EVE General Discussion

FFS, NO! You sound like Gevlon Goblin here with his nonsense about how each ship loss will eventually bring down the Imperium (aka CFC).

What matters is the aggregate. Inflation is not a "micro" concept. Yes, what people (the micro level) do can have an impact at the aggregate level....no single player is likely driving Eve inflation. This is why people talk about balancing ISK sources with ISK sinks.

So, if the ISK coming in suddenly changes (e.g. a ban on broadcasting with ISBoxer style programs) and there is no commensurate change in goods and services entering the economy then the rate of inflation would deccelerate.

Here is why inflation is bad:

1. It impacts new players more strongly as they have much more limited ability to acquire ISK--i.e. the ISK they do have and that they acquire has its in game value eroded.
2. It can provide a disincentive for inactive people to come back to the game. With double digit inflation you can quickly find what was once a decent amount of ISK is now has less purchasing power.
3. Inflation is essentially a tax...taxes are "bad" in the sense that all taxes come with a deadweight loss. Deadweight losses are unrecoverable.
4. A non-zero rate of inflation means you'll have to grind ISK at a rate equivalent to the inflation rate to stay even. While the idea of having people logging in is good, having to need to log in to keep up with the inflation rate is probably sub-optimal.

Just about everywhere you look the ideal inflation rate is zero or very close to zero (not counting price increases due to things like changes in demand, etc., that is the monetary component of inflation).

In this game ultimately the central banker is CCP. Concord is kind of like a member bank for the Federal Reserve or the FOMC and the main way CCP can influence monetary policy in the game. But like the Fed they have other tools too. Such as the EULA. CCP's change in interpretation of the EULA could be likened to the Fed changing reserve requirements.

Why would CCP do this....go back to 1-4 above. And for central bankers, reputations matter. A central bank that has a strong or reasonably strong "hawkish" stance on keeping inflation "under control" will be believed. Belief in the stability of a currency IS important...even in a virtual world. Why? Because it goes to the stability of the in-game economy. And the in-game economy is one of CCP's selling points for Eve. It is almost entirely player driven.

So all the arguing about whether or not ISBoxer is a type of botting or not is kind of beside the point if the main reason CCP did this was to shore up its reputation as a responsible central banker and keep the rate of inflation at an acceptable level.

No...not really. Efficiency is pretty clearly defined. A reduction in effort or other inputs. Lucas has spent page after page of saying ISBoxer reduces effort. And Lucas noted it allows people to run more clients than they otherwise could.

And I suspect the reason they did this is that they were concerned about ISK flowing into the game as well as mined resources. The former can accelerate the rate of inflation, the latter depresses the price of those resources.

But cheer up...maybe someday deflation will become a Thing™ and CCP will revoke this ban on broadcasting so that the money supply increases leading to inflation. Although personally, if deflation does become a Thing™ that will be very, very bad and your days of using ISBoxer would again be limited....as would your days in Eve.

Why 1 player? That's the part that makes no sense. Why is 10 players who PvE with solo character and never PvP fine, but 10 characters that PvE and never PvP controlled by one person isn't? In both of those scenarios the effect on the economy would be identical, as both produce but don't consume.

So only those of us with money to buy beast machines which don't need ISBoxer should e allowed to multiboxer at a large scale. Good to know. But no, with or without ISBoxer, memory is the same which is pretty much what caps your usage. ISboxer just means if you don't have a quad or hyperthreading you can actually run them without lag. The point is that any multiboxer has access to the same number of accounts without ISBoxer as with, ISBoxer just makes it possible for people to get there without having to drop a grand on hardware.

this is eve every aspect of it receives a stream of hate from other aspects of it.

Really? So it's the "effort" debate?

ISBoxer makes multiboxing take less effort outside of the game. with the broadcast and input dupliblahblah bans there is no greater efficiency in game. In game we make as many clicks as you to accomplish the same tasks. CCP doesn't care about out of game ... what's that other multiboxing app that they are actually endorsing? yeah it does fast click windows so you can switch clients quickly. thats efficiency outside the game same as you get with ISBoxer.

show me where ccp has an issue with efficiency outside the client ... oh wait ... there it is in that big grey area....you say out of game counts I say it doesn't ccp doesn't say a damn thing.

o7

All that shows is accounts used for multiplexing dropped, which you would expect since multiplexing was banned. What it doesn't show is how many accounts continued multiboxing regardless or the change in monthly faucets vs sinks.

Not sure where the January figures are from, but it doesn't surprise me at all that it went up in January, since some people simply wouldn't know about the changes and would get banned. That doesn't actually mean anything though, that one figure you're taking out of context and generalising. Again you have no idea what relates to ISBoxer and what doesn't, and impact that has overall.

By the way, what's with all this "Earth-August" crap?

I was in the room for that, so I don't really need to watch it. That graph that you are referring to shows the value of ISK and the value of items on accounts banned or when they are confiscated. What that doesn't tell you is how much liquid ISK was removed, or how much was due to macro use vs things like RMT. If you compare the reasons for bans between 2013-2014 and 2014-2015, the percentage of bans for macro use actually went down, while the percentage for ISK buying went up.

Eh? What did you do to those other nine players? You are not saying you only activated a new account every time you deliberately drove a player out the game to make a "spot" for your new one? Or that you have those previous nine paying players buried under your patio? Or in a freezer in the garage?

Because otherwise the impact on the economy from 19 accounts is never going to be the same as 10, and you are a bit silly for suggesting it is.

Personally I suggest blocking him. I did that a while ago, and I only un-hide him to troll this desperate quest to be allowed to cheat once again at EVE Online.

Seriously, I don't know if this thread cracks me up or sickens me. *snip* Trolling is not necessary to illustrate your point. ~ ISD Decoy

So many isboxing miners (and other bear sub-species) in this thread, all pining for their lost revenue stream. Excellent.