Science & Industry

Today someone manipulated the POS fuel market, Enriched Uranium, Mechanical Parts and Robotics went through the roof... from 8k p/u to over 28 k p/u for Enriched Uranium for example.

Goons are killing Ice Miners, the new player-owned customs office will kick in soon, POS fuel prices are going up steadily since the PI patch making POS's very expensive to run already... and there is no end in sight.

imho it will keep rising and i think that's something CCP should look into, because many smaller POS owners and PI producers will stop doing it and it will leave a few bigger players on the market... i wonder if that's the goal of CCP

I noticed the rise if fuel prices this morning, and made changes in my plans for the future accordingly. You should too.

It's a dynamic market and it will correct itself eventually. One result could be higher priced t2 products. Another result could be fuel prices return to previous prices. The least likely result is where t2 prices stay the same, while fuel prices continue to rise.

In uncertain times, people tend to stockpile the necessities.

(Witness the grocery store stampede the day before a major snowstorm.)

Cool story, bro.

Do you need a tissue box?

Checked in Verge Vendor (Gallente Space):

Coolant - 11,000/unit (up from 7,000/unit average over the past 3 months)
Enriched Uranium - 14,000/unit (up from 7,000/unit average) - this one has been showing constant price increase over the past 3 months
Mechanical Parts - 10,000/unit (up from 7,000/unit average)
Robotics - 390,000/unit (up from 44,000/unit average)...uhh what?


For all 4 products, the supply is almost non-existent. Looks like some cleared house on all of them in this region at least. Though the 900% increase in Robotics is nasty.

EDIT: Meanwhile over in Rens...Water, Electrolytes, and Coolant are all up 300%. Wow.

So CCP should look into CCP's manipulation of the PI market by announcing the change to Customs Offices.

Seriously, if you cant do 5 minutes of research on the reason WHY the markets got messed up, you end up looking a little, ummm uneducated.

Smart POS owners will have learned the lessons from the past (semi-annual Hulkageddons screwing with the supply chain) and would already have at least a 1-2 month supply of fuel squirreled away. The larger corps probably keep 2-3 months stored away (because having to re-fuel and re-online everything is a sucky job). A stockpile like that lets you ride out price spikes and either make other plans (like raising POS slot fees) or wait for prices to come back down.

Those who chose not to maintain a reserve of some sort suffer the full wrath of the market when prices spike.

Well, we're certainly grinding planets and buying up as much market PI POS fuel, as possible - enough for a multi-year stockpile, before the player-owed PI custom offices go live. We're anticipating a much larger and perhaps permanent spike in prices, when our current low sec and null sec PI sources are permanently crimped, or even cut off by the new player-controlled offices - given that only one office can exist for each planet and the owner can deny access.

We really don't even want to own our own PI customs offices. Without active starbase defenses (ie. no guns and no ECM), the new PI custom offices are just too vulnerable to attack. We cannot ask our players to guard *all* of our PI planets - it is enough to ask them to guard our POS towers (which do have guns & ECM). Given that most of the industrial alts are running 5-6 PI planets, it would also be impossible to manage a complete defense. So, it is simply more cost-effective to massively stockpile now, and then replenish the stockpile via high sec PI (which is significantly less productive than low/null sec PI).

If we're wrong in this decision, then no big deal - we'll just fuel our towers from the stockpile and everyone gets to take a break from PI, or we'll put a chunk of the surplus up for sale on market later.

Wrong or right, we're probably not alone in this sort of thinking, esp. after some industrial corps took a fuel hit from the Goons' war-on-ice (we dodged that bullet, thanks to stockpiling of oxytopes).

It's an isk sink. CCP wants more isk sinks.

Prices will rise again on top of this when the ice belts are removed from high sec as part of the grand plan to encourage more of us to relocate to nul-sec.

Just to clarify things for the many people that get this wrong:

Sink = ISK is removed from the sandbox.
Faucet = ISK is added to the sandbox.

If ISK is transferred to / from your wallet and to / from another wallet, then the transaction is neither a sink nor a faucet as the ISK is still in the game.

Blowing-up anything is neither a sink nor a faucet, unless it was a ship with an owner, then it is a faucet because of insurance payout.

Examples of ISK Sinks:
* Office rental fee.
* Corp and alliance creation fee.
* Sovereignty payments.
* Buying anything from NPC: skill books, BPO, reactions, PI command centers, etc.
* PI import / export taxes.
* Broker fees.
* Transaction taxes.
* Contract fee.
* CSPA fees.
* Customs penalties.
* Clone upgrades.
* Repair costs.
* Insurance fees.
* Wardecs.

Examples of ISK Faucets:
* Mission rewards.
* Insurance payouts.
* Selling anything to NPC: Sleeper tags, faction tags, DNA, etc.
* New characters (100 ISK?).