Market Discussions

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Data_Centers

Could just be manipulation or lack of supply keeping the prices higher though.

I think I know why.

The main high-sec Caldari Data Center has level 1 agents, level 3 agents and level 4 agents. The level 1 ones are easily accessible, you don't need much standing to get their tag-hand-in misisons. The tags they require are Silver, Bronze and Brass. Just about anyone can hand in those tags to get a quick standing boost.

The level 3 and level 4 agents require much more standing to access (3.00+ and 5.00+, respectively) and so very few players can access them, even after having done the level 1 agents and trained the Connections skill. So the tags they require aren't in high demand. Platinum, Diamond, Crystal, Palladium, Gold and one more. Oh yes, I just remembered: Electrum.

Copper tags work differently, though. For Caldari, you hand them in at 3 different Data Centers, the main one and 2 more. And you don't need a lot of standing to do that. So they ought to be quite expensive. They aren't, or at least not as wildly expensive as I'd expect.

One reason might be that it's a hassle to have to visit 2 other Data Centers to hand in the remaining 2/3 of the copper tags, and a lot of the high price for Bronze and Brass (and Silver to a lesser extent) is that it's super convenient, just fly to one place, hand in those (and the 3 Copper) to get a standing boost.

Another reason might be that Copper tags drop more often than the other ones, at least the other low-end ones required for the level 1 agents. Combined with the fact that you only need 9 Copper tags (3x3), whereas you need 20 of each of the other ones. I don't know whether that's the case, though.

I recently did the Amarr data centers so I don't know from experience how the Caldari missions are setup, but I would assume they are very simular (in regards to standing requirements, standing increases, etc).

The amount of corp standing gained from the first few handins were high enough to not need to grind additional standing. After all hand ins I had corp standings just under 6.0, and only did did a few missions before hand to get access to the data enter mission runners.

It's not 1:1, though. If you gain 0.1 with Caldari, you might lose something like 0.05 with Gallente and 0.03 with Minmatar.

The tags are used to buy standing instantly via data center and that is why they can be expensive. You can buy 5.0 Standing from any of the 4 high sec faction for around 500 to 700m ISK you will have to also do the COSMO missions which can be done instantly by buying the mission item off contract in system (people farm the tags and COSMO items so you can do this). Using the data center of the ally faction and doing their Cosmo will knock your standing up to 7.0 on both which is handy for trading. IE (Dodixie and Rens) or (Amarr and Jita).

Anyway people would rather spend 500m to instantly get 5.0 faction standing to put up a POS and get better deals on both market and refining rather than grinding the standings via missions. I despise EVE PVE and was happy to pay the 500m.

The market of tags at the data center is worth 1 isking you will get a good turn around if you are looking far a market and happen to be near the data center or cosmo agent hand in.

There are also some low and null sec sites where rooms can be bypassed via having certain keys which will drive the price up. Some other keys just have much smaller drop rates too.

The opening question seems to be about the anomoly of blood though.
Why Blood and not the other 3? Of all the nations and tag requirements, why Blood? It's not like everyone is running for Amarr space.