Luk Manag wrote:I'm exited by the possibilities of Eve-Dust market interaction, and allowing players to set buy-sell orders would be much better than direct trading. With direct-trading you have to expect excessive local spam - and worse, team chat spam - "Hey, can anyone hear me in team-chat? Do you want to buy some Thales?" You'll still get that with an integrated Eve type market, but the incentive for public advertisement would be significantly reduced (I hate advertisements & salesmen).
There are lots of problems with the Eve economy, and those problems will spill into Dust 514 when they are linked. With all of the media excitement and rhetoric regarding the professional economist - they produced some fantastic economic reports (always worth reading) - but CCP stopped it, and stopping it was a fail on CCP's part. I think it was due to some knee-jerk worries that honest statistical reporting would be a PR problem if it showed something 'bad' like negative growth. It may have also showed that the virtual economy had fundamental flaws, and exposed direct manipulation by the creators (its a game after all) and the players (just like the real world - not all actors are logical).
A free market can be ruined by bad actors. Obvious problems, like the sacrificing of Eve wealth to permanently finance your own Dust MERCs have no obvious solutions. Hundreds of billions of isk would definitely break the feeling of isk profit and loss that adds significance to your MERC's choices and actions. Alternatively, Eve traders with vast wealth may decide to buy out all DUST market goods - literally cleaning out the markets and cornering Officer weapons - not for honest free-market price-jacking, but simple trolling.
This is all to say - the free-market is complicated, but linking them doesn't have to be too complicated. If I was assigned to find a solution, I would compare the average Eve player's ISK/hr income and Dust player's ISK/hr income. I would then scale the DUST player's income up to match the Eve player's average ISK/hr. Increase all other Dust market item prices by that same factor so that everything basically costs the same in terms of ISK/hr. I would enact some rules to prevent griefing - keeping NPC suppliers (like now) to set a base price for goods, major taxes on Eve ISK to Dust ISK transfers - 95% or higher, and isolating Dust 514 Officer goods to Dust Merc buyers only.
ISK should flow out of Dust and into Eve, because Eve is a natural fit for production and sale of consumables.
Edit: There would also need to be some mechanism to prevent economically broken sell orders posted as a means to circumvent the ISK transfer tax - so 1 million ck.0 suits don't pop into the market for 0 isk in the middle of the night. A minimum sell order price set by the devs.