…I mean I know why… but… why…? Putting it in General Discussion because it’s more of a RFQ than a suggestion.
Resource scarcity drives conflict. Increase moon production significantly, then drop it down to 3 moons per region. No group could reasonably hold them all, but no group would ever sate their need for moon goo with just 3 moons per region, all spread out as far as possible in each region.
Advantages:
Ninja mining might actually mean something (honestly when moons first came out I was salivating at the concept of blops escorting prospects into hostile moon fields, popping the local mining ships and stuffing their holds before bridging out)
Large groups want lots of resources for in-house production. Scarcity would surely encourage them to borrow someone else’s moons. Yet the distance would be such that they wouldn’t be able to hold all of them.
Disadvantages:
Resource scarcity drives up prices of ships which in turn increases risk aversion.
Is this actually true? I’m a noob, so genuine question.
From CCP’s monthly releases, EvE is surprisingly well-balanced - financially. But it’s not balanced based on production vs losses; it’s balanced on payouts (60% from bounty prizes) vs taxes and fees of various kinds.
So, what about materially? Has anyone been able to work out the numbers and/or decipher the algorithm(s) in play? What % of material mined is actually represented by the value destroyed, each month?
For your statement to be true (and potentially for your moon idea to work) the players would need to truly be in charge of material flows, without CCP interference. Where does the material paid out via insurance, starter & mission rewards of new vessels, plus salvage from NPC wrecks, come from? Combined, this is quite possibly a trivial volume overall - but does anyone actually know?
Resources have to be plentiful, actually the time and effort to make them usable in production is what makes them expensive. In a system where there is so much material wasted, you have to get it unlimited amount I think. You can mine indefinitely. As others suggested, its good to have your own production, competing with others.
Size matters - resources will get locked up by the big groups to the exclusion of the small, providing even greater advantage and making it harder to displace them.
There is a balance between too few and too many and maybe it isn’t right just now, but the balance point is enough to satisfy the big players and then some, to provide room for others.
The abundance helps smaller groups provide content for their members, earn income, establish and grow.
In some ways, the abundance of moons encourages conflict more than making them scarse would, because it allows more people to feel that losing ships is not a huge issue.
That data is in one of the first graphs in MER: about three times as much stuff is produced than destroyed each month (although if you look at just mining it is about equal). What we don’t have access to is the amount of material that leaves the economy via players quitting the game as we do for ISK. It turns out that player leaving the game is the primary factor balancing the amount of ISK, so it must also be a significant factor in sinking production as well.
That said though, specific parts of the economy, like moon minerals and T2 production, might not be in such a state of overproduction. It is probably true that if you restrict the output of moon goo, prices of T2 ships will go up further.
But to the OP, yes the game lacks resource scarcity and thus conflict drivers. We are all awash in resources to the point there are very few real reasons to fight over them. For whatever reasons (and I won’t claim it is an easy thing to do) the devs have been unable to build a universe where fighting over tangible things is really a thing that is rewarded by the game mechanics, and instead have built a sandbox where there is plenty of space and room for everyone to peacefully coexist and farming/fortifying is the primary meta.
I don’t see that changing much anytime soon so I suggest you try to come up with other reasons to make content in the sandbox than control of resources.
The old way of moon mining was hand out R64/R32 and some R16s to directors and CEOs, pay some guy to fuel them all for you and clean up your goo once a week, biweekly or every month if you were lucky. Stick a gallente small tower on any decent lower moon to “ninja” it till someone took over space, noticed it and said what the hell and blew it up or you moved on.
Not many people saw income from moon goo and it was rather hard to disrupt it. A lot of fleets were staged around R64 fights sure but in the end it never benefited a lot of people unless leadership was benevolent or rich enough to use it for SRP.
In the end CCP, and players, screamed for more input and more player input that could be attacked and mitigated through not just large fleet fights over static resources like the old tower fights but small gang warfare that would result in more conflicts over time and also allow both goo to flow for T2 ships and income to be dispersed to active miners and not passive goo suckers sitting on a moon or two.
There needs to be enough to supply ships as 3 moons per region would NOT economically spit out enough goo even remotely unless you made each one worth about 300-500bil each a month. There is a lot of goo that ships to Jita to build ships and what you suggest would strangulate that market and kill off all T2 ship production period in one single go.
So no, what you suggest isnt even a good idea to negate anything. And destroying others ability to moon mine isnt as tough as it was before. Yes it has created a new meta with new challenges and pitfalls and I would love to wait and see how Eve players get around to working on these rather than asking for a flat out nerf as you are.
Oh no it’s not. That early graph eg for March 2018, shows three times as much value is produced (4.7 T vs 1.6 T destroyed), not material.
The mining value might be closer to the truth, at 1.8 T, but even if it is an exact analog for material, it would mean we are already close to under-supply, which should have appeared based on CCP’s non-uniform spread of resources. And it is not at all obvious that that is the case.
Where did you get that data from?
That might well be correct, based on my very limited observations. I just don’t think it is proven by the published data (which is moot at this point now anyway).
You are missing the core idea. The destruction loss is measured is terms of value of produced goods so it only makes sense to compare it to the final value of produced goods. You can’t compare destruction of finished goods to that of raw resources collected; that is like comparing apples and pears.
Collectively, we keep 2/3rds of what we build each month (ignoring loss to people quitting) and thus get richer and richer.
It’s the active ISK delta there. ISK lost to people quitting the game in March was almost half of the ISK taken out of the economy by all the ISK sinks in the game. It is not insignificant.
Huh. Had not read the *small print previously. Thanks for pointing that out.
The game is still balanced financially but I take your other point that it could hardly be materially balanced - based on player actions only - under those circumstances
Yeah, we don’t really know. In 2016 CCP Quant told us that there was 3 Quadrillion ISK worth of assets in the game on active accounts. That means, at current destruction rate of 1T a day, it would take 3 000 days, or over 8 years to deplete New Eden of player assets if production stopped completely (and destruction stayed constant). Of course, production hasn’t stopped, and if we ignore assets lost to players leaving the game (which we shouldn’t) we add another 2 days to that number every day that passes.
Perhaps you will find that presentation interesting:
Looking historic production vs. destruction, I don’t think production and destruction are especially well balanced, and since the capital ship rebalance, the rate of asset accumulation by the players has doubled. This is offset somewhat by the fact there are more expensive new toys to build, but we are all far richer than we were even just a few years ago, which I guess is good in some ways, but is bad in others, including for the reason articulated by the OP. We have almost no scarcity, for anything anymore, and very little reason to fight for anything other than fun or honour. For some players that is their ideal version of Eve - one where losses really don’t matter, while for others this erodes the competitive and economic game that they came looking for.
Personally, I think this excess wealth is much more detrimental to the long term health of the game than most realize. So many players play the game to gather and build things to sell to the war machines, and literally their reason to play is diminished every day New Eden stockpiles more weapons than they use. I’ll grant we don’t have all the numbers to conclude that, and loss of ISK/assets to players quitting is a potent feedback loop also underestimated by most, but I consider it plausible that someday there will be an economic reckoning for this period of excess production that will start the real exodus of players from the game.
Can you imagine if only the most powerful groups controlled all the moon’s they would come together to control the price of those minerals and we would be paying 2bil for t2 ships, sounds horrible to me.
An interesting dilemma. I suppose the “best” way to exercise the spirit of the OP’s initial proposal might be to exorcise this ghost of lost production? Perhaps by applying a forced repatriation of assets?
After June 1st, all players who do not log-in in during the subsequent 90 days (or 12 months & a day; or somesuch) will lose any and all assets. SP they can keep. Otherwise, just what any new starter gets, if and when they do ever return. They don’t value it now, then why let them keep it tied up?
You might still need to engineer scarcity after that, a la the OP’s idea, but it would be a start.
that’s a pretty silly thing to suggest. i know lots of people who have alts with bank on them for a rainy day and they’ll log them in if ever needed. you cannot just delete assets like that.
what about those with RL issue who have no choice but to take a long break away from game, again you can’t just delete their stuff.
no offence but that’s a pretty stupid idea that i’m sure would never gain support.
So what? This is a game of community. And you are proposing self-above-all.
Those assets, squirreled away, cost RL money to purchase. What “right” do you or anyone else have to keep those assets indefinitely, whilst no longer paying for the privelege?
Goodwill on behalf of CCP to ensure future access? Sure. But “rights”? No.
It’s also not really necessary. If they have quit for good, then those assets are effectively destroyed so deleting their assets does nothing. If they come back, they will increase the economy but also become and active participant so it balances out. The downside is that it only muddies the waters a bit when looking at the economic numbers and probably underestimates some the amount of ISK and assets, but it’s also true that some fraction of those assets are held by active players who will never spend or trade those assets and they will just sit in that wallet or hanger until the servers go dark, never touching the economy.
What is really needed is for CCP to find a way to stimulate real destruction, while toning back production, but that is hard when the established incumbents have so much power and wealth compared to new entrants. I think the only solution at this point is to reset the economy somewhat with dramatic outside change, but this is risky and difficult to do. Meh, we are drifting off-topic.
Moons are plentiful and not especially good at driving conflict in their current form, although I will say they have succeeded in making moon goo collection an active process. So the OP is correct, but limiting moons isn’t a solution, nor something you probably want to do for the sake of the T2 market. It might though be worth experimenting by adding a few ‘jackpot’ moons that can be found and for a limited time offer a unique and/or very lucrative resource to serve as points to fight over. Perhaps they could be special deposits of volatile material that only last say 3 months, and but there are only like 4 anywhere in the game at any time. If they are that valuable, I’m not sure how much success the OP would have trying to steal them, but I for one would be happy to see such a conflict driver added to the game to give players something concrete to fight over.
