created). So you can think of running missions as mining for isk, and the arbitrary isk sources as no worse than seeding asteroids and sinks as no worse than the arbitrary blueprints.

It is "player driven" enough that I am entertained.

Only a few valid points in this guys argument and his conclusion, and ccp hating is pathetic.

There are npc aspects in game for 2 reasons.

1. To originally stimulate economic development, when players had not yet the numbers or activity to work it all.

This is equivalent to what I usually term "Easy-mode" gamemastering, where you let players create their own story by playing them out "against" eachother, and by creating content according their expectations, and by a well defined lore/cosmology. The more players the more you can lean back, and just let them interact with eachother. With low numbers you have to stir the pot a bit. This is what the npc and gm events are supposed to do, and originally did. This then lead to a few mishaps, like the t20 incident and the poorly thought through lottery of T2 items.

2. The npc aspect is a mechanism to control the flow of isk. The volume of isk in total, and the distribution of resources.

There is a small flaw in the guys argument, and in many peoples understanding of resources. In RL you can say that resources seem limited, but in reality they are only scarce because of the way its accessed. To consider oil, there is plenty of oil available, what makes it scarce is its distribution and the needed technology, and manhours to get it to market. This is the case with most things we know from real economies. In EVE this scarcity is flawed in its mechanic. The scarcity is simulated by npc/server via things like roid respawns etc, and not by the tools, manhours, and logistics. This is the result of catering to easy-mode game aspects like poor time sinks on production, and most important recycle and refine that is instant, and not very capacity and efficiency limited. Hopefully in the coming industry and economy changes these things will be considered.

Also a tl:dr and slightly less ranty version of OPs arguments I wrote up in RP-esque fasion here..

critique-of-the-communistic-reasoning

Upon first reading it seems that the OP is equating a non purely libertarian econcomic model to a pure command economy. it's a kind of black and white thinking that takes two extremes, neither of which exist in the real-world (or in game) in anything close to pure form because their extreme nature, and saying that since it isn't one of those, then it must be the other.

In short. Meh.

I think certain areas of the economy could be floated a lot more based on pure player driven value creation. Office space in stations is one that came up recently and there are muliple good examples where less CCP control would be a good thing. So on that point I'm going to meet the OP part way by agreeing that there is room for improvement.

The second part that the OP quoted just seemed to be a bit of sperging about perceieved injustices and has little to nothing to do with the economy unless I missed something.

You can never have a truly player-drive market in a video game because real markets are driven by real limitations, not artificial ones.

A video game is a wonderland where anything is possible, but the real world has certain limitations that cannot be broken.

It is kind of a pointless argument.

Hate to break it for your overly purist friend, but every economy is driven by big players that act as much if not worse than CCP.

EvE's a good economy because it remains tradable and playable despite CCP and big players taking some dominant positions.

Of course the average Joe will be at disadvantage but wait, in RL economy and markets it's even worse.

This guy must think that there are no player/people-driven economies in the real world either then. Limited natural resources, check. Territorial ownership gives economic advantages, check. More fiat currency constantly entering the economy, check.

Basically, there are boundary conditions in real-life economies too. The main difference is that in real-life these are mostly set by the laws of nature (with the rest set by governments) and CCP sets Eve's (and tweaks them quite drastically sometimes).

I was going to post that his complaints seem to largely stem from the fact that CCP, through the agent of CONCORD is an unelected government... but then I found this post which said it as well as I could.

The side rant about territorial control favoring the defender sounds like someone complaining that Monaco doesn't rule France. Of course an entrenched position is going to favor the defender. It's in the defender's interest to dig in, since they're the ones living there.

No government was required to encourage cave man Grog to trade meat for spears with cave man Gonk

It is well known that Goons are mostly CCP alts. Oh, and so were Bob.