Nope, because your plan doesn’t encourage economic activity. It hits everyone. The same amount of money will go away no matter what, right? That’s the whole point of your proposal, that it’s ‘proportional’, so nobody actually sees their position in the economic strata change.
That means it doesn’t promote activity. It just pisses people off.
Donating isk to pilots who have a better use for such isk is one way!
And how exactly are you going to determine which money “is just sitting there doing nothing”? Checking my wallet 30-day overview, it says income +112B and some change, expenses a tad over -117B. Means that I have moved more than half of my current wallet total in and out over the last 30 days. Yet you would apparently feel entitled to hit me with a tax of a few billion ISK for having “too much ISK in my wallet”.
Stop talking nonsense.
If you deal in stuff that costs millions, it’s enough to have 100M in your wallet. If you are dealing with stuff that costs billions, keeping ~100B in your wallet is nothing unreasonable.
Let’s test the reading comprehension of the emotional knee jerk reactionaries in this thread. My expectations are low but we’ll see.
I used to play Elite Dangerous and owned a carrier there. In ED they implemented a system to prevent a bloating of carriers in the game. The system was such that your carrier would consume fuel costs over time. If you quit playing the game and ran out of money, you would eventually go into debt, and once deep enough into debt, you would lose your carrier - automatically. It turned maintaining a carrier in the game into a grind, and after having been gone from the game for awhile, I really don’t want to log in and see that my carrier is gone. This creates a hurdle that prevents me from logging into the game.
I am saying this to illustrate that I have a certain degree of understanding of what you are saying.
Similarly in Warframe, they implemented a system with their pets. You would need to feed your pet to keep it alive. You could spend real life money to speed up the process of getting a pet, and to boost its power; however, if you stopped logging in for long enough, your pet would starve to death and get deleted (this was the original implementation). I quit the game for a long while because I hated that I could spend IRL money like that and have it get evaporated by simply not logging in.
I am saying this to illustrate that I have a certain degree of understanding of what you are saying.
The suggestion that I am making is not like the previous examples because you can invest into something (other than ISK itself) and avoid getting taxed.
However, such a system would make it more difficult to save up large sums of ISK to make big purchases like BPO contracts or capital ships or what-have-you.
It’s not a perfect idea, I recognize that. And as I mentioned before, some people would get hit harder by it than others, like for example haulers who have to hoard large amounts of ISK to cover contracts. But, as I said in my original post, if there were good arguments made against my idea (like the hauler guy) I would appreciate it. I am still open to good arguments. I’ll point them out when I see them.
This doesn’t sound smart.
People who are hoarding ISK are really doing everyone else a favor. They’re basically an ISK sink unto themselves. It’s a bit precarious though because should ISK hoarders decide to dump their ISK onto the market, that would skyrocket inflation and they can easily deplete resources and manipulate markets on a level that affects a lot of other players.
I’m still open to reading well thought out responses but there’s a bit of lack of civility and calmness in some of these responses in this thread, some hostility, that makes it difficult to have a good conversation about this. It would be great if we had a couple economists from a couple different schools of thought to bring their contributions to the table but that’s just wishful thinking. For now, I guess it’s the armchair devs, and us uneducated Mr. Know-it-alls to debate with eachother like dogs chasing their own tails.
You know insulting people isn’t really the best way to win them over to your side. Just saying.
Also, I’m far from any sort of reactionary, bittervet or CCP fan. Matter of fact I haven’t played regularly in over a year. I’m just saying that it doesn’t seem to be real smart to take peoples hard-earned in-game accomplishments (whether that be in the form of isk, ships, structures, etc) should they take a break. This is especially true when you consider that Eve is LOSING players at a fairly steady rate. The people you want to hit, the null cartels and trillionaires, wouldn’t feel much of an impact. It would be the average player that would be hit hardest.
Last but not least, I was civil and not in the least bit hostile in my reply. Just stating my opinion and observation based on my time in the game. The fact that you choose to be so defensive and insulting to those who disagree with you (especially to Arrendis who offered you a calm, rationed response) says more about you, frankly, than it does about the others who have responded.
You may be saying that to illustrate that point, but your entire proposal illustrates the point that you do not have a sufficient understanding of how the EVE playerbase reacts to things.
The suggestion that you are making is even worse because it would hit anyone who is currently logged out long enough to not show up on the money supply charts. You’d be actively punishing people for coming back to the game.
Except for an inability to recognize them. And that’s not an insult, it’s not hostility, it’s not a lack of civility. It is an assessment based on the evidence you’ve provided. You have been shown consistent trends of large-scale player behavior over difficulties that were intended to provide economic stimulus. You’ve gotten multiple independent statements of ‘yes, in that situation, I’d be one of the people who behaved that way’, and yet you have continued to deny the tendency of EVE players to engage in the behavior EVE players have demonstrated in the past.
Nor is it a matter of economics, because applying actual economics to EVE runs into the problem, stated multiple times already, that people can’t simply opt-out of the real-world global economy. They need to eat. They need shelter.
Players in EVE, however, not only can simply go do something else and stop playing EVE… history—observed, verifiable data, independently corroborated by multiple collection systems and metrics, including both DAU/MAU numbers and PCU tracking—demonstrates that they will. And once they do, they don’t tend to come back.
What is economics is that EVE’s economy cannot handle endless system shocks like that. It cannot endlessly compress down further and further without collapse. There are already segments of the economy with low enough activity that it alarms the people whose primary gameplay in EVE is understanding EVE’s economy from the small scale to the large. And they’re the closest thing you’re going to find to expert economists specializing in EVE’s economy, because while CCP has data analysts, they have not replaced Dr. E since he left to run Iceland’s school of economics.
Okay Arrendis do you have an alternative solution to handling the balance between isk faucets and isk sinks? Or is there no reason to be concerned about the current direction it is going in?
The balance between faucets and sinks is a completely different issue than either inflation or ISK velocity, both of which were the issues you were initially citing.
The proper way to sink more ISK out of the system, however, is more ISK velocity. And get rid of the ridiculous change that gives more money to the owners of player-owned markets. The only reason CCP made that change is to keep money flowing through the economy, but the corporations and alliances profiting from it aren’t exactly running to keep it in motion, they’re using it to rebuild warchests and reserves for the next major conflict (because the one currently going in Poch and the north is kind of just a small brushfire, really).
You need highsec market activity to all be in NPC stations. There’s no reason for player-owned markets in highsec. Lore-wise, it makes no sense that the State would suffer the competition in their own space. Nor that CONCORD would put in place regulations that let capsuleers (a class of people @Oveg_Drust (NPC) can attest, they actively despise) to be siphoning off the funding that keeps the SCC and CONCORD running (broker fees. Where did you think those go?)
In lowsec, there’s no CONCORD presence, so player markets aren’t siphoning money away from them. Also, they’re useful as a trading point for capitals/supercapitals.
But in highsec… no point at all, except evasion of broker fees, and siphoning money from highsec to nullsec. Get rid of 'em. Force all those transactions back into the framework where the money just gets eaten by fees.
Then find a way to actually stimulate market activity, so more transaction fees have to be paid. The biggest and most long-reaching (both in terms of immediate effect and in terms of sustainability) would be to make changes to the actual mechanical gameplay that remove bad complexity/tedium and add good complexity—complexity that adds options and variety of rewards for choices made, rather than requiring more hoops get jumped through just to get the same thing you got before.
Because that’ll have the chance to bring back players, including the whales who spend IRL money to get PLEX, then sell it (generating market fees) to get ISK they can use to buy other things they need from other players. And more players active means more destruction, because those players need something to fly, something to shoot, and something to shoot at, so they need to keep replacing their stuff.
The thing about trying to turn off the spigots while opening up the sink is: it doesn’t work. People tighten their belts, stop doing the things that lose them ships, and stop playing… because they can. CCP’s got no way to compel people to be active, after all. That’s also why in game design, you have to be very careful about being too generous: it’s always better to be stingy, and open things up a little later, because if you’re too generous, and then try to reel things back in… you just get people mad at what feels like a bait and switch.
Well that begs another question: how do you suggest the devs increase the velocity of ISK? I know of a good way to increase the velocity of ISK. Tax it at a uniform % across the board from all wallets in the game. Anybody who is hoarding large volumes of it will need to convert their ISK into anything other than ISK if they want to maintain their net worth.
When you talk about player behavior, it reminds me of a great video for game designers: Why the Sound of a Gun Had to Be Nerfed in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - YouTube
In this video they explain how in an old Wolfenstein game, the players were convinced that one weapon was overpowered compared to another. But the devs knew that functionally, behind the scenes, the weapons had the exact same rate of fire, damage, and clip size. The only difference was the model and the sound effect. The solution? It wasn’t to nerf the gun, they changed the sound effect to be less bassy.
Another example was how in world of warcraft, they had a system in place called “fatigue” where players would get reduced XP gains after playing for awhile, in order to incentivize them to take breaks instead of playing for too long. The players hated it, so the developers rebranded it to an “xp boost” that would wear off after playing for awhile - which functionally was pretty much the same thing but players perception of it was different.
As well it should. But the example of XP fatigue in WoW is a far better one. You kept saying ‘that kind of knee-jerk reaction isn’t that prevalent’, but there you are, presenting an example of the largest MMO playerbase demonstrating exactly that kind of knee-jerk reaction.
Because that’s what people do.
And I’ve already said how I suggest the devs increase the velocity of ISK: get the game mechanics out of the way again. The industrial complications didn’t add options, they added tedium that pissed people off and drove people out of the game and out of the economy. The changes to where ores are found didn’t give people more options, they added more 'here are steps you have to do to get the same results, which made things more onerous for players, so they left the game.
This was supposed to be offset with mechanics like IHUB upgrades that would’ve given the null blocs (where all that money stopped moving) a whole new suite of options for specializing the production in their space, for getting new and better results. And because it was going to be IHUB upgrades, that meant higher sov bills… you know, an ISK sink.
But those new options never happened. People got the additional bad complexity, the additional tedium and headaches… but none of the additional options and rewards. None.
You want to accelerate ISK velocity and put the shaky economy back on a path toward firmer footing… get the mechanics out of the way. When the Blackout demonstrably hurt the game, CCP ended the Blackout. And Falcon, the biggest proponent of the disastrous idea (who insisted, much as you’re doing, that players would never behave in exactly the way they always have) ended up leaving the company shortly afterward.
Personally, I hope he left of his own volition. I hope he had a better gig lined up and decided he needed a change. Because I’d hate to think that he got fired over the Blackout. After all, when the Blackout was doing all this, I went on record with:
CCP needs to keep trying new things. But players need to recognize that those new things have their limitations. Players need to let CCP try new things, again and again. That’s how CCP will get the data they need to understand the shape of things, what the problems are, and how they intersect in an extremely complex system.
Players expecting the Blackout to ‘fix’ things, and talking up how this change will achieve this or that, and make everything better, aren’t helping. All that does is create expectations that this cannot meet. And when those expectations—built entirely by the playerbase, because CCP isn’t saying this is anything more than a test to gather data—aren’t met, people will want to get mad at CCP for it. They may start saying that CCP’s just screwing things up worse, or flailing around in the dark.
The truth is, most of the things CCP is going to try will fail. Horribly, sometimes! Because they’re going to be as much about gathering information as about addressing a problem. And a lot of the eventual solutions, players won’t recognize as solutions, at first. But getting to the point of success depends on them being allowed to fail. Players have to be willing to let them.
CCP needs to be prepared for it, too, and prepared to push forward anyway. Historically, they haven’t. They’ve repeatedly put things in with abysmal reward vs player effort, and nobody uses it. Then they decide ‘this system was bad’ not ‘highsec newbies aren’t spending 100,000,000 ISK plus LP on cosmetic items’. That’s what happened with Resource Wars. It’s what happened with FOBs. They have an idea, it doesn’t work, and they just give up.
I want CCP to keep trying things. I want them to keep trying to find ways to make things better, and I don’t want them creating an environment where employees are afraid to advocate change. That’s the worst thing they could do. But they also need to be willing to undo changes that make things worse. They did it with Blackout. They finally did it with Rorquals (but that was much, much too late). They need to do it with the things that have crippled the economy now.
And they need to hope to hell they get players back. At the same time, they need to find ways to get new players in, because they are not keeping up with the churn. Adding new alts from existing players ain’t the way to fix things. It’s just a way to live in denial.
Now, the obvious follow-up question is ‘how do you get people back / attract new players’? And that’s a great question. I wish I had a silver bullet. CCP Aurora’s work that gave us the FW overhaul was a great step in that direction. Viridian… seems to be a somewhat underwhelming follow-up. They need to build on the momentum of last winter. They need to continue to rebuild player trust. And they need to stop making bone-headed decisions that frustrate players and don’t help their bottom line.
Here’s an example: since citadels went in in 2016, we’ve been asking for structure SKINs. We’ve been begging for them. And we’ve been asking for corp and alliance logos on ships for even longer. And yay! We’ve finally gotten them!..
… except we’ve gotten them in a way that makes very little sense. If these things were available for ISK, for example? Awesome. Not only would that provide another ISK sink, it’s exactly what we’ve been begging for, because it’d be something we could throw actual $$ at CCP for. But no. No, they put in through Evermarks.
They literally took something they knew would provide a large new revenue stream and instead hid it behind a new currency that most of the playerbase believes was a failed attempt at Crypto integration—something the players loudly demanded they keep out of EVE. Worse, though, the currency’s not transferrable… so if you want to put the new structure skins on your alliance HQ… you need to have an alt in the holding corp that owns the structure.
You know, that thing any sane alliance does not let most of its members do. And since the marks are non-transferrable, the groups that own the most structures… the ones that have the most reason to want to use this stuff… can’t make any use of most of the evermarks the group members have.
So what could have been a tremendous revenue stream and ISK sink that the players would have applauded… becomes a headache that makes CCP no money and clears no ISK from the game. That’s not how you build trust, and CCP—outside of, at this point, basically Aurora, Rise, and maybe Fozzie—desperately needs to build player trust.
Because… like with the issue of xp fatigue vs bonus xp… perception is everything. And CCP is horrible at managing perception.
So. What should they do?
And they need to figure out what the hell the players want to do… and then help them do it. Because that, more than anything else, will get people interested in playing again.
I agree with the moving money but I don’t agree that total isk amount and isk injection isn’t a problem to keep on. More isk in the system devalues each Individual isk causing higher prices as people want the same base value that now needs more isk than before to achieve.
They won’t. It wouldn’t force people to use their isk honestly. If anything it would be a one time conversion to something that isn’t taxed that will hold it’s value. Taxes typically don’t cause money movement, it is usually the opposite as people want to horde it especially because it decreases money supply giving other isk more value so they want to find a way to retain that value. It also makes isk typically not get traded as much in higher column so you don’t give out more value and keep more.
As an avid Wolfenstein et player, I remember that. Man I loved that game.
Thank you for this response, I’ll talk a bit more about this. I brought this up in a previous thread where this old town, village, province? (I read about it maybe in 2008 or so) - anyway this small government put a tax on money itself. It was on a monthly basis, and what happened was at the end of every month, nobody wanted to have to foot the bill. And so the result was a sharp increase in the velocity of money as everyone was playing hot potato with money itself, in order to avoid being stuck with the tax.
I do agree that anyone hoarding isk would then convert it into something else, like plex for example. And I will add onto this that one way to make a wealth tax create less weird behavior in players would be to instead of having it be applied once per month, just have it be applied every day during downtime.
Wealth tax in Eve is a poor idea.
Wealth taxes are generally not taxes that incentivize productive/economic velocity of ISK. It is velocity to simply facilitate tax evasion.
That’s nice. I don’t see this playing out in Eve Online though.
If it is a flat wealth tax people will just convert to assets in a one time tax evasion rush plus speculation gold rush. Assets will become scarce and everyday people will be priced out as supply cannot satisfy the demands of hundreds of Trillions. The price distortions means losing ships in this period are ultra costly on killboards, so blocs that track ISK efficiency of FCs will have FCs that don’t take people out flying in space.
If it is a progressive wealth tax (eg 0% rate < 100M, 0.5% rate < 1B, etc) then in addition people (even the non mega rich) will create lots of alts for tax evasion purposes. A lot of tedious gameplay for everyone.
In many way this Kali Yuga age mentality fits EVE [expostulo vetigalis enumero] well.
Its early days still but times are a changing
I would like EVE to survive as a reminder of dystopia averted, but there are tests.
But this continues to punish people for coming back to the game. EVE needs people to come back. The player base needs to expand, and it needs to expand in a way that adds economic activity at scale, not just ‘I’m saving up for 3 weeks to buy my first destroyer’. Though, with your plan, it’d be more like ‘I wish I could save to buy a destroyer, but my money keeps going away and there’s a floor on prices because miners won’t sell their ore any cheaper’.
One of the things CCP very intentionally does is make sure that when people stop playing for a while, they can come back and they still have their wallet and their assets. That’s why the asset safety system was created, after all: to give citadels the same effective security as the indestructible outposts and stations they replaced. So people could come back and not be destitute.
Let’s say you put this plan in. Why should players want to come back to a game where their money is gone?
Hot damn. You’re right. This is the best argument I’ve seen against my idea. It trumps all the others and is something truly worth thinking about. Hmm…
If you don’t tax players who are taking a break from the game, then they come back disproportionally rich. If you do tax players who are taking a break from the game, then they come back disproportionately poor compared to those who were online and converted their ISK into something else. For some players returning after a long hiatus, the shock of seeing less ISK in their wallet would be a real turnoff.
I honestly don’t have an answer to this (at least not right now) and so this problem could be the final nail in the coffin for me to believe in my own idea.
This is a demonstration of a lack of understanding of how my suggested idea would actually benefit the bottom end player who is grinding missions or any other ISK faucet. A decrease in the money supply would benefit players who are grinding missions or other ISK faucets.
THINK about it… one player has 10 million isk and is running missions, earning let’s say 1 million isk per day. Another player has hoarded 1 trillion isk and is trading capital ship characters on the character bazaar and performing speculative investing based on patch notes. Both get taxed at 0.08% daily after downtime (~2.4% wealth tax per 30 days, which is around the middle of my original suggestion of 1%-5% monthly). The Trillionaire would be losing 800 million ISK per day if they sat there and did nothing with their ISK. The low level player saving up for his destroyer would be losing 8,000 ISK per day if they maintained a 10 million ISK reserve. I hope you understand how this does not unfairly impede a low level players ability to save up for a destroyer. I hope you also understand how inflation does negatively impact low level players who farm low level ISK faucets, and how I’m trying to come up with ideas to curb the growing money supply.
With all that being said, I have heard Dr. Oz say on his Youtube channel that there’s no need to be concerned about the growing money supply, in part because if there is a declining velocity of ISK, then it balances out. I agree that this makes sense but I’m hesitant to take comfort in that there are people hoarding large volumes of ISK and their decision to hoard is a major reason why the purchasing power of ISK isn’t declining. I also remember watching Dr. Oz say on live stream that a PLEX sale would cause a rise in PLEX prices (because there would be an increased demand for PLEX), and then get surprised when PLEX prices went down. 
You keep ignoring the prices of assets in your analysis. I don’t know why.
The 10 million ISK destroyer that the newbie wants to save up for is no longer going to be 10 million ISK because the people clamoring to convert hundreds of trillions of ISK into non-wealth-taxed assets will simply buy up the market and drive prices upwards, and speculators plus price gougers will also do the same during this gold rush. That new player is now royally screwed, and it isn’t a mere 8k ISK a day scenario, there is no limit how high prices can go.
These market trades are also not economically productive.
There’s further problems around trade volumes because selling high priced goods is also a disadvantage: you now need to quickly turn around and spend that ISK from your sales. All the speculators and gougers now in turn need to buy assets. However, now some people will opt to instead simply not sell assets because they in turn don’t want to be left holding the bag, chilling the daily trade volume.
Or even worse: people revert to bartering without having to deal with the wealth taxed currency at all. That is not sustainable, and people will do it. People already avoid taxes this way by trading large value items only in contracts, people will simply add bartering with a wealth tax.
You then essentially replace player driven activity form of ISK sinks (market transaction tax with huge trade volumes) with passive no-gameplay ISK sinks (wealth tax). It’s hard to say whether it is more, less, or equal, but it ultimately doesn’t matter because 1. CCP could get any of these gains today by increasing sales taxes and 2. without risking player market activity going majorly down which is a huge no no.
I don’t know if you remember this but if you search this thread for “reading comprehension” you will see me mention it. Or in other words. Wrong. You are wrong. I am not ignoring this. Here, let me quote myself:
I said that in this very same thread you and I are discussing in. I will not read the rest of your post, I don’t have the patience to deal with this. If you accuse me of being ignorant, and you yourself ignore something that I said in this thread, then why should I bother reading what you have to say?