I hear again and again the topic of “isk sinks” and whenever i hear someone’s suggestions i always can’t contain my want to rant. mostly because me going on a rant about isk sinks is either off topic or posting a thread there would be locked and lost to the abyss.
So first i’ll start with saying yes, the fact that players see inflation happen before their very eyes, is a problem. it makes more grinding for anyone who wants a flashy looking/performing ship. it could cause loss of interest in the game for any newbro in the future if buy and sell orders for raw mats don’t rise in parallel.
but when i see people make suggestions for isk sinks, sometimes it just isn’t right. quite frankly, i see a lot of suggestions that have to do with changing the game that are meant for broad implementation, and the effects will only inconvenience the null veterans and cripple the newbros. so i guess now that i baked this thread for awhile, i figure open this up so the next ideas thread about isk sinking actually makes sense.
I’ll get the ball rolling with a tl;dr of a forum post by Gian Bal i read on the old forums: adjusting the respawn rates of rat sites based on how fast they’re cleared, so carrier ratters have to wait after clearing out thier home system. Avoids having to nerf carriers or buff combat sites to get a similar effect.
NullSec ratting will never be healthy in terms of inflation because NullSec ratting is not tied to a corresponding ISK sink in any way. For Missions/Incursions you make your real money cashing out LP - which destroys ISK (ISK sink) and puts items on the market. You make your real money selling things to other players. FW is a pure ISK sink. FW ratting, however, just puts ISK into the game with nothing to balance that out.
As a UO player, I can tell you, the inflation thing gets bad. Really, really bad. UO had a problem where player inventories weren’t large enough to carry the amount of gold needed for some transactions. That’s when… things get said. And for what it’s worth, yes, I am talking about checks, you can only do 255 checks in a backpack for a total of 255 million gold. It would be better to sacrifice newbies than to ever reach that level.
Anyhow, any time that you’re talking about big sums of isk you’re going to run into the newbie vs pro problem. You have to give players a reason to pay the isk, and that reason has to be more valuable than the isk, otherwise people won’t do it. The fundamental nature of isk sinks is that they have to worthwhile, but provide rewards that are value-neutral at worst. So, say, the LP store is a great example of an isk sink
But when you’re talking about trillionaires, what can you offer them that’ll make them give up half their pile?
I made the suggestion on the other forums not of isk sinks but converting the bounties from isk to items such as tags, LP or other conversion chips and the new loot drops CCP is already planning. This way the value of all kills, regardless of the space they are farmed, remains something that requires more work and effort to clean up slowing the farming process down considerably due to the idea of plopping down an MTU or going back in a noctis/salvager to actually pick up your value.
Due to this interaction that value can be stolen, destroyed or intercepted by other players more readily than press buttan receive isk in wallet. Blitzing would be slowed down quite a lot as you cannot just move from one anom to the next without looting your wrecks.
Then running someone out of a site or anom would afford the attacker some gains by looting said wrecks, blowing them up or otherwise harassing the farmers. Between this and ganking in high a portion of the value of isk would be transferred and destroyed and would add another addition to roaming through enemy space, and one that would pay out even if there was no killmail simply because you could destroy their work/time or steal their loot.
Then isk creation would lessen and the trade of goods would take precedence. Like the Elite Drone AIs I would start first with BSs changing over and keeping BC and under being isk generators only. As the vast majority of isk created is BS spawns. On a numbers level the isk generated would drop roughly 75-90% but the value would, or could, stay roughly the same.
I also agree that more ISK sinks is not the solution - that’s like saying “oh hey, we keep getting people cutting themselves - let’s supply more bandages”, instead of “let’s look at what’s causing all the injuries and address that - perhaps there are too many razor blades?” Rather than widening the drain-plug, I think slowing down the most torrential faucets may be a more appropriate solution. (Of course, all those who have grown used to the creep in their favour would end up crying - but there’s always someone crying, and it’s usually the ones with the least cause, the ones who can most afford a change, I’ve found.)
ISK inflation only seems to be visible in the price of PLEX. Other than that the CPI is actually falling - meaning deflation. People are stockpiling ISK along with everything else.
CCP needs to pull ISK out of the game roughly as fast as it is going in. The money supply should only grow if the economy is growing.
Hmmmm some of the points made in this thread against ISK sinks are good ones. Perhaps the developer should look at the major ISK faucets and consider reducing them while supplementing with an alternative reward (such as unusual blueprints dropping during ratting, faction reward points etc.).
Speaking as an EVE trillionaire, I feel that I should also voice that a rapidly contracting economy should be avoided as players like myself will convert assets to ISK early in such a process, effectively becoming richer as ISK becomes increasingly scarce and valuable.
The only other way of limiting bounties and thereby isk into the economy would be a dynamic bounty system based on player usage or farming amounts. Simply put overfarming reduces the quality of NPCs, and therefore the quantity of isk, available in a system. It could be justified simply by that NPCs dont like being killed and therefore move out of the area or that when the best are killed off only the scrublords of the NPC universe remain.
The other way I could see this occurring is using a dynamic system of at least 3 payouts per NPC; bounties, tags/chips and loot, to create a dynamic shift. If isk is to great then it would change into more loot or tags/chips and vice versa. Though this wouldnt stop the power creep issue of simply overfarming nor the FOTM ships from being too good at their jobs.
I would still say an overfarming technique like the “three field system” of medieval europe would work the best. Overfarming leads to “crop” failures and lessened yields over time if maintained.
But as many have pointed out lessening isk in the economy at this point only does make the rich richer. CCP has generally been good at taking large chunks of goods and lowering their collective values to reduce wealth in those areas and the 5% bounty and other nerfs across the board of a few years ago did help quite a bit. But the large influx of both isk and then raw goods from the rorqual buff has made things quite unique from a total wealth perspective in the last year or so. So I am quite interested to see what the economics team comes up with for this last round of wealth generation.
Pirates start coming after players/corps that score huge bounties on them. Bigger bounties pulled means bigger revenge fleets. Pulling huge bounties on more than one type of rat means alliance NPC fleets. Ripping the revenge fleets to shreds just activates that swishy new pirate AI CCP was bragging about and nets a bigger revenge fleet. You’ve got SOV on a system where you’re pulling in a revenge fleet? Yeah, they wanna spin on your entosis and build a new shipyard.
This is what i always suggest (across the board too, not just null sec). People are short sighted, they can’t understand how them making less money is a good thing, even when you tell them that it’s not just you, EVERYONE would make less, increasing the relative value of the isk and items you own.
I remember EVE before respawning anomalies, incursions, l5 missions, before FW missions were so lucrative etc etc. I remember living in OMIST with Atlas Alliance when it was so poor that all the anoms were done as soon as they spawned and people were arguing over who had a right to which asteroid belt. We launched a WAR to get better space.
This is the idea. If you overfarm your space you must start butting heads with your neighbors to go grab theirs or try to hold enough space that you dont run into such issues by three farm system farming your systems. Leaving one or some to regen over time while you farm the others down. If CCP did the balance right then you couldnt allow regen and you would be forced to fight for more farming rights/land.
It would facilitate more strife and conflict near to home which could be a nice thing.
you realize that alliances who rat let’s say in supers have SEVERAL systems/constellations/regions to do so ?
you can’t limit to a system/constellation/region.
IMO this is not an issue of ratting but creation of money.
If you want to stop inflation, you have to stop concord giving bounties here and there. The inflation exists because you can create money. That should not be possible. money should be in constant overall quantity.
What that means is : concord has a stock of money, when rats die the rats actually provide a % of remaining money.
Instead of anything giving X M isk (rat but also missions rewards and NPC BO) this should give a X * multiplier of % remaining concord money.
Of course there is the issue of “someone keeps all the money”. Then it’s very simple : every player/corp account is taken 0.1% of its fund every month. or 0.025% every week if you want. Or even 1/10 000 if you want every day, the number must be very low. So if you want to invest, you have to invest in something else than in isk.
This ensures that concord can pay 1/10000 of total money every day.
of course the % of value should be computed based on the total number of killed rats per day.
Let’s say 20 BS with a bounty of 1M each die every day that is 20M, then you can consider the 20M daily pool should only be a 1% of total remaining money in concord so the 1M BS woul actually mean 1M out of 20M * 1% = 1/2000 of remaining money.
Nice idea to tax ISK stores, but there is a problem, one which you inadvertently stated yourself - encouraging people to invest their ISK in something else.
Can you guess what alternative they might invest in? In fact it would change entirely the general currency of EVE.
I don’t see any issue with traders investing in plex. They already do it.
the goal is not to encourage people to invest somewhere else, the goal is “prevent people from keeping their iskies to control the whole market”. They still could impact the market by conserving their iskies, but the longer they keep them the more money they lose.
ALSO tax every money transaction by a small % (0.1 eg) . the iskies are maintained by a bank, and a bank needs money to work too.
Its not about limiting people to regions or constellations at all. Its simply that each farmed system would simply deplete over time and would have a fairly long regen, depending on that regen, eventually you would have to move systems while the others unused would regenerate. And if you grew to fast as an alliance you would be forced to gain more space. CCP has been trying to shrink space based on usage, this is a good thing, forcing conflict by forcing conflict with neighbors.
So this isnt a limit at all about space. Its about forcing those who overfarm to either spread out or accept less isk/hr over time due to their overfarming. If CCP coupled it with dynamic sec status you would see crappy systems turn into good ones over time as the NPCs move their criminal operations from the good to the bad. It would force larger groups to use all of the systems isntead of congregating in only the lowest true sec and running like crazy. More movement between systems, constellations means more chances at getting caught, more WHs spawning for enemies to come out of, and therefore interaction.
