Paranoid Loyd wrote:You didn't pay attention in economics class, did you?
How about this:
The main activity in EVE is to blow up ****; therefore, players have to do other activities to gain ISK to fund the blowing up of ships.
Some sort of equilibrium will manifest for how much players can spend on average on ships and modules in a given time frame.
Production: If you want to increase your profit you have to sell more than the competition, i.e. sell slightly cheaper but hopefully a higher volume (cheaper stuff will get bought first, some equilibrium will reassert it self). For a miner this means that the single one method to increase your income is to multibox because there is a hard cap on how much you can mine with one character.
Therefore multiboxing will be highly profitable while every solo miner will bite the dust. And I would argue that this is why minerals are so cheap.
Every other activity in the production business is easily done with serveral characters, manufacturing, research, PI, etc. needs minimal interaction, even less than mining. Controlling several ships at the same time even if it is just activating that lasers on every one of them needs more dedication.
Quote:No welfare in eve, no unions, no rights, eve is the perfect flat and open market Sim. No graft, as many middlemen as remains profitable, and prices at what the market will bear. Working as intended.
Eve is enough of an economic Sim that some business courses have used it, and no surprise it needs fine tuning. One small change to ships/guns/modules/mechanics and the demand for certain things skyrocket and the economy frequently isnt prepared for it. A scramble ensues, and market imbalances make themselves known. CCP adjusts drops and raw materials to compensate for a drastic change in market. So there you have it: CCP makes changes to materials to compensate for new game mechanics being exploited as eve players are known to do.
One point of critique: The problem of availability of currency. ISK is generated out of thin air (missions rewards, bounties on rats) and vanishes from the game the same way when purchasing someting from npcs. While this is connected with some reward and time consumption for regulation the problem is that their is no actual value of ISK, no gold reserves, and more importantly no fixed amount of currency in use; if for some reason players spent less ISK on npc offers the amount of ISK in use will just rise uncontrolled. This is where CCP's arbitrary regulations of prices come in, as you already mentioned. By my definition this is not a free market sim and I suppose it is impossible to achieve.
At least I understand the workings of EVE economy a bit better. Thanks for the input everyone.