Jester wrote a good post about passive vs active income. In short: you receive passive income without active effort, for some effort you invested once. For example if you learned the skills and got the standings to start research with an R&D agent, the agent will generate datacores for you as long as you have your account running.
On the other hand to get active income you have to perform an activity now and be rewarded for it, for example running a mission.
Every game economy must be balanced to prevent inflation or "everyone has everything, nothing matters". Passive income sources are usually low in comparison to active, for example my highsec planets earn me about 0.3B/month. I've yet to see someone getting rich over them, they are rather little rewards for long-term continued playing.
Active income seems not really balanced. Highsec missioning can earn 30-40M/hour, so you can earn 21-28B/month by running missions. The reason why there is no runaway inflation in EVE is that the active income sources are limited by the time spent playing. To earn 21-28B/month via highsec missioning, you have run missions 24/7. While there are some "no-lifers", the vast majority of players don't overuse these sources simply because their gaming time is limited, and also within their gaming time they want to do other things besides grinding missions. In the theoretical case where everyone is a "no-lifer" the active income based economy cannot be sustained and must be changed to a scarce resource based one, where you can't just spawn rats by talking to an agent. For example in WoW you can run the same raid once a week, the normal quests once in the lifetime of the character and the daily quests once a day.
Enters the botter and the AFK-farmer and the practical limit of "no lifer farming" disappears. With a bot you can run missions 24/7 with several characters. AFK-ing a Dominix in a newbie complex or a Mackinaw by a chunk of ice let you farm 8-12 hours a day without effort, practically turning the active income source into passive. Just as your planets collect resources while you are away, you bot/AFK ship collects bounties/ore. Except 100x more in ISK.
Theoretically CCP can stop botting by catching botters and banning them. Practically they can't but let's be nice here. However AFK-leeching isn't against the EULA, so the resource acquisition must be redesigned to prevent AFK leeching.
I already mentioned the artificial limits of WoW: you can run the same daily quest once a day, and even if you do them all, you are done in 2 hours and you can't farm more. Similar arbitrary limits could be introduced, like "you can run 5 missions a day" or "you can rat for only 2 hours a day, after that no more loot or bounty" or "maximum 2 hours of mining". They are both immersion-breaking, anti-sandboxy and outright harmful to players in need: imagine that you lost your ships in the first timer of your station and you have 2 days to get back. You are motivated and ready put some extra time in, but the mission and ratting limit practically says "150M/day max no matter how hard you try" and two days later you're facing the most important battle of your EVE carrier without a replacement ship. This would be bad.
I would rather use a more subtle limiting that also rewards good playing, therefore might even promote group-PVE: while in space and not logged off, your ship constantly degrades due to usage and from time to time needs repairs. (For ISK in a station or nanite paste in the space.) The repair costs would be around 10M/hour for a battleship, strat cruiser or mining barge, obviously less for cruisers and frigates, more for capitals. This cost would disproportionately hit those who have low income. If you made 100M/hour, your income decreased by 10%. If you made 20M/hour, the costs halved it. If you leave your Mack by the ice when you go to work, you can easily end up with negative income. This way active playing isn't penalized (if everyone is penalized, then no one is, or the yield/bounty can be rebalanced to give 10M/hour more for active play), but AFK-leeching and horrible performance take a hit.
Until something like that is implemented, there is one solution for AFK-leeching that threatens to remove consequences from the game: gank them!
On the other hand to get active income you have to perform an activity now and be rewarded for it, for example running a mission.
Every game economy must be balanced to prevent inflation or "everyone has everything, nothing matters". Passive income sources are usually low in comparison to active, for example my highsec planets earn me about 0.3B/month. I've yet to see someone getting rich over them, they are rather little rewards for long-term continued playing.
Active income seems not really balanced. Highsec missioning can earn 30-40M/hour, so you can earn 21-28B/month by running missions. The reason why there is no runaway inflation in EVE is that the active income sources are limited by the time spent playing. To earn 21-28B/month via highsec missioning, you have run missions 24/7. While there are some "no-lifers", the vast majority of players don't overuse these sources simply because their gaming time is limited, and also within their gaming time they want to do other things besides grinding missions. In the theoretical case where everyone is a "no-lifer" the active income based economy cannot be sustained and must be changed to a scarce resource based one, where you can't just spawn rats by talking to an agent. For example in WoW you can run the same raid once a week, the normal quests once in the lifetime of the character and the daily quests once a day.
Enters the botter and the AFK-farmer and the practical limit of "no lifer farming" disappears. With a bot you can run missions 24/7 with several characters. AFK-ing a Dominix in a newbie complex or a Mackinaw by a chunk of ice let you farm 8-12 hours a day without effort, practically turning the active income source into passive. Just as your planets collect resources while you are away, you bot/AFK ship collects bounties/ore. Except 100x more in ISK.
Theoretically CCP can stop botting by catching botters and banning them. Practically they can't but let's be nice here. However AFK-leeching isn't against the EULA, so the resource acquisition must be redesigned to prevent AFK leeching.
I already mentioned the artificial limits of WoW: you can run the same daily quest once a day, and even if you do them all, you are done in 2 hours and you can't farm more. Similar arbitrary limits could be introduced, like "you can run 5 missions a day" or "you can rat for only 2 hours a day, after that no more loot or bounty" or "maximum 2 hours of mining". They are both immersion-breaking, anti-sandboxy and outright harmful to players in need: imagine that you lost your ships in the first timer of your station and you have 2 days to get back. You are motivated and ready put some extra time in, but the mission and ratting limit practically says "150M/day max no matter how hard you try" and two days later you're facing the most important battle of your EVE carrier without a replacement ship. This would be bad.
I would rather use a more subtle limiting that also rewards good playing, therefore might even promote group-PVE: while in space and not logged off, your ship constantly degrades due to usage and from time to time needs repairs. (For ISK in a station or nanite paste in the space.) The repair costs would be around 10M/hour for a battleship, strat cruiser or mining barge, obviously less for cruisers and frigates, more for capitals. This cost would disproportionately hit those who have low income. If you made 100M/hour, your income decreased by 10%. If you made 20M/hour, the costs halved it. If you leave your Mack by the ice when you go to work, you can easily end up with negative income. This way active playing isn't penalized (if everyone is penalized, then no one is, or the yield/bounty can be rebalanced to give 10M/hour more for active play), but AFK-leeching and horrible performance take a hit.
Until something like that is implemented, there is one solution for AFK-leeching that threatens to remove consequences from the game: gank them!
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