Hello I would like to write this litte thought without being disrespectful to CCP or to anyone. From some time I have been reading topics about CCP being interested in reducing inflation and looking for a way to create more ISK Sinks (those actions included increased taxes and fees, and adjusting the 0,01 margin, which I believe the last one to be very accurate).
I think that the problem of this struggle between Faucets and Sinks is not aimed at the right direction. If you look at these graphs (Sinks and Faucets altogether) you can crearly see which activity is the most distant from the others, and also you can see how poorly the market has been developed for 5 or 6 months.
The point is that I don’t see that raising taxes or fees would increase the amount of money pulled out from circulation as bounty hunting (mostly) creates.
I think it is obvious to most of us that the bounties paid out in null are the main thing causing an isk imbalance in the game. However, the nullsec power blocs have always had inappropriate influence on the CCP game developers.
Long ago, there was actual cheating going on by CCP employees. That has probably been eliminated. Oddly though, CCP still caters to nullsec. The nullsec coalitions own the keepstar in perimeter. They got the game tweaked so that the structure is virtually indestructible, with TIDI and various specific tweaks to highsec and wardecs. Not to mention that having a keepstar in highsec doesn’t even make any sense from a game design perspective.
The structure charges a tax on market transactions, which is probably quite lucrative. Some of their competition wasn’t charging any tax at all (trying to lure business away). In one of the most absurdly transparent concessions to the null powers, CCP made the market tax “mandatory” so that nobody could undercut the keepstar.
Your observation is correct - NPC bounties are completely excessive. But, the null blocs like them that way, so CCP doesn’t seem to want to change them. It is funny, too, since NPC bounties would be a lot easier to change than all this juggling of mineral resources around in space.
One confirmed example was when a CCP dev rigged the T2 BPO lottery so that his alliance would get all the sabre (I think) BPOs. It was called the T20 scandal. I think there might have been something similar with the allocation of moons, but I’m not so sure about that.
Unless I misinterpreted something, if you compare the market sinks from January’s economic report against the most recent one, you will notice that, as many predicted, not only did it not help removing isk from the game - the sink has SHRINKED by a few trillions - so this market change has been counterproductive to the economy.
Edit: I said “faucet” where I should have said “sink”.
Bounties used for people catch a slippery or notorious criminal. Catching this criminal is so hard for the law enforcement that they need to outsource it. harder to catch, more dangerous the criminal, bigger the bounties. since not many people could doing it.
But here, we got some easily killed criminal that basically everyone can kill them. yet the police keep paying them for full, despite so many of them being killed. These criminal arent really wrecking havoc either. They just there in their own corner of space minding their own business doing no danger to anything.
I mean, eve got great market and industrial activity it almost like real life. But the bounty system is weird. Putting bounty on an immortal capsuler head, that have access to transfer consciousness, and being able to store his/her own corpse? Nice system.
