Market Discussions

Example with random numbers, don't freak out:

1.) Player buys battleship for 100mil ISK. Insures for full coverage.
2.) Player buys 50mil ISK in modules.
3.) Ship gets
a.) Killed by rats, wreck out in the middle of nowhere
b.) Killed by players, some loot is recovered and maybe salvaging is done, but some stuff is inevitably lost
4.) Player gets ISK back for ship, but loses
a.) 50mil ISK in modules (- whatever was recovered, if anything)
b.) However much the implants in their head was worth
c.) Any ammo, cargo, etc. that was in the ship and not looted

That's where the money goes. Implants, and loot lost in wreckage.

If I remember correctly is station services (repair, broker fees, manufacturing etc) the biggest ISK sink. Then we have NPC corp taxes and everything sold by NPC orders (skill books, BPOs) and I believe a few others. To few and to little.

We need more ISK sinks.

It's isk disappearing from your wallet for sure - but it's isk going into someone elses wallet (eg a miner). Now there's some sales tax applied to that transaction sure (which is an isk sink) but otherwise you're merely shuffling isk from one player to another.

It is a common misconception not only in Eve but in the world in general. Destruction of resources does not fight inflation. It actually increases it if you think about it. A bunch of people buy ships to get their pew-pew on. their isk ends up in different wallets yet remains in the general economy. They destroy some of their own and others resources. The same isk (plus a little extra from insurance) is still on the market. There are just less resources (the ships and modules destroyed) for that isk to be spent on. Linky:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The up side as far as isk sinks go is that the new demand for ships and modules becomes demand for BPOs and LP items which are isk sinks as they are purchased from NPCs. The oldmyth that war is good for the economy (out in the real world where there are not infinite supplies of both labor and goods mines go dry, those killed in battle do not respawn in pods) is just supply and demand. Wars consume both materials and manpower making both scarse so the demand for both rises.

Not so sure sales/broker taxes are as insignificant as you may think.

Typical daily volume of Tritanium in Jita is 30 billion units - multiply by 3.3 and we get an isk volume of 99 billion isk. Finger in the air guess of typical tax revenue being 1% (0.5% sales tax and c. 0.5% brokers fees - this is probably a lowball guess) and we see just under 1 billion isk removed every day just on Trit sales and just in Jita.

Use the same guestimation on PLEX and we see a 2500 daily volume at c.430m apiece for an isk volume of over 1 trillion isk per day - 1% of this being 10 billion isk.

So sales of just Trit and Plex, just in Jita, are potentially removing around 11b of isk from the economy every day.


As already noted above, rats will generally (beyond, eg. LP store bought faction mods) be destroying materials rather than isk but I agree that insurance is going to be a net faucet.

Players quitting with isk in their wallet is, as you say, perhaps the only isk "sink" in that it holds the potential for being realised later on wheras other things we refer to as isk "sinks" are more isk shredders.

That is interesting, I'd forgotten about that (and concur, would be nice to see QEN, but apparently unlikely tor return). Just been re-reading; a lot of the skill book purchases in that quarter were put down to the learning skill removals (and people buying new skills with the released SP) and a lot of the BPO purchases were Noctis - 2 trillion isk spent on Noctis prints in one month!

I would guess that at the very least we can quadruple that figure come the release of the tier 3 BC prints.

Examples of ISK Sinks:
* Office rental fee.
* Corp and alliance creation fee.
* Alliance maintenance fee.
* Sovereignty payments.
* Buying anything from NPC: skill books, BPO, reactions, PI command centers, etc.
* PI import / export taxes.
* Broker fees.
* Transaction taxes.
* Contract fee.
* CSPA fees.
* Customs penalties.
* Clone upgrades.
* Repair costs.
* Insurance fees.
* Wardecs.

Examples of ISK Faucets:
* Mission rewards.
* Insurance payouts.
* Selling anything to NPC: Sleeper tags, faction tags, DNA, etc.
* New characters (5000 ISK?).

Far and away the largest "sink" is people quitting the game with billions of isk in their inactive accounts.

There was a developer post on this.. can't link it right now.

People can use semantics to argue whether or not the isk is really gone because it's still there on innactive accounts...

...they'd be right if you defined sink in one way, wrong if you defined it another way.

Even if you don't want to use the word "sink" people retiring with isk in their wallets certainly is a huge factor in the amount of isk in circulation at any given time and without that large portion of isk being made inactive the amount of bounties being paid out without nearly as many NPC isk sinks would create an inflation like nothing we've seen to date.

That is not an isk sink, That's an item desctruction and you likely gave that isk to another player to purchase said item.
ISK sink's are things like skill books where all the money is given to an npc and destroyed.
Isk sink's are NOT giving it to another player, that is merely a transfer.

Short rule of thumb:

Faucet: ISK flows from an NPC wallet into your wallet
Sink: ISK flows from your wallet into an NPC wallet

(Anything else, such as inter-player trading is neither a sink nor a faucet, other then fees/taxes on the transaction.)