The EVE Online Economy#

Why EVE, specifically#

• one server, one currency, two decades running
• CCP Games has published a Monthly Economic Report (MER) for years — faucets, sinks, prices, destruction, all of it
• no other case study in this course has anything close to that public a record

What’s in a MER#

• money supply — total ISK in player hands, over time
• production & mining value — what’s being made, and from what
• destruction value — what got blown up, priced at replacement cost
• Active ISK Delta — net faucet minus sink, for players active that month specifically

Faucets, in this economy#

• mission and bounty payouts
• mining and production income
• NPC buy orders on raw materials

Every one of these is a designer-controlled tap. None of them are “natural.”

Sinks, in this economy#

• ship and module loss — the big one
• clone and implant costs after a death
• market broker fees and sales tax
• skill injectors, which convert real money into a currency sink directly

Reading the Active ISK Delta#

• spikes after every expansion — new and returning players, faucets running before sinks catch up
• a sustained positive delta with no expansion nearby is the signal a designer reads as “something’s over-paying”
• CCP has, more than once, nerfed a payout curve in direct response to exactly this signal

Worked example: a capital ship loss#

• a single capital-ship loss can represent billions of ISK removed from the economy in one destruction event
• the pilot’s insurance payout is itself a faucet, partially offsetting the sink — the two numbers appear in the same report, on purpose
• reading only the destruction total without the insurance faucet overstates how much the economy actually lost

Regional markets aren’t one market#

• prices for the same mineral can differ meaningfully between regions, especially null-sec vs. safe empire space
• that gap is the logistics problem from Week 7 — someone has to move the goods, at a risk, to close it
• the MER breaks activity down by region for exactly this reason

What the reports can’t tell you#

• who did something, only how much — MERs are aggregate, not forensic
• they can’t distinguish “the economy is healthy” from “the economy is healthy for whoever already has the most”
• reading them is necessary, not sufficient — Week 8’s case studies are what the aggregate numbers miss

Before the assessment#

The Market Data Report asks you to read a MER you haven’t seen in class and find where the story the numbers tell surprised you.