This is a stronger argument. I didn’t consider that there would be people hoarding ISK to cover collateral for hauling contracts. You’re right, you’d get hit the most. I could foresee a situation where players like yourself would purchase a bunch of plex the day before the wealth tax hits, and then sells it back into ISK afterwards. (I’m not saying this is a good thing, I’m just thinking through the effects of my idea).
I don’t think there is a perfect solution to it, because there seems to always be some people who get hit a little bit harder than others do. For example:
If this was the solution, then players who do a lot of market transactions would be getting hit harder than players who do hauling contracts.
Yup. Nor should you expect it to be staying level. To be staying level, there would need to be ISK sinks that actually balance the faucets. There never really have been, though. To make matters worse, what you really want is sinks that impact the people with idle ISK, while faucets go to those who are actively engaging with the rest of the players and the economy, and that is the kind of sociological and economic manipulation that CCP can’t even begin to undertake.
But you did ask what an ‘organic’ shrinkage of the money supply would look like, and in the current game, that’s what it would mean.
As for the health of the game… yeah, if the people dropping inactive are the ones who aren’t really doing anything, and whose ISK isn’t doing anything? That’s perfectly healthy for the game. Someone logging into the client to chat, check mail, and maybe occasionally update their PI while they sit on trillions isn’t helping the game by logging in. They’re just inflating the ISK supply numbers.
No, because money supply shrinkage doesn’t actually have any deflationary pressure in EVE. Ship production is already at a razor-thin profit margin. As small miners have dropped off, demand over the last year has taken 1 unit of Trit from ~3.7 to ~4.35 per unit. That’s an increase of 18%, and that’s the major cause of everything else going up in price. Most of that’s come, completely unsurprisingly, in the two waves of increased fighting in null—destruction driving demand.
What you need to address is the large multi-boxing (and, let’s face it, mostly AFK, if not outright botting) mining fleets in highsec. Because you need the small miners to get back into the game, and you need them to be able to make money. Why do you need small miners? Because you need competition. That’s what provides your downward pressure. One guy tossing a billion trit up there and letting it ride for 3 months… he’s not doing that because it won’t sell. Prices may dip below his line, but he knows the demand is sufficient to move his product.
How do we know that? Because you don’t get to where you’re moving a billion trit in a single order by not being successful on the market. If that’s where the big fish thinks the market’ll keep selling his trit, he’s got reason to believe that.
Oh, god, no, they’re not helping ISK maintain its purchasing power at all. Money supply is not determining prices. Money supply never determines prices in EVE, because money is functionally infinite in EVE. Demand is determining prices, and how that demand compares to the production levels being seen… as it always does.
Prices are high because suppliers are not supplying. Some of that is because they’ve just left the game. Some of it is because the added nonsense CCP put into things like capital ships has just made the ability to move certain product crash. And some of it is because the results of the economic shakeup has broken the bottom of the economic food chain, and you’re starting to see the results of that.
It all comes back to Trit. Supplies, demand, and prices. It’s all about Trit.
No, because the impact of player-owned markets that’s critical isn’t ‘who’s getting hit with transaction fees’, but rather 'those fees don’t leave the money supply. They go into someone else’s wallet. Player-owned markets significantly reduce one of the main ISK sinks there is.
EDIT: Here, lemme give you an example of what I mean about money supply not being a significant factor in determining prices:
When CCP redid what was necessary to build capital ships, prices jumped. Prices jumped because there were more inputs needed, and those all cost ISK to make. But nobody was willing to spend that much for capital ships, because they knew what the actual value of those ships was—not in terms of ISK, mind you, the actual value was determined in terms of utility and survival: how long they could be used before they were probably dead. Dreadnoughts, for example, are pretty much assumed to be dead as soon as they jump. That’s what they’re for. Faxes too, they’re basically ablative meatshields for bigger things.
So, nobody was willing to buy. Demand was there, but not at the price point the sellers wanted. Did prices come down to meet the point where the available money, the money people were willing to spend on capitals, would flow again? Nope. Why not?
Because they couldn’t. Because it actually cost more to make the damned things than basically anyone was willing to spend. Didn’t matter how much the sellers wanted to lower their prices, they couldn’t afford to. And a lot of them stopped building capitals. They stopped playing, entirely. Which meant a bunch of the demand for minerals wasn’t there, and the smaller miners (the ones who actually need to move product because that’s their actual game play, as opposed to the AFK multi-boxers who tend to have more assets and more liquid, and can ride out market shocks) ended up not able to really do anything… so a bunch of them left, too…
Massively rich supercapital producers dropped off the money supply chart. You can see it on the chart, in Sept 2019 with the Blackout, and continuing into the economic overhaul. That huge drop, and then… flat, as all of the ISK faucets don’t do much more than keep up with the people dropping out.
No downward pressure on prices. Because for the most part, nobody in EVE is posting huge margins. So there’s no room for prices to drop, and there’s no ‘you have to eat’ to force spending.
Bots don’t complain. They’re bots. The people who complained about excessive ganking were mostly the freighter pilots.
However, you’re not going to make the game ‘inconvenient’ for mass-multiboxers who are already breaking the TOS by botting.
Generally, the only thing ‘inconvenience’ does is make actual players angry, because it inevitably involves more tedious nonsense. It’s textbook ‘bad complexity’ where you have to jump through more hoops to do the same thing, as opposed to the ‘I have more options that each allow me more control and/or a wider variety of rewards’, of ‘good complexity’.
No, nothing so drastic if done properly - read in a simplest way possible. Just a plain %ISK removal daily during reboot, very uniform and steady. The effect is just to scale money, making it more expensive. Essentially an anti-inflation procedure, intended to keep the average prices stable - if the “tax” rate is normalized to average total of all goods or some such measure. Could be easier to handle than adjusting bounties and mission payouts manually every month (following economy reports, more precise but unrealistic) or a year (12x less work but questionable convergence of the process) an alternative would be some kinda automation to reprocess payouts daily (ideally), but that would also be way more complex. So, just plain %isk removal daily to keep global totals about level might be the easiest way to handle the inflation disballance.
But yeah, it’s a complex topic (economically). Irl we have all the many entities adjusting to inflation in parallel. In-game CCP has to do it manually for all the npc faucets, or assume some ISK recalibration control.
None of which impacts how people react to losing money, as outlined above.
No, it will not work. You can pose all the theoretical ‘oh, this is how we do the mechanics’, but what matters is how players respond.
And we’ve seen how they respond to things like that: They go play some other game that doesn’t punish them for, you know, playing. And once those habits change, and they find a thing they enjoy… they don’t come back, because they’re already doing something they enjoy.
ETA:
IRL we also can’t have 1/3 of the entire population just decide ‘nope, I’m gonna go live on some other world’. Which is what happened in '19 with the Blackout and economic overhaul.
Yes we should be. Rapidly rising total isk is a contributor to inflation. Honestly a big fix and controller this is to curb large isk injectors like events commodities and ratting in terms of isk and replace them with items that need to go through the market and NOT be sold to npc orders.
Yeah this sounds reasonable. I think comparisons made between this idea and operation blackout are unfair. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people wouldn’t even notice it if the percentage was small.
Then you’re a fool. Either CCP will tell people it’s happening, in which case they’ll get mad, or CCP won’t tell people it’s happening, in which case, they’ll get madder.
EDIT: Here, let me lay out why thinking people won’t notice is foolish (and yes, I know you say ‘a lot of people’, but ‘a lot of people’ aren’t the ones you need to worry about):
Let’s say this change goes live without CCP telling everyone ahead of time.
People look at their wallets to see if they have the money to buy something, and notice that the running total on their transaction log has a sudden and unexplained drop. Or a drop that’s ‘explained’ by ‘anti-inflation tax’ or some similar nonsense. Well what the hell is that? Pretty soon, someone’s asking that question on these forums, and on reddit, and on the various discords CCP’s customer service team are on. Hard-working, honest people like @CCP_Convict and @CCP_Swift .
So, do those CCPs answer the question? That’s gonna make people mad. Do they not answer the question? That’s gonna make more people madder, and the longer they don’t answer, the more people will get more angry.
Next, let’s point out that in order for this to work, it also has to affect corporation and alliance wallets, or people just start storing their money in 1-man corp wallets.
Well, that means it’s gonna hit the large null groups (who are the people you NEED it to hit, anyway, mind you). And the large null groups have teams of people whose jobs, by and large, is ‘keep an eye on that number’. And more than just teams of people, they’ve got their own 3rd-party tools for keeping an eye on that number and tracking where the money goes, because this is EVE, where embezzlement is a thing you have to watch out for.
So they’ll notice. Do you think they won’t go to reddit? Of course they will. And now once again, the hue and cry is going up and people are getting mad.
Then, we add in the next fun level: the CSM exists. If this change goes live and the CSM knows nothing about it… expect tables to get flipped, top to bottom. CSMs will resign en masse, posting to reddit about it, and CCP will take a huge PR hit in the actual gaming news media, because not only do the CSMs know the guys who write for Kotaku, MMORPG, Massively, etc about EVE… a lot of those guys are in the large null blocs. That’s if the CSM doesn’t know.
If the CSM does know… I don’t expect it to leak, but I do expect the CSM members—some of whom, every year, are on those ‘watching the wallets’ teams from across nullsec—to just happen to advise alliance leaders to put in place measures to offset it, like ordering those same finance guys to set up large buys on items where the market value can be quickly manipulated. And then, the very moment the change goes live… they’ll take advantage the best they can, and go telling everyone about it if CCP hasn’t.
They’ll also position themselves on the ‘we told CCP not to take your money’ position and there’ll be a great hue and cry that’ll basically end up a major black eye on CCP with the community.
In every permutation of this, people leave the game over it. In every permutation, player trust in CCP is damaged. In every freaking permutation, this is bad for the game. Not because of the economic math… but because people behave like people. Always.
I admire Arrendis for having the patience to even argue about such a colossal nonsense…
Taking “a small percentage” of everyone’s wallet every month is an idea that may only feel attractive to someone never having any ISK capital worth mentioning. Say, you’ve got 1B in your wallet and have to pay 10M tax? No biggie, you do a lvl4 mission or two and you’re back to your 1B. One hour of your gametime, two tops. But I’ve got 100B in my wallet and have to pay 1B tax. Now that is something different, right? My monthly tax would be the same as your whole wallet. How long did it take you to accumulate your 1B? And you’d expect me to take a hit like that every month? Why? Because I’ve been playing longer or because I’m better at making and/or saving ISK?
I’m not a bittervet who threatens to leave the game over every minor change… actually, ever since I started playing, I have never left the game, not even after the major changes - always found a way to make ISK and prosper. I love this game… but if a tax like that (or a “storage fee” for having one’s stuff stored in stations, which is another dumb idea fairly often floated around the forums) was introduced, I would have to sadly leave to never come back.
Because nothing would change the simple fact that the more successful you are in making/accumulating ISK, the harder you are punished for that. And that’s something even resilient players like me would’t tolerate.
The game would stop making sense on the most basic level.
And I think you’re ignoring, or simply never paid attention to, how people—especially people in EVE—behave. Again, you can argue the theory all you like. I’m telling you what has happened. Over, and over again. Consistent patterns. You know, the observed data that good theories are built on?
Even the best economists in the world will tell you that a fair chunk of the time, economists don’t know WTF they’re talking about, because they try to treat economics as a hard science, when really, it’s a sociological science. It’s all about human behaviors, not mathematics.
All ISK-sinks should at least try to cover up as “service fees”, be it for using the market, NPC stations, clone bays or whatever. Just deleting ISK from someones account because he has it, will feel ilke theft and punishment to the players.
I personally see a lot of room to reduce ISK-generation by changing the rewards certain NPCs drop more towards tradeable goods and cosmetic stuff that might be valuable for other players, so for running sites/anos a larger part of peoples rewards will be “other players ISK” and not newly created NPC ISK. Also there is a lot of room for increasing or creating ISK sinks, as long as the payment offers some kind of return and the players can made the decision volunatry to pay for some kind of “service” or not.
The real issue isn’t reducing the ISK supply. ISK supply’s ultimately meaningless in terms of economic health. The economy can be healthy and everyone making a decent amount of money even if there’s higher inflation as long as there’s demand. That’s why CCP’s recent tax changes have all been in the vein of ‘keep more money moving through the economy’—because they don’t need to cut down the money, they need the money to move.
Ultimately, though, getting the money to move means they need Destruction to be moving in the other direction. They need to find out what’s keeping people from fighting, and figure out how to get it out of the way.
You know a great way to get money to move? Tax money that’s just sitting there doing nothing. If you have 100b isk sitting there and you don’t want to lose it, it take 2 seconds of critical thinking to understand you need to spend that money on either revenue generating assets or on something that will retain it’s value. Simple as that, not hard to understand. Not a hard problem to solve. You want demand? Force the hand of ISK hoarders to spend their isk. That will drive up demand.
Nope. As others have said so eloquently, it will just force people out of the game. I don’t play anywhere near as much as I used to (basically went alpha and on a hiatus after CCP’s subscription price hike) but, I’ve been around long enough to have accumulated a nice chunk of isk. I know I’d be pissed if I returned and saw that a few billion had been arbitrarily removed by some hokey “tax” scheme. I wouldn’t bother going alpha again, I’d just find another game to play.
I get “punished” enough by taxes in RL. I sure as hell don’t need that in my online gaming.
