Science & Industry

The NPC sellers have a constant amount, so if you see an NPC seller selling 50 Salvager I BPOs, you buy 10, the NPC will have 50 up for sale right after, maybe at a slightly increased price

it'll be 40, until either
1. other people buy the remaining 40 (this'll immediately restock at a few ISK higher, to a cap of +10% over baseprice)
2. DT (at which point the item is restocked and the price goes down a few ISK, to a minimum of -10% below baseprice)


NOTE -- this is "Pre-Retribution" market workings. CCP did something with the market recently (a week or two ago) and it's changed a few numbers... either because we're collectively space-rich enough to warrant it ... or the market baseprice maths have been changed. (or ~CCP~)

The economy is a mess?

How so?

I kind of feel like maybe you aren't terribly familiar with Eve's economy as it presently stands.

Supply is essentially unlimited. All the ore in the universe is replenished every 24 hours, and anyone can make anything. It's not much more complicated than that really. Yes, some money does leave the economy in the form of taxes, fees, npc purchases etc. But the basis of any economy is raw materials. If raw materials are essentially free and unlimited, there are no real constraints on the economy. I have a feeling that CCP does some other forms of "inflation control", but I just don't see that they are being effective.

For example, I was buying T2 ships a week after I started. I just think it should be harder than that to buy high-tech gear.

On the one hand I do see your point, but the folks who think Eve is a real "economy" are kidding themselves. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game about flying around shooting stuff, but that's all it is really. The part about manufacturing and science and all that is really just CCP's way of broadening it's user base. If everyone decided to stop manufacturing and mining tomorrow, the game would go on just fine, prices would adjust only because the only people left would just be the pvp types and all the free money from mining disappeared, and if stuff got too expensive to buy, then those folks would just go find another mmo to play, and CCP isn't going to let that happen.

Convince me I'm wrong here, I would love for it to be more complex than it is, but the mining/manufacturing/research component is really just tacked on for fun (for the people who would rather do something other than flying around shooting stuff), not an integral part of the game universe.

Hoo, boy. You're kind of all over the map, here.

First and foremost: You are confusing the availability of resources in the world with the availability of resources in the economy. Not the same thing, at all.

The fundamental error in your understanding is that raw materials are "essentially free and unlimited". There is, in fact, a limited supply of resources available in the economy at any given time. Were it essentially unlimited, as you say, you would see, e.g., mercoxit and tritanium both sharing a very similar and very low price.

It might interest you to know that those "unlimited" low-end minerals are currently enjoying what would have once been thought of as obscenely high prices, due to the removal of some major supply sources (drone alloys and Meta 0 drops). Were the economic supply actually "unlimited" you wouldn't see this impact - the price would remain largely unchanged because the supply would have simply gone from unlimited to... unlimited. :D



Er... funny you should mention that, for two reasons:

1. The materials required to build T2 items actually have a relatively fixed maximum income rate. Without getting into the details too much: They're mined from moons, there are a fixed number of moons, and the rate at which a material can be harvested from a moon is also fixed. I say "relatively fixed" because it's possible to add more systems or moons, or alter the harvest rate in a patch, or introduce a new mechanism for harvesting them, of course - but unlike T1 minerals, for the time being it is not possible to exceed the cap simply by, e.g., making more mining characters.

2. At least one of those materials, technetium, is entirely controlled by an enormous multi-alliance opec-like conglomerate.

The end result of this is that T2 prices are probably somewhat artificially inflated beyond where they would be otherwise.

That you apparently feel they should be higher is simply an issue of perception. You seem to perceive them to be high-end goods (they're not).


Anyway, the really important thing to understand is that supply in the world != supply in the economy. That the universe will never run out of Tritanium doesn't mean that supply and demand don't exist within the economy - what you're paying for is the effort of retrieving that tritanium.

So like I was saying: I kind of feel like maybe you aren't terribly familiar with Eve's economy as it presently stands. You seem to have taken one (errant) point - that materials are "unlimited" and concluded, from there, that the economy is "screwed up".

Assuming you're going to persist in this assertion (because I've never seen anyone in S&I listen to reason ), try pointing to an actual *effect* of this allegedly screwed up economy - not an imagined cause from which you will extrapolate a bunch of hypothetical effects.

What you're describing existed once upon a time. Before invention, T2 production was only through BPOs, a limited quantity of which were distributed via lottery. Naturally, cartels formed to exploit the BPO scarcity. It made for bad gameplay and was changed for good reason.

Mining is another matter. If you want to exclusively mine a system, that's totally doable - you're just going to have to leave high-sec. :D

Just to be clear: "Named" meta-level items are not manufactured, and are only found through loot drops. If you wanted to "corner" the 'scout' market, you could probably do it, given enough capital (and no particular aversion to finding yourself holding a massive inventory of overpriced autocannons).

Well, if it takes 2 minutes to save that 80K, that's 40K a minute or 2.4 million an hour.

Incursion running produces something like 70 million an hour? Missions will net you a good 15-20, I think. From a certain perspective, if you value your time, "saving" 40K a minute can be quite expensive.

And, yeah, in Eve, a mining laser pretty much IS a pack of gum.



Well, the comparison is a bit flawed. They don't have laser-miners run on power generated by engines that never run out of juice in the real world. That aside, a single mining laser in eve is basically the equivalent of a pickaxe.

On the other hand, if you want to mine like a BOSS, you could easily spend a few hundred million on an exhumer, or even billions on a Rorqual to support fleet mining operations.