Jita Park Speakers Corner

I suspect people are interested in the price of PLEX a little

Some thoughts of my own on PLEX pricing. Pass them on as you will.

One possible factor in PLEX inflation is subscriber growth and account growth - not the same thing! Subscriber growth is an increase in unique players. Each new player will have some chance of being a PLEX buyer (buying PLEX with real money to sell for isk, in other words) and a PLEX user. So long as the number of PLEX bought by buyers matches or exceeds those used by the users, this shouldn't overly contribute to inflation in prices. Account growth, on the other hand, is an increase in the average number of accounts per player, which could drive PLEX usage to exceed PLEX supply. This sort of inflation is okay, though.

Economically, I think PLEX prices are primarily driven by two factors: The liquidity of the economy, and player incomes. But, they affect them in different ways. I'll explain.

Liquidity in the economy of course refers to the amount of isk floating around. Based on old tweets from CCP Diagoras, this is probably up over 500T by now. But other old tweets tell us that it mostly sits idle. That idle isk functions as a buffer for those wealthier players - they're less likely to care about the exact price of PLEX. The actual movement of isk is low - less than 5% (perhaps 15T on a good day through the market, 1.5-2T via contracts, a few hundred billion through direct trade). But, if you can come up with a reason to raise that movement, to get that idle isk into the hands of relatively poorer players, you see an effect on plex prices.

Thus, income matters. Income is what I feel causes the increase in PLEX prices, and with this in mind it can be evaluated relative to a baseline in a few different ways.

1. Accessibility. If more players are able to do an activity, then more idle isk moves into their hands. Thus, an income available in highsec has the most potential to affect prices - anyone can do it, and in relative safety to boot.
2. Magnitude. The more isk an activity pays, the more likely it is to drive an increase in prices, because it will increase the rate of movement of otherwise idle isk.
3. Involvement required, otherwise expressed as the isk per effort ratio. The higher the isk per effort ratio, the better. This can obviously vary in many ways.
4. Finally, ability to multibox, or horizontal scaling. One account yields a 100% return. The easier it is to multibox, the better, and the closer to an additional 100% yield each account can generate, the better.

I consider highsec L4 missions to be the baseline. Let's look at the criteria. They're infinitely accessible; being in highsec, skills and standings are the only barrier. Their magnitude is 15-50m per hour, depending on a variety of factors. They require a fairly high amount of attention to run optimally...you can (or could, not anymore once retribution comes out) practically AFK them in a well tanked Dominix, but your income drops as a result.

What about some other income sources?

Faction Warfare
Worst offender in the history of the game. Despite being in lowsec, it was highly accessible thanks to the low barrier to entry. Plexes could be farmed in frigates, while L4 missions were farmable by bombers, virtually eliminating the risk. The magnitude was of course through the roof. Effort required didn't even get up to real L4 missions - FW missions require you to kill far, far less. And it could be multiboxed pretty well. Orbiting plexes was low involvement meaning you could do it with several at once if you wished, while the way missions function meant much of the time was spent in travel, so if you added more alts you could take more missions at once and get more overlap in systems.

Incursions
Everyone likes to cite this because of the "faucet", but FW was a sink and it mattered. But no. Highsec incursions are just as accessible as L4 missions and indeed significantly overlapped in skillsets and ship requirements. They exceeded L4 missions by a considerable amount, without requiring much more involvement (especially once players got them down to a science), and they could scale horizontally quite well. Multiboxing three or four battleships for an incursion was no big deal.

Mining
Today's highsec mining dynamics are a perfect example of how big a role effort plays. The new mackinaw allows a miner to be extremely low effort, requiring attention only a few times an hour. Meanwhile, sky-high mineral prices mean that a single maxed out Mackinaw yields the same income as a low end mission runner. It also scales horizontally very well - if you add a second account in an Orca you only get a 50% boost out of it, but two or more Mackinaws plus an Orca will mine better than the same number of pilots in Macks. All you're bounded by is how fast you pop rocks, requiring you to retarget or move.



Based on this theory, there's no "quick fix". If CCP wants to regulate plex prices, they first need to get a ton of isk out of the economy by introducing more sinks to sop it up over the course of several months. At least for the time being, that means sinks would need to exceed faucets considerably, although once they've pared the excess down, a smaller net faucet is probably preferable. It has been speculated, incidentally, that DUST is meant to function as this sort of sink, but if that's the case it has to be a lot more meaningful than an optional system in FW space. On the income side, new sources of income need to be carefully evaluated to make sure they're appropriate given their accessibility, risk, effort required, and overall magnitude of income.

Just my theory, of course.

vvv Yeah, that's the short version.

“Minimum wage?”

The only thing that matters is determining what price point PLEX users can bear, and attempting to balance the economy towards that. Perhaps you might call that price point divided by the average number of hours of ISK grinding per month “minimum wage” but what do you do when you find out that the ISK farming PLEX users are playing more hours a month to get the ISK to pay for the PLEX? Do you adjust the “minimum wage” down?

What do you do when it turns out that PLEX prices are influenced mainly by institutional buyers who routinely buy and sells dozens of PLEX per day? Would be allow CCP to place a limit on the number of PLEX orders per account?

I agree with corestwo that income sources and drains are just as important to consider as ISK faucets and sinks. Just because FW complex spinning didn't generate ISK in bounties doesn't make it okay. Sure, it sunk a lot of ISK out of the economy, but so would consumable vanity items such as vinyl cat suits and fancy ship skins.

I am not disagreeing with corestwo at all. We are in complete agreement. I am saying that in order to balance EVE income streams (null,high,wh) you must have the basis for what you consider balanced vs what you want plex pricing to be.

PLEX pricing in EVE has always been hugely impacted (read: won't fall below) by the "easist" way to farm mass accounts. R&D cores, or PI, and now AFK mining in macks. PLEX is just a ratio of EFFORT:ISK. So, what is the best EFFORT:RATIO in EVE going to be? Where is it going to be, and how will that discourage mass farming, or afk-wealth generation. These are all things that need to be talked about in any discussion about the economy as a whole.

Should players be able to afk 40 hours a month and make what a player at the keyboard makes in 15? What should that ratio look like. This is what I am talking about.

I miss Diagoras a lot more, his information was a hell of a lot more relevant.

How much effect do tech 2 logistic ships have on the demand and price of platinum technite and/or technetium?

With the switch to tech 1 logistic ships, will technetium/platinum technite be oversupplied on the market?

What effects have the new "stuff" for PLEX had on the price of it?

Any new "stuff" for PLEX programs planned for the future?

please listen to the goonswarm trillionaires; they give a detailed and accurate picture of the problem (if you see it as a problem that is).

my humble proposition on getting ISK out of the economy is as blunt and simple as a doorknob: make people pay for NPC services. i'm not talking production slots, i'm talking jumps, docking, item and ship hangar space etc., pretty much anything the silly NPCs are providing for free out of the love goodness in their hearts.
to keep young players unscathed, you can stagger the fees by expected player wealth; moving around in a frigate or shuttle may cost you only 100ISK per jump/dock, but when you're hauling stuff in your jump freighter, you probably have the money to pay 100k or maybe more.

Do us a favor and remove "Eve Economy" from the thread title and session name. CCP has severed all but one economic discussions with us and they don't show any sign of picking it up again.

lol virtual Occupy protesters... Damn that capitalism and free market pricing. I'll bite just for fun. To ease PLEX prices why not just enforce your damn EULA and start perma-banning the people RMT'ing moon minerals, and botters who turn around buying 80 PLEXs a shot to fuel macro miners and botters. Oh wait... we saw what happened last time CCP did that, the bean counters **** bricks and sub numbers took a dive. Now it's a three strikes policy ensuring they can get a good return on those bots before they vanish. Just in time for the next bot to macro out an ROI.

The purpose is not to eliminate that gap and if that does happen as a result, I'm sure that the T2 ships will be rebalanced to restore the gap.



If you think that the concept of a "minimum wage" as we describe it is some sort of rage against the machine down with the system type of thing, then I don't know what to say other than that you obviously have no clue the point being made.