Out of Pod Experience

I don't think this is an important concept for EVE. It would be different if we were spending ISK on fixed cost items from NPCs. Look, if a piece of ore cost 3 ISK a few years ago, but now ISK is twice as accesible and a piece of ore costs 6 ISK to acquire, your purchasing power remains the same.

The only thing that inflation does is to encourage players to not sit on fat wallets and instead invest in other items that are more inflation-proof and easy to liquidate.

No

How do you know there's inflation? You have an economy! Inflation is a tendency, not a condition. You can manage it. You can't stop it. It's like saying how do you know it's rain? It's wet outside. It tends to rain. Get rid of rain, you get rid of a lot of other stuff TOO, including YOU. So, the next time you see rainclouds...don't complain...

What's bad about runaway inflation? That's the question. It drives down the value of your currency. That's the answer. Why don't we use leaves for money? With all these trees, everyone would be rich! (Thanks Douglas Adams, and 42 right back atcha.) The profusity of leaves, the sheer abundance would make the concept of currency as a means of exchange absurd. Of course.

MMOs, as experience has shown everyone, tend to generate currency, or money. The first, and most time-honored way games do this is as a reward for effort. REMEMBER? You get XP, you get some item or other that's "dropped" and you get MUNNY. Kill the mob. Get paid. Kill the mob. Get paid. Well, of course, each time you do this, "money" enters the digital reality. It wasn't there. Now, it is there. Unlike real life, you don't need a commodity - or an investment banker with a phd in math, to gin-up money out of thin air. A computer will do that just fine by entering a figure in the right spot on the screen. Here we call that the "wallet." Hoo haw.

When people list how ISK is made, I noticed not many people mentioned mission payouts. Mission payouts are probably the most significant "printer of cash" in any game. Gamers won't game without some sort of pay off. The rise in gear quality alone demands more munny more munny more munny. It is how we gauge our progress. (Say it ain't so.)

The problem arises when there is more money being invented by the game than is being removed by actions in the game. To tell you the truth, it's a mathematical impossibility for a corporation the size of CCP to generate content on the scale that would match the money creation being done by its player base using mission payouts for rewards. It is inevitable the currency will amass faster than it's removed. Therefore, inflation is like the rain. It's here.

How does this become a real problem for a game like EVE? One thing devs can do is recalibrate the prices and payouts. More more more until we're dealing with figures like 1,000,000,000,000,000.00 ISK for a single level IV mission. Why this? Think about it. How long does it take you to go from first-day n00b to owning your first battle cruiser? Isn't that BC the mark of just being able to get off the porch and run with the big dogs?

What if it took a n00b a year to amass enough ISK to buy the first BC? Do you think that player would be around for that long? How long did it take YOU to make that first purchase - unaided, just on your own effort and enterprise? How long is long enough? How long is TOO long? Like it or not, advancing in a game is tied to this equation effort=payout.
It's interesting. Is it solvable? I really don't think so. Is it manageable? Looks like we're finding out, don't it?

"Place all the economists end to end and they point in every direction." -Harry S Truman-

Thread has been moved to Out of Pod Experience.