4 ms·

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

• 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.)
  • MrLeap 10y ago
    The lack of money printing wouldn't prevent groups of people from coalescing into big blobs and gaining a competitive advantage. In fact, I'd assert it makes it even worse. Imagine a sufficiently large alliance in your idealized game that by hook and crook "surrounds" your central bank. All new money in the economy passes through them. Sure you can finely control inflation, but without helicopter money you have no knobs you can twist to control wealth inequality in such a situation. Even if you do use helicopter money tactics, you'll be in a constant arms race with the big alliances to try and distribute the money as far away from them as possible. Long term players having big piles of cash really causes a lot of price dysfunction in my mmo experience. Eventually all the goods and materials that aren't required for end game play approaches a price of zero, where everything else gets more and more and more expensive as money loses value for the people who have it in abundance. As for the arbitrage thing -- price in nullsec for capital goods was 10-20% higher than it was in empire. Having an operation that hauls replacement ships, mods etc out to nullsec, and nullsec resources back to empire was an easy way to make billions if you were set up to move enough volume. I could easily make more money moving goods in my carrier than using the carrier for combat. Eve's combat system is a piece of design brilliance in and of itself. Battleships struggle under most circumstances to destroy frigates. Each ship size tier is loosely isolated from the other tiers by tracking constraints. Drones blur this a bit, but even though that guy spent 100m on that battleship and you spent 250k on your rifter -- he's probably not going to instapop you. Chances are he can't hit you. Your mobility makes you generally more of a threat to him than he is to you if you're tracking and tackling and people are backing you up! In terms of other mmo's, FFXIV made some good decisions but suffers from inflationary currency problems because the lack of gil sinks. High level crafting uses tons of low level materials, so new crafters can still make a profit off turning iron into screws or whatever. They do it really broadly so there's a whole lot of goods and materials that still churn on their auction house for non 1,inf prices. I haven't played WoW in a while, but low level ores and used to be pointless to the endgame players, so the prices on them zoomed towards zero. I think eve is a pretty boring game, but I have never seen an mmo that did a synthetic economy better. If you manage it I'll be the first to carry your banner to future mmo economic discussions ;)
    • 10y ago