Topic: The great Perpetuum economic crash
Perpetuum has always had a problem with low market activity. A lack of NIC sinks in the game create a situation where people don’t actually need liquid cash, they just produce the goods for themselves. Despite that there was enough difficulty in obtaining NIC and enough reason to use it so that limited market activity happened and ICE was bought as a way of the lazy buffing their wallet.
The new mission system has changed all that. The amount of NIC this is pumping in to the game is extraordinary. A solo player in a MK1 heavy can produce a billion NIC in a day with ease. There are a few problems this creates:
1) Hyper inflation: Epriton as an example has risen from 9 per unit to 40 – 60 in a few weeks
2) Scarcity: The only reason to sell goods is to gain NIC. As people get NIC rich the market is stripped bare of goods and people are not motivated to sell more
3) Divergent values: As the value of NIC reduces through inflation the impact on static priced items is huge. Plasma becomes worthless. Terraforming becomes cheap.
4) ICE sales dry up: ICE no longer becomes a trade item and is only purchased by people looking to get credits for themselves
Normally in this situation NIC will balance itself against goods however the consequences of that cannot be seen. At best it will unbalance the whole mission system as the desired outcomes are skewed. What needs to be addressed is the flow of goods and NIC in to the game.
This really is an economic crash that is happening NOW and not something that is going to happen in the future. The consequences on new players are significant – a dead market leads to a dead game.
Steps need to be taken to encourage the flow of goods on to the market and the flow of NIC in and out of the game.
Right now there are no good options to do this. To balance this requires a lot of thought and probably some significant development. It seems like reducing mission payout would be the way to go but that isn’t the problem – the problem is there is nothing to spend the money on.
I have a couple of ideas as to how this can be addressed but I’ll leave that for a balancing thread but the important thing to note is that your economy is burning and long term levels of imbalance enter the game the longer you take no action.