[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.)