You should hear what I say to my stockbroker 
Donāt get me wrong, for folks who enjoy the math, itās great. I find it useless now as opposed to before when trends were trends with consistent player bases. As population declines, Iām less enthusiastic about knowing what happened, more interested in figuring out where to go. ISK-earnings-wise, anyway. I could always play another game but I still love this one.
Considered running for CSM so I could consult with them Unfortunately, at the end of the day Iām an Eve nobody in popularity and CSM is a popularity contest.
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You are an economic ignoramus prancing around on stilts. Deflation is bad mākay?
OMGā¦
The EVE economy is in serious trouble. Look at industrial output it has been dropping consistently for months. It has been going down since pretty much February with a brief rally mid September then going flat. That is not good. You want an economy to grow. And prices are also going down. That is because the money supply was shrinking. It appears to have stopped, but when these things happen together you have a situation known as DEFLATION. Deflation is bad if it is too large, it is very much like having a positive rate of return on your ISK holdings. That is your ISK will buy you more the longer you wait to spend it. Even destruction is at an pretty low level relative to what is shown in the MER graphs. You are completely wrong in your narrative. It is showing a drop off in people playing the game. Sure some bots might have left, but more likely it is people.
Firms do shut down and sell off their assets.
As for CCP Falcon, he resigned.
What narrative? Did I have a narrative?
Yeahā¦I knowā¦thanksā¦ My question was posted a day before his announcement of his leaving ccpā¦and it was kind of a promting remark rather than an actual question anyway
Sorry that was aimed at Dragos. I wanted to quote you and hit reply by accident.
Just to try and give people the āOh F***ā picture here of how bad this is. The following is somewhat self-explanatory. It is the sum of production and mining value less destruction. Note that the decreases we have seen in the last three quarters are very large (keeping in mind that Q4 of 2019 is just two months). These are absolutely massive drops. This is not bots getting the boot.
For those who donāt appreciate graphs here are the numbers. Note, I added in November by multiplying the 5 days from November by 6 and set December as being equal to October It is not pretty either.
These are very bad number. This indicates the EVE economy was collapsing. Black Out was a disaster in terms of the economy, IMO. Looking at the monthly data there is a glimmer of hope since October has higher production, mining value and destruction. That is activity in game is increasing.
The ISK supply is also growing again. The price indices are no longer showing declines, but leveling off.
If anyone is still prattling on about inflation, increasing ISK sinks, etc. they are completely and totally wrong.
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I think āCollapsingā is a bit harsh, ādeflatingā might be the right term, but really what weāre seeing so far is less a ācollapseā and more a āreturn to 2015 activity levelsā.
What we need to ask are 1) What happened in Q3 of 2016 and 2) How do we get industrialists (even solo and small group) active againā¦ This has become a very much PvP oriented game (I mean more so) because the population decrease is very much oriented towards the producer and much less towards consumersā¦ That is PvP players produce almost nothing and consume very little, but are now the majority of the player baseā¦ More pirates with less convoys means the convoys will continue to decrease linearly, while pirate activity will only decrease as targets do and those players get bored.
Stimulation of production and consumption is generally equal, that is increasing one also increases the other (producers generally consume more, where as PvPāers simply redistribute).
This is seen by the abysmally small numbers in the primary NPC corps.
I think targeted fixes should concentrate on giving more options to the non-PvP players and adding more challenges to the PvP activities.
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That is what happens when you have deflation reach a sufficiently high level. Think Great Depression, or even the financial crisis/Great Recession of 2008/2009. As the financial markets were starting to un-spool because of the sub-prime mortgages the Fed was still worried about inflation and in the early days were sterlizing money they were injecting into banks.
2016? Did you mean 2019?
Donāt forget that a major component in the ISK supply is the active ISK delta. Players leaving the game basically take their ISK out of the game. On top of that players leaving the game means there will be less consumption as well as production. So not only could a decrease in the money supply be having effects via deflation, but also less people in game.
After all what determines GDP. At a crude level it is people and their productivity. More people more production. Less people less production.
I think this is incorrect. PvP players are often out there producing and selling too. NS, WHs, those guys are quite industrious.
The industrial cyno overhaul was good help in this area. The new cyno module uses more higher-end materials and ozone. The ām3 per industrialā transport problem, encourages local production. At a cost of less than 1m per industrial ship it can seem individually small, but, lots of them are needed - everywhere in LS/NS.
Not at a ratio that sustains a population. Usually itās enough to sustain their habit, a little extra scratch, flyby opportunity between meals, that sort of thing.
This is completely true, and yet doesnāt cover everything. Look at the US governmentā¦ LOTS of people, not very much productionā¦ The number of people increase production, only if those people are producers. Greece has lots of people and for a while was completely sustained by the EU. After all fewer people also means less production requiredā¦ Itās all about balance, ecosystems and all that.
I just think collapse or even crash you mentioned goes too far. In the great depression you mentioned and in situation in Germany after WW2 necessities of life were greatly inflated, bags of apples for wheelbarrows of cashā¦ The game isnāt experiencing thatā¦ T3 cruisers are still produced, sold, videos of them are made, and those are the luxury end of the production chainā¦ what is missing are all the pirate mods needed to blingā¦ see the number of pirate x-large shield boosters and their priceā¦
Nope, look at the charts yourselfā¦ the huge drop in activity everyone is pointing at just puts it at the economic average of 3 years agoā¦ The charts show that the economy was much better over the last two years than it was the three years before that.
I myself am back after about a 5 year break, and all the forums Iām reading show lots of returnees over the last couple years (and you see it in the forums, there are much more you donāt see).
The problem is I donāt see what CCP is doing to take advantage of the new interest. I read the patch notes where they WRITE they are aiming patches towards keeping new player and returnees, but what they are doing doesnāt match what they are saying.
example: Itās quite easy to make an alpha PvP clone, and almost impossible to make an industrial alpha that can also defend itselfā¦ one of those players is going to keep playing and possibly plex to hunt bigger fish, the other will have problems affording to be able to.
Increase cost of combat skills (the offensive ones) and decrease the cost of science and production skills. Allow for all rock types to be available in all areas of space (like a new miner getting lucky and striking gold). Now that T3 is a thing, allow for the T2 BPOs to become available again and create T3 modules for everything. Initiate a catch-up system for newer accounts that increases skill learning and increase the minimum skills before extraction is possibleā¦
These are ideas that would improve the economy by making those aspects of the game that are struggling to be more fun and less work, and by making the parts of the game that currently show a predominant excess into slightly more work.
Losing a farmer makes a hunter bored, risking his loss as wellā¦ but losing a hunter doesnāt change the farmer in the slightest.
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Unhealthy activity? Like 1000 people logging in for 15 minutes to mass drop on a single grid is better than 100 people logged in for 150 minutes?
People had to work to get to that point. Stop whining about the castle walls that went up to keep the marauding barbarians out.
If CCP hadnāt done their usually free skill point apology/participation events the numbers would have been even worse than what they were. I almost wish BO had continued so those people whining right now were flying around in desolate and deserted systems, bar a few untouchable areas covered with the super umbrella.
Yes. High security space shouldnāt have drilling platforms. Spawn rates for ore anomalies in null are much too high, if a colossal/enormous gets mined out it shouldnāt come back until the natural decay timer (3 days) has passed. Haven/Sanctumās should only spawn after a anomaly of lesser difficulty has been completed and they should be gated to keep out caps just like incursions.
Yup, BO reduced activity everywhere. I know a bunch a folk who unsubbed, even if they werenāt residents of null in protest not only against BO, but the way BO was implemented without proper community consultation.
Really? Mining in HS is trashy return on time invested, unless its off a drilling platform.
Not entirely true. I still havenāt undocked since BO ended and the Halloween event was just a big old helping of KY Jelly for the Ganktards of the world.
Blackout was not balanced. For one, the in-game map still showed activity, 3rd party sites still showed activity and except for the first 24 hours, zkillboard still showed the activity. It was a blackout for some people and not others.
So true.
Well, except for the Ishtar, the Domonix and drones in general.
Like Cyno changes? No more rookie ship with cyno dunking 100 dreads on a procurer.
+1
When CCP demonstrates they are going in a direction that isnāt the death spiral, then Iāll log in again.
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bravo
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- Add back some reasons to increase your agent, corp, and faction standings.
Since I started playing in 2013, they removed the requirement to have standings to get jump clones (by accident, then kept it as a feature, not a bug)ā¦ to put up POS towers in HS (and ofc citadels never had that requirement)ā¦ and I may be forgetting other things. Well, I guess standings for trade hub buy/sell orders donāt matter as much with the crazy increases to NPC tax/broker fee structure and trying to drive people to the Perimeter/Ashab/Botane/etc. trade hub citadels where the money goes to players and not to NPCs and your standings with Cal Navy donāt matter, for example.
In any event, the only reasons to increase standings now is to unlock higher level missions, which ofc soon becomes a non-issue if youāre missioning already, andā¦ to avoid being shot at in Amarr/Caldari HS if youāre doing tag missions for Gal/Min/SOEā¦ or vice versa.
Interesting idea, but CCP flipped the switch that denied caps from taking those gates (in NS, at leastā¦ not sure about LS) years ago, and I donāt remember ever hearing theyād flipped it back the other way (but hey, the patch notes do leave out a lot of info occasionally). But yes, ofc they could change it back, and anoms could have the restrictions that incursion gates used to have, sure, why not.
I canāt know for sure what Dragos Highwind meant by botters moving to HSā¦ but thereās plenty of non-mining HS botting. For awhile there, tons and tons of Myrmidons named ā*Simulated Myrmidonā were roaming HS and eating up all the anoms (hideaways, refuges, dens, etc.) that can escalate to DED 3/4/5 sites. You still see some of that, though sometimes itās a Gnosis.
But now the big thing is Rattlesnakes sitting alone in Emerging Conduits with a plain t1 MTU with a space at the start of the name on d-scan. Heard about snakes botting them on reddit a couple months ago, so I started d-scanning (max range, 5 degrees cone) any emerging conduits I was flying by on the way to running anoms or mishes, and sure enoughā¦ always the same space at the start of the MTU name, incredible. These bots have patterns they show even on d-scan, let alone on grid. And they are doing combat/earning bounties, not just mining.
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Far too much to quote here lol. I appreciate the spirited economic debate though.
On deflation - Deflation for this game is a good thing and it needs a healthy dose of it, which the BO was great at. Techosās charts, while nice looking, mean little.
Mining materials - Do not have a flat line cost. As they are over producted the price drops and as they become scarce the price increases. In Dec 2018 the price was about 15 isk Jita and in Sept the price was around 20isk.
Production - Likewise productionās value is dependent on demand and production levels. An increase in cost could be from materials base cost, transport issues, production levels, demand, etc.
Destruction value - This number again is a number that doesnāt correspond to mining and/production. This doesnāt include abyssal mods nor abyss mod rolling bricks. The number also includes faction and deadspace modules that wonāt produced or mined.
However the most important note here: Eveās economy IS NOT REAL LIFE. Players in EVE do not have to eat or shelter themselves. They do not have to save for retirement and they do not have to provide for their children. Deflation doesnāt cause market collapse because players do not have to worry about instinctual survival. Trying to liken it to a real world country only goes so far because there are underlying differences in economic models.
The driving force for players to play the game is is the value of their activities. Currently industry is a giant hot mess because of overproduction. A new player joins the game and finds industry cool. They quickly find that the majority of items they can make come at a loss. They try to go mining to lower costs, but they quickly find the amount they can mine is almost meaningless.
Null was meant to be a contested area of constant wars, struggle, and danger. Itās rewards were made to match that level of difficulty and destruction. Without it isk and resources flow into the game at an unsustainable rate, as shown by supercap production levels and isk inflation.
IMO the following would make great strides in helping the economy the way the BO did.
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Bounties are removed and replaced by NPC loot. Ratters have to actually care about wrecks slowing down the isk generation time and giving hunters a window of opportunity. The transportation of NPC loot also give an opportunity for destruction in route to low/high sec NPC stations for sale.
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Corp taxes are applied to all market\contract sales and introduction of alliance taxes that are enforced on all members. With the removal of bounties this gives a tax stream for corporations and alliances. Overall this should lead to an increase in Corp/Alliance coffers which is more likely to be used on driving conflict.
For those the read this rant, kudos. Bring on the quotes.
If missions were overhauled, Iād be happy to look at them again. Once I got standings with a few NPCās YEARS ago, I got tired of the endless repetition and found other things to do. I did a mission binge recently, only because the mission standings boosters were going to expire. Same old grind: reading mission reports write-ups on another screen, so I could get each one over with as quickly as possible.
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While this could be done, corps and alliances compete for members by offering the lowest taxes; some HS groups with no goals can recover alliance maintenance fees by donations. Even if fees were increased 10x, this would still happen.
Bounty tags is a frequent suggestion, I donāt have a problem with more of that. Redemption is required for sleepers, overseer effects, the ESS - and probably a couple other things Iāve missed.
This will happen regardless of how you change tax rates. This change would be in conjunction with bounties removal to give a revenue stream to replace teh current one. No bounties = no automated tax collection.
Exactly. Iām sure a lot of other people who donāt tend to do them too often have similar reasons to you.
Personally, I still do a fair amount of missioning, because as repetitive as they are, I still have a few faves I never tire of: the various Blockades, various Pirate Invasions, Gone Berserk, Blood Mining Manipulationā¦ basically anything with one single room and tons of battleships to kill is fun to meā¦ Dread Pirate Scarlet is decent despite its 4 rooms, tho I miss being able to warp freely from room to room before they made it deadspace like almost every other multi-room missionā¦ Iād love the Extravaganzas and Worlds Collides a bit more, but thereāsā¦ justā¦ so many accel gatesā¦ To me, the main thing that makes a mission less fun is A) too many jumps to get to it, B) too many rooms/accel gates in it, and C) too many frigs and not enough battleships. ;D
ā¦ Anyway, in addition to still loving some of the missions on offer, over the years as I train into new ships for PVE and/or PVP purposes (from t1 BSes into t2 HACs into t2 marauders into Leshaks now), Iāve wanted to test out and try out new doctrines and fittings and just totally different ways of missioning with those new ships Iāve unlocked. I also do incursions, sleepers in WHs, event sites when we still had event sites a few years agoā¦ and now have been enjoying the new abyss and Trig Invasion content the past couple of years to varying degreesā¦ but a lot of forms of rat-shooting PVE in this game have a pretty clear best 1 or 2 options and then thereās no point in trying out different ships unless you just want to make things harder for yourself arbitrarily or unless CCP has gated them like no t3 cruisers in DED 3/10 and DED 4/10 sites.
Whereas many L4 missions have been fairly nonlinear in the multiple paths to complete them. Base burners can also hold my interest. Anyway, tl;dr: many people who currently mission and/or many people who have in the past but have fallen out of it and/or many people whoāve never missioned much beyond the tutorial/SOE Epic Arc might find a bit more to like about them if standings had more point to exist than they do now. As the years go by, it just seems like standings have less and less importance, which is kinda sad unless someone else is going to replace them. But it sounds like Triglavian standing will be coming soon with the whole āchoose your sideā thingā¦ so weāll see. Maybe CCP will iterate upon that and add some things back to standings to make them more point-ful.
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Maybe not. I have a number of alts. Those alts are all skilled for invention, mining and a couple for ratting. I have one dedicated PvP character (my main [this character]) so the idea that PvP players are not involved in the broader economy is likely untrue. After all, every alliance takes advantage of their moons and regional resources.
The point is that in EVE output will move, all other things held constant, with the number of players. If the overall level of output is falling that implies the number of players is falling. This also fits with the decline in the ISK supply related to the active ISK delta. These two things are āreinforcingā in terms of the effect on the overall economy. A declining ISK supply implies deflation and reduced output. Less players to produce stuff implies reduced output.
Decreases in the range of 20% plus is pretty bad. Granted the money supply has stopped shrinking. Hopefully things will turn around, but the direction of the economy in game is not healthy.
I donāt know what this means. In 2016 the in game economy does not look nearly as problematic.
Yet EVE Offline shows that numbers are not looking good.