Veers Belvar wrote:Sabriz Adoudel wrote:If anyone thinks EVE's economy would work without destruction, I invite you to look at Archeage, where building a top tier Delphinad item takes (on average) 64 crafting attempts, each of which consumes well over 1000 labor points from crafting characters and many more from gatherers. If we assume it's a total of 120000 LP needed, that's about 100 days you need to remain subscribed.
Titans take less than half of that, and you can build thirty-three of them on one account at once.
But titan production cost is based upon them being a consumable, not a permanent, indestructible power upgrade.
Not sure I see the comparison. Imagine if your goal is to own 1 of every ship and 1 of every officer mod....how much isk would that take? Tens of trillions? More?
There will never be an end to demand for high end shiny stuff...and that is totally independent of destruction.
That kind of depends. If you exclude Titans and "priceless" ships (the ones that can't really be acquired), it actually wouldn't take too long to acquire everything. I am pretty sure I have at least one of each "regular" thing in the game now, excluding supercaps, and some hulls that I never use and therefore don't need (such as dreads). Same goes for modules, excluding officer gear specifically (deadspace is equivalent, and I have that all over my ships). Anything I lack, I could buy, and I definitely don't value myself at the "tens of trillions" level. And keep in mind, this is with constant expenditures and very little pve activity. The thing is, in the absence of destruction, not
everyone would make it their goal to collect one of each thing. Some people would just "play the game," and of those, many would get bored. I've played other MMO-type games with "loss ceilings," and that's exactly what happened. At some point you simply lose your desire and motivation to keep going, because you have everything you need.
Veers Belvar wrote:We don't need destruction to fuel demand for goods...we just need people who enjoy amassing wealth.
Correct, but the one thing you forgot to mention is that this demographic would constantly have to be growing. The only way you can sustain an innovation-capped economy without destruction is to turn it into a pyramid scheme.
So sure, we can have a game like that; an economy-focused game that's constantly growing, and has no pvp or violence to get in the way of peoples' daily grind. But that game sounds very different from EVE. Should it
have to be EVE? Why can't it be a different game?