| The problem of having a lot of people with tons of cash is really hard to solve. There are two ways to attack it; prevent people from amassing tons of cash, or give them things to spend tons of cash on.
Preventing them from amassing it is really tough provided that your game has an interesting economy. The bell curve is inevitably going to float the most intelligent and motivated players to the top; in EVE, that's the people who are smart, dedicated, and have smart, dedicated connections so that they can hold valuable moons, run the best complexes, or manipulate the market. In a MMORPG where the scale of playtime and intelligence in the playerbase goes from 1-hour-a-week-and-clueless up to 80-hours-a-week-and-brilliant, there is going to be a similarly enormous disparity on the amount of wealth people sit on.
Giving people something to spend their riches on sounds easy, but it's not. In EVE, a "rich" player (pulling numbers out of my ass, I'll say this is the top 1% of the population, and peg that number at about 10 billion ISK in assets) has a lot of different ways he could blow that money. You could easily spend that on about three or four deadspace-fit faction battleships, add in an implant set, and blammo, you're broke. A "super-rich" player (call this 100 billion in assets, which is probably about the top 0.05%) could blow the same amount of money on an officer-fit supercapital.
However, you'll find that rich and super-rich players almost always prefer to sit on the majority of their assets, rather than spend them on these things. The problem is that spending your money on things like that gives you a significant, but marginal performance upgrade (and, gameplay-wise, a similarly marginal entertainment upgrade -- maybe a downgrade if you're buying a huge ship!) Even most rich players feel silly spending a big chunk of their cash on expensive rare modules that give maybe a 50% aggregate bonus to their ship's power for a few weeks until they explode.
From a gameplay perspective, that's not something that is easy to change around. It would be unfair and un-fun for the majority if expensive gear were really supremely powerful in any conventional way. About the only thing you could do is provide some kind of enticing expensive cosmetic or convenience upgrades of one sort or another.
(And having played for 6 months isn't new to EVE anymore!) |