If you try to make a corp or alliance that has a name already taken or fails for some other reason, it pulls the ISK from your wallet, then refunds it right away.
Edit: Would be funny for a bunch of people to fail alliance creation over and over and make it the number one sink and faucet for a month 
Iâm pretty sure that not only is CCP fully aware, but that this completely intentional. As are all the consequences. CCP doesnât need a vibrant game. They just need enough occasional âbiggest PVP fight in historyâ events to keep recruiting new players. Obviously this is a fatal strategy, which suggests that this is part of their grand plan to decommission EVE as profitably as possible, a plan in full effect.
Are you planning to mention the ISK removed by deleted chars / assets in future?
I have heard of two big traders, who have deleted their accounts with around 1T and 1.8T ISK liquid and all the assets are not included yet.
And the guy who has blown up his Golden Magnate! Is this ship calculated as 1 ISK or as a classic T1 Magnate? Or is how do you rate its value?
That would be part of the âactive isk deltaâ though that also includes inactive accounts, but it wouldnât include non-isk assets. Would be interesting if we got a more thorough breakdown of that, though I suppose only the isk part is typically very significant.
This is a bit too much tinfoil ⌠but I think itâs more like a situation we have in the real world, some entities became âtoo big to failâ. CCP canât afford to really piss off the big powers to make most of their players (and whales) quit or create massive public negative noise about the game. I get the impression, they donât know how to break up the situation without risking the health of the company.
This economic report is the strongest case Iâve seen thusfar for letting the reins on mechanical design go a bit in favour of introducing entropy and cataclysm mechanisms into New Eden.
Kinda funny, exactly as the good doctor once extrapolated when asked.
If he got insurance payout of any amount then it would actually be an isk faucet.
The situation itself is risking the health of the company. Or it would be if the only things CCP actually seem to be excited about are the projects that have nothing to do with EVE. Licensing custom software and such. Seems to me that CCP just wants to become the ID Software/Unreal of VR. Not having to have a full staff, but have a ridiculously profitable product that requires very little maintenance to sustain. Not having to deal with whining players. CCP reported record profits last year, even though EVE has had record low TCU. It sounds like they can afford to let EVE die, and that it might make make the company itself more profitable to do so. The nullsec deathspiral has been going on for a long long time, and the @CCP_Seagull plan has done and will do nothing but cement and accelerate it. EVEâs long term future isnât as long term as its past.
CCP = EvE. They try to get a foot into other businesses but none of those can keep the company of current size and value alive. EvE Online is generating the cash, so they must keep it alive and profitable to fund other divisions.
For how much longer? Like I said, record profits with record low player counts. It sounds like they are already turning a hefty profit licensing VR. Look at EVE Updates. Is there anything in there that doesnât fall under the âjoin > MT > fleet fight > quitâ umbrella? When was the last expansion that reflected a EVE4eva goal rather than EVE4now? The fact that escalating stagnation is built in to every step of the @CCP_Seagull plan is especially what makes me think itâs deliberate.
And I guess in terms of the OP, the MER makes a lot more sense when you view it in terms of CCP knowing that EVE is temporary. It doesnât matter of the economy is broken, itâs not going to be inherited by a future generation anyway.
Hm, there is too much being mixed-up here. Any MMO usually is owned by a company. Such a company employs people, lets call them employees. These people can find other jobs if needed. But maybe they like their job, due to their cool colleaques and the general swag of the game, not to mention a lovely playerbase (not sure if Iâm talking about EVE here). Nevertheless their influence in âkeeping the game aliveâ is limited. If the company(CEO/board) who owns the game for any reason decided its capital would be better off invested elsewhere, it is not something employees can usually change. The reasons for such a decision can be manifold, but one exemplary one would be failure to grow profits. Certain games might barely be able to sustain their basic cost (wages, taxes, offices, server etc.) with player subscriptions and directly game-affiliated sales and they have another horse in the stable, of some kind.
An great influx of players, new subscriptions etc. would of course do very good for the company and in the end the game itself, but here as well the influence of employees is limited. Not only does a game need to break news every so often, but it needs its players to be the number one advertisement, both in and out of game. While many people stream and use all kinds of social media to make a game visible, any game must also deliver on promises such as âendless possibilitiesâ, âgreat communityâ, âlotâs of funâ and so on. Even more so, if a game is not really a game, but a political/economical simulator with aspects of gaming.
Some games can and some games canât deliver on the aforementioned promises. Or they can only to a specific type of players. If you have a core stable userbase and mostly make game-mechanic decisions in their favor, these decisions in general will mean less attractiveness to new players: even if frustration can be a motivation to get active, leaving no visible way to work yourself out of that in any reasonable time, turns frustration into giving up and leaving. This problem rises with the age of any such simulator game, as the unequality will rise. Slogans like âHarden the â â â â upâ fail to work once this is nothing but an invitation to join a game you not only can never win, but your entire experience will be losing, losing, losing with only the occasional nice person you meet (and usually hear them talk how bad it all has become) as a ray of sunlight until the moment you meet someone who has less power than you and make them lose as well. To realize what that means one would have to accept that certain games are not one game, but a number of games knit together as a simulator. To have fun and good experiences in some of the game-parts of the simulator will not provide for long-term dedication if the general simulator-experience is too frustrating. Being a poor person who is â â â â â â -over by the rich is something many people can already experience in real life, why should they pay for the same experience online?
Another topic is the game culture. âGreat communityâ means something different for everyone. If blatant mysoginy is accepted part of a games culture for instance, youâll less likely be succesful in gaining a significant amount of women as customers. Same for any kind of hate culture. A game culture centered around entertainment might not appeal too much to lone wolfs who prefer not being forced to communicate too much. If a game is culturally too much either âyoungâ or âoldâ youâll again less likely find customers of the other side. Finding the golden egg in the middle is hard if not impossible.
But, and now specifically to EVE and what you said @mkint: if you want EVE4eva you might need to re-think how that is even possible. Maybe EVE4now is the only way to sustain and not because some employees made mistake, but because of the impossibility to make the old version of EVE4eva a good experience for everyone. Currently it is like inviting people to take part in an arms race versus the US, while the invitees are technologically and economically still in the Stone Age. Sure they might be able to hit someone with a stick once in a while and they will feel great about their phyrric victory, but in the end theyâll realize they will never be able to even nearly catch up.
Maybe CCP never anticipated EVE being such a long term project, thus not taking long term effects into account and failing to plan the necessary purge, to even the field. Or maybe the players found ways around that. No matter what, if a game cannot renew itself, a game is no more.
CCP is no longer EVE. Everything else is SQL, reporting & fiscal projections with a touch of keeping a knife behind your back due to venture dependancies. How old are the original team? Itâs only natural they want to go and spread their wings - remember the drama party of Incarna? That was exactly this, just within EVE and over its back. So keep in mind, things could be much worse 
Truth be told, moving on is not something we can blame them for.
The thing is, CCP is part of the village, whether the venture model suits it or not. Combined with the strict mechanical design and accumulated human behaviour this results in missing things outside of the statistics.
As I said elsewhere, everything reflected in the Economic Reports over the past two years looks fine from a statistical perspective. From a strict viewpoint of econometrics also. Itâs only when you add the remaining human sciences that it becomes visible how unstable the pattern is. EVE has no entropy, and behaviour isnt just hemmed in by mechanical design, also by players who have seen it all, done it all, mapped it all out - up to and including themselves.
Itâs perhaps a little funny, but New Eden quite strongly reflects group & sectoral flows of Iceland prior to that little banking issue. Weâve seen indications of CCP intervening a few times, but a big question is whether they can see players intervening just as hard. Damocles would be having a ball.
Which time ?
The customer is always kunt.