Science & Industry

I initially jumped for joy when CCP announced a few years ago that they were hiring a real life economist for EVE online. I thought it would keep the economy balanced, which it hasn't. He should be fired. Seriously.

The problem with economists is two-fold:

1) Economists are journalists. They look back in time and carefully document the failures of the past without developing the management skills necessary to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Alan Greenspan from the US-FED once said, "spending money to shorten a recession is like firing a cannon... it can be an effective weapon but you can't forget to reload between shots". A brilliant analysis of what has been happening... but completely devoid of any way to escape from this pattern.

The problem with the eve-online economy right now is that too much money is being created. Null-sec alliances are running high-sec incursions because it pays better than anything you can do in 0.0. That is... utterly UTTERLY rediculous.

This enconomy works on the basis of faucet and sink..... but if the faucet is wide-open and the sink doesn't keep up then inflation will result and make the money in everyone's wallet worth less!!! .... I'm glad CCP hired an enconomist but instead of just carefully documenting the failure .... he should be saying this: .... This is ********.

We need a controller... not an economist!!!!!!

2) Economists are not fire fighters. They don't care how big the flames are as long as they can describe them. Personally, I want inflation to be minimal because the money I have in my wallet means something to me. To the CCP econonomist, inflation is 'good" because it's a defacto isk sink. That's not the way I see it. I want to see is that if I save my isk for a shiny ship that I'll be able to afford it faster than someone who started saving after I did.....!!!!

3) This economy is in serious trouble. If everyone can speculate on everything then there is only one possible outcome....hyperinflation.... people will be buying titans like rifters and there will be no 'invested emotion" in a loss anymore.

In other words... EVE online will become like WOW... grinding profit with no risk. ... in fact. It think because of incursions, that EVE is already like this... grinding MASSIVE ISK with no risk.... to an economist this should be a disaster scenario.... but evidently to the CCP economist... only one more thing to "document".

CCP ... you need to wake up..... if the economy doesn't work then EVE doesn't work..... seriously!!!

T-

How could this happen? No matter how much isk is floating around, a ttitan will still require X amount of miner hours. Inflation doesn't change that. Also, inlfation is not necessarily a bad thing, like you seem to think.

I see that prices for some expensive ships went down a lot.

I also see that i have to pay MUCH more now for a plex and prices are going higher and higher.
So i better buy a plex then grind isk for playing eve. And thats what ccp wants from us. They for sure like how its going.
So i buy an other plex to buy cheap ships to have fun and forget mining or missioning because its not fun.

And i dont care much about terms, either inflation or deflation. Its all working as intended.

Oh, that's the difference! And here I thought the difference had to do with one game being about space ships and the other about casting spells.

FYI, Wow and Eve have a lot more similarities than people here like to admit, especially in terms of crafting items. In Wow, you can craft many, many items. Those raids that you mentioned require fancy potions and such, just as our wh anomalies require ammo. If you're just starting out, many people will go to the player market and buy a set of player crafted gear as a starting point to start doing raids.

For that matter, Eve has quite a few non-crafted items. Look at what the most expensive items are on the market. Caldari Navy Invulnerability Field? Did you craft that? I sure didn't.

If you ask me, the main gameplay difference between Eve and Wow is the fact that you can get blown up in Eve.

I'll ask you again: when was the last time you built a Caldari Navy Invulnerability Field?

Not everything in Eve is made by players. The only difference in that regard is that you can sell the CN Invuln, whereas you can't sell all your raid loot in Wow.

Plex prices are going way up, and I have a feeling the OP's thinking is this is due to more isk in the game from incursions. He might be correct, but you would need an economist studying that market...oh

I would tend to disagree and let me explain why.

The way I see it, the basis of everything in EVE are the mineral and moon-goo markets. No minerals, no modules. Right?

Let's take a look at the prices of minerals today as compared to 12 months ago

Tritanium : 3.34 up from 2.16 a year ago (50% increase)
Isogen: stable at about 61
Megacyte: stable at about 2774
Mexallon: 34.5 up from 29.5 a year ago (let's call that 15%)
Morphite: 3200 down from 4300 (25% drop)
Nocxium 480 up from 330 (45% increase)
Pyerite 4.25 up from 3.80 (10% up)
Zydrine 770 down from 1170 (35% drop)

At first sight you might think, "some things up, some down, but it will cancel out".

But that's wrong. If you look at WHICH minerals are inflating, then you'll see that these are the most common/neccessary ones. The ones mined in high-sec. They are also the ones that control to a large extent, the price of an item.

Take one example, building a Drake: approximately 25 million isk of the 32 or so it takes to build a Drake consists of minerals that are up significantly in price as compared to a year ago. If you look at the price of a Drake, it's also up from about 25 to about 30mil as compared to a year ago.... That's a 20% increase. In a real-world economy people start to have spasms if inflation is more than 2% or so year-on-year. Moreover, if it weren't for noobs building Drakes and selling them for less than they cost to make, the price would (should) be about 32 mil, which means that the reality is even worse than the 20%

You will see the same pattern across the board for the T1 market. The T2 market is also controlled somewhat by this because you need T1 items as input to make T2 items.

Ergo... Even without analyzing the moon-goo market we can already see inflation.

The question is, what's causing it?

To my way of thinking, it's incusions... Why? Put simply, the make or break activity in the EVE economy is mining and specifically, high-sec mining, where most of it is done. Inflation will happen as soon as there is less mining and you can see by looking at the minerals above thta the minerals subject to inflation are the ones normally mined in high-sec.

A clear example of this effect can be seen by looking at the Oxygen Isotopes market. Goons' suicide ganking of high-sec ice miners has resulted in less mining and therefore a doubling of the price of oxygen isotopes in a short time. Simple case of supply and demand. Also, one could assume that CCP has gotten better in weeding out macro-miners in high-sec, which despite people appreciating the banning of cheaters, has a negative effect on the economy in terms of inflation.

Same thing holds true across the board. The simple conclusion is that as soon as there is a high-sec activity that pays better than mining on an hourly basis, that there will be less mining and therefore inflation will occur. ...

Enter incursions. The money that can be made by incursions is INSANE. No risk, all reward and people are mining less as a result. This needs to be balanced, to my way of thinking, so that people will go back to mining (especially in high-sec) and inflation can be controlled. Ways to do this would be to lower rewards on incursions, or make them more dangerous by, for example, allowing compeating incusions fleets to attack each other in high-sec (increase risk) or to implement some form of "legal" macro mining (increase reward).

T-

While I don't do CN Inv fields, I do make FN Mag Field Stabs. Using CN, FN, or any other LP gear is a poor example, since there is an unlimited faucet of those items. As their value increases, any number of players may choose to run missions (or incursions) for LPs to buy those items, driving down their price. To a lesser extent, the same can be said for deadspace modules.

A better class of module to illustrate the point I think you're trying to make would be officer mods. More players can choose to hunt officers, but doubling hours spent hunting them won't double the number of modules found. Since their supply is limited by officer spawns, and they are best in class, their price is only limited by the ammount of isk a player is willing to pay to get their share of a limited resource.

Wow revolves around the raiding gear, gear never dissappears unless vendored or destroyed of course, which means the only market demand there is, is from the new characters. Sure, you can craft potions in Wow aswell, and say it's similar to building ammo in Eve, ignoring many of the mechanics eve has that Wow doesn't. Then what would Eve be if there was only market demand for ammo?

Manufacturing in Wow is only about getting your professions leveled up so you can get stat bonuses. Manufacturing in Eve is a way of making ISK, if there was no ISK to gain you wouldn't do it. You want to get ISK because it can actually be spent on something usable. Gold in Wow is simply worthless (not far from Diablo 2, if you're familiar with that), there's nothing to spend it on, after you've spent it on the few gold sinks there are, which is a matter of days if you trade for a bit.

The items that would be worth something in Wow, can't be sold, in Eve they can. I don't think the economy and manufacturing sides of the two games are comparable at all. Oh and in my opinion Wow lacks Buy orders, Material efficiency, production efficiency, production time, invention, reverse engineering, BPCs - those are also just some of the things that makes Eves manufacturing system so much deeper than the professions in Wow. Not that it was ever the intention of Blizzard to match eve, I'm just saying I think it's wrong to say they're similar.

Agreed. I'm sure CCP has a good idea of how much isk is getting destroyed, how much is locked up in wallets and how much is being generated.

An interesting idea for CCP to play with going forward would be to link the rewards for ratting and incursions to the isk sink. In other words, in periods of intense war where many ships are being destroyed the tap could open more and in periods where people are turtled up and hiding from fights the tap would close a bit.

But the main problem still remains that they have created risk-free high-sec activities that pay better than mining.... and however you look at it, that has to be fixed.

T-