This thread is a slap in the face to the idea the economy is broken. That’s not possible…
The economy is a collective representation of what people are willing to spend time on.
It can only be broken if you declare your time on a preferred activity as more valuable than someone else’s.
Whenever someone else spends more time on something, devaluing it, then by definition YOU have more time to do something else.
If your idea of fun is to find market inefficiencies and exploit them…then you can profit from people’s different perceptions of what is valuable.
But if you want to make a “living” doing something that’s not valuable it doesn’t mean the market is broken.
It means you’retoo stubborn to go do something else.
Disclaimer the reason this isn’t true in the real world should be obvious. But has to be said.
IRL we don’t have the luxury or option to do something else. at least not like in a video game.
If EvE made you pay 1billion isk a month with only game play to earn it or you died in real life…then yeah…maybe then EvE recessions would be broken like real life recessions are.
Op is talking about social mobility, but eve doesn’t have a great deal of social mobility.
Johnny McHisec can try to goto null, but he probably won’t survive. He may even lose more than he would make in hisec. He may leave the game altogether rather than face constant threat and docking up every time an non-friendly comes by.
At the end of the day eve’s a game and would be best served by having interesting and relatively rewarding gameplay in ALL areas. Just like ship balance is best served by having interesting options for ALL ships.
So the economy most certainly can be ‘broken’ if the rewards of one area are so high and oppressive to the rewards of other areas in the same way a certain ship or group of ships can be too oppressive to other ships.
Balance is just important for eves economy and is the whole premise of risk/reward that eve was built on.
No. I’m saying that people should be relatively engaged and rewarded in all areas of the game.
It should not be a case of ‘if you don’t think hisec is rewarding enough then leave hisec’ Because then what is hi-sec for?
At the same time it’s not self correcting either. The rewards in hisec are the same as those in null sec (isk, minerals, pi goods etc), so they can be oppressed by over farming (broken) in null.
But those are not the same thing. Just because there are too many resources available and mining is completely devalued doesn’t mean the economy is broken. It still works. The issue is that there are too many resources available.
How is it helping if you blame some adjacent mechanism and not the actual problem?
Hisec has lowest risk, therefore it follows it should make lowest profit. Why should an area of space that I have to organize with others regularly to defend against other large organized masses make the same amount of ISK for me as space wherein I am protected automatically by the deterrence of CONCORD and wardec mechanics?
If I understood Daichi correctly, he isn’t saying that high sec should make more or even equal profit as low/null sec space. He’s just saying that all areas of the game should be rewarding.
And I agree with him. EVE is a game after all, and this game would be most fun if all aspects of the game are playable, which means that all sectors of the game should have some rewarding gameplay. Just like the game would be most fun if all types of ships have a role in this game, instead of some being overshadowed by others.
Let’s take some extreme examples of a broken ship balance or broken economy:
Ship A is better than every other ship in the game, cheaper as well. Everyone is flying only ship A and having fun, while all the other ships are neglected. Is ship balance broken and does CCP need to do something about it? Yes, obviously.
Sector 1 is better than every other sector in the game, safer and more profits for everyone. Everyone lives in sector 1, neglecting all the other areas EVE has to offer. Does CCP need to do something about it? Obviously.
Last but not least:
Economy: some parts are much more profitable than others, making other styles of gameplay completely irrelevent and unrewarding. Does CCP need to do something about it? Well in the real world people would adjust. But this is a game and it would be disappointing if certain parts of the game go wasted because CCP does not fix the economy.
Luckily CCP is aware and they do attempts to fix the economy every now and then, such as their changes to lower the ISK inflation a few months ago.
@Alistair_Atreides You’re right, the economy is functioning perfectly well. People are able to trade goods and markets function like they should, completely self-regulating.
However, when people in EVE say ‘the economy is broken’, they don’t mean that the markets are bugged or that people are unable to trade. When people say ‘the economy is broken’, they mean that other aspects of the game aren’t functioning well, mainly the influx of certain items or ISK.
A hypothetical extreme scenario:
A new type of exploration site now drops everything. And I mean everything: blueprints, ores, ISK. And a lot of it, more ores than you could ever mine in a single ship in the same time. More ISK as well. Obviously, most people start doing only these exploration sites, because it’s more profitable than everything else in the game.
In that scenario, if someone says to you ‘I like mining but the economy is broken’, does that mean he is - as you would call it - too stubborn to do the more profitable thing and explore the sites instead of mining?
I would say that the guy is correct. He isn’t too stubborn, the game is unbalanced and CCP should fix it to make mining relevant again.
Now back out of the hypothetical example: I’m not saying that the economy in EVE is broken. I’m merely saying that the economy can be broken if the influx of goods isn’t balanced well by CCP. And since your statement is that the economy cannot be broken, see:
