Market Discussions

Not true.
A rumor started by Goons to make people dump all their isk...

Woah...I actually made a serious MD post O_O

and in my excitement I double posted -.-

As mech said, CCP lately has been increasing the build cost of ships to act as a sort of ISK sink to counteract the faucets created by more efficient means of isk generation such as incursions and LVL 4 Farming that devalue what ISk is worth.

CCP intervenes with changes such as Build costs, mining barge changes, ore changes, and PLEX manipulation. This is not a bad thing as our governments do the same...Like Mech said, this is devaluation of ISK and not inflation.

Isk in eve are actually generated by only a few things.

- Mission rewards (small in comparison)
- bounty rewards (the big one imho)
- NPC buy orders (idk)

Most of other actvities which are considered by players as isk making dont actually make isk but just transfers them from other person to you.

There are also so called isk sinks which try to keep inflation in check

- Interbus poco taxes
- various NPC sell orders
- LP store (yes it actually destroys isk you pay even thou you have more walue in your hangar at the end)
- sov bills
- some other....

PLEX prices are by CCP (plex sales etc) imho kept between 500M and 600M. Prices of other goods imho stagnate because as increases amount of isk thus increases supply of goods.

Real inflation is felt by the actual value of items. If you had titan some years ago you have been considered super ultra rich. Now everyone and his momma have titan and super on side account.

Isk inflation - the amount of isk in the game increasing - is a thing. So long as it's not too high a rate, that's fine and normal and acceptable.

Price inflation as a result of isk inflation is not really a thing, or if it is the effect is drowned out by price inflation (or in fact deflation) as a result of mechanics changes.

what he said. also, to elaborate: you may think that with the total amount of ISK in the game increasing, prices would increase accordingly. this is not necessarily so, as at any given time, a lot of ISK is sitting unused in the wallets of rich players and is thus irrelevant for the economy.
the amount of ISK that is actually moving through the economy is more or less arbitrary, as it depends not only on faucets and sinks but also on if and how the big players decide to invest.

Plex don't generate isk flow to the system.
Simply the isk that gets in to the game cannot be sinked so fast.
For example.
You kill rats, and for this buy yourself new shiny BS ( 200mil). Next day you loose it.
This 200mil is still in the system - it is just passed to the person that mined and constructed this ship.

Worst situation.
You buy yourself a BS , and insure it.
This cost you 200 for ship and 80mil for insurance . Again you loose this ship next day and this generate more isk in the system.
How?
200 - 80 + 200mil insurance payout = 320mil flowed into the system.

Isk actually is removed from system by :
- lp stores - usually you have to pay also some isk to buy something there
- all sort of taxes ( trade, build, highsec poco etc)
- Sov bills
- Sov upgrades ( i think you don't construct all)
- ship insurances that went over due.
- buying BPO
- etc.

The problem is that more isk from ratting and other pve activites flow in the system than all current isk sinks can pull out of it.

All those big battles actually generate inflation, as most of those ships are insured.
So most of T1 ship battles are only sinks for minerals and salvage - and at the same time generate large amount of isk flowing to the system.

?
The first 200 merely circulates from one player to another with a bit sliced off for taxes. It is neither created nor destroyed.
The 80 is destroyed.
The 200 payout is created IF the payout is made.
Ignoring the taxes from the player to player transaction to start. This would result in creation of insurance payout - insurance premium in ISK not the 320 originally stated.

As to bounties being an ISK faucet from an earlier post. I guess this must mean the bounty paid on rats.

Citing the good doctor in support of your argument is a sign that you may be doing something wrong.

Let's take a step back. There are three asset classes in Eve: 1) PLEX, 2) isk, and 3) everything else (i.e. stuff, all the other in-game items including raw materials, things made with raw materials, dropped by rats, or sold by NPC or through the LP store.)

PLEX is actually an out of game item that is created when a player (the real-life person) buys them with RL cash and they are destroyed when another player turns them in for game time.

Isk and in-game stuff are actually similar in that they are both entries in a database that are created and destroyed through in-game processes.

When you talk about inflation and deflation in Eve there are two different types that you could be referring to.

The first is called "mudflation"and is a common problem in multiplayer games. It is the phenomena when in game items are continually created faster than they are consumed and the perceived value of those items declines over time. Rising PLEX prices give us a handy way to measure this in Eve although a more accurate measure might be the purchasing power of PLEX, for example how many ships of a certain class a single PLEX could buy over time. Of course this is not a steady trend because at certain times you have more money coming into the game than at other times while the redemption of PLEX for game time is probably more consistent over time.

The other type of inflation/deflation is isk vs. stuff. Without listing all the ways that isk and "stuff"gets created and destroyed within the game, we all know that the amount of isk in the game and the amount of "stuff" in the game varies relative to each other even though they both tend to increase over time. Large battles obviously destroy lots of stuff and it is "good for the game" that these battles continue to occur with high frequency. The question is do these relative changes in quantity of isk and "stuff" constitute
inflation or deflation?

When Spain started moving vast amounts of silver beck from the Americas the value of silver coin in Europe dropped significantly. This is a kind of inflation, too much money chasing too few goods. But this is a somewhat different from modern inflation which is caused by money being forced into the market by investors and lenders (which is the velocity theory.) Without a practical financial market in Eve many of us choose to keep our isk in our wallets where it doesn't drive up the price of anything.

I feel the general level of prices in Eve (excluding PLEX) is probably moderated by things like the relative profitability of mining vs. ratting. If prices ever became out of sync too far one way or the other players would flock to the more profitable activity and a new equilibrium would be established. Obviously changes made by CCP can throw the system out of whack but a new equilibrium will be established and a single patch will not cause never-ending inflation or deflation.