Market Discussions

What exactly is causing the demand for buyers? when they're spiking so high? I understand supply/demand but why is the demand so great right now with these horrible prices?

I personally think that at over 600 million now, is far too high. I remember moaning though when they were 380 million. I understand that you cant just dump these on the market and make the prices bomb but Id for sure like some market expert to drop by this thread and enlighten myself a mere market amateur as to what's driving the sales of these things.

As far as demand goes. much of the world economy is still recovering from the big dive it took over the last few years. With many players having income reduced or expenses increased due to rising energy rates paying a subscription for a game is less of a priority for many players. If your choices are give up the game or spend isk on PLEX to keep playing what would you choose?

The fact that you are asking this question would seem to indicate you are or at least have considered paying for game time through isk for PLEX. You reasons for this are your own. Many other players are also looking in the same direction, which has lead to the increased demand.

In addition to this the rising PLEX prices have encouraged more players who do have disposable income to buy PLEX to sell in game for isk as the returns are much higher. I believe this has actually curbed the inflation of PLEX. Based strictly on demand it could be much higher.

Considering when PLEX was 380 mil trit was about 3.6. trit is now between 5.5 and 6. If you use trit as a base line for inflation. This is reasonable as it is the highest volume traded item on the market and is used in almost everything. 3.6isk/unit compared to say 5.6isk/unit now. the 380 mil for a PLEX with the same rate of inflation would be 591 mil. Considering that trit has come down. It was over 7 for quite a while which would have put PLEX at 750 mil with balanced inflation(which it never hit). I would say the current prices of PLEX are cheap compared to what it could be.

I will not be the least bit surprised if PLEX hits 1 bil by X-mas.

I was one of those incursion runners who cried :P You are totally right though it was not the pay cut that did it it was the sheer HP of the rats etc.

What CCP dont seem to grasp is that I for one did it for the fleet working together side of things to learn about how fleets work how FCs work etc and it put me in good sted down in null. [i was a empire bear]

CCP should seriously step in and curb this inflation imo. If you corrolate the amount of isk you get for selling a plex then look at what things are actually worth its crazy.

Funny you say that. I DO consider mackinaws in empire that make 14-18m/hr (more like 25+ when fleet boosted by an orca) to be a problem, a major contributing factor to why plexes are not falling in the wake of the FW nerf and even slowly continuing to rise. However, that's not necessarily a problem with high sec itself so much as it is the state CCP has left the mineral market in. If low end prices were "normal" - say, trit for 3.5, pyerite at 5, mex at 30 and isogen at 60 - then it would be more like 7-8m/hr, 11-13 with an orca booster, which is far more reasonable for an almost entirely afk activity.

Not that you'll acknowledge this, of course, as any and all nerfs to highsec are unwarranted, in your mind.

Neither did FW and yet CCP themselves said that it was at least in part to blame for pushing PLEX prices. By now there's probably at least 500 trillion (half a quadrillion!) isk floating around the economy, but a lot of it is sitting there, unused. The actual amount that moves on a daily basis is perhaps 15-20 trillion. So, anything that encourages that to increase (such as FW) is basically as good as an actual faucet.

Well to be fair...




"Has contributed to" is not the same as "is the sole cause of".

i'll see your obelisk and raise you this.

CCP did not nerf FW because it caused inflation but because it was a monkey mode to get humongous amounts of ISK.
Mining does not compare, because:

- you need lots of accounts to make for *1* FW or pre-nerf incursion runner.

- look at ice prices, they tanked to super-low. Low end minerals are holding because high ends have tanked and because we are in a high demand period of the year (which also somewhat revitalized high ends).

What needs to be nerfed is real faucets and I am not sure hi sec L4 missions is as huge of the kind of that as the past.

Drone regions were an ultra-huge minerals faucet and almost halved low end minerals value till it got converted into ISK faucet.

Now, drone regions have joined the ISK faucets bandwagon, this will require an across the board nerf of a massive magnitude, which will have negative secondary consequences on many other mini-games.

Incorrect PLEX price spiked to about 650 million until the surprise speed up of the Incursion nerf now we're at a shade under 600 million ISK. Price of PLEX after the Escalation nerf did not fall as drastically ( as a matter of fact PLEX had been falling in the weeks right before Escalation's nerf of Incursions )
Right now though PLEX seems to have stabilized at ~600 million


It'd be tuff to blame Incursions. I'm willing to bet per month ISK faucet fell 70-85%.

I am curious how much more profitable mining is for miners... I doubt anything in the range of FW farmers before: How many hours does it take a Veldspar miner to make a PLEX @ 600 million ISK? It took FW farmers what 3 hours?

Yes of course. The current and wildly outlandish isk/hr you can get in highsec is, because it's currently how it is, how it always should be, and so we should seek to keep it in place even while reducing mineral prices.

Yeah, no. If CCP screws up and makes something ridiculously out of line, returning it to the normal it "should" be at is not a nerf, no matter how much players like to label it as such. This is why the faction warfare "nerfs" weren't really nerfs. That's what CCP did with mineral prices - they attempted to fix high ends (by removing the drone alloys) and screwed up (by not realizing that the drone regions produced even more low ends than high ends). That's why highsec mining is currently as stupidly lucrative as it is, and attempts to fix that should not leave it as lucrative as it is.


I sure hope that you mean the faucet only from incursions and not the total faucet here. Because if you mean the total faucet, then uh...lets just say you're wrong. Very, very wrong.