EVE General Discussion

Like Liang said. it would be a failure that would only cause people to lessen their inventory and/or quit due to annoyance. Instead of trying to create weird sinks, just cutback or start removing faucets. Switch some faucets too loot based and/or LP.

Also PVP isn't a isk sink, destruction drives the market, but doesn't actually remove isk. Its a asset sink.

Now that i come to think of it, i never ever spent money on bicycle maitenance.

I lol'd when I read this. Essentially this is a feature that many MMO's use, WoW comes to mind readily.

Take the total amount of isk in the game and divide it equally amongst all the active players. That will make everyone happy.

This is dumb and I feel dumberer after reading it.

I haven't read everything in the thread, so I apologize if I'm parroting someone else ideas.

I can imagine that a player with a large inventory that goes inactive could come back to the game with nothing, or a repair bill that will inhibit the player from having what should be a happy return to the game. Even insurance can be tricky if you come back and the costs of things have gone up so drastically that it makes even pulling the ship that you could afford to lose before unable to fly.

I know that I have come back to the game before and had a bit of this issue. Luckilly I had some other high value items that I could sell that were rather worthless before. Basic modules come to mind. I have a rather large reserve now in case that happens again,, as I play more games than just eve online.

I'm also going to talk a bit about repair costs and other money sinks. SWG had item decay, and it was a huge distraction from the game I think, and I was a armorsmith/weaponsmith. In principle it should stimulate the economy be giving items an expiration. In reality it only made it frustrating when lost 10% of your durability on very hard to get gear because you disconnected or made a simple mistake. Not to meantion it also made tanks non-existent (and they were needed in the game) as thier armor decay would outstrip any gains that could be made. And PvP, which was a lot of fun, started to become unpopular because players were having to spend all their money in order to do it.

Some of the same could be said about even, but there is insurance to offset some of the cost, and decent ships can be had for cheap. Because if you can't afford to fly battleships, you can still fly a frigate inexpensively and still contribute. Now if everything you own costs you money, you simply don't ever own but exactly what you need exactly when you needed. So you don't have a hanger full of prefitted firgates for pvp. So that means if you die, you are out of the fight much longer, and probably paying more for good to refit since you have to pay whatever if being offered at the time instead of just buying cheap when its available.

It could work, but I just don't see that emphasises the right things. You can cut the isk faucet in other ways. For instance, if agents would dynamicly adjust mission payout and concord adjusted rat payouts based on activity, so that higher global activity reduced payouts, incentivizing players to seek more risky options, which have their own faucet mechanisms (low/null mission running).

It would also be self regulating. As missions and rats reduce payouts, players are more likely to seek better payouts in lower security systems, which subjects them to higher risk in the form of ganks. This incentivizes pvp fits for pve conent, which slows the rate of consumption. As pirates feed on the pve'ers, the face increased capability from pve ships, and ship loses increase for both parties. The regulates to optimal profit potential, as these losses encourage pve'er to move back into higher security and pirates have less targets due to thier own disincentivizing behavior. The net result is an flucuating equilibrium that naturally adds inefficiency into the system, and lowers isk input, and increases isk output. The devs then have a clear method of tuning mission/rat income by the a simple hidden payout coefficient tacked onto the mission and rat rewards. And this coefficient can be optimized by the devs as a tuning fork for the economy much like the interest rate does in the real word.

Ok, thats a mouthful, so I'll stop my blathering.

You may also wonder why we cannot place our ISK in an NPC bank where it earns a couple of percent of interest a year. Well, we do. But all that interest goes to ship crews, who when the ship is docked do the maintenance. The bank pools all the interest from all the wallets in New Eden and pays it out as needed as a service to us pod pilots so we do not need to be bothered by such issues.

Let's make it so we have to feed and clothe our crews too.

Oh and that we need to buy fuel for the engines even without jumping.

Oh and lets make sure our capsuleers have to run on a treadmill and what have you a couple of times a month to reduce muscle atrophy from being in a pod.

Or we could carry on playing a game.

I think a better idea for an isk sink would be to charge amateur wannabe game designers 10M isk for every bad idea they post in GD instead of Features & Ideas Discussion where those kinds of posts can be more easily ignored by the general populace given their due attention by interested parties.

Ships don't break down because we have nano bot repair facilities that maintain our hulls.

Docking fees, on the other hand, could provide an interesting sink. Not hangar fees, mind you, just docking fees. When your wallet circles the drain, you get to dock at cheapo noob stations.