Gartel Reiman
Project F3
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Posted - 2007.03.25 16:22:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: 000Hunter000
mebbe we will end up in a bartering economy and can scrap isk alltogether, 1 large shieldbooster 1 will cost u 100 small shieldbooster 1's.
Well, that's effectively what we have already. ISK doesn't mean anything more than what you can get for it - it's a time-delay barter effectively. If the price of a large shieldbooster I is 100 times that of a small shieldbooster I, then we already have the situation you described! Albeit, you can sell the small boosters over a period of time, to different players, rather than having to present them all to the large booster owner in the form of a direct trade.
And if there were no bounties, it wouldn't change anything - no-one is saying remove the concept of ISK, so you'd still sell your loot for ISK that you could use to buy different loot. It seems like a lot of people have looked at the economic aspects in a one-sided way and assumed that less (no) bounties mean people have less money to spend on modules, so they become worth less. This isn't true. Assuming that the loot drops are appropriate to the level of the rat (a large assumption, but lets go with it for the moment) then instead of say a 250K bounty, you get loot that you can sell at the market for 250K. So after doing your mission and selling your loot, you have earnt 250K ISK in both the old system (from bounties) and the new system (from selling loot). Plus the mission reward, of course.
At this point a lot of you may be saying "Oh, but how will anyone buy the modules if they don't get bounty money any more?" Indeed, there seems to be a common misconception that no bounty money will stifle the economy. However, this is definitely not the case - a piece of loot is worth 250K because people will pay that amount of money (to you!) to buy it. These people may be miners or industrialists or mission-runners; what matters is that they have the cash available and want to buy the module. And after you've sold the module, you become one of these people who wants to buy modules from someone else, and you use your money to do this, just as now, in a virtuous cycle of prosperity.
I suppose some of you may be thinking "what happens if no-one wants to buy my 250K module", or rather "what if I only get offers of 50K"? In which case, the module has been incorrectly valued as the true market price is 50K not 250K. And indeed, this is the main issue around this change (remember the assumption from earlier? You can let it go now). The price of 1 ISK is fairly static, partly because we tend to use it as the baseline for value anyway. However, the price of a module may be very dynamic and it's important that the loot that drops reflects reasonably well how much CCP 'wanted' you to earn from that rat. Since the loot tables are probability based anyway, this isn't a major problem if one or two prices start to drop while others start to rise, but the overall average payout needs to be moderated fairly well.
As for the other posts addressing to what extent bounties are an ISK faucet and how that affects the amount of ISK re: inflaction and deflation, as well as the distribution of wealth, I don't feel I ahve anything to add to that. From my amateur point of view, the macro-economic arguments seem sound.
So in conclusion, the micro-economic arguments around the fact that "the market will crash" are failing to take into account the definition of market value of loot. So long as appropriate loot drops, mission runners should notice little variation in their income - except their money now comes from other player, for providing a real service, instead of magically from CONCORD which can only be a good thing.
However, this all relies on loot working. Fixing the loot tables should be a bigger priority than ever if/when this change goes through. Asides from that, I think it's a great idea.
Gartel
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