New Eden Macroeconomics: ISK Sources
ISK makes the cluster go ’round. It lubricates the wheels of commerce, motivates men and women to take risks, and generally makes things happen. To help my fellow players understand the EVE economy a little more, I’ve put together a series of short articles on some of the core fundamentals. In this first article, let’s look at ISK sources.
EVE follows a “faucet and drain” model: in-game currency enters through various faucets (ISK sources), sloshes around in the sink (market and other transactions), then drains out (ISK sinks).
ISK enters the universe in a few ways: mission payouts, NPC bounties, and NPC buy orders. All of these activities directly generate ISK into a player or corporation wallet, increasing the amount of currency in the game. It doesn’t come from some hidden Fort Knox wallet deep in Jita or Yulai, but rather gets generated on-the-fly by the game engine. NPC buy orders (like for trade goods and tags) also generate ISK in the same way.
Some players and even a few CCP developers (fortunately, not game designers, at least that I have seen) think that mining also creates ISK. That fundamentally misunderstands how the EVE economy works. Mining does not create any ISK. Mining is not an ISK source.
Right about now, a few of you have already started to compose replies in your head to tell me why I’m wrong and stupid and should go pod myself. But I’m not. Sure, mining creates value. It creates resources. What do miners do with those resources? Sell them to other players for ISK that someone else has already generated. Those other players then trade those resources or convert them into manufactured items, but nobody generates ISK directly here. Resources and items have value, but they do not actually equate to ISK because the money used to purchase them came from somewhere else.
Unlike in the real world, the overall economy never has a shortage of ISK. NPC corporations don’t tighten their budgets and stop giving out missions, CONCORD doesn’t stop paying out bounties because they’re broke, etc. The supply side of monetary policy, such as it is, comes in the form of CCP tweaking payouts and sell orders, but this doesn’t happen too often. So as more money enters the system, somebody is getting richer. More money is available to spend on items, and thus the dreaded word “inflation” starts getting thrown around.
Of course, on a micro level, lots of players have ISK shortages. This usually results from not having much due to just starting out, losing what they have to the harsh consequences for which EVE is so famous, or simply preferring activities that do not bring much monetary gain (like roleplay, PvP, or blogging).
The next two articles will talk about sloshing ISK around (transactions that move ISK among players) and draining it from the economy. Future articles will discuss employment, inflation, security ratings, and why the QEN doesn’t tell us everything we want to know.
Photo credit Shermeee via Flickr
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Date: 2009-09-05
Categories: Guides