MeiJin - I'm open about the loss. It was only 120b in total I could not withdraw in time. Normally everytime I reach 100b+ in wallet, I withdraw everything leaving 20~30b to gamble more. So it's not percentage based. I won Rat Race once for 430b, withdrew 440b or so leaving 20b behind. I won it again at recently at 360b, withdrew everything leaving 30b or so. But when I won Fedo double (100b), I withdraw 70b, leaving 30b. I've always done it this way after 100b+ wins, some of the nice memorable wins were Caldari JP 4 times (360b, 130b, 200b or so x 2) and Nothing But Jackpot at 200b+, Wyvern BPO bundle double at 240b, etc.

I also openly said that my heaviest loss was after winning Pirates slots for 240b, which I did not withdraw and blew all on gambling in 48 hours of manic spree lol. It's after that I stuck to the above method to keep the ISK build up and turn them into more secure assets in game after big wins.

So my strategy was never percentage based, I felt that 20~30b was the optimal amount to gamble with and was always good enough buffer to run many many tabs of slots & do odd raffle here and there. Once I have over 40b in the IWI account I tend to spend too much on raffles, which was usually not a good thing.

This 120b in account was an abnormally because I got about 100b from the Infinite Pool after IWI was already banned. If the ban came after I won the pool I would've only lost 20b or so, which is the usual amount I keep in IWI out to be, and I feel sorry for everyone that lost and lost all the love ).

The thing is, ISK that sits in your wallet is out of the game, temporarily. So we have a huge ISK faucet in the bounties on NPC rats and in the mission rewards, and what tends to happen is, it moves around (helping the economy) until it collects in someone's wallet in the hundreds of billions / trillions.

Realistically, if you had trillions you wouldn't spend them all, or fast, so they just sit there as you lose interest in the game. But the possibility exists that you could re-activate one day and blow all your trillions on some new feature that CCP adds to the game, thereby preventing everyone else from enjoying that feature. The ISK in your wallet is out of the game, but only temporarily so.

Best thing that CCP can do for the game at that point is to ban you, thereby taking the ISK out of the game permanently. It helps that when people have so much ISK, the temptation to RMT is really high, and this gives CCP a reason to ban.

So I'm arguing that IWI helped the game by helping to make ISK circulate, until it accumulated in a few (easy to ban) wallets.

Look at the ISK Sinks and Faucets chart from the last economic report. Look at the Bounty Prizes faucet, and look at the total difference between Faucets and Sinks. CCP needs to ban, each month, approx. 30 trillion ISK to keep the game prices the way they are now. In this economic report, they only banned 18T, indicated by the Active ISK Delta number.


And now for speculation:

I think that, without gambling, ISK concentration dynamic will have to fall back to just scams, theft, market trading, and PLEX conversions, and in theory they're not as effective as gambling at concentrating the ISK. CCP will have to ban a lot more accounts (that are poorer) to achieve their 30T ISK delta. Possibly that's what the EULA change of the reduction from 6 months to 3 months for "if your account is inactive we can delete it" is all about.

Or, more reasonably, they can reduce the ISK faucets; however, the faucets are 74T, and to reduce them by 30T is a 40% reduction. Considering that Alphas CAN do (lower level) missions, possibly the faucets are going to be higher than 74T, so I'm strongly expecting a major nerf to rat bounties, mission payouts, and incursion rewards.

And also consider all the ISK in IWI account that can no longer come back to the game. For me it was 120b but I know people who had much more than that in their account, and IWI had thousands of players. You are probably looking at minimum 10~20t removed from the players alone, not counting the bankers and IWI corp. Unlike big ISK sink that halpend with Citadel launch, this ISK is completely removed from the game, not converted to NPC sold BPOs, so the raw effect will hit harder IMO.