I will invariably receive a lot of hate for this post, but this needs to be said and understood by more people in here. I just ran across this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89q9VFRozsM You don't have to watch the whole thing, just the first 30 or so seconds so that you can understand what's going on. This guy has created a YouTube channel devoted to spelling out how prices are fluctuating in Eve's player driven economy. This allows players to better understand the markets and get into trading. Lets break this video down a bit. He's got several charts. One is labeled "Trending up this week". These are items whose price has increased since last week. You might initially be appalled at a 140% change in price, but these are extremely cheap items, so large price fluctuations won't impact the average player much at all. Damage Controls, Webs, Shield boosters... in Eve Online these are equivalent to some of your cheaper ship components, so it doesn't matter much if you have these kinds of drastic swings. These are sold in huge volume (you need one for every ship in the game essentially) and the way sellers make money is by selling a TON of them. There are other panels, but just kind of ignore them unless you've actually played Eve Online. Now - THIS IS WHAT AN IN GAME ECONOMY SHOULD LOOK LIKE. This is how economies should function. There should be price fluctuations. Players should be able to make a profit by producing or moving goods to various locations to even out those price fluctuations. Why does this matter? It matters because I believe that CIG has decided to avoid the route that Eve Online - and other games with good player driven economies have taken. They instead want some kind of bot economy. The first thing the bots will do is even out all of these price fluctuations. If you bought Damage Control IIs and put them up last week in Eve, you'd be making some money, 140% increase. If you were able to achieve high enough sales volumes (totally possible with a component that common) you could have made a lot of money. How would this work in Star Citizen? My guess is that there would be no significant price fluctuations. The 100,000 bots that everyone has to compete with due to Quantum would smooth out those fluctuations. Opportunity would be gone. This kind of hammers home why I'm so skeptical about the Quantum economy and the choice to veer away from a player driven economy. Player driven economies do what players need them to do. They provide goods for reasonable prices, they keep the supply coming in, and they provide opportunity for players. I cannot for the life of me understand why CIG has taken this system - examined it - and tossed it aside in favor of Quantum. Never mind that Quantum will take enormous developer effort. Never mind that it might wind up being buggy. Why veer away from such a proven system. CIG. Just add trade kiosks. Let players buy orders of components at various factories and move them to trade hubs. Why complicate everything with Quantum? How about just having an economy first, and then if you want to later, you can start introducing bots to it.. and if that makes sense you can keep adding the bots. Why avoid this easy gameplay win?