EVE General Discussion

Watch the most recent econ presentation from fanfest, pay attention to the graphs. Previous fanfest econ presentations also provide some net flow numbers.

Sinks and faucets have been adjusted over the years, you just have to dig a bit in dev blogs to find the information, you'll excuse me if I do not do the work for you.

Define pirate. A pirate is someone who ransoms people for ISK, such as myself.

Fining us in highsec, as well as making us kill-on-sight (which we already are), for playing the game in lowsec? There is one fatal flaw in your plan. Alts. I already use an alt to buy ships for me. If I need to move a ship through highsec to another lowsec pocket, but I would be fined if I tried to, I would just put it in my carrier and suitcase it over.

If you're talking about gankers, which are not pirates, then your plan is still flawed. True gankers are already alts and -10. Fining them until their wallet goes negative would serve no purpose, as their other hauler alt would buy the ships for them and trade them over. If you disable ship trading to "pirates", the hauler alt would just park an Orca in a safespot and launch destroyers for the ganking alt to board.

In short, that was the stupidest idea I have ever heard. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read it. May Bob the wormhole god have mercy on your soul.

Except that has nothing to do with inflation or deflation.
Refer to my earlier post about misunderstanding inflation as opposed to supply & demand.

TLDR Version, No, you are wrong.

Not going to read the entire thread, so someone most likely already said this:
When you buy a PLEX for ISK, you buy it from another player, so the ISK stays in the game. The only ISK that leaves is the sales tax and the broker's fee. CCP does not sell PLEX for ISK, they only sell them for real money.

As for controlling inflation: Bounty and mission payouts are fixed. If manufactured goods inflate in price, then players will migrate from missions to mining and manufacturing for their ISK making activities. The result: less ISK enters the game and inflation is controlled. If the price of manufactured goods drops, fewer people will make stuff and instead run missions. This controls de-flation.

Thus, the game is self-regulating. CCP has done a few things to reduce ISK growth: They once increased sales tax. And at one point they reduced the number and quality of anomalies that appear in null sec.

Basically.

Also removing faction standings losses from missions would help protect mission runners from inflation issues, which I expect to happen probably soon.

A few changes that I can think of that CCP has done:
* Increased base transaction tax from 1% to 1.5% (Inferno 1.0)
* Reduced NPC bounties [ESS] (Rubicon 1.1)
* Reduced clone costs by 30% (Odyssey 1.0).
* Reduced insurance payouts (Tyrannis 1.0).
* Increased prices of NPC goods (BPO, etc.)
* Added drone bounties.
* Overhauled the bounty system (Retribution 1.0)

I'm sure there are others I've missed.

Except CCP has said that plex is all funded off banned accounts. They have never GENERATED plex to sell you. Only put existing locked plex onto the market.

On top of that, my guess is any ISK generated from sale of PLEX confiscated from a banned account goes right back into that same account. That way if the account somehow gets un-banned, the player still has value for their assets.

This also brings up the question if ISK in inactive accounts should be considered a sink. At present, CCP does not, as an inactive account could become re-activated, allowing that ISK to be circulated. But from a practical standpoint, any ISK sitting in an inactive account cannot be used to buy anything, and hence is not affecting the economy. For all practical purposes, it's been removed from the game. If ISK in accounts that become inactive was counted as a sink, and ISK in re-activatred accounts was counted as a source, we may see something interesting.

CCP does remove ISK derived from RMT and botting. That surely should be considered a sink. As I recall, it's a big number.

Edit: CCP had also said they have no idea what the "right" price for a PLEX is. on Serenity (the Chinese server) it's presently around 3 billion ISK. CCP seems willing to let the players and the free market determine the PLEX price, so long as the changes are slow.

It's not that I can't it's I choose not to. I could earn a plex in a few hours, do not be upset that you are unable to do that same and make stupid statements like
People who are playing via plex are doing so because EVE is not worth the real world money to play. SO when these people are unable to play the game via plex and they choose not to continue to buy plex and cancel accounts, that leads to less money for CCP and that leads to CCP dev lay offs.

EVE is a good game for what it is but the reason CCP offers PLEX is to subsidize their business because without people using plex to pay for accounts you would have a lot less players and less money coming in.
If anything us players who play the game by using plex are doing more good for the game than the ones who are paying a monthly fee.

Every Month I plex an account that is $20 to your $15 or less depending on how you pay 1mo , 3 mo ect.
So it would be a very bad idea to lose out on the accounts supported by plex. But like always most EVE players are to consumed with "their game" to even listen to facts about what is going wrong in the game.
Players like you can not stand when anyone says something negative about their game so they come and make stupid remarks.

Bottom line is when plex prices become to high to be a feasible means to pay for accounts CCP will lose money.
There are guys with 50-100 accounts you can bet your ass they are plexing those accounts.
And say I do choose to play the game paying RL money I would do so paying on a yearly plan.

So let's reflect just on me alone I went from 4 accounts plexing down to 2 that used to make CCP $ 960 yearly just from me.
Now I am down to 2 accounts and I start paying $131.40 so a yearly plan for two account that is a yearly loss of $697.20 USD.

Now lets just take a hypothetical situation let's say the entire eve player base is online at this moment that is 32,227 pilots online right now and let's call that every active account in EVE and let's say 5% of those people go the route I am going they drop down to two accounts they used to plex 4 and now they are just paying a yearly $131.40 for two accounts. CCP will then lose $112,493.00 yearly . Now we all know EVE has more then 32k accounts and it is pretty safe to assume more than 5% of those people plex.

Let's take an other hypothetical situation using some real numbers for a moment.
EVE had 500,000 active subs at it's peak. no w for the hypothetical part as I could find no hard numbers on this but let's say 15% of those accounts are plexed. We come up with 75,000 accounts now let's say half of them stopped plexing and went for the $15 monthly option and we will give the benefit of the doubt that not a single person quit EVE over this CCP will still lose $187,500 a year.

Now let's not be hypothetical at all and look at http://nerdsoliloquy.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/eve-online-may-have-experienced-its.html we can also look at CCP lay offs and see a downward trend. Companies who are making profits do not lay off 20% of it's work force. Also all of the people who left CCP to go to other companies.

CCP needs plex and they need to make sure it remains a viable way for people like me to continue to make them money.