5 ms·

"At the end of February 2016, the total liquid ISK in the EVE Online economy was 948.043 trillion ISK (equivalent to $16.45 million using PLEX conversion)." fi

by sybhn 10y ago

"At the end of February 2016, the total liquid ISK in the EVE Online economy was 948.043 trillion ISK (equivalent to $16.45 million using PLEX conversion)." find this fact mind boggling!

stcredzero 10y ago
Meh. It's a by-product of the typical hyperinflation you get when you try to devise an economy where everyone gets to print as much money as they care to. (Which is what MMO grinding for cash basically amounts to.) Their trying to peg ISK to real world money through PLEX is a typical strategy to try and counteract this, which also typically kind-of works, but only typically kind-of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.
- girvo 10y ago
  Off topic: Would it be possible to get updates on your project? I've seen your comments regarding it, and I'm quite intrigued!
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    http://www.emergencevector.com http://www.emergencevector.com I've hit a kind of "writer's block." I have 2^87 star systems, but I've hit a kind of blank-page syndrome about what to put in them first. Also, I'm a bit discouraged with regards to WebRTC vs. websockets. Websockets are pretty solid, but carry TCP stream semantics. WebRTC, but used in only client-server is my next step, but that particular use case is pretty much nonexistent in terms of examples and documentation. There's clearly a need for an energy mechanic, however. Maybe I'll tackle that next. (Not an energy mechanic, as in make you do microtransactions. I mean an energy mechanic to limit weapons firing and maneuvering.)
- MrLeap 10y ago
  I'd be interested to know the parts of Eve's economic system only 'kind of work'. I just checked the isk price of plex, it's only about 40% higher than it was 3 or 4 years ago when I last played. The yearly graph looks like a nearly perfect sine wave. I just spot checked the ships I used to fly and all of them are the same price or slightly cheaper than they used to be. Frankly, for a system where the only way to get most ships is to buy them for other players -- that's amazing! It's awesome to know I could log in and my savings is still enough to outfit the same kind of thing I could half a decade ago. Eve heavily regulates a player's ability to print money. Most of the great faucets are not risk free endeavors, and efficiently exploiting them requires expensive ships that are completely* lost when you screw up or are murdered. For any "hardcore" players that play enough to screw up the economy in other games, it's much more lucrative to spend your time on arbitrage than suckling on the isk faucets. I'd call that as successful an economy as you could hope for in a post scarcity sci-fi universe. * insurance is irrelevant when we're talking about an officer fit machariel.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    That's pretty good, and probably the best run MMO economy out there. However, there were still problems. Most of the great faucets are not risk free endeavors, and efficiently exploiting them requires expensive ships that are completely lost when you screw up or are murdered.* The really good faucets in nullsec when I was playing in the mid-oughts were largely dominated by big alliances. There wasn't as much opportunity to strike out on your own and stake a claim. (I quit when wormhole space was new.) Also, the way risk was used as a sink didn't quite do a good enough job of encouraging players (especially the modestly resourced ones) to build their own "civilization." I think the way very capable items were used as an ISK sink also basically favored very large alliances. There were also other anomalies. Players selling ships for below what it cost to make them, for example. Was that money laundering? For any "hardcore" players that play enough to screw up the economy in other games, it's much more lucrative to spend your time on arbitrage than suckling on the isk faucets. This is something I don't know a lot about. Tell me more. I'd call that as successful an economy as you could hope for in a post scarcity sci-fi universe. To heck with post scarcity sci-fi whatever. That has almost nothing to do with what happens in a real working economy, or making a fictional economy workable. I'm thinking that many of the problems with MMOs stem from how their economies dysfunction, and that a good way to solve the problems is to simply not let players print money. Only banks will be able to print money. There simply shouldn't be any arbitrary ISK faucets. (I suspect that under the covers, Eve Online in the mid-oughts was basically largely "crony capitalism.") EDIT: Something that just occurred to me: in Eve, player characters basically pay to get to fight. (Or pay to get to fight with better equipment.) Instead, player characters should be directly paid for their willingness to fight. (Killing NPCs on missions doesn't count, as this is just dressed up grinding.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- floatingatoll 10y ago
  PLEX was designed as a 'legal' mechanism to undercut (and, for the most part, terminated) the black market trade in "cash for ISK" and the accompanying problems caused by automation of ISK farming by those black market sellers. It also serves as a mechanism for players to 'sell' ISK for 'cash', in the sense that they won't have to pay the real cash monthly fee if they sell their ISK (or other liquid property) to someone else for a PLEX. It is not, however, an ISK sink. The only way to buy PLEX with ISK is to trade with someone who bought theirs with cash. That ISK remains in the economy and is not destroyed by the trade. The actual mechanism is hinted at early on in the article: > The main way ISK is removed from the game this month was the purchase of skills from NPC corps on the market, with 13.602 trillion ISK sunk into skill books over the period. This is wrong, based on the 2015 Vegas report: LP stores are also an ISK sink, exceeding - in 2015 - the skill books. Anyways, the above article links to: https://web.archive.org/web/20150129024846/http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/10/24/eve-evolved-isk-sinks-and-faucets/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150129024846/http://massively.... Which tries to explain this, but is filled with broken links to forum posts. I eventually found this post from 2012 that concisely indicates actual ISK sinks in the game in dollar amounts: http://twostep4csm.blogspot.com/2012/03/its-econmony-stupid.html http://twostep4csm.blogspot.com/2012/03/its-econmony-stupid.... And their 2015 economy post includes a graph of ISK velocity ("the estimated number of times one isk is spent to buy goods each month, in this case a 30 day moving sum of total trade over total active isk each day") as well as the "total ISK" growth over time: https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-economy-update-eve-vegas-2015-report/ https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-economy-u... And finally, it links to this chart, clearly showing the ISK sinks and faucets for September 2015: http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/sinksfaucets.png http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/si... In the sample month shown above, the amount of ISK in the economy increased from 870T to 876T (0.7%). This is not a significant level of currency printing - but currency printing isn't part of the definition of inflation, 'spending power' is. Fortunately, they also include the price of PLEX over time in this post: http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/plex.price.png http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/pl... Estimating by visual inspection only, the price of ISK rose unusually quickly between June 2015 and October 2015, from 900M to 1200M, where it promptly flatlined. They decline to explain why this is - however, the current price today, over a year later, is 1300M: http://www.eve-markets.net/detail?typeid=29668&limit=14#history http://www.eve-markets.net/detail?typeid=29668&limit=14#hist... So whatever inflation occurred during that window of time has apparently returned to normal levels. Looking up the definition of hyperinflation on the Internet (I'm not an economist), the generally accepted definition seems to be a monthly inflation rate of 50% of the price of a given good, assuming a fixed spending power. While it's impossible to say above with certainty that spending power remained constant, assuming that, the price of ISK would have had to increase from 900M to 1350M in one month to count as hyperinflation by the usual definition. There have been no indications that the EVE economy has reduced the spending power of its users, given their continuing efforts to feed users a steady trickle of additional ISK in the economy each month. So with the current price of PLEX one year later not yet having reached 1350M, it seems safe to hazard a guess that 'hyperinflation' - in PLEX, at least - is not applicable to their economy.
- jerf 10y ago
  Rather than avoiding printing money, I'd suggest considering using feedback loops to try to control the economy. One of the core problems with a simulated economy is that it can't ever really be a real economy as long as it has significant chunks of the economic transactions coming from programs rather than people. There's always a border between the humans and the machines, and I think a lot of the silliness of MMO economies comes from that border, and the way it can be exploited, rather than the economic issues themselves. For instance, in the real world, there is no such thing as a fixed price. You can't wake up one day, harvest a bushel of apples, and take it down to the fruit stand down the street to sell for $5, regardless of all other economic conditions. That bends the economy. In the real world, you can't buy an unbounded number of apples for $10 a bushel. That bends the economy. In the real world, if you sell a bushel of apples, it doesn't essentially disappear from the Prime Material Plane, it has to be transported to someone else who wants it, without destroying the apples, before they go bad. That bends the economy. The inaccuracies are fundamentally unfixable in some sense, but they could probably be mitigated by trying to put in a feedback loop where things get more expensive as more people buy them, and get cheaper as fewer people buy them. If done correctly, this would also prevent the problem where you have to explicitly create and manage sinks; you let the economy figure out the sinks for you. It would also almost certainly be dynamically unstable, with some things being under- or over-priced all the time in various cycle... but this can be seen as advantage for a game as much as it can be seen as a disadvantage. Some very clever thinking might even let you exert some control over the cycles and do things like try to ensure they don't all end up in sync (i.e., consider the equations for simple harmonic motion and how you can affect the "k" constant for different commodities). The other thing I'd consider would be implementing storage fees (which themselves float) to prevent hoarding and gathering excessive wealth, probably structured as a progressive tax, too. Or at the very least, make it a knob you can crank and tell people it may change on a day-by-day basis.
  - FreezerburnV 10y ago
    If you're talking about fixed prices in EVE's economy, you possibly don't understand it very well. There are very few fixed prices in EVE, most of which are things like skill books which by necessity have to be generated by the game systems. Or commodities, which have no real use outside of buying and selling for some small profit. All useful items in the game are sold to other players, and the price changes over time based on supply and demand, or other traders just being cutthroat about selling their items. I made a decent chunk of money by putting up buy orders for items to get from actual players, and then selling those items to actual players for several hundred percent markup. (that was just how the price was at the time) Occasionally a single item could become entirely worthless to sell because other traders would get into price wars to make sure their items sold first by modifying their sell price down by a small amount. Or buy price up by a small amount. Recently there was a large war, and the price of a lot of the popular ships went up because the large alliances were buying large amounts of them. Possibly the price of manufactured items went up by some amount as well due to minerals becoming more scarce from alliances consuming huge amounts of them to fuel their war. All that is to say: you don't sell apples for $5 every time ;) Though the price of certain base goods, such as a common mineral, might only vary by +- 0.10 of an ISK in general.
- di4na 10y ago
  Just to remind that all tentative to follow "inflation" in eve show that the inflation is nearly inexistant...

by sybhn 10y ago

"At the end of February 2016, the total liquid ISK in the EVE Online economy was 948.043 trillion ISK (equivalent to $16.45 million using PLEX conversion)." find this fact mind boggling!

stcredzero 10y ago

Meh. It's a by-product of the typical hyperinflation you get when you try to devise an economy where everyone gets to print as much money as they care to. (Which is what MMO grinding for cash basically amounts to.) Their trying to peg ISK to real world money through PLEX is a typical strategy to try and counteract this, which also typically kind-of works, but only typically kind-of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.

girvo 10y ago
Off topic: Would it be possible to get updates on your project? I've seen your comments regarding it, and I'm quite intrigued!
- stcredzero 10y ago
  http://www.emergencevector.com http://www.emergencevector.com I've hit a kind of "writer's block." I have 2^87 star systems, but I've hit a kind of blank-page syndrome about what to put in them first. Also, I'm a bit discouraged with regards to WebRTC vs. websockets. Websockets are pretty solid, but carry TCP stream semantics. WebRTC, but used in only client-server is my next step, but that particular use case is pretty much nonexistent in terms of examples and documentation. There's clearly a need for an energy mechanic, however. Maybe I'll tackle that next. (Not an energy mechanic, as in make you do microtransactions. I mean an energy mechanic to limit weapons firing and maneuvering.)
MrLeap 10y ago
I'd be interested to know the parts of Eve's economic system only 'kind of work'. I just checked the isk price of plex, it's only about 40% higher than it was 3 or 4 years ago when I last played. The yearly graph looks like a nearly perfect sine wave. I just spot checked the ships I used to fly and all of them are the same price or slightly cheaper than they used to be. Frankly, for a system where the only way to get most ships is to buy them for other players -- that's amazing! It's awesome to know I could log in and my savings is still enough to outfit the same kind of thing I could half a decade ago. Eve heavily regulates a player's ability to print money. Most of the great faucets are not risk free endeavors, and efficiently exploiting them requires expensive ships that are completely* lost when you screw up or are murdered. For any "hardcore" players that play enough to screw up the economy in other games, it's much more lucrative to spend your time on arbitrage than suckling on the isk faucets. I'd call that as successful an economy as you could hope for in a post scarcity sci-fi universe. * insurance is irrelevant when we're talking about an officer fit machariel.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  That's pretty good, and probably the best run MMO economy out there. However, there were still problems. Most of the great faucets are not risk free endeavors, and efficiently exploiting them requires expensive ships that are completely lost when you screw up or are murdered.* The really good faucets in nullsec when I was playing in the mid-oughts were largely dominated by big alliances. There wasn't as much opportunity to strike out on your own and stake a claim. (I quit when wormhole space was new.) Also, the way risk was used as a sink didn't quite do a good enough job of encouraging players (especially the modestly resourced ones) to build their own "civilization." I think the way very capable items were used as an ISK sink also basically favored very large alliances. There were also other anomalies. Players selling ships for below what it cost to make them, for example. Was that money laundering? For any "hardcore" players that play enough to screw up the economy in other games, it's much more lucrative to spend your time on arbitrage than suckling on the isk faucets. This is something I don't know a lot about. Tell me more. I'd call that as successful an economy as you could hope for in a post scarcity sci-fi universe. To heck with post scarcity sci-fi whatever. That has almost nothing to do with what happens in a real working economy, or making a fictional economy workable. I'm thinking that many of the problems with MMOs stem from how their economies dysfunction, and that a good way to solve the problems is to simply not let players print money. Only banks will be able to print money. There simply shouldn't be any arbitrary ISK faucets. (I suspect that under the covers, Eve Online in the mid-oughts was basically largely "crony capitalism.") EDIT: Something that just occurred to me: in Eve, player characters basically pay to get to fight. (Or pay to get to fight with better equipment.) Instead, player characters should be directly paid for their willingness to fight. (Killing NPCs on missions doesn't count, as this is just dressed up grinding.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
floatingatoll 10y ago
PLEX was designed as a 'legal' mechanism to undercut (and, for the most part, terminated) the black market trade in "cash for ISK" and the accompanying problems caused by automation of ISK farming by those black market sellers. It also serves as a mechanism for players to 'sell' ISK for 'cash', in the sense that they won't have to pay the real cash monthly fee if they sell their ISK (or other liquid property) to someone else for a PLEX. It is not, however, an ISK sink. The only way to buy PLEX with ISK is to trade with someone who bought theirs with cash. That ISK remains in the economy and is not destroyed by the trade. The actual mechanism is hinted at early on in the article: > The main way ISK is removed from the game this month was the purchase of skills from NPC corps on the market, with 13.602 trillion ISK sunk into skill books over the period. This is wrong, based on the 2015 Vegas report: LP stores are also an ISK sink, exceeding - in 2015 - the skill books. Anyways, the above article links to: https://web.archive.org/web/20150129024846/http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/10/24/eve-evolved-isk-sinks-and-faucets/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150129024846/http://massively.... Which tries to explain this, but is filled with broken links to forum posts. I eventually found this post from 2012 that concisely indicates actual ISK sinks in the game in dollar amounts: http://twostep4csm.blogspot.com/2012/03/its-econmony-stupid.html http://twostep4csm.blogspot.com/2012/03/its-econmony-stupid.... And their 2015 economy post includes a graph of ISK velocity ("the estimated number of times one isk is spent to buy goods each month, in this case a 30 day moving sum of total trade over total active isk each day") as well as the "total ISK" growth over time: https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-economy-update-eve-vegas-2015-report/ https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-economy-u... And finally, it links to this chart, clearly showing the ISK sinks and faucets for September 2015: http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/sinksfaucets.png http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/si... In the sample month shown above, the amount of ISK in the economy increased from 870T to 876T (0.7%). This is not a significant level of currency printing - but currency printing isn't part of the definition of inflation, 'spending power' is. Fortunately, they also include the price of PLEX over time in this post: http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/plex.price.png http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/pl... Estimating by visual inspection only, the price of ISK rose unusually quickly between June 2015 and October 2015, from 900M to 1200M, where it promptly flatlined. They decline to explain why this is - however, the current price today, over a year later, is 1300M: http://www.eve-markets.net/detail?typeid=29668&limit=14#history http://www.eve-markets.net/detail?typeid=29668&limit=14#hist... So whatever inflation occurred during that window of time has apparently returned to normal levels. Looking up the definition of hyperinflation on the Internet (I'm not an economist), the generally accepted definition seems to be a monthly inflation rate of 50% of the price of a given good, assuming a fixed spending power. While it's impossible to say above with certainty that spending power remained constant, assuming that, the price of ISK would have had to increase from 900M to 1350M in one month to count as hyperinflation by the usual definition. There have been no indications that the EVE economy has reduced the spending power of its users, given their continuing efforts to feed users a steady trickle of additional ISK in the economy each month. So with the current price of PLEX one year later not yet having reached 1350M, it seems safe to hazard a guess that 'hyperinflation' - in PLEX, at least - is not applicable to their economy.
jerf 10y ago
Rather than avoiding printing money, I'd suggest considering using feedback loops to try to control the economy. One of the core problems with a simulated economy is that it can't ever really be a real economy as long as it has significant chunks of the economic transactions coming from programs rather than people. There's always a border between the humans and the machines, and I think a lot of the silliness of MMO economies comes from that border, and the way it can be exploited, rather than the economic issues themselves. For instance, in the real world, there is no such thing as a fixed price. You can't wake up one day, harvest a bushel of apples, and take it down to the fruit stand down the street to sell for $5, regardless of all other economic conditions. That bends the economy. In the real world, you can't buy an unbounded number of apples for $10 a bushel. That bends the economy. In the real world, if you sell a bushel of apples, it doesn't essentially disappear from the Prime Material Plane, it has to be transported to someone else who wants it, without destroying the apples, before they go bad. That bends the economy. The inaccuracies are fundamentally unfixable in some sense, but they could probably be mitigated by trying to put in a feedback loop where things get more expensive as more people buy them, and get cheaper as fewer people buy them. If done correctly, this would also prevent the problem where you have to explicitly create and manage sinks; you let the economy figure out the sinks for you. It would also almost certainly be dynamically unstable, with some things being under- or over-priced all the time in various cycle... but this can be seen as advantage for a game as much as it can be seen as a disadvantage. Some very clever thinking might even let you exert some control over the cycles and do things like try to ensure they don't all end up in sync (i.e., consider the equations for simple harmonic motion and how you can affect the "k" constant for different commodities). The other thing I'd consider would be implementing storage fees (which themselves float) to prevent hoarding and gathering excessive wealth, probably structured as a progressive tax, too. Or at the very least, make it a knob you can crank and tell people it may change on a day-by-day basis.
- FreezerburnV 10y ago
  If you're talking about fixed prices in EVE's economy, you possibly don't understand it very well. There are very few fixed prices in EVE, most of which are things like skill books which by necessity have to be generated by the game systems. Or commodities, which have no real use outside of buying and selling for some small profit. All useful items in the game are sold to other players, and the price changes over time based on supply and demand, or other traders just being cutthroat about selling their items. I made a decent chunk of money by putting up buy orders for items to get from actual players, and then selling those items to actual players for several hundred percent markup. (that was just how the price was at the time) Occasionally a single item could become entirely worthless to sell because other traders would get into price wars to make sure their items sold first by modifying their sell price down by a small amount. Or buy price up by a small amount. Recently there was a large war, and the price of a lot of the popular ships went up because the large alliances were buying large amounts of them. Possibly the price of manufactured items went up by some amount as well due to minerals becoming more scarce from alliances consuming huge amounts of them to fuel their war. All that is to say: you don't sell apples for $5 every time ;) Though the price of certain base goods, such as a common mineral, might only vary by +- 0.10 of an ISK in general.
di4na 10y ago
Just to remind that all tentative to follow "inflation" in eve show that the inflation is nearly inexistant...