Militia junk is a small problem. It's bad equipment and will result in the players doing poorly against good players. So there is a faucet effect, but its minimal -- especially when competent matchmaking filters out these bad players.

With APEX the situation is different. Good players can abuse many APEX suits and do incredibly well. This gives it a large faucet effect.

An unchecked faucet is highly damaging to economy. In a game where all you are doing is buying from an NPC market, this can be forgiven. However that is not Dusts stated design. It's not supposed to be that way, and with every update we move further away from that. The concept of APEX is poisonous to the direction the game is heading.

It is also poisonous to the concept of schadenfreude, which is supposed to be the defining meta of Dust as well as EVE. The game was supposed to get an ISK destruction stat to make people feel good every time they secure a kill. It's one of the reasons the devs originally took the BPO's out of the game in the first place, despite all of the complaints to Sony that happened afterwards. They recognized it was a necessary step to forging the proper public metagame, as well as economy.

Rattati effectively reversed their efforts and made that fallout from that decision be entirely in vain. He did this because the team was scrambling to find something -- anything -- that would sell. They were that close to getting the lights turned off and Dust shut down. More methods of monetization have come since, and its no longer necessary for APEX to exist.


Ergo, APEX is trash and should be removed from the game. If that isn't possible, then its use needs to be tied to a resource that can deplete. Something that can be tied in ISK in some manner, and can be measured when it is destroyed.

I barely have 150 mil and I cant remember a time where any of my 3 accounts had to think about risk vs reward? Perhaps 10% of the dust populus is playing that imaginary game you speak of.