Darin Vanar
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
0
   |
Posted - 2013.11.01 18:10:00 -
[1] - Quote
This paper will cover the following:
A) Supply and Demand in EVE
B) Broken Rails
C) Infrastructure and All-Region Wide Economics
D) Gameplay (AKA the big part everyone should read)
I'm going to go over a comprehensive analysis of the economic system in EVE and how it affects the general player, its impact on the larger player base as a whole and gameplay, ways to improve on it.
The whole sales pitch in EVE revolves around Supply and Demand. In scope, this is a great concept, but the way it practically plays out, is completely broken due to the way mechanics are laid out for it to work. Let's take an example.
Something common, like Veldspar. You would expect this item to be in its lowest prices where its highest concentrations are found, with the highest prices being in far off systems, where other ore types, much more rare, are found, but not so much of the more widely used ores common in highly secured Empire space.
This does not happen in EVE.
In fact, the system is so broken, you find Veldspar at its highest price point, right next to the hub where the highest concentration of Veldspar spawns. The same pattern repeats for Plagioclase. I go to the Veldspar system where there is no Plagioclase in sight and do these guys want Plagioclase? Nope. They want Veldspar.
Do the guys with the station right next to the Plagioclase want Veldspar, since it's farther away and there is less supply right next to them? Nope. They want Plagioclase. They have the highest prices for Plagioclase in the region, and Veldspar is not in high demand despite it being farther away and in less quantities near the base.
This is not a shortage of supplies, but a shortage of labor.
Broken Rails
In EVE online, you don't really have a market simulation, you have a labor simulation, due to the factors that I'm going to go into next.
Supply and demand on broken rails does not work. Which means, even if supply is sufficient, the constant "sinking" of it breaks the idea of coverage from the point of origin, and time instead becomes more valuable than the resource being harvested itself.
What is "broken rails"? It's when a supply chain is broken at some point, due to whatever reasons and the supply will never be able to reach its destination. You would think, well, wouldn't this make the supply all that much more valuable? The answer here is no, because in practicality, it doesn't work this way. Broken rails is still broken rails, which means it is impractical to try the same thing over and over as the value continues to increase, to the point where goods have a preferred means of remaining stationary. Stationary is bad in any economy.
When the risk of moving the goods outweighs the need for goods, you have a lot of market apathy and stagnation. A true market is when there is lots of activity, as opposed to a labor market where prices are not dictated by a supply and demand dynamic. In the end you may argue it works out about the same, but the actual workings of the market are polar opposites.
The main reason for the bottleneck is gatecamping, and the way the game tanks its own economy by allowing it to be tanked in the first place, so the Supply and Demand mechanic never ever leaves the ground and we have to suffer through a labor market.
Resources are not so much scarce as they are -time- effective, which means their transport over long distances is offset by local labor in "hubs" where the highest prices in the region are the stations at which said ore spawns at. This means, that there is no distribution of said goods. They stagnate until the need for goods outweighs the risk of moving them. This is not dynamic.
There is no distant mining hub where a rare ore type spawns, for example, and it relies on the infrastructure of players to slowly bring it to outlying systems in incremental coverage that gets more and more costly depending on how far away the transport comes from because it is this mechanic that makes the good valuable, because this infrastructure is broken. Goods never make it through the transit. When was the last time you saw Isotone for sale in a 0.9 security system? It doesn't travel to those systems because that is unnecessary haul and thus risk. Highsec belongs to the labor market, and that is safer to bring down than to haul lowsec ores to highsec in order for them to end up in outlying stations. The greatest offender for this is gate camping, but really not limited to. Basically any freelance miner or resource harvester is going to be fair game and treated as if they were a military target. Yet these players are crucial to the game and should be protected by the game in some fashion.
Treated almost as a civillian sector.
The demand for lowsec ores never rises in highsec systems because those systems are labor systems. They move the ore down, not up. An ideal market provides a very large coverage of a good, at increasingly more costly prices the further it has to travel. Yet this demand for rare ores in highsec space is never so high as to ever be present, at these exponential prices. Why is this so?
Infrastructure and All-Region Wide Economics
Again, we go back to EVE having more of a labor simulation, which means there is more demand for someone to go to the hub and mine the ore for 30 minutes, than there is for the ore to arrive in highsec space as it would if the region was under a dynamic market which is an expansive market, usually marked by a large region coverage of a rare good at increasingly astronomic prices. But this does not exist. The prices are very similar, almost borderline, until it is spiked by need outgrowing risk. Where there is no growth from the primary node hub, there will be no demand outward. |