hey what if we all went out into space and started mining rocks
and it can be iron
and we would just say from now on iron is our currency and it can never drop below $5/kg
like we can control our own economy by converting our building materials directly into currency
#RandomShowerThoughtsWhileHigh?
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especially now we get to an age where
energy and matter conversion are proven science
but to what capacity
It would be interesting if we could start harvesting from the astroid belt. I wonder if we would be able to make an alloy tritanium like qualities en mass easily/cheaply. Or new super conductors.
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If we had no isk most likely another form of currency would have emerged by player choice but since we have isk we use it.
PLEX would’ve probably been it
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what if veldspar was currency
and maybe fuel
You “convert” materials into isk, by selling them.
If materials could be directly converted into isk, isk would super-inflate, and material prices skyrocket.
Within a week everything would have 6 zeros added to its isk price, and with a month, 48 zeros.
Ironically, the same would happen if 100% of EVE players did nothing but farm NPC Isk bounties. Isk would be overflowing, and no materials introduced to buy with it.
Doesnt even need to be anywhere near 100% for that to happen, and arguably is already happening, especially in Delve. Huge isk generation, and very little export.
When such an alliance operates on the principle of “dont report botters in our alliance” despite CCP specifically saying DONT TOLERATE THEM… it’s not hard to imagine what would happen if their “isk printers” evaporated overnight.
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I have a better idea. How about a juice press? One that takes corpses and produces ISKs?
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no thats not how it works thats crazy
Okay, so this is your question, actually two questions.
You want to create real life value using in-game activity, mining in this case. Well, we already have that. They hourly payment is bad and you are limited to receive a specific service for your in-game labour, which is game-time in the form of PLEX which you usually can buy with ISK (but people may choose to trade it for ore, using the contract system).
For this you are asking for a lower treshold on the exchange rate between in-game currency (iron in your example) and real world $. This may be temporarily possible if you manage to organize every “iron” producer to agree on not undercutting. In practise this won’t work for long, because someone will drive the price down. If you think about it, you have to exchange any in-game currency (no matter if ISK or iron or ships) into PLEX first, in order to receive payment in real-world value (not in $, but in game-time that would otherwise cost you $). So, you are asking if it is possible that we all agree to never pay more than X amount of currency for 1 PLEX. Or again shorter, you are asking if we can agree on a maximum in-game price for PLEX. It’s unlikely that we can regulate it with a strict treshold, because there is pressure from both sides. This pressure also keeps it somewhat stable. In the end it also has to do with real-life money-making opportunities of players. Once you have to work 10 hours in-game to pay for one month of subscription, you’re talking a wage of the poorest countries of the world and it would be better if you just paid your game-time with real money.
The other side of that is when everyone would suddenly only pay the subs with real money, the demand for in-game PLEX would go down dramatically. In return, people who buy PLEX with real money in order to exchange it into ISK (and later goods) on the in-game market, would find a far harder exchange rate. In other words: if everyone would only pay subs with money instead of grinding for PLEX, the value of in-game labour would rise dramatically and thereby the price of ore/ships/ISK expressed in PLEX would grow tremendously.
Then you are asking why not use ore instead of ISK as the in-game currency. The answer is simply that ISK is far more practical as a currency. A currency is the universally tradeable commodity in which every other commodity (for instance your ore) express their value. In theory this universal commodity could be anything, but once you account for the need to transport it from player A to player B for any exchange, you’ll immediately realize that ISK is far more practical. You can send ISK from Wallet A to Wallet B, without any need for transport. So while everything could express its value in ore (following your example, where ore should be the currency), it’s highly unpractical. Additionally the market system is far more established and easier to handle than the contract system, which would have to be used in your example.
no its not actually for this game its for my own game im trying to design a realistic virtual economy but its hard to figure out how to make it work but it occeured to me that maybe building material currency and fuel could all be the same thing
and i havent really figured out how that would work out yet
well thats the thing by making the material currency you can just force a fixed lower value that you cant legally undercut
like selling $10 for $9
you cant do that because the material is legal tender
in busy hubs they might pay more because there would be a shortage of mateiral to build with and so they will pay more for material but then how does that even work when the material is currency
how can you pay more material for material
im not sure i havent thought about it properly
Look into the economy of NMS for a single player game
@Chribba becomes a monopoly.
i dont have it but i might check it out
Managed to misread that as wanting to use people’s bodily fluids as currency.
Was halfway to Amarr’s sperm bank before I figured it out >.<
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That already happened, and continues to happen.
PLEX turns into ISK. And I swear that Incursions were the cause for PLEX prices skyrocketing. Once upon a time you could buy a month’s sub for 250-300m ISK. Then Incursions came out, allowing people to earn 10m every 5 min. And the one thing all those Incursion Runners have in common, is wanting to keep playing month after month. So the PLEX prices started creeping higher and higher, until today it costs 1.5bil for a month.
today it costs 2.5bil for a month
Gonna have to assume that’s a typo.
I remember the 300m plex from my earliest days in 09. I don’t think a singular mechanic/feature can be blamed for the entirety of eve’s inflation. And I don’t think it’s a huge deal. Outside of static-income activities, all ISK is relative.
Plex primarily rose in a series of jumps. Each of which tend to be a ccp change which directly affected plex such as a new way to use it. New popular skins. Or the plex split.
Also the incursion myth has been destroyed 10,000 times. Null bounties always have been the largest isk faucet even in the hey day of incursions. And now are even larger relative to incursions. If any isk faucet is impacting on the prices it’s the null cash. Not incursions.