Unfortunately no.
The data at EVE Offline is PCU, not average players online. Yes, it has gone down, but again, number of players is not the issue so much as what is going on in the real economy.
In an economy there is the real economy–i.e. the goods and services we buy, and there is the nominal which is the real side denominated in current currency. We care more about the real side. Money is not really all that terrible important other than as a facilitator of transactions, but in the end we care about the stuff we can obtain via our economic activities, food, water, shelter, medical care, entertainment, etc. In game we care about ships, ammo, skill books, etc. We engage in various activites to obtain ISK not necessarily because we love those activities, but because we want the ISK we get will allow us to buy.
So, if ISK is going up, but the real economy is going up faster and nothing else changes (yes, a heroic assumption, but we have to do this otherwise we can’t work through these things logically…think of this assumption as like a partial derivative from calculus) then we have deflation. If the reverse is true we have inflation. Too much of either is bad. Too much inflation can lead to hyperinflation where trust in the value of the currency is completely gone and there is literally no investment–i.e. eventually GDP will collapse as it did in places like Germany prior to WWII. Too much deflation and consumption spending collapses as holding cash actually has a positive return–i.e. stuffing it in your mattress and not spending it means you can buy more stuff tomorrow, so you have less incentive to spend, the higher deflation the greater the incentive to not spend. As consumption spending falls, GDP again collapses.
Now an economy can handle “some” inflation or deflation. “Too much” of either is bad. CCP keeps an eye on these things. If they think it is getting to high they intervene. The last time they intervened was in 2017 when in one month the money supply grew at a staggering 64 trillion ISK in one month. Of course the ironic thing is the reaction for the economic ignoramii on the forums was pure unadulterated rage because CCP nerfed carrier and super ratting. Too some extent I understand the rage in that it reduced the overall combat efficiency of carriers and supers, but still it was probably a good decisions…although I had hoped CCP would revisit it and change how carriers/supers could make ISK in anomalies/ratting and return them to their combat efficacy vis-a-vis other player controlled ships. If you find that thread on the old forums you’ll see my posts on this making pretty much this point.
Another factor to consider is that our wallets are not like bank accounts IRL. EVEN IF there is a monetary multiplier, it does not work in EVE. Nobody is loaning out the ISK in our wallets generally speaking. There is a stunted and limited bond market in the game, but it is not like what we have IRL (look at the overnight paper market it is trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in loans, many of which mature literally overnight, and it is enormous…huge, fecking huge). So if IRL we increased the money supply by say 500 billion by giving that money to banks, and there is a 10% reserve requirement then the money multiplier is 10 and we should see 5 trillion in new money. That simply cannot happen in EVE. At all. Ever.
The only different conclusions is that players are individually getting more ISK. But again, that is not so much of an issue for things like inflation/deflation. It is not the amount of money/person but money vis-a-vis the real economy. Inflation is caused by the money supply growing too fast. Inflation is not caused by CCP tweaking an in game item and making it more desirable. That is a shift in demand, not a monetary issue.
In looking at the various price indices, which really are not meant to capture inflation per se[1], there is little indication of overall inflation. In fact, until relatively recently the trend for the CPI measure was generally downwards and/or flat this would indicate that overall we have deflation not inflation. So no, I disagree, I see no reason to change my conclusions based on the number of people in game.
[1] Price indices are actually an attempt to put an upper bound on what is known as a Cost of Living Index. However, those indices are not observable in that such an index would also include both substitution and income effects from price changes. To see this we’d need to know the consumer’s welfare function which even consumers themselves would have a hard time articulating. As such price indices are an approximation and usually in the sense of providing an upper bound on the cost of living. They are not, as such, a direct measure of inflation.
