Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Since I started EVE I often wondered why there isn't much fluctuation in the prices of of the more "expensive" stuff - this should be a player driven economy. Well, after turning on my pocket calculator, err, calculator app (I don't remember when the last time was that I saw a real pocket calculator). Anyways, I was shocked when I realized that this is not really a player driven economy:

Example:
Astero: 90M ISK
Astero BPC contract: 80M ISK
Astero LP store cost: 30000LP + 15M ISK
Astero manufacture mineral costs: 500k ISK

This is so wrong! You pay 15M license fees and about 1-2 hour work (missions) for SOE so that they allow you to build a ship that is worth 500k in materials + some manufacturing costs -- essentially nothing, even if we don't outsource manufacturing to Amarr! I mean people buy it, but then there is no labor union or anything.

You could double the amount of minerals needed and no one would notice through fluctuations in the market price.

I can accept that LP ratio is that high - done by players. But the 15M vs 500k is just bad. I petition for the SCC to drastically regulate the license fees to ensure a more freely exploitable market.


So my suggestion is to shift this unproportional distribution of the cost drastically towards the minerals.

1. Nothing really has to get more expensive.
2. Mining gets more profitable.
3. Ganking miners gets more profitable.
4. ???
5. Profit.


I doubt I am the first to suggest this - but I didn't find anything similar posts with a few tries with the search function.

You're paying for the LP, not the minerals. Why is that a problem?

With your reasoning, there would soon be no ISK sinks in the game.

That is actually a good argument against my proposal. I'll have to think about this some more.

Then goes on to describe how its player driven.



so SoE cant put a premium on their own ships...which are unique and highly sought after?

They even give them away at a cheap price, provided you've done some work for them.

... and it is part of making a Taranis.

Oh and volume, if you buy into making ships for profit you need to churn them out in good numbers.

How about this:

The main activity in EVE is to blow up ****; therefore, players have to do other activities to gain ISK to fund the blowing up of ships.

Some sort of equilibrium will manifest for how much players can spend on average on ships and modules in a given time frame.

Production: If you want to increase your profit you have to sell more than the competition, i.e. sell slightly cheaper but hopefully a higher volume (cheaper stuff will get bought first, some equilibrium will reassert it self). For a miner this means that the single one method to increase your income is to multibox because there is a hard cap on how much you can mine with one character.
Therefore multiboxing will be highly profitable while every solo miner will bite the dust. And I would argue that this is why minerals are so cheap.

Every other activity in the production business is easily done with serveral characters, manufacturing, research, PI, etc. needs minimal interaction, even less than mining. Controlling several ships at the same time even if it is just activating that lasers on every one of them needs more dedication.




One point of critique: The problem of availability of currency. ISK is generated out of thin air (missions rewards, bounties on rats) and vanishes from the game the same way when purchasing someting from npcs. While this is connected with some reward and time consumption for regulation the problem is that their is no actual value of ISK, no gold reserves, and more importantly no fixed amount of currency in use; if for some reason players spent less ISK on npc offers the amount of ISK in use will just rise uncontrolled. This is where CCP's arbitrary regulations of prices come in, as you already mentioned. By my definition this is not a free market sim and I suppose it is impossible to achieve.



At least I understand the workings of EVE economy a bit better. Thanks for the input everyone.

*puts on tin foil hat* ah, but all money is fiat money, created out of thin air as representation of debt, or a universal IOU.
*takes off hat*
Fake game currency needs some kind of fake labor/time investment. Ccp's management of resources could also be seen as setting up market scenarios, but ultimately is because eve needs to be fun enough to make real money.

Also, eve's market has to be the equivalent of "spherical cows in a vacuum" because, I for one am not a day trader, production manager, broker etc, and while some may be, I just hope they're here for fun too.