- Some people put stockpiles in different places for war, or to reduce travel times. For example, more people are storing copies of incursion ships in different spots since niarja fell.
- Some PvP’ers will buy 10 or more copies of ships at time so that they don’t have to run to market every time they lose a ship.
- Many players get into different activities, and/or do different roles -which require different fits and ships.
- Having stuff on hand reduces the chance of having to make a market run when you want to put something together for you or a friend (you have no idea how many times I put together a fit for a friend in order to fly with me).
- In fact, many FC’s/communities will keep spare ships on hand to lend out to people (here’s a recent post by an incursion community saying that they have loaner praxi…praxi…praxeese?). People want to play the game, not sit around with their thumbs up their asses while their fleetmates run to market. And this becomes especially important for gank fleets, who lose ships up to every 15 minutes. In fact, I personally don’t move anything less than a freighter full of catalysts when I do my logistics.
- Many people will stockpile based on in universe events (looming war, resource harvesting disruptions) or dev comments (i.e. CCP said they were going to buff marauders like a month before actually doing it). They do so in order minimize costs, ensure no interruption to their operations, maintain war readiness, and/or make easy money.
- Many people do swing trading/long term trading. Oz has a video about it, but the short an skinny are that there are two types of trading. Margin trading is when you create buy orders for items that have a good margin, and immediately create sell orders as your buy orders are filled. Swing trading is when you buy things that you believe to be currently undervalued, so that you can sell for more money when prices recover/go up.
- Finally, there are collectors out there that collect stuff. I have not gone all out like some people have, but I hold on to what I come across -such as all the random lore stuff that I have found/been given and random special edition ships like council diplomatic shuttles and victoreaux (spelling?) luxury yachts.
And, I’ll probably thing of more stuff later, but this is good enough for now. What’s important to note here is that you have failed to account for the needs, wants, and desires of many players and play styles when suggesting your change. And for what? Not only will your change come with a lot of disadvantages, but you still haven’t made a compelling argument for why you think it will result in any sort of good.
For example, what does this even mean? What do you mean by restore value to things? Does that mean drive prices up? Are you trying to make losses more meaningful? And why is that a good thing? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that capital ships should be disposable or anything, but I dispute the idea that scarcity breeds war and conflict. This might be true at an organizational level, but high prices make many players risk adverse, and make some players log off and go play other games for a while (because they don’t want to spend a bunch of time replacing their losses during the era of resource scarcity or whatnot). In fact, I’m going to make a prediction right now. CCP will eventually move away from Hillmar’s desire to make losses more meaningful again because they will find that it suppresses activity.
Finally, this whole thread kind of pisses me off. It’s people not considering how a change impacts everyone that results in various demographics getting shafted by changes. It’s why you hear the word “collateral” damage get thrown around, especially by wormholers. I mean, the fact that I have to sit here and explain how your idea will impact various players and play styles to you indicates that you have not thought this out, and that does kind of piss me off, because that’s how people get screwed. It would be one thing if you failed to predict the 2nd or 3rd order effects of a change, but this is first order stuff right here. So, you really have no excuse.
Oh, and I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re being hyperbolic with the titan comment. Because, if not, that’s just evidence that you have no idea what you’re talking about.