Market Discussions

Hi

I read a claim, somewhere, that the 30 billion ISK stolen by the Guiding Hand Social Club, back in 2005, was the equivalent of 16.5 thousand dollars.

That sounds quite wrong. But how wrong is it actually? How much was ISK worth, in terms of dollars, back in 2005? I'm sure it was a lot more than now, but was ISK once so scarce as to make the 1.8 million ISK-per-dollar claim true?

As best I can calculate it, at places like Shattered Crystal you pay $35 and get 2xPLEX, which sells for something like 1.1 bilion ISK. Unless I've made a mistake, that comes to 31 million ISK-per-dollar.

So were ISK worth 17 times as much back in 2005 as they are now, here in early 2013?

I have massive respect for what GHSC achieved there. Isk was worth a whole lot more back then, both in game and out of game.

However, the media's real world value claims for all the famous EVE scams have always been exaggerated for the sake of a good story.

The past prices were largely based on illegal RMT exchange rates and while a little high were at the right order of magnitude.

PLEX undermined that demand and crack downs have increased their costs to produce the current PLEX-ISK conversion rates.

If you want a more accurate conversion, a month of gametime when I started (which was actually early 2006, but we're talking about "close enough" here) cost 90m isk. PLEX didn't exist of course but there were legit mechanisms to sell gametime.

So 30 billion isk would have bought ~333 months of gametime. At $15/mo, you get a value of more like $5000. The same amount of isk gets you 73 PLEX today, which is $795 worth of gametime. Note: I know PLEX cost $20 to buy, but to the typical user they're just a month of gametime, which is $15, so it seems most accurate to tally them that way for this sort of comparison. Either way, the end result is that isk is "worth" about 6.3 times what it was back then.

Although that's a questionable claim, since it's ignoring everything else you can buy with isk. I know, for example, that my very first ratting raven that I bought mid-2006 I paid about 150m for, and I'd pay about 150m for one then, though I'd have paid 80m for it a little over a year ago. The obvious conclusion to draw, then, is that PLEX are the only commodity in EVE that are subject to normal inflationary pressures - everything else brutally and efficiently obeys laws of supply and demand, with the classic ideas of inflation playing no perceptible role whatsoever.

ETC could be bought and sold legally in 2007, and in 2008 up until PLEX was introduced. It wasn't limited to RMT before PLEX.

I was actually pretty heavily involved in WoW botting and RMT scene at the time. Dealing with Chinese sites on a regular basis I saw prices on isk often. 180$/b is too high, those are 04' prices on isk, but 100-120$ range would of been common at the time.

Even once the introduction of the GTC trade prices on illegal isk was still very high simply due to the fact that GTCs fetched very little isk. For example here's my GTC resale thread from 06' listing 100day gtcs for 395m. If I remember correctly I generally sold 30days under 150. http://community.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=418479

Nonsense. If I spend isk to buy a PLEX, I'm saving myself $15. That's a very real dollar value - I can spend the $15 on lunch or something instead. Present your argument as "Any isk above and beyond what is required to pay ones subscription fee has no legitimate/EULA-approved dollar value" and it'd be more accurate.

That dev blog contained a lot of fluff.

We had hugely rampant botting and RMT skewing the economy, some items were hugely depreciated, others inflated.

Yet, if you were legit and wanted to sustain some good T2 fitted PvP you had to work harder. Harder enough that many low / null sec PvPers resorted exactly to RMT ISK to sustain their habits.

If the effort to fit a BS back then was about as much effort is fitting a few carriers now, then by that single measurement, wouldn't that mean we had deflation?

WARNING: it is Monday(or insert any other day of the week as an excuse), so I may be a bit confused.

ahhh, yes. The relative value of a BS has changed because the game has changed. As much as we want to compare a BS then to a BS now, we can't because they do not hold the same value as they once did.