To mesh the economies without breaking DUST beyond repair, will require an exchange rate and possibly a transfer cap.

Logically you cannot achieve equilibrium between the 2 games. In Eve you fund super expensive star ships but in Dust you are funding only a soldier. They can never be similar in price because it makes no sense.

I'm not sure that's true, because the idea expressed here...



... is premised upon the idea that items in Eve and Dust have an objective value, unrelated to the time players spend to earn resources. Time spent by human beings playing each game is what drives the current exchange rate between Dust and Eve (which is about [Dust isk 1 to Eve isk 5] and [Eve isk 10 to Dust isk 1]). I presume that exchange rate is holding somewhat consistently because in aggregate, it is somewhere between 5x and 10x easier to earn an isk in Eve, compared to Dust.

The exchange rate is currently driven by the ease with which isk is earned in each game, but can potentially be driven by the effect each game can have on the other. We're not seeing much of that effect on the exchange rate yet, except in the most wildly speculative sense.

I've converted about 30B Eve isk and 5 or 6B Dust isk between the games, over the course of about 150 transactions. The unofficial exchange hasn't destroyed Dust. To the contrary, I think its fostered interest in Dust among Eve players, and interest in Eve among Dust players. CCP should build an official exchange that makes it easy for Dust players to take their saved Dust isk, convert it to Eve isk, buy a plex (sold to them by an Eve player who paid CCP RL money for that plex) and keep playing Eve after their free trial runs out. CCP should build an official exchange that makes it easy for Eve players to fund Dust corps while they fight on the ground in a way that help their efforts in Eve. PC should be more than a friendly-locked isk printing machine, particularly while Dust isk is so much more valuable than Eve isk.

A currency serves a purpose and arises organically even in the absence of an official medium of exchange. When you argue for a second currency, its characteristics should serve the intended purpose. A second currency that has the same problem of being less wealth producing for a player's time spent earning it, doesn't resolve the desperate earning potentials between Eve and Dust. The only lore solution is to deflate the value of Dust isk toward parity with Eve isk. You can't do that with a second currency; you can only do that by causing price inflation within Dust to catch up with Eve prices.

You want something like parity? Multiply every isk held by a Dust player or Corp, and every payout and price in Dust by x7.5. Bingo, price equality, and easy market integration. Lore can not overpower the actual economic incentive players experience.

I would like to see an isk reset, isk at the time being on dust is unbalanced due to PC and when CCP sold your salvage items that were outdated, some got mega rich while people that are new or didnt go for certain suits vehicles etc got left behind. I myself have 100mil plus, and even that is way to much. Once eve can transfer isk over, it will get even worse.

Its like real life, rich get richer, poor are reduced to skin and bone.


Hindsight tells me this idea wont be popular, but the only people whinging are the ones that got mega rich for stupid reasons, and are just to greedy to give it up.

well im all for removing isk from the game entirely and moving to a BPO system with a decent skill point investment to unlock them at least until the game is actually finished and they have delivered all the content they originally promised us.

While I do agree with you, its far to late for it to have any effect, unless its based on a percentage of isk rather then a base number, therefore the more isk you have the more u have to lay down for certain things such as upkeep, or items.

I would like to see an isk reset, isk at the time being on dust is unbalanced due to PC and when CCP sold your salvage items that were outdated, some got mega rich while people that are new or didnt go for certain suits vehicles etc got left behind. I myself have 100mil plus, and even that is way to much. Once eve can transfer isk over, it will get even worse.

Its like real life, rich get richer, poor are reduced to skin and bone.

Hindsight tells me this idea wont be popular, but the only people whinging are the ones that got mega rich for stupid reasons, and are just to greedy to give it up.

The principle issue we are ignoring here is the lack of ISK sinks in Dust.

As I said its not a popular idea, and I never stated that anyone that doesnt like it is greedy, only those that got there isk through stupid reasons, such as PC farming or the sale of outdated items that seen some get rich while most didnt. I would gladly sacrifice all my isk for a fresh start on isk gaining.

When they sold off the tank items, I had a total of 650 million isk rounded off. Since then ive donated most of it to fellow corp members that have absolutely nothing and even then I dont see many of them playing anymore. Over the past few months im lucky to have spent 10million isk on vehicles and dropsuits IF THAT.

So take your attacks and suck on them lols, in the nicest way possible

... is premised upon the idea that items in Eve and Dust have an objective value, unrelated to the time players spend to earn resources. Time spent by human beings playing each game is what drives the current exchange rate between Dust and Eve (which is about [Dust isk 1 to Eve isk 5] and [Eve isk 10 to Dust isk 1]). I presume that exchange rate is holding somewhat consistently because in aggregate, it is somewhere between 5x and 10x easier to earn an isk in Eve, compared to Dust.

The exchange rate is currently driven by the ease with which isk is earned in each game, but can potentially be driven by the effect each game can have on the other. We're not seeing much of that effect on the exchange rate yet, except in the most wildly speculative sense.

I've converted about 30B Eve isk and 5 or 6B Dust isk between the games, over the course of about 150 transactions. The unofficial exchange hasn't destroyed Dust. To the contrary, I think its fostered interest in Dust among Eve players, and interest in Eve among Dust players. CCP should build an official exchange that makes it easy for Dust players to take their saved Dust isk, convert it to Eve isk, buy a plex (sold to them by an Eve player who paid CCP RL money for that plex) and keep playing Eve after their free trial runs out. CCP should build an official exchange that makes it easy for Eve players to fund Dust corps while they fight on the ground in a way that help their efforts in Eve. PC should be more than a friendly-locked isk printing machine, particularly while Dust isk is so much more valuable than Eve isk.

A currency serves a purpose and arises organically even in the absence of an official medium of exchange. When you argue for a second currency, its characteristics should serve the intended purpose. A second currency that has the same problem of being less wealth producing for a player's time spent earning it, doesn't resolve the desperate earning potentials between Eve and Dust. The only lore solution is to deflate the value of Dust isk toward parity with Eve isk. You can't do that with a second currency; you can only do that by causing price inflation within Dust to catch up with Eve prices.

You want something like parity? Multiply every isk held by a Dust player or Corp, and every payout and price in Dust by x7.5. Bingo, price equality, and easy market integration. Lore can not overpower the actual economic incentive players experience.

when it comes to it, i would think that inflating the cost of a militia fit medium suit to cost 500,000 would be beyond a joke."

edit: your argument for an inflated DUST isk to reach parity, and your argument against a DUST currency because its inherent value would be less than on par with an isk, are self defeating.

The trick is to force prices to adjust slowly, so that the value players truly place on these things can be found without economic shocks killing trade. Adding yet another currency merely hides all of this (poorly) behind a flimsy curtain. It changes nothing and adds unnecessary complexity to cross-game trade. The intention is for us to provide resources that eve players want. When you're making those trades you want the process to be as simple as possible.

No harm, no foul.

I understand that the solution may not be reseting all isk, but it seemx the only logical way to do it without someone being able to abuse a solution to put the game back where it it, an idea that just popped into mind would be to pool all the isk I dust and spread it out evenly amongst the playerbase, but even that will see players with alts getting more then others (maybe per ip address) and even that will see family members playing on the same ip address missing out, its just a very sensitive thing that can easily make or break.

CCP, may need to ditch the current player base and take a step back (which ultimately might be a step forward in the long run) make a new server alongside the one we play now forcing players to start over either altogether or to transfer your character over at the cost of all your isk and may even cutting your sp In half or all of it.

Either way I would be up for that as well. Keeping all the players that just wont give it up a chance to keep doing what they want on there own server and vise versa for newer players to enjoy themselves and to build a better playerbase.

Keep in mind these are just ideas, and flaws will appear

Yea, I've been operating an isk exchange since last October. The isk exchange thread Customers give me isk in one game, and my alt pays their alt in the other game. They exchange their isk between games, through me. Luckily, no one has suggested the values you just offered. I don't get the joke. If the problem you're trying to solve is that Dust mercs aren't as cheap as you think they should be, try adjusting the lore to the economics of the game, instead of other way around.

An eve pilot might move his consciousness across space into another clone, as much as once a day. A Dust merc can wake up in a new clone and almost immediately perform, sometimes as often as 20 times in half an hour. Dust mercs are rarer than Eve pilots. Why would their equipment, particularly prototypes that can perform significantly better than their peers, be less expensive than the wildly more common space ships hauling garbage between space stations?

Multiplying the prices and payouts in Dust by 7.5 would make milia fits costs rise from about 5k to 37k; advanced fits costing 20k would rise to 150k; proto fits costing 150k would rise to over 1M; tanks costing 2M would rise to 15M. A proportional rise in payouts would leave no net effect on the time it would take to support someone's play style. I'm not saying that should happen. I'm saying that if that's where CCP's headed, it would make sense, if they want Dust and Eve isk to have roughly the same value.

You can't link the economies of both games, without taking the player's time in to account.

I don't understand your first edit. I'm not arguing for a particular outcome, I'm describing contingencies.

what you are doing is offering a service that skirts the inability to transfer isk, you are not actually transferring isk.

It may be that there is no reason to adjust the lore...

The costing of mercenary gear vs capsuleer, is not a matter of rarity nor technological complexity (both lore wise and mechanically), costing should be based upon and production cost with a profit margin based upon demand and supply.

To make a mercenary fitting cost as much as a frigate similarly fitted for aggression is taking the scale too far, the aggregate material costs are not proportionate, nor based upon scale of end product could they be. ...Once again, you cannot ignore the material cost of the product.

Inflating DUST isk artificially and to a point where basic game and market mechanics are ignored, in order to maintain it as a currency is both inelegant and overly convoluted.

By giving DUST its own currency and then establishing an exchange rate, you bypass the need to inflate DUST's economy and you bring forward the date by which time we can expect Eve Production to begin supply of merc gear (also known as merging the markets).

I would guess that you are bleeding off isk generated from locking districts ...

... to suggest that a suit which will likely see one production run=100 units should then cost more than a frigate hull simply to satisfy a desire to maintain a single unit of currency across two very different games, with very different attrition rates and very different methods of warfare.

... a seperate currency because its inherent value would be less than an EVE isk...

I hear the idea of using inflation to push DUST into viability, but a part of me wants to resist that path because my (limited) knowledge of EvE's industrial and market place systems provokes within me disquiet at the thought of DUST being used to provide incomes for Eve to the detriment of DUST players.

This is just a sentiment with me, if i have intuited wrong i apologise, and education was always the harder (for me) when hot feelings are involved, please none the less, educate me to my errors.

I'm not arguing against the current separate currencies. Currencies like Dust and Eve isk don't have an inherent value. Again, I think we're talking past one another, perhaps because you're carrying around this completely unnecessary idea of objective economic value. Things have value because we as individuals value them. You can aggregate those values, but they simply don't exist apart from subjective value judgments. If no one will pay a penny for that shuttle, it is worthless, no matter how much veld was consumed in producing it. If that Thales cost 1k worth of materials to produce, but I need it to win a PC battle that will result in locked-district income, I'd be perfectly reasonable to spend millions to get it.

I like the idea of fluctuating price levels, driven by supply and demand. This seems to me an indicator of a healthy market (?). And unless i've edited it out during the writing process, i am fairly sure that i've said as much earlier, ill have to reread i guess.

on revision, the central point of my initial suggestion is that i do not believe that the economies will ever reach parity. There is much talk about increasing the amount of isk floating around DUST till a normalised average comparable to a per capita Eve wealth index, or some such(?). Yet the only way to feasibly achieve this For the vast majority of DUst players is to inflate their incomes. Inflating incomes without inflating costs would ruin the game, so the hand in hand approach would be to inflate costs as well.

Hopefully isk transfers become available some time soon. >.< ( in game), so i can fund my DUST adventures with my EvE toons

I could easily have misread your post. I thought you were dissatisfied with the potential results of prices driven by supply and demand, if they resulted in Dust weapons costing more than some Eve frigates.

Re: the hand in hand approach, exactly. I don't see the downside to that approach that would deter CCP from pursuing it, specifically because a big part of the web of supplies and demands that determine prices and opportunity costs, is each players time, whether they play Dust or Eve.

i wouldnt get to use my sniper rifle if there were different currencies because i never fight for Caldari, or Amarr. and im sure im not the only one who uses weapons that arent made by their faction.