EVE Online

Eve is one of the games with a very rich economy.  Players can engage in all sorts of activities that fuel and drive the economy.  Unfortunately, despite all of that, it suffers from some flaws that other MMOs are subject to.  Such flaws include typical faucet/drain mechanics (faucets like NPC rats, missions, trade good trading, arguably insurance.  Drains like clones, skill books, BPOs, ect...).

Other oddities include the rare and expensive minerals that exist only in lowsec space.  Which begs the question, why not tame these regions instead of inhabiting the useless veldspar regions?  That is, civilization normally clusters around the valuable resources.

Finally is that of location.  Location seems to mean fairly little in Eve.  At least, on the wider scale.  There are no minerals which are used for any particular purpose which have to travel a long and perilous distance to do anything, leading to a fairly static economy where the people that make any money are the people willing to work for nearly nothing.  There are no diverse outposts that each have their "key" mined good which in turn have to take a long journey to other outposts so they could all manufacture goods together, since all of the minerals seem to exist everywhere.  There is an exception to this in the ores Omber and Pyrox, which don't exist in some sectors of empire space and have to be imported, but this only applies to two minerals which move easily between the areas that don't have it.  The other 2 rare minerals are produced domestically though recycling pirate loot.

For a more interesting economy, location should mean more.  Like each empire ought to get an exclusive mineral, perhaps one that's used mostly in it's own specialty.  Caldari ships might require more of their exclusive mineral and missile technology uses it too, which makes these goods much more expensive ouside of caldari territory due to the rarity of the mineral.  Meanwhile Minmitar ships and drones would require more of their exclusive mineral, making it cheap in their territory, and so on.  0.0 space might see more cooperation and "cold" wars if they have to rely more on trading with other alliances to manufacture what they need, as an example.

I'd like to point out that location, for a corporation at least, means everything.

I am a member of an industrial corporation, we sit in a .5 system which gets the occassional omber.  It allows us great access to get to 0.0 space when we are ready to make that big leap, it also lets us mine every single one of the basic ores, run missions (Missions are feaseable and I wouldn't consider them faucits, even if a few repeat sometimes), refine materials, have lucrative trade routes for our traders, and it's all close to home, where we do corp mines.

You stick a corp in a newbie 1.0 system and you'll be doomed to have practically no money.

The game requires you to have ltos of access to everything.  You say people should clump around needed materials.  Hasn't this happened already?  Look at the largest alliances in the game.  They control vast regions of 0.0 space for their resources.

As for materials required for each race.  Please take a look at capitol ships and doomsday weapons.  For each racial ship, it takes a different type of fuel to let it do what it can.

0.0 space is competitive because those huge alliances make HUGE PROFIT from mining and producing in 0.0   Competition is good.  Makes it so I can buy all my stuff at a lower cost.

i do not see how you could possibly have played this game and not noticed how much the economy is based on location

one simple cheap example.  minmitar shuttle cost in tash murkon 9000ISK (9% under regoin average)

one juimp over into domian. minmitar shuttle cost in domain 9000ISK (17.5% over over regoin average)

that is a 26.5 percent difference in one jump now if that was the difference on say a raven

HYPOTHETICAL.

raven in domain (real price) 100 mil average

Raven in say The Citadel (im making a point never been there) either 74mil or 126 mil.....probably the cheaper knowning the race of the regoin

do you see my point?