Monthly Economic Report - June 2023

EVE Information Portal Dev Blogs
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61

Dude. Chill. I’ve no idea why the sudden hostility.

If you actually read it, I have addressed your very counterpoint you originally said, and have repeated here. So once again: People will simply not liquidate into ISK. Why would they when it’s a taxed disadvantaged situation.

That’s where I fundamentally disagree with you. I don’t know why you hold the belief that players would want to liquidate themselves and subject themselves to a punitive wealth tax, when they could do nothing and stay wealthy. Or barter in goods.

The rest of your argument hinges on this belief, which is not one a rational economic agent would do. That’s my criticism you leave unaddressed.

I have read your posts and comprehended them fine. Please stop the ad hominems and remember the golden rule.

62

It would not. Because you are taking crazy pills (to use your framing there). You seem to be under the impression that decreasing the money supply just makes prices drop… but the only thing that makes prices drop is people dropping their prices. You even bring up this because you’re doing the magical thinking thing:

But why would they want ISK? Think about it. Why would they want to liquidate the actually-valuable assets into a ‘larger volume’ of something they know will be taken away? Especially since, let’s face it, they’re not fools. They know the markets, and they know CCP. They know this maniac idea of a flat, regressive wealth tax can’t survive, or EVE won’t. They’ll ride it out, and wait. Or they’ll use contracts to sell their assets for other assets, like PLEX (which is, after all, EVE’s real hard currency. ISK is just a currency of convenience, at this point).

So let’s look at what actually happens in your scenario:

Money starts going away. That means you don’t want to have your wealth in money, right? That’s the whole thrust of your ‘hot potato’ argument, that people will be looking to divest themselves of ISK. So the big mining consortiums keep their wealth in minerals as much as they can, because they’ve got those minerals, and those minerals will always be in demand.

So now mineral supply tightens. Demand hasn’t changed. What happens to the price of minerals in that scenario? And the hulls built from those minerals?

That’s because he failed to understand that a PLEX sale is a sale on PLEX for real-world $$$. That causes people to buy PLEX with $$$. Not just people looking to sell PLEX for ISK, either, because the people who normally would buy PLEX for ISK… were just buying with $$$ on the cheap and cutting out the middle-man.

So supply increased, demand dropped, et voila! Prices went down.

Get it? Nothing in your model reduces demand for anything but the now-unreliable ISK. It increases demand among people looking to divest of ISK. Your model for reducing the money supply immediately devalues ISK, because people don’t want to be holding it.

63

Not followed all of your debate with @Arrendis but as someone thinking of returning, here are my thoughts:

  • I left the game after the rorq nerfs. I ran 5 rorqs to fund my pvp so when that income stream disappeared overnight, I did too… For 2+ years at this point. Went to play an MMO that doesn’t have a record of arbitrarily removing something I spent several years worth of sub payments investing in to enjoy (no injectors here, I pay for my accounts and skilled them all up individually).

  • Similar thoughts on titan/super HAW/application and build cost nerfs. I spent far too much sub money on dedicated cap accounts (as you have to have them on separate accounts from FAX / subcap mains). Those accounts just didn’t provide value for money anymore.

  • In other words, I simply object on a fundamental level to CCP taking something away that I felt I’ve earned. If they did the same via an ISK tax, that would be the nail in the coffin for me and I’d certainly not be thinking of returning now.

It should be blindingly obvious that implementing such a design runs contrary to keeping people playing! Who wants to pay money to be kicked in the balls? You’re talking utter nonsense @Boozbaz.

64

Geez, dude, where do you live irl? There we have a progressive tax - where you pay higher % the larger your income is. Sure, there’s tax trickery and ways around, but only mitigating it to some extent and in more extreme cases. In most cases this is the way and, in fact, it seems to have more benefits than detriments in many places…

65

Shouldn’t compare IRL tax to game, though. Your IRL tax isn’t just being pulled out of existance. You get something in return, government, police, army, social services, etc.

Tax in game just punishes players for no reason, you get no benefits in return, it’s theft. They could reduce some faucets to the same effect. Which would be slightly better framing, game design wise.

They went on with mining waste/residue, though. Same useless idea of punishing for no reason. So IDK, they’ll probably do it.

66

The Mining Changes are a BUFF, not a nerf. They doubled all ore in the roids at the same time and waste/residue does NOT lower your yield. When do people get that? You have MORE ORE now than before, even with T2 B-Type crystals that produce quite some waste. And you can make unwanted belts disappear and respawn new ones with C-Types if you wish, without having to mine all the ore you don’t need/want.

It cannot be so hard to understand? CCP did all miners a huge favor with implementing the residue-mechanic and it absolutely works as it should.

67

Agreed. I live in a country which has had a wealth tax on private individuals for several hundred years at this point, and it only works in context of a larger society. A wealth tax in Eve makes no sense.

FYI this is factually wrong, and spreading misinformation. With the introduction of residue, yields (rate of rock into your hold) actually increased with Type B. What changed is “in addition your yield, 1/3rd of the asteroid in space disappears due to residue”. But – and here’s the kicker – CCP doubled the size of the rock, meaning you have the increased speed of mining and more total availability of rock-in-space to mine.

This misinformation is so prevalent I even had to make a diagram for it:

mining_changes
mining_changes1570×878 57.4 KB

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68

Did they not cut ore availability from 50 to 90% at first, in Resource Redistribution Update? They then doubled what’s left later in Waste Update.

That still is only 20-30% of what was there before 2020.

Dunno if moongoo or Poch ores compensate, I’m no miner.

69

It is really complex to say anything for certainty when you include the Redistribution changes. There were several aspects to it:

  • Mineral redistribution (some minerals became more prevalent, some less so, but on the whole mineral quantity over all ore types [unweighted by ore availability] went up), Poch definitely became more valuable
  • Rock redistribution (some rocks became more prevalent, some became less prevalent)
  • Belt removals

But then it is not fair to exclude the new rare Blue (A0 star?) belts which are getting mined out regularly due to their value:

  • New A0 ore anomalies

So if you want to conflate:

  • Scarcity
  • Resource Redistribution
  • Residue Introduction
  • (Compression Changes)
  • Blue Star Ore Anomalies

It is really hard to be able to claim any sort of equivalency (or “better” or “worse”) to pre-Scarcity. It’s just different. But then you open yourself to the criticism: why stop there, there’s no good reason to compare to just 2020, you might as well keep going back and back and back to complain about how easy mining is now compared to 2003-200X when there were no ore holds and jetcan mining in battleships was a thing.

But for the criticism on Residue specifically, isolated from these conflating changes, I stand by my prior post.

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70

I like the mechanics for new mining crystals.
What I don’t like is arbitrary changes.

50%-75%-90% reduction, 100% addition is not fine tuning and turning knobs, its whacking and chopping.

Tax is bad game design. I’ll stand by this.

71

You’re setting yourself up for disappointment as that’s like 90% of CCP’s changes to Eve Online.

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72

The progressive tax (which we do have in my country, too) is applied to your income, not to your accumulated wealth. In other words, any money you make are only taxed once (let’s ignore the VAT at the moment). What Boozbaz is suggesting is to tax your hard earned ISK over and over and over… every month, or even better, every day, until you spend them… :roll_eyes:

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73

This, once again, is because of perception. The fact that CCP framed it in a negative manner at first poisoned the bonus rock. I can’t stress how frustrating it is to watch, over and over again, as CCP has to constantly re-learn the game design theory lessons made manifest in WoW, EverQuest, Ultima Online, and even MUDs and BBS door games going back over the last 40+ years.

3 Likes
74

The frustrating part is the lack of incentive to spend skillpoints into mining or the feeling that millions of skillpoints are wasted when you already learned all T2 mining and then many corps do not allow the use of T2 miners any more.
It would have been much better to allow spending skillpoints create less waste than more. Thats just the opposite of what we expect in the (real or game) world

75

The original plan was to do it that way, but it was pointed out by the large mining corps that that basically meant they wouldn’t allow any newbies to mine… ever.

76

Excuse my mining ignorance, but how are the large mining corps going to disallow new players from mining? Do you mean they will not allow them to join their fleets?

77

My apologies for not being specific: yes, it means the larger mining concerns in the more profitable places, like lowsec, openly said that it meant anyone with less than perfect skills wouldn’t be allowed to join their fleets and mine in space they controlled / mine their moons.

And while that leaves a whole lot of veldspar out there… trust me, the difference in both monetary incentive and player retention between ‘mining veld solo in your venture’ and ‘hanging out with friends socially and ripping up lowsec ores and moon goo’ is considerable. And while some people can make the argument of ‘well, they should be providing incentive for people to get their skills up’, those incentives already exist in increased yield/cycle and decreased cycle time.

The real shame of it all is that all of the negativity could have been avoided by CCP simply approaching the bonus rock as bonus rock. Rock sizes don’t visibly change, T1 lasers get normal performance, then put in some lore stuff about improvements in mining laser containment fields from ORE or something, and give the T2 and ORE mining lasers/strip miners a side-effect ‘residue’ that can also be compressed, and has its own industrial uses or can be reprocessed into the same minerals as the ore would have been.

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78

Since i was in null sec mining and trying my best to get the skills and isk for a Rorq during the time of the “rorq golden age” and living through the dumpster fire that is everything from Blackout to present.

I cannot see how you think we have more ore now.

So maybe i am mis understanding you.

But adding the waste mechanic with everything else ccp has done to how ore was before blackout(the year before blackout, not since 2005) and how ore is now.

I cannot call it a buff.

79

I’m not sure this is as profound as you think it is:

“I played during the era where everyone agreed mining with Rorquals was absolutely completely overpowered and for some reason nothing compares to it”

(It’s tautologically true, the boring kind of true)

80

This is not the discussion on weather the Rorq was or was not at that time, overpowered.

I believe we can do a whole other discussion on that.

My original statement stands. I still can not call the waste mechanic a buff.

that’s not boringly true or redundantly true. If anything I would call that empirically true.