Idea: Drain Jita (Or Eve, while we're at it)

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1

Hey guys,

I’ve been thinking.
over the last few days I have been reading a lot of chats and having a lot of discussion over how “safe” eve has become.
in short, we are sitting on piles of isk with little incentive to undock and put it to use. we even have faction titans now.
at the same time, there is little fear of losing stuff, for a replacement is easy to find.
It seems we are in short supply of Consequence.

So here’s a thought:
What would happen if, overnight, something like 25% of eve’s assets were to disappear?
I’m talking minerals, materials, goo, salvage, ships, items, ammo… name it. what if we would just take it off the markets and destroy it?

I have no idea how much people have in storage right now (probably a LOT) but what if we were able to drain eve sufficiently to induce some volatility? A lovely moment to try this would of course be in the time leading up to the moongoo changes, where I forsee stockpiles being strained quite a bit already.

And while we’re at it, since we’re here at MD, immagine the gains to be had if overnight everything would be in short supply…

EDIT the following is a horrible idea, but I’ll leave it in for kek.
/ Such a project is impossible if done by one person of course.
/ but this would be a great open ended IPO of sorts:
/
/ 1. raise funds to have Chribba or Grendell buy up enough of eve to destabilize the economy.
/ 2. ??? (Chaos)
/ 3. Profit
/
Tell me, have I lost my marbles or would this be awesome?

2

Remove the stuff on the market? I don’t see how someone buying what other people are willingly selling will somehow destabilize the economy. Can you explain?

Oh, btw, I have marbles to sell if you need some! :grin:

3

if you put it that way, it does seem silly indeed. damn you for making so much sense lol.
anyway, my reasoning was that if somehow we could strain stockpiles, we would see some more volatility and therby consequence of action. but you are right, the market is only a fraction. its imperative we factor in the stockpiles with a plan like this, disrupting the market supply would be the way to go.

4

I took your idea and wrote a whole page about it.

I mean … the idea all by itself is crap, but there’s room for fantasy and stretching it.

I’ll keep writing … :grin:

5

The solution your looking for is called perishable goods…

Something like minerals going poof after 3 months, or BPCs being useless after 10 weeks etc…

If CCP needs to add “sinks” they should do it right, and not some weird random stuff, that will just make players explode in rage…

NERF and NPC services, add scarecety in ALL of EVE, and consider some goods perishable… problem solved…

6

That would not fix the issue, though.

It would rather legitimize it.

7

What issue then? Try using some more words, if you have an opinion, mind reading is hard on the internets…

The problem OP posted is about oversupply, and I am pretty sure what I just suggested will resolve EXACTLY that…

1 Like
8

Well, I disagree with your approach of fixing oversupply. I don’t think you actually thought this through.

It would legitimize the reasons why oversupply happens. A better way to address this is by controlling player motivations, rather than the outcome of it. That’s all that I was saying. I was actually hesitating writing more, because it would just go off topic.

Plus it sounds like it would hurt people who can’t log in for certain periods of time, which wouldn’t be okay.

But even if you address that, it would still not fix the game. It would just mask out the issues until the next time something needs to be corrected.

Oversupply happens, when:

  • There’s not enough room: Too many people build too many items everywhere
  • There’s not enough consumption: the influx of items is much higher than demand
  • There’s not enough destruction: too many items go (back) into the market

One of the above, some of the above, or all of the above.

Your approach would only address “there’s not enough consumption”, because all it does is pretend to be consumption over time. It could literally be tied to a variable determined by measuring average consumption of any item over a period of n days or x weeks or whatever.

It would not fix “there’s not enough room” because of the high influx of new goods.

It would not fix “destruction”.

The idea of perishable goods, as great as it may sound at first thought, also isn’t technically feasable. CCP can’t track all items individually. You have to make concessions. It costs the cluster either production-time to follow all these items or it prolongs the downtime considerably.

And then the details as well. Track stacks as whole? What if they get split? Is it a fixed timer? Only track assembled goods? Do they just go poof, or does the timer reset when the item gets used, like a module or a ship? What is the psychological effect of the player knowing he has to use/consume an item, otherwise he will have wasted time/work/money ?

It’s easy to declare “perishable goods” as a solution, but I’d say that there are a lot of details missing. And simply adding “sinks” does nothing to actually fixing the game. It just masks the issues.

1 Like
9

Personally, i blame the concentration of Assets in Jita due to the fact every freaking Alliance and its parent dumping every asset it can into it. I mean whoever the hell is charge out of mapping out an alliance’s infrastructure has to be smart enough to figure out that it be cheaper to sell at the closest Market Hub, with Goons in Delve selling in Amarr as an Example since thats way closer. Sadly, this is the fault of poor planning on some of the alliances fault since they are taking advantage of what their local hubs offer.

10

[quote=“StarterrorPrime, post:9, topic:7896, full:true”]it be cheaper to sell at the closest Market Hub
[/quote]

That doesnt happen purely because other hubs have a LARGE disparity in availability, stocks, velocity, margins, and price points compared to jita.

If an alliance could dump it’s junk in jita on buy orders (which are, lets say, 10% higher than buy orders in the closest hub) instead of sell orders (which are 3 times that of jita) and do so wholesale (ungodly amounts faster than the other hub), all while still making isk compared to production or reprocessing value, why, pray tell, would they deign to use the closest market hub (if it’s not jita)? Cheaper taxes? Sure, probably because they’re also getting LESS isk overall.

11

As the OP suggested, or at least desires, is some way to remove stuff from market. I feel, while this may help, the current Economic situation is because of the fact that Caldari space is being subjected to an overinflux of trade as where others are stagnating with the exception of Amarr, due to alliance politcs.

12

Unfortunately, short of CCP itself going on a wholesale buying spree, there’s going to be exactly 0 ways to go about that.

13

Glad you think I have not thought this through… Its very cute and trolly statement. I have played this game for 15 years, and have done nothing but analyse the markets and the ecosystem of EVE.

Either you dont understand economy and ecosystems, or you have not thought this topic through yourself.

Creation and destruction cycles is the core of EVE, and it is supposed to “simulate” real life markets and ecosystems, and thus emergent geopolitics and social behaviors.

You on the top of your head claim that coding perishables is a problem is equally half finishies… If items had another entry with date of “birth/creation” and a state of longevity, thus expiration date, you would not need to check ALL items in a db to clear the items that are due to exit the game today. sorting a db by a variable and adding a function to then clear the ones with due date, is NOT a huge strain or demanding several more minutes of DT. Sounds like you basing your statements on technology levels back at EVE launch…

The fact that you dont understand that scarcety brings value to assets, space, characters and organisations, just shows you lack a modicum of grasp of economy 101.

We are in an age of Easy mode EVE, and anyone that has been around for longer than a year or 2 will be able to attest to that. This is a direct result of player requests and ccp catering to these requests. Usually because CCP forgot to check their macroeconomics and ecosystem science books, or someone in there said “but its just a game, its supposed to be fun”, and well even though that is partly true, a game of chess does not become more fun if both sides just have 16 queens. The Titans4Everyone era is what si killing EVE, because if everyone is equal no one ever wins.

14

oh, so now saying that you weren’t thinking this through, which you obviously weren’t, is trolling. could you step off of that high horse of yours and stop being butthurt about someone who writes an actually proper post, which explains why your simple oneliner isn’t actually a fix? and your decade long experience doesn’t change anything about how your idea is not thought out at all and ignores the actual issues.

you don’t even understand my points. for some reason i triggered your ego and your high horse can’t deal with it, so you call me a troll, despite actually properly making it obvious that your approach isn’t a good idea and won’t work technically anyway. and then you project your cluelessness onto me, by declaring that i don’t understand what you said. Nonsense, I do! That’s why i know that your idea is bad!

i agree on the last part. that you don’t see that your “fix” doesn’t actually solve the issue isn’t my problem. it’s a bandaid at best, making it look like the problem is fixed, while ignoring reality around both the issue and the bandaid. i’ve tried explaining you why it doesn’t, but apparently you chose to ignore it and go the “dude i just know better, DONT DISRESPECT MUH AUTHORITYYY” route. so while we mostly agree, is your idea of introducing scarcity by giving items timebombs simply not well thought out at all. it’s a bad idea.

if you can’t not be butthurt, just don’t waste time replying.

if you need the last word to feel better, then please have it and i’ll just not reply. that way i don’t risk your sensible ego being triggered and i avoid your immature behaviour.

Deal? or do you want to try again?

thanks. vOv

and just to make this even clearer than it already is: you’re not wrong per se, but your fix isn’t actually going to fix things. it will not fix oversupply. you did not think this through and your 15 years of experience don’t change that at all. and your assumptions that i don’t know what’s causing this is far off, but you can’t see that from the horse you’re sitting on.

So, try again?

15

AWESOME you guys here are braining on a level that far exceeds my ridiculous plan (Durrrr lets go buy up Jita that will show 'em)

while in the process I see you have triggered a bit more than purely cognitive excellence, let me say that the points that are being raised so far are definitely making sense to me.

Perishable goods - the idea that certain items don’t live forever. if I give my own spin on this, lets look at things like building materials: you need em fresh if you want to build something sturdy. no one is gonna build a titan with a few rusty nails. Could even tie the effectiveness of the item being built to the type of materials being used, lets say variable bill of materials: different balances and uses of items will have different outcomes in strength.

Not enough room - Not sure I agree. There is a lot of space. maybe not in terms of a lion needing a backyard of 50 miles to have his daily morning workout, but definitely enough to clash with one another. personally I am still having serious issues with the jump CD timers, this took a lot of speed out of a game that already moves at a glacial pace.
Oh, I see now you are talking about room on the market. sure, you can get everything, everywhere, always. this calls for a few good supply chain tragedies (more on that later)

Not enough consumption/Destruction - Yes I am connecting these together. Risky airspace makes people dead. dead people buy things (only in eve though, in RL dead people are very much dead). So right now production has become a lot safer (yay citadels) and the result is that everyone is fitting officer mods on blockade runners “for lolz” (ok not everyone but it sounds nice). I think CODE is focusing on the wrong audience, I just don’t really fear moving around the major tradehubs anymore. granted, it has become a lot harder with all the offshore hubs going on.

The point of alliances responsible for Jita is a bit more complex in my eyes, Jita has been Jita since forever, therefore people go to jita. it is also the only real marketplace for moongoo, making it a must stop for everything related. Also, good alliances have the logistics in place to survive being besieged for long periods on end, which usually means either a healthy market, a good production cycle, lots of contracts, SRP, or all of the above.

Now an important thing to keep an eye on is to not feel victimized by game mechanics. Sure, if only CCP would have done X instead of Y, we’d be spinning our ships clockwise instead of counterclockwise. but I do believe there is in fact a lot we can do ourselves. To find out what to do, it is very helpful to point out what the problem is, which is what you all have been doing very effectively. so keep at it! from there we can start talking solutions, even in microscale. oh and be nice, I think we all desire the same thing.

16

Simple idea : make Jita and Perimeter low sec. Problem solved, content created. If it will be FW space - even better.

17

My guess is that it’s not buying stuff what should do the trick but holding(or trashing) this stuff instead of letting it back to market.

This way ISK stays in economy buy goods don’t.

Maybe this was an idea?

The problem with this is that when items are repackaged and stocked they do not have their unique IDs. The whole stock has it’s ID, type of items and number of items only.

This makes it impossible to track lifetime of each item.

18

There really is next to nothing we as players can do in the current game design environment. CCP have added so many economic and ecosystem “mistakes” into that game, that the interdependencies and reasonings for wars and any PVP is dwindling if not completely lost. The only thing left is for “gud fites”…

The reason Jita exists is because “IT CAN”… People like convenience, and market hubs will always arise natturally. The problem in EVE is that CCP have not designed for proper supply and demand, there is no real way or incentives to comepete with Jita, the upsides are not big enough, and the logistics and work load to build “competing hubs” is near impossible. (Exceptions being local service for null entities, but these are not public markets)…

To mention just one good example of where CCP “Broke the economy” I will mention how industry slots are handled today, after the now not so “new” industry system was introduced. In the past there used to be a limited number of slots, in stations, and in POS for that matter, and public slots would always be plugged. There was no changes in prices for use, so there was no disincentive to just plug things forever, even if it was just to “reserve” the slot. The first solution CCP tried was queues, that helped a little, but still the slot wait was a huge issue for player, and again the price was still pretty much static. Then we got the new infinite slots system, and now everyone can build and research at all times. SO the plug problem is gone, but now so is any chance of competion. CCPs solution then is some crazy industry index, which really only force people to spread out, but in a way that feels forced, and with little to no influence on how to work around the problem. Add to this, the irony that now when we can finally build structures that can rent out services, CCP has services ad infinitum, this mean NO competition, not on slots, not on price not on any economic method.

tldr: CCP destroyed the economy, with a bad solution to an actual problem.

The real solution to any of these related problems is to ALWAY look at handing over supply and demand controls to players. For service slots the NPC “backup” should be a dynamic changing price, with 2 parts a base fee and a percentage fee, just like most real life brokerages. The base fee goes up with high activity, and the percentage goes down. This would “force” players to look for a player created alternative to the service. The result would be HUBs for markets, and building etc would be created, and that would make these structures a potential target for contesting. This is the way to make emergent gameplay.

Scarcety, bottlenecks, and limitations is the most important factors to supply and demand, and that is the core of what makes EVE unique, it is the conflict driver. Without it, we have League of Legends in space.

19

This is very true… But I never claimed that items that are stackable should be perishables…

My suggestions would be to make things like BPCs perishables, and boosters from drops like the events. Make them NOT stackable… and NOT tradable on SCC market, but only in contracts.

20

In this case there will be little to no effect of this mechanics.

Is it really a problem if it’s there too many BPCs? Or events results?

I guess the main offender here would be minerals or ships/modules.