Yes, that is the entire point really. The OP was to demonstrate that the economy isn’t ‘broken’, isn’t spiralling out of control, isn’t overrun by inflation. The economy is, overall, merely too productive. ISK was way too easy to farm in Null, and resources/manufacturing also got somewhat out of hand with Null/Rorq/PI production levels.
However, an economy running ‘too rich’ can be corrected, and already was in the process of doing so. The actual problem with the economy is that most players are oriented towards wealth building and productivity (just like most humans are), and very few players are oriented towards destroying things for the sake of destruction (again, thankfully, just as few humans are IRL).
No matter what the actual details though, if your economy produces more than it consumes, for over a dozen years, you’re going to end up with those huge stockpiles of wealth and resources. It’s not hard to do the math: take 5,000 players with several alts each, all of which make a billion profit a week (that’s a small number for Null farming btw) - you’re going to end up with massive wealth in some hands.
You can try to deal with this by cranking back the wealth generation and slamming the gates on it, as CCP has. Which is a somewhat shaky position to take, when 3/4 of your player base is primarily interested in wealth generation.
You can try to increase the ‘destruction’ levels, which CCP has done by changing the rules so your citadels blow up easier, changing the rules so you need to stick a rich prize in your citadel, changing the rules so your assets get locked up in Trig space, changing the rules so random packs of death-squad NPCs roam around high-sec, warping in from random wormholes, to blow up player assets. You get the picture here, this is basically CCP telling wealth-oriented players “we let you build up all these assets but now you have too much of them, so we’re just going to change the rules until they all explode”. Which again, just discourages a big sector of the playerbase.
What really needs to change is cranking up the motivation players have to engage in battle with each other and consume excess wealth. Motivating more players to engage in more destruction will eventually whittle down excess wealth. But the point is, that won’t happen if players feel they have more to lose by engaging in combat than they stand to gain. This gain/loss balance does not need to be an ISK profit, there are other forms of motivation.
At the moment, the primary reasons to initiate combat involve profit-hunting, ego-stroking, grudge-matching, and for a small percentage, simple enjoyment of EVE combat mechanics. But most players are “wealth production oriented”, and most players will suffer a loss in combat, so without a better structured PvP system they simply have no rational or emotional reason to engage in PvP - quite the opposite in fact.
And that’s it, right there (except it’s about resources too, not just ISK). You don’t just target people’s hoards and nuke them. You give them a reason to blow big ISK or big resources on something else they want. That’s what’s missing.
