Portalarium Currency Sales (Please Read) -- (Dev) Replied

Yes, but isn't a part of the fundamental purpose of PLEX is to convert ISK into gametime / convert USD into gametime?

EVE has a very serious money pool problem that won't be fixed quite so easily. The amount of ISK cycling through the economy numbers in the trillions and the 'shadow banks' hold hundreds of trillions; inflation is an extremely serious problem in EVE. When I began playing EVE, pyerite was like 4 ISK per unit... now it's something like 14 ISK per unit. Yes, there were artificial constraints such as NPC corporate sell orders which could be refined into minerals that created an artificial barrier to price.

However, it is important to remember that it didn't become a problem until nearly 5 years into EVE's life, and it wasn't fixed until year 7. For those years prior to year 5 however, the artificial cap hadn't been reached yet. The price of tritanium has steadily increased over the last 9 years because the agent mission system and other ISK faucets cause inflation to increasingly spiral out of control.

Disclaimer: I've been playing EVE since mid 2004.

And instead of fixing this problem, EVE encourages it by introducing plex as a means to induce players to open the ISK faucet even wider. The players then turn that mission/whatever ISK over to players who hold the PLEX but it isn't removed from the economy save for the 1% transaction tax which does almost nothing.

The real problem with gold farmers is that infinite sources of money are allowed to exist. In EVE, these are missions or the 0.0 NPC complexes that spawn via exploration and many other avenues. If the number of currency units were ultimately limited, and no more were generated, then gold farmers simply turn into banks. These banks hold vast amounts of wealth and either loan it out 'sell it'.

If you cap and control the amount of liquid wealth that can exist in the game world at any given time then people are compelled to spend the already existing gold for goods and services (repairs, items, goods) whereby a sales tax removes gold. The removed gold is then recycled back into the system via loot and it lives its life again. The system can be made to monitor inactive accounts and inactive gold and account for that in its daily amounts. If the system detects that player returning, then it simply increases the sales tax or conversion rates across the board to suck the extra money out of the system. If the overall player count increases, then the system can compensate by increasing the overall money supply proportionately to keep things in balance.

The problem we get with computer game players is that they feel they have a right to printed currency when they kill something. Most folks feel as though by completing a quest or killing a mob they necessarily deserve printed currency from the main system. However, I contend that in order to properly maintain a healthy economic ecosystem and prevent gold farming that it must be limited by a system that tries to recycle gold via loot but not generate unlimited sources of gold per kill. It is the very definition of gold farming.

One player holding 25% of the economy's gold hostage is a serious concern, but one that I believe can be overcome with taxes on holdings over a certain astronomical sum simply for having the funds in the bank. Call it a royal tax for the protection of the realm, I don't know. However, if you want to cure gold farming then EVE Online is not a good example. Take away the 'liquid wealth faucets' and you kill the gold farmer.

That's what I think.

 

Give everything an estimated value then flag any trade that goes beyond 100 times that value. Don't allow free gold trading. If I try to buy something with an estimated value of 19g for 2000g the trade gets flagged and has to be cleared by an administrator.

This would be a little restrictive but it would be effective at severely slowing down gold selling and buying.

Paying another player for doing a job would have to be done with items instead of gold and that would be the worst of the restrictions. It would be less annoying and destructive than gold sellers.

Small amounts of gold could maybe be allowed to change hands. Creating a massive time sink to gold sellers.

 

The difference is WoW never seemed to consider the problem until they had it, which was after they had a finished game. SotA is being built from the ground up and has a chance to design the overall economic system with the problem firmly in mind.

Furthermore, just allowing the problem to exist doesn't make "wasted development time" go away either. Instead they have to keep adding new gold sinks to try and flush money out of the economy which doesn't really work because you're always chasing your objective. And the gold sinks are generally irrelevant to new and poor players/players who don't care much for gold because it consists of content way out of their price range.

Lastly - "because they might start hacking/duping/whatever instead" is no reason not to target the problem.

 

@Vandigeth Good points, I had an idea though...
Wouldn't it be simpler to just ignore the unspent wealth when calculating the "active" economy? There's always going to be players that simply quit the game, leaving their thousands of gold stagnating on their account. As the game ages, that's only going to increase. Inflation due to that is negligible, in fact it's deflation.

Why not monitor the amount of gold that is actively used in a day and alter the economy's inflation accordingly? If a billion gold is spent in a day, the economy inflates. If only 500 million is spent the next day, it deflates proportionately (in so far as NPC price of goods or whatever, or exchange rates for gold and gems).

I'm not an economist, and that's likely a huge amount of bandwidth and server power, but it seems like that would be effective. This way, people that hoard gold will have a minimal effect on the overall change in the economy's shape.

Am I wrong?

 

Eve online has no "ToS Breaking Aftermarket" that was what I was referring to, and the risk to reward from buying 2 billion ISK from a aftermarket retailer is quite dangerous and at the same time you could buy a PLEX from CCP for only 20% more USD.

Also PLEX is not only for game time or primarily for gametime... It is for Aurum (virtual vanity goods) and mainly for ISK. Buying PLEX with ISK for gametime pretty much just makes you a slave to the game if you like that, that's fine... Most PLEX purchasers are trying to get fast cash.

Pyrite now is about 13.66 in Jita 4 so the price has stayed constant since you played... And with mining being literally equivalent to ISK inflation of pyrite is a second class example, a much more effective model would be Tech 2 Modules to track product life cycle vs inflation. Raw material prices have always been directly based on the amount of ISK available in game - this actually helps new players since Hi Sec mining has always basically yielded the same rewards at the end of the day.

Since actual "gear" and "ships" became cheaper today then they were a couple years ago - mining low medals is actually more lucrative now then it was long ago.

The Eve economy is basically flawless for a new player (1-2 years of playing) anything that you could actually pilot or use, you can easily afford without PLEX'ing if you want to work the game like a job... this is true with all games.

Your point is a bit broken all Economic Currencies that are not related to an actual raw material will always inflate take the US for example.

Bimetallism persisted until March 14, 1900, with the passage of the Gold Standard Act. The Act fixed the value of the dollar at 25 8?10 grains of gold at "nine-tenths fine" (90% purity), equivalent to 23.22 grains (1.5046 grams) of pure gold.

That amount of gold today is worth 61.07 cents so 1 USD = 1 "penny weight of gold" (1.5 oz)....back then.

Alright so if the US economy was based on Gold there would be no inflation actually deflation would occur on everything other than the dollar meaning goods would become much cheaper over time.

However this changed and the dollar became currency...

Eve is more like Bimetallism, what you describe is more like the US Economy today which doesn't accurately describe Eve...

If I could grab a gold pan today and go get gold daily to pay for all my needs that would be equivalent to Eve. Which dilutes the value of gold which would average the market out to a solid all around inflation that hurts no one.

 

1.5 grams not 1.5 ounces.

Huge typo!
I screwed that up xD.

 

@tekkamansoul

You bring up a good point that I tried to cover in my post:

The system can be made to monitor inactive accounts and inactive gold and account for that in its daily amounts. If the system detects that player returning, then it simply increases the sales tax or conversion rates across the board to suck the extra money out of the system. If the overall player count increases, then the system can compensate by increasing the overall money supply proportionately to keep things in balance.

I attribute a lot of that idea to Montesquieu Paine here on the forums as well.

You are correct that the variables Portalarium use can be flexible to adjust in reaction to gold entering active circulation. The equation is pretty simple, and it really only requires counting the active amount of gold in the economy and comparing it to the amount in existence and recognize what kind of balance is necessary to keep things moving. From there, you simply adjust sales tax values / currency rates / rent and other things and move them higher to suck the excess currency out of circulation. People may not like it, but it is necessary to promote a healthy economy.

I had an equation in another thread that tried to account for these things to maintain a stable amount of gold not only in the game but in circulation as well.

However, let me just say that you are on the correct track and I approve of your thinking

 

@vandigeth Trying to force and constrain the market is probably the worst thing you can do in an MMORPG. It will cause a lot more problems than it helps. Inflation is a fine, normal, and healthy economic model. Especially when vendor items aren't as important as player made/found items. If we were dependent on the vendors for everything then the devs would have to tweak prices and curb inflation, but we aren't. One thing that might matter is housing costs.

I really don't see how your proposed system will help the player experience, I only see it damaging it. (taxes?)
It is much easier and less time consuming to allow inflation at a normal rate as people accumulate more and more gold, we'll have more and more inflation. If you don't allow players to collect and horde their gold they wont see any point in playing and quit.

The economic model you are suggested would make me not even want to play this game.

 

@ Sir Mishri

I agree.


@Vandigeth, @tekkamansoul

Would you like that if your economy and government did that to you in real life?

I know I would not.

And I like the same things in my real life as I do in my gaming verse. That would kind of disgust me honestly to know that was the back end working of their economics. Let alone how painful that could become to a brand new player that joins the game 2-3 years later. I only have a minor in economics, but I already see many pitfalls that could occur in some circumstances.

 

@Monkus You clearly missed things like datacore farming and other sources of passive income. There was once a time I could sit and do nothing for a whole month and have my accounts pay for themselves via datacore harvesting. The economy of EVE is *extremely* flawed for many, many reasons. The old saying goes: *any* change benefits those already established more than the new guys. Prices and fluctuations before the release of an expansion has netted me tens of billions in profits.

The one thing EVE does do right for its economy is the loss of equipment and gear upon death. This keeps people coming back to the trough. However, as an enormous asset holder, my money pile *never* stopped growing as people kept feeding me mission money for PvP ships and other crap. ISK is pretty much worthless in EVE once a person plays long enough. It's toilet paper to me. Meaningless.

However, my point was not so much that the value of ISK is based on mineral value; rather, that mineral value is symptomatic of an inflation problem plaguing the system. It is irrefutable that the prices of raw materials has steadily increased. The general mineral index has marched upward for some time now even with the decline of megacyte and zydrine. Isogen has remained contsant, but nocxium is still problematic. Mexallon was once like 13 isk per unit. The only reason the price of goods has decreased is because as access to the manufacturing skills and goods becomes more easily accessible to a larger population it lowers the margin of profit that T2 inventors can draw from the economy. Believe me, I built T2 gear for four years pretty much nonstop. It became apparent that my efforts were becoming fruitless and so I switched to full time Jita trader. That is where the real money in EVE is... well, and moon mining

Also, I'm not concerned in the least about someone posting a packet of gold on EBAY to sell on SotA. That is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The problem that arose with ISK buying and selling was the pandemic of hacked accounts and problems plaguing customer service. It became easier to say "if you lose your account to hacking from buying ISK, then you are SOL." in so many words. It became so problematic that they had to actively seek it out in order to proactively keep accounts safe because there were people... foolish enough to give their account credentials and stuff out.

It was outrageous, but that is what those major stings on Tranquility were really about. Account security. There is so much overflow of fiat currency in EVE that people selling it is meaningless; that and EVE realized they could make the money themselves instead by selling gametime in the form of PLEX and take the gold farmer money for themselves instead. And why not? It's their game.

In fact, I argue that EVE is very much like the US economy where the US Federal Reserve can print as much fiat currency as the US government needs (mission running equivalent in EVE) to satisfy the needs of the economy right this minute in hopes that inflation down the road will devalue that debt (price of goods) and make it easier to repay in the 'good times'. Further, the control of that reserve had led to a great deal of money made by large corporate banks borrowing cheap fiat currency directly from the Reserve. The fact there is always money available keeps prices on an ever increasing pace upward as margins on the profit of manufacturing grow ever smaller. Raw material prices generally continue to rise in the US economy and the world, in my experience.

Whereas, the gold standard tied the value of the dollar to something tangible and limited in supply. I'm suggesting that SotA tie the currency to a tangible asset that isn't in game basically. Pretend that the total number of allowable gold in the world is set by Portalarium's 'Fort Knox', if you will. If too much currency is released into the game world than there is gold to back it up, then the government sucks up currency to get it out of circulation.

So, I think you've got your examples backwards to be honest. No offense or hostility implied, please understand.

In as much as your argument concerning PLEX for AUR goes, that is a USD sink... not an ISK sink. So I'm not sure how that really applies to anything we're talking about.

 

@Sir Mishri

Then how do you control the ever increasing prices of goods? Sure, I can see 2-4% inflation over time but allowing an infinite source of gold to flow is only going to cause the sort of issues like Ultima Online saw particularly post-Trammel.

I couldn't store all the gold on UO. I had alts with their banks chuck full of 255 bank checks just to keep it all. How on earth is that fun? What good does that do anyone? The prices of goods climbed steadily along with the inflation. Rares were going for a hundred times their pre-Trammel rates and heaven only knows what those prices are today.

That is what the variable taxes is for is to control inflation. If new players join the game then the game allows for more currency to enter the system. How is that not clear?

Edit: I quote my original post directly:

"If the overall player count increases, then the system can compensate by increasing the overall money supply proportionately to keep things in balance."

End quote.

It wouldn't be much beyond that to allow for a 2% (or whatever) annual inflation rate to be built into the variable rates system. However, I understand that I am presenting keeping the money supply at an absolute number and I apologize for that. I'm not against inflation; I'm against rampant unregulated inflation that isn't controlled.

Even if gold is tied to currency, new gold was always being mined up. I'm not against a healthy inflation rate believe me.

 

That pretty much is how it works... Unless my interpretation of exchange rates, taxes and interests are gravely mistaken, and I don't they are.

This is a virtual economy with no tangible impact elsewhere, and it is a game meant for enjoyment. However, it has the potential for uninhibited inflation, unlike a real economy, which is the issue stated above. You can just keep killing mobs for gold, NPCs don't have income and expenses and become essentially banks.

Nobody is arguing lassaiz-faire isn't the best approach, but there needs to be equivalent checks and balances in the game economy. As a player, you don't need to spend x gold every day just to *stay alive* like the real world. We're talking about keeping the game just as balanced, fair and fun for people who have just joined as it is for people who have been playing for years.

This is just one approach, anyway. It's not so different than encouraging a barter economy or a metals based economy, it's just another interpretation.

 

What were you doing? gold duplicating? 255 million? that is a ton of gold last time i played (around 2009).. most high end items were no more than 10 million. ever increasing item prices is fine, you dont need to combat them, your items are now worht more, their items are worth more, there is nothing to combat.

At most they would have to change checks so they could be 100 million each or something like that. (more likely, do a gold reverse split, you get 1 gold for every 2 in your bank/person)

 

@ Vandigeth

I do not have a huge bankroll in Eve but I still play, I have about 10 billion right now in liquid assets and probably another 40 billion in non liquid assets.

Economics in a 100,000 player world are extremely simple.

You implement as many types of currency as possible this isn't rocket science. Most things would be done with alternate currencies much like WoW. Valor Points, Achievement Points, Honor Points, Dungeon Points, etc. these can be used to buy recipes which should be 1-off production and then can be crafted using regular materials. This makes a raw material/ crafting based economy that will have a very solid backbone. But you need to have Portalarium selling currency or gold sellers will do it.

Building these backend solutions are silly just have alternate "currency" and make recipes 1-off that cannot be sold let's say they are "taught" to you at the npc so you cannot resell it on the market.

This is a simple logical solution.

Edit: Add to this farming or collecting a couple rare materials for the key pieces of each piece of gear and you have a pretty fun system.

 

@Monkus The National Debt is how money is removed from the economy. Interest rates set by the Federal Reserve takes money out of the economy when they are high. Sales taxes, income taxes and whatever else is taken by the state to service those debts. High interest rates removes currency from circulation.

Mortgages, credit cards, and everything else is a means by which to remove money from the economy by the Federal Reserve when it raises its interest rates.

They've been doing this to the American people since the 1910s...

 

Okay vandigeth, that is not at all how the economy works..... not even close. I'm sorry bud.

oh btw, vandigeth, i do agree with you in the thread, about not wanting special color titles.

The national debt actually adds money to our economy... and devalues our currency...

the federal reserve buys and sells bonds to add/remove money from our economy

The federal reserve changes interest rates to promote growth and restrict inflation.

 

@ vandigeth

SotA will never hit the population that there was in 1910 in America....

Economics gets more complex with scale and age. This game will not live for 100+ years and it will not have the population America did between 1810-1910 so those points are irrelevant.

Your ideas are 21st century geared towards gigantic consumer populations. Nothing like a 1,000,000 monthly population gaming environment.

 

@Sir Mishri

I sold bulk resources. I bought 999 of a certain resource off NPC vendors and sold them to vendor houses who in turn sold them to unsuspecting players. Really, I kid you not, I couldn't store all the gold. I began sinking the gold into rares to soak up the cash.

However, I don't believe the limit on checks was 100 million when I played. I believe the maximum was 254 times 60,000. 15.24 million per check. And yes, I had a *lot* of maxed out checks. You wouldn't believe the ridiculous prices people paid for absolute junk in that game... and why did they have so much money to spend?

Unlimited gold faucets and no danger from PvP.

 

@Sir Mishri

That is how the Federal Reserve removes currency from circulation. The repayment of Federal Reserve loans at high interest rates removes currency from the system because it goes back to 'nothingness', or infinity depending on your perspective. They control the printing press.

How do you think it works?

 

@ Vandigeth

Stop talking about the federal reserve the economics of somewhere like Fiji or Lesotho in Africa are more like what a gaming environment should represent. An economic model that sustains 100 people is completely different then one that is sustaining 1 million people likewise a model that can sustain 1 million people is much different then a model that sustains billions.

Your on such a scale with your economic ideas that would cripple a growing nation like Fiji or Lesotho. Economics is a tool to help promote healthy growth through scale and age.