For need of ISK Sinks, Tax online Structures

So here is a dumb question, why not limit light fighter damage application to BC and bigger at BS class DPS and heavy fighter damage application to capital ships and structures at higher DPS? Thus making hitting frigates in anomolies impossible with light fighters, and all sub-caps impossible with heavy fighters.

Because those sorts of arbitrary hard restrictions aren’t how Eve works, for one.

Two, the whole point of Carriers and Light Fighters is that they’re effective against Sub Caps. It doesn’t make sense for them to be arbitrarily unable to hit subcap targets in PvP but not in PvE.

I didn’t say they could not hit PVE targets but still hit PVP targets. I am saying, through the use of tracking speed and relative velocity, that a capital ship should have a tough time applying full damage to a small target. It could generate a state where it takes much longer to clear a site due to having issues taking out small fast targets.

Carriers already apply nothing like full damage to Frigates. In fact the only thing they apply full damage to with both Missiles and Cannons is Battleships. The thing is that the PvE frigates are calibrated for a Battleship so even though they’re not applying full damage it’s still not hard for them to kill those Frigates.

Getting them into a state where they can’t deal with the Frigates and Cruisers in a PvE site easily would make them worthless against anything smaller than a Battleship in PvP, and that’s not the role CCP wants them to fill. It’s also not the role they’re currently filling, so changing that dramatically would create quite a bit of outrage among Carrier pilots, considering how people reacted to the original set of Carrier nerfs right after the original rework, when Carriers were stupidly OP.

Debt would not remove ISK from the game - it simply shuffles it around. Same with war. Only way to remove ISK is to give it to NPCs - taxes, LP stores, etc…

Of course not, but you don’t need to remove ISK from game to create the necessary Crisis. It is exactly what I’m saying: ISK sinks we have now are not enough, even with some more taxes here and there. You need a system in which you can artificially bloat the economy and then have a nice juicy Crisis. I mean, if you want “the economy” to run.

The problem is elsewhere I suppose and I was wrong before, comparing EVE too much with the real world: in fact this is a closed system and the problem never is “too much ISK”, but rather the drastic imbalance of wealth distribution, which is a problem of and for the playerbase and needs to be adressed in a way that re-distribution becomes possible. Stations and personal wallets should not be safe. There needs to be a risk for warehousing and collecting money.

ISK, in fact any currency, is simply a medium of exchange; you accept in in exchange for something you have because you trust that you will be able to exchange it for something of equivalent value that you need. If this trust is broken the economy collapses back to a barter economy until a new medium of exchange achieves trust.

In a real world economy, uncontrolled growth in the money supply will inflate the price of goods and services because demand exceeds supply. In Eve that doesn’t happen because there is no scarcity - goods are massively overproduced and the CPI is actually declining.

The excess supply of ISK moves to PLEX - the only “safe haven” investment in the game and the price of PLEX, denominated in ISK, has been rising steadily as long as I have been playing the game.

The danger is that this threatens the trust relationship. If it continues, we’ll get to the point where players say - “I won’t accept ISK - payment in PLEX only!”

Large in-game events like wars and the upcoming refinery release can redistribute a lot of ISK. People who anticipate the event and prepare are handsomely rewarded. These tend to be the people who are already rich!

New blueprints for the refineries will sink a some ISK but reimbursement for the POS will likely put a lot more back into the game.

Higher taxes isn’t a magic bullet but, coupled with reduced bounties, you have at least moved your foot from the accelerator to the brake pedal!

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I agree with you on most points. Rapidly rising PLEX prices are undisputably an issue and CCP is aware of that. They have tried to intervene with the early recompensation for smaller amounts of AUR. I don’t play the game for long enough to remember PLEX prices of 500m ISK, but I have to assume it was much harder to acquire 1 ISK 2006 than it is today and players still seem to be able to grind for PLEX. It becomes a problem when we nerf income of newer and less rich players, because then we might actually lose a bunch of those.

I don’t see people moving to PLEX as the universal exchange, simply because game mechanics make it a hell more difficult to set up contracts than to put down market orders. At least not unless the PLEX price suddenly start rising in extreme ways. Holding PLEX over a period of some years will surely net you a profit, but it is not efficient in any way if you compare it to even the basic forms of market trading. Just a nice passive income if you don’t want to get involved.

The thing is that noone has to pay any kind of maintenance cost other than PLEX/subscription just to “keep them alive”. Every maintenance of POSes or structures is spreadsheeted into projected profits - may they be short-term or strategic investments. Taxing that is not wrong, but it doesn’t solve the issue with massive ISK faucets. You don’t really hit the break, you just accelerate at a lower level.

The biggest issue seems to be for the small and medium level producers. Introducing scarcity now might further put pressure on them, while the monopolists will probably survive.

That’s why I think the only solution is putting an additional tax on wallet ISK and warehousing PLEX. Make it like it is/was in some countries so that greater personal wealth gets taxed higher. You would need to limit the wallet of Alpha players of course, so offshoring gets harder. It might also raise the CPI because people would try have less liquid ISKs and thus be happy to buy goods.

An example:
Player A has 500b ISK in her wallet. She needs to pay 5% monthly tax on that, forcing her to get an income of 5b ISK to not lose any money. She makes 20b a month, so she doesn’t really care. Or, she decides to lower her active ISK by going to Jita and buying loads and loads of ships, until she reaches 300b, at which point she only pays 3%.

Player B has 20b ISK in his wallet. He doesn’t pay any taxes on that, but he knows once he gets more than 100b he will have to start paying taxes on wealth. Now he can plan his EVE career accordingly. Sustaining a huge amount of ISK will be a lot of work, so he might be better off buying ships and playing the game in different ways.

Player C currently has 70b in her wallet, 100b in buyorders and 50b in assets (I know, not very realistic). 40% of the month she will have 100b in her wallet, so she will pay 2/5 of 1% on that 100b.

Player D is hoarding PLEX and has to pay, too.

This isn’t the problem either. Money that just sits in a wallet isn’t doing anything and doesn’t affect the economy either.

A few people with trillions of ISK won’t have a big impact on the economy. The problem is when a large swath of players suddenly see their income jump up relative to the playerbase as a whole.

I fear you didn’t get much of what I said. Are you even playing this game?

Yes, I am. Maybe you just didn’t explain it very well?

Or maybe you are unable to understand. I don’t care. If you have any own opinion to share on the topic, be it a precise and well argumented position on the problem or even possible solutions, I’m happy to read them. Otherwise I’ll also read your ongoing platitudes… with increasing boredom.

Well, I’m not here for your entertainment.

How about you try and explain better what you meant by:

If not the significant reduction of the funds held by people with huge personal stashes of money.

If that is, in fact, what you meant then there’s a rather significant problem with your reasoning. The players with very high personal values, on the order of the 100b you mentioned in one of your other posts, are generally gaining wealth across multiple accounts and by trading on the market. For a smart one of these players quite a bit of their wealth is tied up in market orders at any given time, to the point where I know several people whose personal wealth yo-yos by at least 50b based on what state their market portfolio is in at the moment.

On top of that taxing wallet ISK massively punishes players who aren’t actively playing, and thus not actively contributing to inflation since they’re neither earning ISK nor significantly imposing demand on the market.

Overall taxing wallet ISK is a ridiculous and flawed notion.

It also completely misses the problem here. There is one outsized ISK faucet spread over a large number of players that’s currently creating problems. Prior to that spike, and after the Citadel expansion changed the market tax, the overall ISK level in the game was relatively stable for months.

The only thing that needs to be fixed is that faucet. We don’t need some grand change or new sink here.

It will be interesting to see the impact of the new moon mining on the flow of ISK. Not to individuals so much as to corporations and alliances that hold significant moon mining POSes. The activity of passive mining to active mining of the resource should make for some interesting PvP opportunities.

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The PvP angle is interesting but purely hypothetical at this point.

It’s somewhat unlikely this will significantly impact the flows of ISK though. Moons will still largely be Alliance and Corp level assets. Groups will just need to convince/bribe their miners into collecting the stuff now.

Hence why it will be interesting to see.

I don’t think it will be very interesting. Reason one: the people that get hit hard by these changes are lowsec groups. Increasing the effort to make money out of them, is a nerf to their income, thus to their capabilities to PVP. Now if you hold an Moon, for instance a Cadmium moon, you will make 500M ISK a month from it at the very max. To actually get the ISK in your wallet, you need to acquire and transport both the fuel and the minerals from/to markets. Many haters said that this is too passive, but the reality is that you put a number of hours into that each month while still having to maintain relative control of the area. These hours should absolutetly be better compensated (because you have to dominate through PVP enough to keep them) than the average shitty lowsec PVE content, but they barely are, even now. So either less time or less ISK for lowsec groups - equals less PVP.

Reason two… hunting and protecting miners, there is nothing interesting about it. It is already happening and gets old rather quickly. Sure there will be one or the other cool gank while people mining their r64 minerals, but that will be it.

Reason three: increasing overall boredom in this game by introducing even more forms of mind-numbing repetetive tasks is doing no good for this game as a whole and surely not its PVP.

You mean by lowering the influx of free2players who only play to consume content, only want to hoard isk/stuff and play as if it’s an arcade?

I have an idea that could be beneficial regarding to this problem.

Currently Concord pays all bounty even in null (leading to carrier ratting become a problem) but why exactly? Concord only operates in hi-sec, they may care about the low-sec perimeters but sov-space is definitely not their problem.
My idea is reducing the bounty payed by Concord in null to 10%, but at the same time allow the sov holders to pay part of or all the remaining 90% or even more.
As a result the ISK printing is reduced by a lot, while sov holders can pay the small people to increase their systems’ defense rating. You may even send your people to enemy territory to kill rats and get paid by the enemy. Or set up a trap by increasing the bounty a lot to lure people there.

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Nah, how would that impact NPC Null?

No, best is to simply lower the spawn rate in Sov Null. The base should be identical to NPC null with the Detection arrays increasing it up to %75 the current max boost. They should also see about adding attrition to Null Sec NPCs so it is possible to kill the golden goose by over farming and thus requiring more space to do it in.