Market Discussions

I've noticed some prices for PI goods have been dropping lately. Anyone have any thoughts as to what may be causing this? How they might be over supplied...or if demand is starting to dry up for one reason or another.

My p4 operation is definitely feeling the pinch.

From my understanding of it, it is just a market 'recorrection' after a spike in demand just after the crucible patch and the release of POCOs.

Alot of the products are used in the construction of the offices themselves, or their gantries. The immediate demand for more and more POCOs has started to dry up as alliances no longer need by the gantries anymore. Most of the POCOs that caused the demand still stand in relatively safe 0.0 space.

This and the fact that in Low Sec many of the POCOs are ignored by the vast majority of the population means that demand is dying in the a$$.

Two things that could turn this around is a lot of 0.0 space changing hands ( and clean up operations being conducted on deep 0.0 POCOs) or a mentality shift from low sec inhabitants (ie that they start focusing on taking out the POCOs and/or hold their owners to ransom)

A further factor could be high sec PI runners mentality. I think alot of them are unwilling to commit to low sec PI running out of player owned POCOs, least they are destroyed retrieving their product or held to ransom by low sec pirates...

That makes sense.

I say they just need to stop seeding command centers and make them player-built with research-able BPOs that use PI goods as the raw materials to build them.

That isn't a bug, that is lower Planetology/ Advanced Planetology skills.

Without full Planetology skills, what you see on scans is not 100% accurate to what is actually there and total/hourly extractions estimates can be off in either directions.

In your case, there exist "nuggets". Tiny patches of extreme productivity that appear and vanish quickly. These patches are very small in size and tend not to show up at all on the scans of lower Planetology skilled colony builders. You very well may have accidentally put a few extractor heads on one of these nuggets, resulting in a metric F-load of goods.

From my understanding, Planetology IV and advanced Planetology IV will let you see nuggets. These nuggets are one of the incentives they put out there to encourage serious colony builders to invest even more skill points in the field.

This.

The more time passes the more people train up PI alts resulting on more pilots doing PI meaning more supply with out having an increase in consumption. So, falling prices.

Even with a 20% decline in overall price for the PI goods I produce I can still make enough to cover PLEX for my accounts and have ISK left over.

The big issue with PI is that CCP hardly ever adds new recipes that require PI goods.

We need more BPOs/BPCs changed/added to the game which consume PI goods as part of the build process. Hopefully at least 5-20% of the value of the item coming from secondary sources like PI.

Implant BPCs would be an obvious choice for consuming the "biological" PI goods along with some minerals, salvage and moon goo.

The latter. Sell BPCs instead of raw implants. Maybe even change existing implant drops into 1-3 run BPCs. There's probably an order of magnitude more +5 implants that get sold every day then POS towers. So it would create a good bit of demand for harvested materials.

(I don't believe there should be BPOs for implants, it would be too easy to flood the market. Or maybe make the +1 implant a meta-zero version and seed that BPO, with the rest of the implants being meta 1-4.)

the POS fuel components that come from PI are also down, this is a function of Isotopes being really high (3x of what they were 2 months ago). Because POS fuel is expensive, people are consuming less and therefore the demand for PI is less and prices are down.

Enriched Uranium
Oxygen
Coolant
Mechanical Parts
Robotics

That, I have no clue about. Could just be price lemmings? People who already have a P3 > P4 factory setup and are just buying goods to maintain production without checking up on what the price of the P4 is doing?

Either that or they know something we don't and are hoarding P4s until some new thing causes a fresh wave of demand in them and a subsequent spike in their price...but even then they would be better off just buying and hoarding the P4s directly...

This is both a very valid and very scary point. With hulkageddon being extended indefinitely, this could have an even more profound impact on higher end PI.