Science & Industry

Plex is not a sink or a faucet. Plex is bought with RL currency, and the selling of plex's is just an ingame transfer of funds. The ultimate Sink is PvP.

No, CCP sometimes offers lapsed subscribers like 5 free days to check out the game again. Especially near expansions. Hoping that they can get them back to subscribing members.

From CCP's own data:

The index values for September 2011 :

Mineral Price Index
12 month change: 19.5%

Primary Producer Price Index
12 month change 24.5%

Secondary Producer Price Index
12 month change 8.1%

Consumer Price Index
12 month change 7.6%

I can't find the downward trend in those numbers. Moreover, if this were a real-world economy, those numbers would be reason for grave concern. Basically what those numbers (especially the consumer price index) are telling you is that the isk you have locked up in your wallet is worth about 7.6% less now than it was a year ago. In concrete terms is like this: for every billion isk you have in your wallet, about 76million of that "evaporated" last year because of inflation. Moreover, the 12 month change in the mineral price price index will cause inflation over 2012 to be even higher.

That said, in terms of game play is it a huge problem? For someone mining veldspar in high-sec 76 million isk isn't made in a day. For those players it should be a big deal. For the fat-cats ... dunno. it's an hour or two of effort over the course of year for zero gain. Personally, regardless of the scale, i don't like griding isk for zero gain.

T-

I don't follow your logic. If you buy a pvp ship for 50 million isk and it gets blown up then you have no ship and you're 50mil isk poorer. And if you win, then the other guy probably lost, which means it's his wallet that suffered. That's an isk sink.

... and before you point it out, if you salvage the wreck and sell what you picked up then, yes, your wallet may grow but that's *transfering* isk from the loser to the winner and not creating isk.

Activities that create isk out of nothing (or out of time/effort) are isk faucets. Things like mining, ratting etc.

Seem pretty straight forward to me.



Er... yes. Every purchase is good for the market. If people didn't buy stuff then there would be no reason to make a lot of it. Part of what keeps prices down, in fact, is the mere fact that there are fewer items being sold than made. In other words, there are fewer isk sinks than faucets. For producers this is a bad thing because it puts margins under pressure... sometimes to the point that producers end up selling for under the cost value of making an item (I assume) just to get it out of inventory. If you want to see many examples of this, then look at the T1 market. It's FULL of stuff you couldn't make for the price at which it's being sold.


Yeah, in that way it's a bit of a mirror for the real world. Savings evaporate and investments in things that increase in price with inflation are generally "good investments". If you make a lot of money then simply speculating market is an easy way to make isk in eve. To pick a random example, if you were to invest say, 30 billion in buy orders for minerals you see on the inflation curve and just stockpile them then you can take your profit over the course of a year as you need it. A buddy of mine does this and he has a good nose for things that tend to be subject to inflation. Last year IIRC he invested 14 billion in something (can't remember what), sat on it for a year and sold it for 20. That's a way, if you have the patience for it, to make inflation work to your advantage. In other words, he was making over 100mil a week just by stockpiling stuff that happened to go up a lot in price. (now that I think about it, it might of been one of the POS fuels). The trick is to see it coming before you find yourself fishing behind the net.

Getting back to what you said, inflation would work to a miner's advantage if he held on to his stockpile (at least of minerals subject to inflation) for as long as possible before selling them.


Yeah, and the more I think about it, the less of a problem I see it being. Maybe I'm becoming an economist but what you don't want is for players (after all it remains a game), to be poor and unable to get ahead. That would happen if the isk sinks and faucets were in balance.... You don't want to make people risk averse becuase they are always worrying about their wallet. You want people to have money to spend on shiny toys and to not worry too much if it gets blown up.

Maybe the solution is to occasionally just devalue the ISK and take off a zero so people don't get dizzy looking at the prices of things. :)

T-

To illustrate the effect of ship losses on the economy, let's go back to the good ol' days when BoB folded and there was mass warfare in null. Due to all the cap ship losses, trit was over 4 isk/unit for months. (This would be inflation) Since the null-sec wars have cooled off, fewer ship losses have led to lower demand on minerals, especially trit, which has dropped prices back down.

Ship losses drive the economy, but they also drive inflation. They are a mineral sink, not an ISK sink.

anyone comparing EvE to WoW is dumb. I don't ride a magical pony I fly a freaking spaceship. my economics is better then your economics. nuff said

is not an adjective

ri·dic·u·lous


Yea.

EDIT - Double post. Ah instant Karma