EVE General Discussion

I have defended market based pricing on a number of items including PLEX. Most of the "PLEX prices are too high" complaints are coming from people who feel they should be allowed to play the game at a discount.

The bottom line is that the uses for PLEX have been increasing since their introduction. As a result of this increased demand at all price levels. Demand curves represent the locus of points for a given set of parameters and a variable price. That is as price decreases the quantity demanded goes up. Either people want to buy more than before, new people start buying PLEX or more likel, both. This is not shocking nor controversial to anyone with a rudimentary familiarity to neoclassical economics.

Q = D(p;a,b,c).

That is the quantity demanded is a function of the price, p, given parameters a, b and c. A could be something like income and b could a taste parameter, and c, a parameter related to compliments. In the case of PLEX, initially it started out with:

Q = D(p).

Then CCP introduced another use for PLEX, e.g. character transfers, so now we have

D(p;a) > D(p) for all p. That is the demand curve shifts outwards or to the right if you are going to graph it. Then they introduce additional character training on the same account or,

D(p;a,b) > D(p;a) > D(p), for all p.

Then they replace Aurum with PLEX and now we have,

D(p;a,b,c) > D(p;a,b) > D(p;a) > D(p), for all p.

Given a supply curve, then it is going to be the case the price that clears the market has to increase with each of these changes. No, these changes will not effect the supply curve in the same way. Yes, the increased price will mean a higher level of PLEX are being supplied but that is a movement along a given supply curve. That is,

S(p;a,b,c) = S(p;a,b) = S(p;a) S D(p), for all p.

In other words, the supply curve in all four instances represents the same locus of points.

The equilibrium price such that S(p;a,b,c) = D(p;a,b,c) will be higher than the equilibrium price such that S(p;a,b) = D(p;a,b).

All of this is covered in an introductory economics class.

We do not need to invoke a conspiracy theory to explain the rise in PLEX prices when we have explanations that work without this unverifiable hypothesis. You know things like Ockham's razor, the principle of parsimony and all that other Bravo Sierra.

And artificially setting PLEX prices below the market clearing price will result in the following:

S(p;a,b,c) < D(p;a,b,c).

This is called excess demand. What this means is pretty straight forward: demand is higher than the supply. That is, some people who want PLEX won't have any to buy. They'll show up here on the forums and whine. "I want a PLEX but I can't buy one." The implication is that they want to force some other player to spend RL money and sell them that PLEX at a discounted price.

Oh, and for you "Grrr Goons" types, I am a PLEX buyer not a seller. I would be strictly better off with lower prices.

/shrug

I don't care where you live. Learn to adult.

No, I'm saying that based on the $15 and the hourly rate you get/got paid at that is the maximum number of hours a person indifferent between paying RL money and using PLEX should be willing to rat. You are correct that somebody in a country like the U.S. and Western Europe, Australia, Japan, etc. can earn the same amount of money in a fraction of the time. My point is that if some people are going to look to PLEX to play the game and PLEX is becoming more and more expensive, well that is not good for those people. However, your opportunity cost is also quite low: $0.48/hour.

The price of PLEX has little to nothing to do with speculators. Speculators take advantage discrepancies in information--i.e. if they know something (or think they do) about a given good then they can either buy or (short) sell the good. When the information becomes more widely known the speculator (hopefully) makes money. Speculators and manipulating a market are in fact quite different. And manipulating the PLEX market is not as easy as some here make it out and would entail some risk on the part of the manipulator.

For example, churning where a manipulator puts up lots of buy and sell orders at around the same price to try and create the impression of more activity in the market to try and drive up the price. To do this one would have to put some ISK at risk and it may not work. Pump and dump is one I suspect those people posting, "PLEX will go to X millions in 2 months!" The idea is: buy your PLEX now before the price goes up. That surge in buying could cause the price to go up at which point the person making the post dumps his own stock of PLEX. Related to churning is wash trading...a manipulator buys and sells PLEX over and over to create the impression of more activity in the hopes of driving up prices. One could try this strategy of releasing a rumor on say Reddit or other message boards about how CCP is going to have a big sale during a coming weekend. Some PLEX buyers might hold off on buying PLEX, and this could cause the price to drop as demand flags as a result. Our intrepid rumor monger steps in and buys up PLEX, and when the weekend hits and there is no sale and the price rebounds, he dumps his stock of PLEX.

But note, these are all short term manipulations. To truly corner the market, the long term plan, you'd have to have pretty deep pockets and it would likely be self defeating. Suppose you have deeeeeep pockets. So you decide to corner the PLEX market--i.e. you want to be the one to set the market price for PLEX. So you go out and start buying. But what happens as you start buying up the PLEX? The price goes up. As the price goes up, it becomes more lucrative to buy a PLEX for RL money and sell it in-game. In essence you don't need deep pockets you need infinitely deep pockets. Since nobody has infinitely deep pockets this is not a winning strategy. And after a certain point you are going to have alot of ISK tied up in PLEX...and what happens when you try to unwind that position and sell those PLEX?

You could be like DeBeers as was noted back up stream and sell only a small amount at a time. But that means you'll almost surely be sitting on a pile of PLEX you are never ever going to sell. And recall DeBeers controlled almost all aspects of the supply side of the diamond market. Nobody can completely control the supply side for PLEX. Nobody. Nobody can stop me from buying PLEX from CCP and then selling it in game.

All these stories about people manipulating the price of PLEX are simply hard to believe. Maybe it is happening, but only for short periods of time. The long run rise in PLEX price is almost surely the result of CCP expanding the role of PLEX in the game.

Edit: Another way to put it: at $0.48/hour to earn $15 you'd have to work for 31 hours and 15 minutes. So, that is where the "rat for 31.25 hours" comes from. I'm not saying you should, just noting that based on the pay and price that is how the numbers work out.

Really? That's disappointing, I thought it was a player-driven free-market economy. =(

They did have economist on staff, CCP EyjoG (aka, Dr. Eyjolfur Eyjo Gudmundsson). They have an analytics department and they publish the monthly economic reports. How much CCP intervenes in markets is not really known. There was one known intervention years ago, and players were informed at FanFest well after the intervention.

However, here is something that Dr. Eyjo said in an interveiw,

“So when players are able to make a dent in the market by moving prices in a direction of their liking, to me that is a part of PvP,” says Dr Eyjo. “It is player interaction and they are putting a lot of effort into making it happen. It creates excitement and so on within the game, so everything that has to do with player trading – as long as they are using the tools in the way that they are supposed to be used in the game, then I see nothing against players trying to do it. And I challenge them to do it, simply because the size of the EVE eoncomy has become so big now that anyone trying to make a dent in the market overall will have to put a lot of effort into it.”--emphasis added

In other words, if somebody is going to manipulate a market in EVE then they will have to work at it and almost surely put alot of ISK and/or in game resources at risk.

Take for example this constant notion that there is a Cabal™ of players manipulating PLEX prices. Let's suppose that is true.

Suppose the current market clearing price, absent this Cabal™ would be half the current PLEX price. The current price for PLEX in the Forge is 3,066,647.90 ISK and the price should be 1,533,323.95 ISK. So the question is...why aren't people buying PLEX for RL money and cashing in on these fabulously high prices? There is a huge premium to be had in doing so.

See, for this scheme to work the Cabal™ has to be influencing the price by buying up PLEX and driving the price up, right? Well this creates a significant premium for people who buy PLEX for RL money and sell them for ISK. It is essentially like a sale for PLEX.

A sale you get 10% or 15% or 20% more PLEX for your RL dollars. Now thanks to the Cabal™ in our thought experiment here you get 100% more PLEX!

That is, suppose without the Cabal™ you could buy 100 PLEX and sell them and get 153,332,395 ISK. But now with the Cabal™ you only have to buy 50 PLEX to get the exact same amount of ISK. Or if you buy 100 the amount of ISK you get is exactly the same as if you had bout 200 PLEX without the Cabal™!

So are people not out buying PLEX and driving the price back down due to the artificial scarcity? No. Why?

Before you answer with something like, "Well...maybe people don't have that kind of RL money!" Consider that perhaps there is no Cabal™, the price is not artificially above it's market clearing price....in which case, there is no benefit to buying PLEX for RL money and selling them.....

Speculators can't stop new plex being bought with real cash and put on the market. The price ultimately reflects 100% of what people are willing to grind to get one - ie you are complaining about the class of players you belong too, nothing more, nothing less. Really funny to see someone whining about themselves.

I'd rather grind progress on my character and spend 10 minutes working for the sub, and if more people chose that, then the price would fall, and speculators would lose their shirts. ie its your behavior, not CCPs that speculators profit from.



Ghost training as it stood was an efficiency bug that reduced the amount of a plex consumed to produce a skill point.

Removing ghost training may of course remove one limit on plex isk price growth (since subs are now required), but how it actually plays out also depends on how people grind up the isk to buy injectors.



I spend about 10 minutes a month working to pay for an eve sub, and I spend about 1 hour a month paying to maintain my bicycle, which takes twice as long to get anywhere as a car (for me a total of about 1 hour extra a week). I can't possibly pay for a car with the 1 hour a week of work, not having one costs me, and honestly I don't want to play eve for 15 hours a month to stand still when I could work for 10 minutes and play eve for 15 hours for fun. I'm betting your life is full of life calculations that are pretty inefficient, which is you have 10-15 hours to grind a sub, but not 10 minutes to an hour to work for one.



They have made many missteps with EVE, but you can't look up how to design eve on stack overflow, and there are many other mistakes they don't make that well meaning developers could make, ie we only get to sample and give feedback on one of a billion possible paths. IMO focus on important things, not grizzling about people like yourself bidding up plex "too high".

Not everybody makes 90 bucks per hour mate. And usually you cannot say Ok i just work like 2 paid extra hours per month to pay my sub. You get your monthly paycheck and ifs a small one even 15$ subfee plays a role at the end of the month.

(I am aware that one could better spend the 15h grinding per month to qualify for a better paid job. that would also be my opinion. on the other side things are not always that simple)

I find plex to expensive to buy from CCP so that I can pay for you to play for free.
so in my opinion CCP must make plex cheaper to buy from them or increase of Isk for plex
2 billion for 500 seems me a fair amount

Its an alpha. Its months behind from their first timetable for 3.0 alpha and progression is going to be buggy and then undoubtedly wiped. Its going to be followed by betas which will be months behind whatever timetables they proffer at 3.0 time, buggy and then wiped.

I have thus made made the same decision I made in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, which is wait until they have a game and buy it then.

Okay, here is what I read in this comment....

The game is getting more expensive for you to play....so you want a discount? Me to pay your sub? Coralas to pay your sub? Both of us to fund your game somehow? What?