The QENs have shown that substantially more ISK is pouring into the economy than leaving it, and that high level sinks like BPOs take the edge off in a given quarter, but this has kept most players out of reach of being effective currency sinks. Starbases have shown themselves to be a historically efficient ISK sink, and it’s worth re-evaluating for the Citadels that are replacing them.
Based on Fanfest’s structure numbers, a tax between 1 to 2 million ISK per day for Astrahuses and Raitarus, 10 to 20 million for Fortizars and Azbels, and 100 to 200 million per day for Sotiyos and Keepstars would sink approximately 1.5 to 3 trillion ISK per month from the Eve Economy. It won’t stop the large scale flow of material, but it will take the edge off of the faucets a bit across a larger portion of the player base.
Actually, June’s economic report shows about 17T more ISK left the economy than entered it, largely from people quitting the game and taking their ISK with them.
I guess as long as Eve keeps hemoraging players, there really isn’t a need for new ISK sinks.
Personally though, while I agree inactive structures should be way, way more easier to remove and a ISK tax is one way to determine this, I think it is folly to try to fix the real economic imbalances of New Eden with some fee on structures. Given the rate ISK is flowing into the economy, you would have to make structure taxes so high that it would defeat the goal CCP has of wanting us to use them. It would be much better to fix the problem at the source and sort out how ISK enters the economy rather than try to soak it up with ISK sinks.
I don’t believe we should be looking for singular fixes to faucets as much as realize that there’s some need for sinks to counterbalance the inflow. The goal of a structure tax should not be to singularly control the influx all by itself, which is why the targeted values per structure are relatively modest.
I agree with @Black_Pedro on going to the source instead of trying to fix the consequences.
On a sidenote, I personally think it would be far more interesting to look again how ISKs are spread amongst players - and to get some numbers on how ISK velocity relates to that, meaning how often does each one ISK touch the hand of a player in the top 10% (ISK-wise) vs. how often does it for the bottom 10%?
Because that is what makes or breaks the game. “Only fly what you can afford to replace” turns into a cynical statement if you look at player realities. New or newer players face years of grinding for ISK if they want to play in the same “i dont give a ■■■■, i can afford everything, this game is for PVP fun” league as others.
You know what would really help this game? Fortune-tax!
(1% on everything above 5B, 2% 10B etc.)
I’m not sure I see how a structure tax would be a significant contributing factor to the slow crawl to wealth for players who are not yet established. Hitting faucets directly impacts players. Taxing infrastructure hits corporations as entities and alliances.
As a structure owner the tax that makes sense is one based on fuel. Fuel, whether you produce it yourself or buy it, costs ISK (one is an indirect cost in terms of not being able to sell the blocks while the other is a direct cost - but both are a cost). Additionally, a specific fuel bay could be added to Structures which can hold only a limited number of blocks making it feasible for someone who has left the game to have their structure removed when it runs out of fuel - corporate wallets have no easy restriction on them.
But like Black Pedro said: go after the source of the leak. There are plenty of small groups who are not rolling in ISK faucet income who would be paying the tax the ones directly sucking off the faucet should be paying.
I feel a large problem stems from the lack of low cost infrastructural items that I as lower income player would use to make my life generally easier and more profitable.
A lot of the ISK leaving the game in June was likely clawback from ghost trading. Now that we have Alphas you can’t simply assume that people who let their subscriptions lapse are no longer playing the game.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, it makes sense to me that Upwell would charge a fee to connect to their network. This connection should be optional but failure to do so would have consequences - perhaps only 1 reinforcement cycle like the Blood Raider shipyards.
Dialing back the bounties punishes the innocent as well as the guilty. CCP could achieve the same objective by adjusting the spawn rate of high end anomalies and reducing the number of escalations - both of which I believe have been mentioned. They could also adjust rat spawn timing within a site so a capital ship has no advantage in how fast it can clear the site.
A structure tax is another of those bad band aid attempts to solve the underlying fundamental design problems in EVE…
Its a horrible way to even begin to approach a solution. What is needed is CCP designing for scarcity in space. That means scaling the npc service prices, to allow player alternatives to grow from the competition. A huge one in this range is to make all the services to tiered in payment structure. A Base fee and percentage cost. These need to be inverse linked, so base fees go up and percentage down. Thus adding a scaling ISK sink, and the alternative to avoid it is to move to player owned structures or less populated locations.
Infinite slots and infinite spawning anoms, etc all the faucets are misblanced, and CCP forgot to design around supply and demand and ecosystem balance. Maybe because they got too focused on trying to add design that caused revenue stream increases, even though recently its design is just cannibalising the existing playerbase, and not really bringing new paying customers.
Right now, most ISK sinks target newer, less affluent players. NPC taxes on bounties, PI, market transactions, skillbooks, blueprints, etc… are all aimed at newer players in highsec while the ISK faucets are predominantly aimed at experienced players in riskier parts of space.
There is no mechanism to redistribute wealth so the rich get richer and the money supply grows. Any new sinks need to pull ISK from the wealthiest sectors of the economy.
A structure tax is a tax on the wealthy. Corporations will tax bounties or usage to raise the funds to pay it and those earning the most will pay the most.
Maybe it should take twice as long to copy capital or structure blueprints. Irrelevant for newer players but a big deal for some of the wealthier sectors.
A small increase in market transaction taxes would make a big difference for wealthier players but be virtually unnoticeable for newer players.
Rich players don’t accrue wealth through the game’s currency faucets (with the probable exception of people building things to insurance fraud them). The little guy creating something from nothing is the game’s primary source of inflation.
Players only do things because they want to get something out of it. Wealth redistribution cannot happen in a game like Eve without bigger players wanting to buy something from smaller players.
This isn’t going to help, it’s just going to price a lot of people out of operating structures at all.
The whole point of Citadels is that they’re supposed to be a big upfront cost for a bit more benefit, as opposed to POSes which had light upfront costs and heavier operating costs.
The problem with a sink like this is that it won’t actually solve the problem with Carrier Ratting as a faucet because most people who are Carrier ratting aren’t running a Citadel, or if they are it’s spread across multiple people. This still leaves us with the problem of Carrier ratting becoming way too good of a faucet relative to other options. Even if you introduce a sink that balances out the overall ISK in the economy that’s not actually fixing the issue if the value of Carrier ratting it outsized relative to the risk and other costs and compared to other ways of making ISK.
ISK enters the game through bounties, NPC buy orders (blue loot, tags…), incursions, insurance payouts and mission rewards. Bounties dominate by a huge margin.
Industrial activity, markets and wars move ISK between wallets but they don’t create or destroy it.
Corporations own structures and corporations can tax the bounties earned by their members to pay the upkeep for the structures.
Inflation is defined as the sustained increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.
By that definition the Eve economy is deflating. the consumer price index (CPI) has been trending downward since 2005.
The ISK to PLEX exchange rate is increasing steadily since PLEX is tied to the real world economy and is the only “limited” resource in the game. If your money supply is growing faster then your economy people will look for somewhere “safe” to store the excess cash - PLEX.
We need a way to slow down the growth in ISK to match the growth in the economy.
Either dial back the faucets or increase the sinks or both.
One of the key issues is CCP’s push to have players make and own everything in Eve. This has greatly reduced ISK sinks.
For example, PI and Fuel Blocks. Back in the day, the PI components of Fuel Blocks were NPC sold comodities. If we went back to that system, yes remove PI, and CCP sold the commodities at roughly the same rate they sell at now, each block would have an added ISK sink of 8.5k ISK. At 40 blocks per hour, that is a 250m isk/mo ISK sink, that structure owners wouldn’t see. It would however cost CCP all of the accounts that are dedicated to only PI.
This isn’t really correct though. When Citadel dropped CCP adjusted the Tax on orders from 1.5% to 2.5% and the effect was actually a quite stable ISK supply for a number of months until Carrier ratting got big and things went out of balance again.
You’re also assuming the same PI values as today, but the NPC products sold back then were less expensive than current PI goods are today, and those goods get sold on the market which takes some of the value away as market tax and broker fees.
The current problem is one of a new and very lucrative faucet being introduced with the Carrier rework, not a problem of not enough sinks.
You could argue we are playing Capitalism Online and as in the real world we will need regularly a Crisis to keep the machine running. The wars in EVE are currently not big enough (some people argue that is due to not enough incentives, I’d rather say that EVE encourages risk-aversity), so that doesn’t count. Also we all use the same currency, so no possiblities there either. Then we can’t make debts. This is a huge problem for Capitalism Online. Debts are an integral part of ruining parts of the machine to make sure the whole can survive. Etcpp.
The problem starts when people such as the Economic Advisors come from a school of economics in which they learn that Crisis are an accident and avoidable, that there would be something like a “healthy economy” which is based on profit.
We need a Economical Crisis in EVE and we need it now! CCPls introduce options to make Debts. @CCP_Quant
