Lets say the monthly tax profit off a lava planet in Eve is 20m (hypothetically). This is part of the production chain that leads to people paying hundreds of millions for spaceships. It has all been designed to work together. Now suppose your asking play station players to fight over something that is only worth 8m a month in profit. To scale everything properly, the armored vehicle will need to cost several thousand isk, the infantry combat gear hundreds of isk, and the financial rewards in the same area, to make it viable to fight over the planet. This is fine. This is how it should be. Ground combat should be massively cheaper than running around in spaceships.

However, with the two markets being somewhat connected or the currencies exchangeable, you have a problem. In respect to the costs of ground combat in Dust, the average Eve player would be filthy fucking rich. Presumably, there are poor people in New Eden, people that don't have clones, people that do the janitor work. But we aren't concerned with them, we have been concerned with the other people that fly spaceships and try to kill us before we kill them. So in practice, in relation to the rest of New Eden, capsuleers are the Fortune 50,000 club. They have also had a decade to acquire more.

Now you enter a bunch of these poor people (its a perspective, not an insult) running around with machine guns and tanks for thousands of credits. There are capsuleers that could literally buy every NPC item produced in Dust and delete it, every day for the next decade and still making billion(s) isk every hour. (unless there is an infinite and instantaneous respawn rate) There are alot of problem with this example, especially while its in the NPC control stage, but most of those details disappear once the economy is player run. The idea is that Eve players could destroy the Dust economy with little effort, they could grief it, they could buy everything and raise the prices, and still have the money to buy up the people trying to undercut them. They could even make money this way.

Economically, I'm of the Austrian school. I'm a fan of the sandbox, and of free-markets. I think that markets left to their own devices tend to fix themselves because thousands of people all trying to get more tend to advance technology, lower overall prices, and fight vigorously to ensure that real monopolies never succeed in the long run.

Although Eve's economy isn't a free markets, its as close anyone has gotten in an MMO. To a large extent, Eve's economy has and will continue to fix itself; we find it doing this most often when CCP fails to fix something and creates second and third order unintended problems. (flashback real world) The problem is more that in the real world you have to endure market shakeups, endure layoffs, and invest in institutions that are legally protected. (you go to jail for fraud…hypothetically) The way to opt out of the game is to either kill yourself or become a homeless vagrant. Most people choose to keep playing real life. Eve and Dust are games. The tolerance for waiting for the market place (or CCP) to fix or sort through all the malevolent, malicious, or profit hungry activities that the saddistic Eve Fortune 50,000 could bring to bear against all these poor Dust players is probably very small. A couple weeks of the game being shit is probably the most any player will endure, even a "free" game.

This is just a small treatment of a very issues that could arise, but is at the heart of the matter. Dust is a world of poor people meeting a world of rich people. In the long term if people kept playing inspite of Eve players, a great transfer of wealth would probably occur between Eve and Dust until Eve players were tired of wasting money griefing Dust players. Eventually it would become to costly to keep griefing poorer eve players that are trying to economically fight the griefers, and make a profit doing so. Eventually Eve and Dust players would develop well understood profit making methods that would even out this all out. Eventually prices would find a stable place. Eventually the game would be economically playable. EVENTUALLY. Will anyone own a play station long enough?

Notes: The extremes of this matter are entirely debatable, and ultimately unpredictable. Regardless, the creativeness, fake money available, and the creative maliciousness of Eve players is not something to bet your company against in the short term.

Also, Sugar Kyle, you never invited me to Vegas. I'm hurt.

The overall theme seems to be that they want people to suffer somehow and someway. Whether it's cutting profits, increasing taxes, or just having ships explode…

:smug:

CCP better have something really fancy planned for PI… Otherwise PI materials (Read: POS Fuel materials) will skyrocket in costs as people try to recoup their losses in taking a planet.

I like that last part. I would like to see DUST mercs and EVE pilots walking on stations together.