The lifeblood of everything that happens in EVE… is the economic balance. The out of control ISK injection that ratting in nullsec from bounties represents. The stockpiles of billions of tons of ore, moon goo, and PI that the nullsec empires are sitting on, and mining more of in record numbers, and carefully controlling the supply of to gain full control of the T2 market. The devaluation of the ISK.
Yesterday I watched a guy with a HAW Titan, perfectly applying to cruiser rats in a Haven, then Boson’ing the ■■■■ out of the entire site, then in come his five Rorq alts to further strip mine everything in the site, and in comes them dank ticks. In perfect safety, under a super umbrella. He barely finished the site, and another site spawned for him to hoover. No risk, full reward. No subcap fleet (or even small gang cap fleet) can even get close or even if they did and engaged him, he just lights his cyno, and in comes dozens of bored alliance/coalition supers and kills everything. Everyone knows this. So they don’t even try. PVP for the small gang in null is dead. PVP for wormholers roaming into null connections is dead. N+1 has reached its ultimate form. This isn’t an ISK faucet, it’s an ISK waterfall.
There are no more reasonable means to steer the economy back into competitive health. Only unreasonable draconian measures from CCP can work now:
Introduce Mineral/PI/Moon goo Denaturation - apply a time algorithm to every unit of resource - you don’t use that stockpile of robotics - it’ll sit in its warehouse and eventually rust. That mineral stockpile will decompose if it sits too long. The moon goo will deteriorate with time. The decay rate can be adjusted and is another tool of balance that CCP can use.
The Triglavians are sick of our incursions into their space, and unleash a superweapon onto New Eden that propagates throughout the cluster. Jump Drives can no longer function without the ship blowing itself up due to the interference. The only form of Jump Drive that still works due to its technobabble use of a different frequency or domain of subspace, are those on Black Ops battleships and the jump drives on Freighters.
The Concord call centre is sick of the endless pings of capsuleers demanding bounty for killing pirates, and changes the way rewards for busting pirate scum works. “Bring us physical proof.” (Nullsec rats now drop a “random color” loot, that they have to physically bring to Concord stations in hisec to get the ISK bounty)
Asset safety fee is 100% tied to the market value. Concord Officer: “Oh you can get your stuff back, got it out in just the nick of time, risked my non-immortal neck to do it, let me just check the market price. good, that’ll be xy billion to get all your ships and cargo contents back.” Boom, a significant ISK Sink.
The point is that the balance between destruction and creation in EVE is titling increasingly towards creation. The balance between risk and reward is almost firmly in reward’s corner. There is no more consequence in the game worth writing home about - the very thing that was famously touted in the past as a major selling point of EVE, is gone.
Point 4 hammers the people who don’t have that isk waterfall far more than those who do. If you have the isk waterfall you can afford to pay to recover stuff, if you don’t losing stuff = death knell.
Point 1 also hammers smaller groups harder because it takes them longer to produce the same amount of stuff, therefore they suffer more decay when trying to reach a certain threshold to produce things.
Also the problem is not the isk being produced, the problem is all that isk is being produced by a small number of players. Wealth inequality leads to massive stagnation. And wealth inequality is on the rise in EVE and has been for quite a few years.
Too much of anything and that thing loses value - a rapidly growing money supply should be resulting in inflation but there is no material scarcity in Eve - the supply of goods is keeping pace with the supply of money with one exception - PLEX can’t be harvested in game and is increasing in value relative to ISK.
I’m not sure CCP needs to turn off the faucets but they need to balance them with sinks that insure growth in the money supply is balanced by growth in the economy.
I agree there needs to be an element of scarcity in the game. Maybe as simple as a 4 hour respawn timer for anomalies - it works for ice belts. The use it or lose it idea would complicate the database - every unit of tritanium would need a lifespan timer! I think you could achieve the same objective algorithmically by scaling the amount of any resource that spawns as a function of the amount currently available in the game - as stockpiles grow, the harvest shrinks.
Can we please not? Stockpiles aren’t the issue. Generation of these things is.
I thought you wanted risk? Why high sec? Drop off in low sec.
The fee is already tied to market value, just the average of the last 7 or 30 days, I don’t remember exactly. Tying it to current market value allows players to manipulate markets and then extract things when prices are the cheapest. Besides: Which market? There is no market in Heimatar where Stuff from Odebein lands. Or In Derelik for Podion.
You know what would introduce more risk again: #DeleteSupersTitansRorquals - That alone would fix all the issues.
Or increase any capital align time 10 fold :D, and any cyno a capital activates takes 5 min to establish connection to it, so you have to protect that cyno for 5 minutes before it becomes usable then caps don’t need to be deleted, they will just be balanced for their power and won’t be the end all solution for every situation that they are now.
It’s not that said HAW titan pilot had no risk. He did have risk. He, and his alliance, however, were prepared to mitigate that risk. And you’re right, the average subcap roam would never have even caught him.
Their warp core strength is high enough that your average subcap roam wouldn’t even have enough points… I wouldn’t have even bothered to light the cyno, I’d just moonwalk out unless they started bumping me.
That said:
Punishes indy, it doesn’t punish the so-called “isk waterfall”. Remember you aren’t printing isk here. You’re producing materials that isk-printers buy. There’s no issue at all with PI supply or demand, thus this change isn’t needed
Careful, your cap hate is showing. What if I countered and said “the trig disable random gates instead”? This is an outright stupid change.
Jump freighters are a thing? I know dudes who literally enjoy just being logistics.
This I do support. Because it forces large groups to commit to defending citadels that they don’t have time to evac fully. Staging systems become infinitely more valuable targets.
Id like to see decay of everything, use it or not it is going to die, either in a fiery glorious death or just rotting on your front lawn up on bricks, either way it will be gone in 1 year, so it would be best to use it.
The problem is this game wasn’t set up with that in mind and i think implementing it would be very hard to impossible.
To implement that you need to implement decent player level passive incomes. Which then break when you allow multiple accounts doing it which means you have to change that also.
Otherwise anyone who takes time off sees their stuff wrecked for nothing.
You do not have to do any of those things. In real life if i stop working my income decays, that is my problem, not a societal one. Same would go for the society of EVE, stop working (stop playing) and you become poor, your problem not EVEs problem.
There is nothing at all wrong with the idea other than it probably could not be implemented in a game this far into its life cycle.
The fact it is a game is the issue. If taking time off the game means you lose everything then people will never come back if they take time off.
That is not what you want to happen.
Hmmmm Eve likes to think its a game that bridges real life industry, economics into a sci-fi setting… BUT WHERES THE RESEARCH??? The constant creation of new and improved weapon systems and ships with giant inflated research budgets and resource allocations, with teams of scientists and engineers working to get a few % points more in performance. If Eve needs better isk sinks then make research the new isk sink. With mutaplasmids adding variation to modules theres not much difference then in letting a corp make a rocket design with more damage or a cap booster with 850 cap in it. Custom BPO’s in new libraries, all your old bpc’s would be redundant since people would be creating new cutting edge ships and modules. Balance of power shifts from the old guard and asset flippers on the market and shifts to more proactive groups running research and resource missions all over new eden to corner their prospective markets. Sounds like a good shake up of the economy and makes room for more players in the market and removes the +1 isk game on end products since they are sold by the people making them in a more limited fashion… Corp Stores in Citadels?
Anyway my 2 cents for more risk and balance in the game.