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.
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.