Market Discussions

Yeah, sadly in EvE there's this terrible thing called "law of supply and demand". Even worse, EvE got markets driven economy. Preposterous.

Also, there's no "redistribution to the poor" and no "popular republic".

Gotta find them in real life, where they show how good they are.

Buyers in Amarr will lag Jita while sellers will go with Jita prices so the margin is not surprising.

If it was manipulation, I think volume would be higher. It's been more than a year since the last sustained manipulation attempt so I don't have those volume numbers handy, but trust me I wish it was manipulation.

Go to Jita and look at the graph. Whenever volume is low price rises, whenever volume is high price falls. This is a classic sign that prices are driven by supply and supply has been dismal. Large sellers have apparently been selling from inventories, but even those folks might either run out of inventory or decide to wait to see how high prices could go.

Blame it on bad press if you want, but apparently the guys that have cash to spend on a game have decided that they don't want to give it all to Jita scammers and they've gone somewhere else (for now.)

I"m not 100% sure about the "economy" of the outside world.. . .it could be just a downward drift in "whats a fair price for a game?", and more specifically "what's a fair price for game microtransaction benefits (which is basically how people using $ to isk look at the transaction)


There are all sorts of offseting things ... benefit of plex accounts to game goals on the demand side...


.... need for expensive ships to motivate putting extra $ into the game from need of ISK and lack of time who are having fun.


The in game "economy" I think is based on which ships are popular to fly and get blown up , and how many are getting blown up and whether or not there are corp reimbursement programs etc.

If everyone is flying T1 cruisers for roams... or interceptors... there isn't much motivation for a casual player who would use $ instead of farming, to use those $ as much.

10 intercepters blown up a month > 1 plex is going to let you cover 2 months.

10 T3 ships getting blown up a month? (ouch) > you'd need 5 plex a months 10 times the intercepter route.

That sort of thing isn't about player activity necessary but FADs, Fashions Trends it what players are doing at a given time.


The buff of intercepters and previous buff of T1 cruisers meant the portion of the corps flying those for fun made it so their members flying fleet disciplined fits didn't need to use nearly as much $ to play and brought less plex to market ?

Interceptors tend to die a lot more than T3 cruisers, and especially so in regards to t1 cruisers.

So they're falling, in other words. This isn't much of a surprise to anyone who watched EyjoG's economy presentation at fanfest.

People who listen to the good doctor are rarely surprised but often amused.

Hooray, now that it's posted, maybe everyone will pick up on "speculation is driving the recent increase".


Then the real fun starts.

e: Here's the TL;DR of the section in case you don't want to watch it for some weird reason.

* Plex behaves as an investment good with potential utility, similar to gold in the meat world.
* Subscriptions are the biggest source of PLEX consumption.
* Graph at 17:40. Sales of PLEX have been increasing throughout the lifetime of plex, yet since summer 2013 quantity traded on the market has been dropping. This led to the rapid spike we've observed.
* PLEX Pricing policy is unchanged: CCP does not maintain a target price for PLEX prices.

The important point to note is that he says PLEX sales (by CCP) have been consistently increasing (although he provided no numbers or graphs for obvious reasons.) So the real question is "Why are the PLEX bought by players resulting in fewer relative market trades?"

Assuming every PLEX bought with RL cash is sold for isk on the market at least once, some of those market buyers are not reselling PLEX immediately for a short-term profit but instead hanging on to PLEX for the long run.

Yes, but there is plenty of information (for some) to speculate on what's happening.

I think you do have a valid point, that there is limited isk for short-term PLEX speculation but that is not the whole story.

I used to work in commodities trading and once made a model of the US gasoline market. The storage of petroleum products is divided into three broad sectors: Primary (refineries, pipelines, and large tank farms), Secondary (wholesale storage, tanker trucks, and retail underground tanks) and Tertiary (end user storage.) It turns out the tertiary storage capacity dwarfs the primary and secondary storage. Think of all the gas tanks in vehicles. What this means is that if there is ever a potential disruption to gasoline supply and people rush out to fill up their tanks the distribution system will quickly break down and you will see lines at the pump like we did in the 70's.

The tl;dr is that it might not be short-term speculators that are driving up PLEX prices, but it could just be ordinary end-users buying extra PLEX just in case the price is lot higher a year from now. I think that is part of what mynnna is driving at. Speculators presumably flip their inventories while end-users buy and hold so that would account for the lower velocity.

The other factor is the Dr. E is not giving us the whole story. He says PLEX sales by CCP have been increasing since they were introduced, but we know it has not been a steady increase month to month. I don't think it is a coincidence that the drop in market volume last September and October brought about the 4 for the price of 3 sale on Amazon in late September and the "accidental sale" in late October.

Another possible explanation for low velocity those months is that people who scooped up low priced PLEX held on to it for future sale or their own use. Ordinarily you would expect people buying PLEX for cash to convert it to isk fairly promptly since there is no incentive to buy PLEX at full price just to sit on it (unless they felt the RL price was going up.) Some people might buy two or three PLEX to take advantage of the lower price and only sell them one at a time as the need arose, but I think that use case can be ignored when it comes to velocity.

Anyway, I think this just proves my point that there is more than enough information to speculate on.

Wait until you hear me describe the post-Kronos logistics chain.