Perhaps it's time to give plasma a use other than just being converted into cash.
Would be nice if someone could do the numbers with market prices to give us an idea of the inflation rate.

Seeing the NIC supply in circulation should be easy for the DEVs, I'd be very interested in seeing such a chart!

Edit: Just looking at global market charts for the past 1 month, it certainly looks like more is being sold.

Cobalt, did you missunderstand the topic? I was not suggesting to decrease total profitability of farming, but rather the sources of this income. There is a huge difference between making the income come from drops such as CPUs and mkII etc (as in artifact scanning) and pure NIC (i.e. plasma). One encourages trade and interaction while the other just blows up inflation.

Plasma in not good for the market , it devalues NIC and creates inflation specially with increase PVE activity and higher plasma rewards from NPC mobs. Some form of NIC sink is in order soon or some use for the plasma other than a money printing machine.

ok so I looked at titan ore.

Global 1 year. Now we know that stats on the market have not been recorded for a year. But I used 1 year anyway.

titan @ Global 1 year starts an avg of 0.22 and ends today at an avg 0.44

Calculate inflation formula

((0.44-0.22)/0.22)*100 = 100

That gives us a 100% inflation of titan ore.

Of course this is a single item, but I picked Titan ore since it is the very basic build block in the game.

But if you go and look at HDT. You will see that is has deflated.

We would need to build an index for all items to really track the true rate of deflation or inflation.

One could weight an inflation index by value (Q*P).

And indeed, the population size matters a lot too, which is why I'd like to know the TotalNIC/AverageActivePlayersLastWeek

The golden triangle was a NIC faucet (it was removed because it was a bad game mechanic, click button, drive, click button; NIC) and I would hazard that more NIC/hour was created with that; it was less per person, but many more players were using it.

As long as only a portion of the population has access to the NIC faucet, inflation won't be rampant. Any growing economy is going to have inflation, its only an issue when it gets out of control.

The new I 2.0 is supposed to have some very large NIC sinks, 1B NIC to buy 100%, if that is implemented, it will remove many hours of farming from the market. But this should also be OK, since there should be more players out on beta earning that kind of NIC.

The other GOOD thing about inflation, is that just 'sitting' on NIC means your losing value. This is a benefit to players that are actively playing the game. If you log off with 1B NIC and come back 3 months later, your buying power is going to be reduced, that 1B NIC may only be worth .9B now.

EDIT: I'm not saying Inflation is or isn't out of control, simply that if it is a reasonable 1-2% per month that is OK for a video game. 10% per month is out of control.

Ville, speaking from a balance perspective, should their increased risk justify increased reward on such a magnitude?

What about when/if ore spawns are made random? How many miners will be left after that

Im a big miner / harvester / producer myself, but sometimes I wonder these things.

On a side note: the market forces dictate the price of ores currently. They have decided that the ore is not very valuable.

Yep, it definitely could use a form of diminished returns to encourage shaking farming up, so one spawn is not clearly better than another at all given times depending on what is being farmed the most on certain islands.

One problem with it is the majority of spawns on islands are the same faction (the color of the island). So the majority of the spawns would give less NIC return.

Dynamic Ore spawns would not need a universal miner charge, but a revised geoscanning mechanic.

Arga: while i think your idea is not that bad, it would mostly hurt the lower end, not those its aiming at. As long as someone with the power to solo any high-end spawn, can sell his plasma at the same spot as the guy who hardly can handle a first star spawn... it would solve nothing.

The objective of all of you is trying to standardize player experience. The only result of this will be shallow game, with no players. Sandbox mean opportunity, becoming rich if you know how to etc...  A veteran with same EP than me maybe wont be able to do the 10M/H, so what?

In your idea of "balance" and "working economy", you want to eliminate all the special little things that make a sandbox a sandbox. Find the good spot, accept the danger, reap the reward. In what *** game were said that veteran and long time followers should not get many more income per time played?
Your calling about inflation, everybody with a sense of logic know with such a small playerbase, it wont happens.

Biggest corps = internal markets, no NIC influx in open economy, no inflation.
Small corps/players = no NIC production power to make inflation incontrolable.

All is all about is not inflation ,admit it. All this is about is: Why a guys could make ten times more than a yougling in the same time? Wake up, it always existed.  If my wealth production capacity was the same of a newbie/ half time player, i wouldnt farm at all.  And Lucius wouldnt sell his T4 mods at over the top prices (no personal here, you follow the trend), because nobody would spend 8M for example for a T4 med shield, or 65M for a HM MK2 like i did.

You guys talking about inflation?  Care to show the stats, because ive seen someday ago Heavy mechs MK2 at not so much more than production cost.
Show the maths, show the curves, then we will talk about inflation and how to circumvent it. If it exist at all.

What? Ratting income is 100% independant, but what do you do with all your NICS? Spend them on the market. Or leave them in your wallet, in that case theres no inflation, just NIC volume increase. But some seems to confuse those two parameters.

Inflation 1rst reason is peoples make easy nic too fast. But the 2nd and mandatory reason for inflation, is sellers inflating their prices. Everyone could be billionnaire, and no inflation happens. If nobody would up his prices, we would end up with increased buying power for "money vets" and same buy power for newbies (if its your problem with inflation). If you up the prices in line with NIC in world (and not in economy, cause adding NIC in economy is always a consequence of upping prices (given a fix amount of players/transaction, lets not overcomplicate it) , not the other way around), then yes newbie will have a hard time buying anything.

So...  if you really care about inflation, and fear big farmers will create it, remember the only deciders of inflation is the sellers, producers etc...

nvm