Eve Evolved: Analysing Eve's New Economic Reports

Instead of paying player characters to grind, and therefore have players consume game content, why aren't we paying players to create game content?

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 ;)

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.

http://www.ibtimes.co.in/valve-economist-yanis-varoufakis-ap...