| 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.) |
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.