[stcredzero]

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

My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.

[MrLeap]

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]

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.)

[FreezerburnV]

It's important to note that the actual faucets of ISK into the economy are actually few. Off the top of my head I can think of only three: destroying pirate ships, running missions, and collecting destroyed ship insurance. Every other "faucet" of ISK is really just shuffling it around to different wallets. A huge corporation has a large moon mining operation going and selling what they receive for large amounts of money in Jita? That's just shuffling ISK from a player's wallet to another player's wallet. And in fact, the game takes a small tax out of selling those lucrative assets, so there is also a constant sink of ISK out of the economy. And considering the number of trades going on at any time, those small taxes build up to what is probably a larger amount of money than you might think per day, offsetting the actual faucets pretty nicely I would imagine.

The beauty of the economy is that most lucrative assets do not generate ISK, and are highly temporary. The moon mining materials go into ships and modules, which explode permanently. On their way to exploding permanently, they sink ISK out of the economy via tax on selling (if sold) and money required to actually manufacture something.

This is probably why the price of stuff stays relatively even. If the price of a ship has gone up, it's likely largely due to supply/demand rather than purely inflation, as last time I played (this year) the price of minerals had stayed approximately the same. There might have been a little inflation, but no hyperinflation that I could see.

EDIT: Thought of a fourth faucet: buying commodities for cheap and selling them for more at an NPC-run station. Because those commodities are generated and bought purely out of thin air by the game systems.

[mos_basik]

W O R M H O L E S

Sleeper rats don't give bounties. If they did, wormholers would never come out of their caves :3 so sleepers drop blue loot - one of those NPC commodities you're referring to; isn't required to build anything, generates isk when sold to NPC buy order. Forces the wormholers to transport stuff to market.

Before the site changes that came with the capital rework, highclass capital escalations were habitually pulling 800m/hr with fully insurable dreads and carriers. Fortunately(?) that got nerfed, so now highclass peeps use Rattlesnakes for 150m/h in C3s like the rest of us. I say (?) because while the change certainly reduced isk faucets it also certainly reduced the number of exposed capitals to be attacked[0] -> reduced the number of people in wspace who principally enjoyed using/attacking capitals -> increased the use frequency of much-harder-to-catch ships while simultaneously plummeting the active population -> maybe sort of kind of killed jspace (we'll see).

[0]: https://comparison.hrdkx.space/timeline

[FreezerburnV]

Ah, my mistake for not knowing that one, thanks! I admit I've never really done much with wormholes except used them to get from highsec to nullsec and vise versa, so I didn't know about that faucet.

It sounds like the change had the right heart to it to get people into Rattlesnakes, as 800m/hour with the extra faucet of full insurance sounds like it might have been just a bit too much. I imagine it's a pretty delicate balance of faucets/sinks, and that might have been throwing it off. I don't think I was playing at the time, if you were did you notice any extra inflation in Jita prices?

[mos_basik]

Here is a recent Reddit thread on the topic[0] but the discussion has been going on for a while - at least a couple of months before the wormhole town hall thread that the top comment links to. There are a couple of other good threads that I can't find immediately - one in particular by an Hard Knocks member trying to clear up some public perceptions of how HK plays into the current jspace situation (apply salt, as with any public statement made by an Eve player who declares his affiliation). In any case, HK flairs are everywhere when this is brought up.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/52ri3v/lets_fix_high_c...

The stuff about Rattles being impossible to catch and not worth it if you do is spot on. Those things are so cheap. Not as cheap as when Goons were in Dek poopsocking Guristas DED sites, but still cheap. I help run a new player friendly low class group and we've pretty much skipped recommending remote-rep domis (which are even cheaper) and now just recommend Rattles.

The people who were running high class who decided to leave are pretty much (as far as I can tell) just running incursions. The description in the thread of how much work it is to set up a secure wormhole to PVE in is pretty good too. Incursions aren't as much money but they're so much easier.

>price inflation

Nah, I don't think it was enough to make tooooo much of a dent in prices. Even before the current exodus, jspace players are like 2% of the population. The null ratting faucet dominates the blue loot faucet hard. The highsec incursion faucet is bigger too, but not by nearly as much. Similar case with running lowsec Level 5's in an insured carrier - 1b/hr, but so few people do it that it's not a big deal.

Btw I was being a little facetious about the insurance (in jspace). Caps are probably not buying insurance much honestly. You can only insure in a station, not a POS or citadel, so it's a pain in the ass to get your cap out of the chain, insured, and back into the chain every 3 months. Caps mass holes pretty fast. The lowsec missioning caps, on the other hand, are certainly insured. I think you lose 150-200m tops from a t2 fit, platinum insured carrier or dread loss. (A plat-insured Dominix is a 50m loss, and 6+ of them remote-repping each other is about as cancerous as the old slowcat fleets, but in a subcap form - thank god you can't move them far or fast because of lowclass mass limits.)

[MrLeap]

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 ;)

[stcredzero]

Imagine a sufficiently large alliance in your idealized game that by hook and crook "surrounds" your central bank

I'd simply make access to the central bank universal. Done.

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.

Well, for one thing, I don't have a defined endgame. The leaderboards will be based on how far out into space a player can "camp" -- with the environment becoming exponentially more powerful as you go out. Tech level N+1 items will be made out of tech level N items.

Also, I'm starting to think that I should limit the uses of money. There will be the equivalent of "cold pressed latinum" -- which will have very limited uses. Maybe have everything be based on a sophisticated barter-matching system, with money only being available to and used by players? (And in-detail simulated player-equivalent NPCs.)

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.

Okay, I thought that this was referring to something else. This is the reason why I knew my small alliance would fail! We didn't build the "infrastructure" to do this! Or rather, we didn't create the intra-organizational norms and information infrastructure that let us do this efficiently. We even had a freakin real station, which should have been an insurmountable advantage -- except for the whole server crashing thing every time we were clearly going to win a sovereignty battle.

even though that guy spent 100m on that battleship and you spent 250k on your rifter

I loved the Rifter! My alliance had a philosophy of flying cheap ships, having no mods, and not being afraid to die, so long as you destroyed more ISK than was destroyed out from under you. We had it all over our opponents in terms of battle tactics. We couldn't manage our own economy, though. (It was badly centrally managed.) We also couldn't maintain morale.

High level crafting uses tons of low level materials, so new crafters can still make a profit off turning iron into screws or whatever.

My scheme for a procedurally generated tech tree has this property.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3DPalL7p5w

If you manage it I'll be the first to carry your banner to future mmo economic discussions ;)

Thanks.

[jerf]

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]

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.

[stcredzero]

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.

That bends the economy.

This is exactly what I've been thinking! (Actually, some of this thought fully coalesced in this very discussion!) It's a truism that mechanics tend to get deeper if the AIs have to play by the same rules as the players. I think this goes for the economy! The way to solve a lot of the silliness of MMO economies is to eliminate as much as possible the fake parts of it!

The inaccuracies are fundamentally unfixable in some sense, but they could probably be mitigated by trying to put in a feedback loop

If you ground the economy in a simulated "nature" then this provides an inherent feedback loop. This also solidifies my thinking around how to coalesce everything that fosters emergence into one game! The point of Genetic Algorithms in my game shouldn't be to design new ships, or new content. The point should be to provide the substrate of an ever changing and evolving ecology to ground its economy.

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.

Another thing I could do would be to make the economy mostly an information economy, with the physical economy being vastly simplified. (It will fundamentally have to be vastly simplified no matter what.) This also fits in with my notion of a procedurally generated tech tree.

[girvo]

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]

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.)

[floatingatoll]

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....

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....

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-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/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/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#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.

[di4na]

Just to remind that all tentative to follow "inflation" in eve show that the inflation is nearly inexistant...