Market Discussions

Actually the Goons exploight revolved more around manipulating the price of implants that improve defender missles %'s I recall although they did start with minerals before they stumbled onto that.

Only people who are willing to exchange RL $$ for in game isk buy plex.

As the price of plex goes up they will not need as many to obtain the isk needed for their plans.

I am not convinced that the higher isk price pushes more people into the column of people who are willing to make this trade.

The longer term trend from OP shows that less isk are being traded in Jita then from a year ago.

It doesn't need to be anywhere near the profit of mission running.

AFK ice mining people can click button every half hour, or even twice a day before work and bed and make enough ISK per month to play for free.

AFK Mining is more profitable that mission running assuming you have a reasonably recent computer and are playing a certain number of hours a month.

Lets assume you're willing to pay for 2 accounts (to give mission running a fighting chance in the ISK/month game)

You can usefully use maybe 2 characters running missions. Each earns 60m/hr (overestimation).
You can usefully use as many characters as your computer can handle mining, either through ISBoxer or through clicking through windows every 45m mining Ice in Mackinaws. Each earns 10m/hr (underestimation) Lets assume your computer can handle 20 toons (not unreasonable given that there's a guy running 70+ mining accounts).

Let X be the number of hours you play per month.
Mission running earns 120x mISK, Mining earns 200x-4800 mISK.
After 12 hours of playtime, Mission running is up 1440mISK, while mining has just broken even.
After 60 hours of playtime, Mission running is up 7200mISK, while mining has just caught up with its own 7200mISK.
After 60 hours a month, mining pulls away by 80m ISK per hour.


The relative pay of mining vs mission running indicates to me that the market setters of ore prices are running multi-box farms. If they weren't, I would expect to see people desert mining for mission running causing mining income to rise until mining and mission running reached some income equilibrium.

Good grief. If someone's paying for their accounts with ISK, it's ISK/hr per account that matters. Throwing 20 characters into a mining fleet means you have 20 accounts to pay.



Only because you have ignored the cost of maintaining those accounts.

I have no doubt that there are people running FW plexes in crappy ships with day old pilots to make a billion ISK a week, buying up huge volumes of PLEX. Since CCP has expressed no interest in curbing this rampant exploitation, the obvious take-home statement is that CCP is actively encouraging the activity. Thus everyone who is having financial woes should go and run FW plexes with throwaway alts, abuse the system to the absolute maximum, and contribute to the destruction of the FW community.

This is what CCP is implicitly stating by not addressing the issue of FW plexes being far too high a reward for the risk involved. Why are you flying a titan in a structure bashing fight in nullsec when you could be playing FW and enough ISK to play for free for the next ten years?

Did I?


Why else would the mining income curve start so far in the red?

(Now that I look again, I screwed up the number for PLEX[should be -7200 moving the 60hr payoff to ~72hrs] but it is there).

My guess is when PLEX hits around 900m sooo after approximately 2-4 more FW tier 5's

I assumed that you were willing to pay for 2 accounts no matter what your profession is. I also assumed that dualboxing missions would net you 60m per character working together (so 120m/hr total) with a limit of 2 (because realistically, you can't multibox missions the way you can mining). The first was to give mission running an equation without a constant, the second to make sure that I couldn't be attacked for underestimating mission income (similarly, my assumption that each mining character brings in only 10m ISK/hr* when Ore mining will get you 15).

If you want to assume you PLEX everything, the equation would be, allowing you to plug in whatever numbers you want,

[Missioners][Mission Income]x-[Missioners][Plex]=[Miners][Mining Income]x-[Miners][Plex]
which becomes
X=([Miners]-[Missioners])[PLEX]/(([Miners]/[Missioners])([Mining Income]-[Mission Income]))

Where X is the break-even point between Mining vs Mission running.

... I hope....

Of course, as Mining income falls, (assuming they don't run out of computing power) the miner can simply add more miners to maintain or increase their total monthly income until a PLEX exceeds the total monthly income of a single miner.

*Though it seems that Ice ISK/hr has tanked to ~6m ISK/hr unless I'm looking at something wrong, so the truly infinitely extensible mining requires a much larger fleet to produce an acceptable monthly income.

You're right, but depending on what ice they mine it could take up to 80 or so hours of AFK ice mining to make that PLEX, and while that character is mining that much they're pretty much useless for anything else.

Frankly mining ice right now is a recipe for insanity, especially high-sec ice, unless you get creative in how you do it. I've gone from being able to PLEX up 6 accounts in a 2.8-5.6 day period to needing a minimum of one week if not two to do it, and the low end numbers are if I go ice mining 20 hours in a day. Going from 56 actual hours of work to 146 to achieve the same thing isn't all that pleasant, and that's not even factoring in just how many "man hours" it really is.



Maybe for people just starting out on it. Depending on the configuration of ships I can easily handle 4 ships, though I generally tend to leave it as three runners and one salvager.



Your assumptions here seem a bit flawed based on my experiences. Dealing strictly with the "maximum number of clients in the field" end of things we're presuming high-sec ice mining (belt rats aren't dangerous, mining ore has micro-management limits) and the maximum reasonable hourly profit for high-sec ice is probably closer to 7.5m while more "profitable" builds just make your ship gank bait. Even at 7.5m/hour I'm not comfortable with them being gank-resistant enough to not have to factor in lost mackinaws to the total profit scenariio. That said to achieve that you have to factor in that you've got (total accounts - 1) mining at most because at least one is in an orca to provide mining bonuses and hauling.

On top of that running 20 characters on one PC is fairly unreasonable for most people, even people who built multi-boxing machines. I've got a Phenom II x6 1090t and 8gb of RAM and 10 clients runs my CPU at 60-70% output and sucks up 5,000-5,800mb RAM. I would imagine that my machine's far more multi-boxing friendly than the "average" EVE player's PC and it can't handle 20 accounts. On the flip side I would expect most EVE players' machines to handle 2 accounts for running missions.

If we're going to presume a PC capable of handling 20 accounts mining ice, however, then it's also reasonable to assume that it can handle at least 3 accounts running missions.



I don't see the numbers working out that way. I won't argue with the 120m/hour for missions as 3 accounts at 40m/hour/account is a much more reasonable set of variables in my experience, and it still adds up to 120m. I'm also not sure where you're pulling 4800m isk from as 20 PLEXes would run you closer to 11,600m/month than 4,800m/month. That said when you factor in a more realistic 7.5m/hour profit for mining high-sec ice (and do we really want to compare null-sec ice to high-sec missions?), and 580m/account lost for PLEXes, the numbers look more like this:

Hour 0 : Mission runners = -1,160m, ice miners = -11,600m
Hour 10 : Mission runners = 40m, ice miners = -10,175m
Hour 100 : Mission runners = 10,840m, ice miners = 2,650m
Hour 250 : Mission runners = 28,840m, ice miners = 24,025m

Given 60m/hour/account doing missions and 7.5m/hour/(mining)account doing ice you'd need 464 hours for mining to break even with missions. At that point, however, you're doing 15.46~ hours/day so it's probably a moot point.

If you increase the number of ships running missions to 3 and drop the number of ships mining ice to 10, more reasonable account numbers for the "average" multi-boxer I would imagine (average taking into account people who only run 2-3 accounts tops even when mining), then mining ice will never never catch up even in unrealistic examples. The gap starts at 4b (PLEX expenditure differences) and goes up to 30.3b by 500 hours even if the triple-boxing mission runner is only pulling 40m/account/hour, the same value as your dual-box example.

All of which isn't factoring in just how much simplicity is worth. Trying to manage 20 accounts, or 70 accounts, would be a potential nightmare for most people even with really good software support.

PLEX Prices out of control...

Really?

Lots of people claiming inflation and others claiming it has nothing to do with inflation.

lets look at long term inflation in EVE over say the last two years.

It could be argued that game updates and changes have had a greater impact than isk faucets, but inflation is inflation, no matter what form it takes.

to get a basic view of how much inflation the EVE economy has actually experienced in the last two years we need to look at a high volume market item that has consistent demand no matter what happens in game. What market item do you think moves in the highest volume, with the most consistent demand in EVE? Thats right, the core mineral tritanium.

About two years ago tritanium was stable at about 3.3 isk/unit. It is currently stable at about 6 isk/unit(a little higher in Jita a little lower everywhere else.) That is about an 80% increase.

Two years ago PLEX was selling for about 350 mil it now sells for about 500mil. The spikes up toward 600 mil I attribute to market manipulations, It always seems to settle back down to 500 mil before the next manipulation attempt. If you are patent you should be able to buy a PLEX for about 500 mil just as you could buy one for 350 mil two years ago. That is only about a 40% increase.

looking at just about any high volume or high valued market item you will find the prices 75-120% higher than they where two years ago. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part everything in EVE is near double give or take a bit from what it was two years ago.

Some items such as freighter have increased even more. 1.6 bil compared to 600 mil two years ago 160% increase.

It seems to me PLEX is actually on the low end of increase compared to the inflation we have seen in the overall market in EVE long term over the last two years. EVE if you considered the base price of PLEX at 600 mil currently. That is still only about 70% increase, which is still small compared to everything else.

Two years ago when I mined ICE I was lucky to get 80k per block. Now you are lucky to find high sec ice for less than 140k per block. a 75% increase. And that is after prices dropped from the crazy high prices they hit during the interdiction's.

Although income from missions and plexing has not increased much as bounties and mission rewards are the same, other professions whose income is dependent on market price have also nearly doubled. Two years ago a solo miner was hard pressed to make more than 10mil isk/hr now they can easily make 16-20 mil an hour, a 60-100% increase. right in line with inflation.

Based on what the EVE market as a whole has done over the last two years I would say an out of control PLEX price would have to be more like a 200% increase not the 40% we have seen, compared to the 75-120% increase we have seen in the general market. A 200% increase would put PLEX at just over 1 billion isk.

PLEX at around 500 mil is right where they should be if not a little low in relation to the inflation the EVE market as a whole has seen in the last two years.

PLEx being 1 bil by X-mas, although I would hate to see it that high, is not unreasonable. Stock up now while it is cheap.

I really wonder where things will settle when the market levels off.