This answer is really good. One thing I want to add is that “players destroying value” doesn’t have to be quite as literal as it is in EVE Online to be useful.
In World of Warcraft, players destroy value every time they equip a “soulbound” item (these items can only be used by one player and can’t be given away or sold once they’re used for the first time).
There’s also levels of accuracy in the simulation. You can probably test economic theories in World of Warcraft’s auction house, but you’d have to keep in mind that the economy in that game isn’t like the economy of any real countries (but maybe some parts are similar enough to generalize?).
The significance of value destruction in Eve is that it provides continuous opportunity for players to produce value.
This is similar to selling gear to NPC merchants in most games; selling stuff to the NPCs destroys the thing, and new things similar to it are harvested from the environment. Since this is the default, and is often relatively symmetric, there’s only as much opportunity for players to produce value as there is value routinely destroyed by the players.
This is surely just a heuristic in most cases; games from Diablo to D&D have long suffered from a gold inflation problem because no-one troubled to balance this.
This answer is really good. One thing I want to add is that “players destroying value” doesn’t have to be quite as literal as it is in EVE Online to be useful.
In World of Warcraft, players destroy value every time they equip a “soulbound” item (these items can only be used by one player and can’t be given away or sold once they’re used for the first time).
There’s also levels of accuracy in the simulation. You can probably test economic theories in World of Warcraft’s auction house, but you’d have to keep in mind that the economy in that game isn’t like the economy of any real countries (but maybe some parts are similar enough to generalize?).
The significance of value destruction in Eve is that it provides continuous opportunity for players to produce value.
This is similar to selling gear to NPC merchants in most games; selling stuff to the NPCs destroys the thing, and new things similar to it are harvested from the environment. Since this is the default, and is often relatively symmetric, there’s only as much opportunity for players to produce value as there is value routinely destroyed by the players.
This is surely just a heuristic in most cases; games from Diablo to D&D have long suffered from a gold inflation problem because no-one troubled to balance this.