Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I have seen, and read about, huge price swings, inflations, deflations, etc. in Eve's history. Those kinds of things are fine if driven by market forces, and even if driven by player market manipulation. The problem is the portion that isn't - the portion driven by the mechanics of creation of ISK and items out of thin air (bounty payments, drops, asteroid fields, etc).

I have read that the economic model is one of ISK 'faucets' and 'sinks.' Faucets create ISK (bounty payments, etc) and 'stuff' (asteroid fields, rat drops, etc) out of thin air. I have seen the charts released by the Eve showing faucets and sinks in action - for instance the amount of ISK created in the form of bounties over a given period, the amount of insurance payouts, etc. Often these things are out of whack. In other words, every time I've seen these charts and graphs, there is more faucet than sink, i.e. ever more ISK created.

I thought about how to fix this system. I thought of having a rule like in physics with matter and energy, but with ISK and 'stuff' instead: "ISK and 'stuff' can never be created nor destroyed; It can only change form." In other words have some permanent amount of unchanging ISK and 'hardware' in the game. That amount can never change, just flow around, be converted, etc. But the difficulty was in coming up with a way to make this work with the current mechanics of bounty payments, miners going out and mining asteroid fields which spawn out of thin air, etc. Seemed like it would be too big a change to make, and once that change was made it would be hard to cram all of the square pegs in the forms of bounty payments and rat drops and asteroid spawns into the round holes of the new economic system.

Then it hit me. Rather than have ISK and hardware that can never be created nor destroyed, just the form changed, simply balance any newly created ISK with newly created hardware, and vice versa.

Imagine you have a small town which is entirely hermetically-sealed and self-contained, with its own economy and currency. No trade with the outside world (in fact pretend the outside world doesn't exist). You have some set amount of currency circulating in this town. And you have 10 cars in this town total. Everything is in balance. Now say you add 1000 cars. The price of cars drop. Or say you remove cars so that instead of having 10, you only have 1. Now the price of cars go way up. However, what if you add cars, but also add currency to the town's economy, so that the amount of currency added roughly equals the value of the cars added? Prices should basically stay the same. This is what I am proposing for Eve.

SOLUTION: All ISK created by bounty payouts, insurance payouts, etc. should be balanced by the creation of asteroids, hardware dropped by rats, etc. And vice versa.

Except we don't play in an hermetically sealed game.

At any point in time, rich older players could leave the game for some time, effectively removing all of their ISK and assets from the economy. New players join and have to pick up the scraps.

It's not a model that seems to work very well because people want to have fun and any player can just leave the game at anytime; and come back later on.

You are wrong actually. There are some isks sinks that are "removing" isks from the game, as nobody ever get it back in any way, for example:
- transactions tax
- npc broker fee
- all items sold on the market by npc corps (skills for example)

There are others certainly too I may have forgotten about.

Anyway, -1 for the whole idea

There's nothing that needs fixing unless ccp decides as such.

CCP controls everything in the economy from amount of resources to items drops and their value in the market, by buying supplying through the market, and changing things around with games patches as they see fit.

This thread is useless, ccp controls the economy directly and indirectly, not the players.

Okay, one thing you are missing in a big way is that New Eden does not have a well developed capital market. Money, generally speaking, sits in people's wallets. IRL, when more money enters the system it tends to go into circulation. It is either spent or loaned out. In New Eden the second one is missing. Loaning out ISK on a broad scale just does not happen. Thus the notion that there is a major problem with ISK creation is not so clear cut.

Second as Scipio points out one big ISK sink that is not captured in the official statistics, and let this be a warning about official statistics both in game and IRL, when a long time player leaves the game, his ISK is essentially sunk. It is in his wallet and will never enter the economy unless he comes back and starts spending it.

Third, please point to a period in game when there was massive deflation.

He runs a university in Iceland now and left CCP in 2014 (might have been early 2015). CCP haven't replaced him.

Edit:
Here's a TMC article from May 2014 on his leaving:

https://www.themittani.com/news/new-edens-economist-leaves-ccp

Biggest problem is the lack of destruction, we build way more than we use.

I do my best to get expensive ships destroyed as much as possible, as my kb clearly shows, but even my vast stupidity is no match for the production of eve.

Then get shooting.

I can't stockpile this stuff for ever!

Nerf highsec plz. AFK2Stronk.