Market Discussions

This.
although personally my spare char slots are getting close to having their skills as i want them and i will then stop spending plex on dual account training. These extra account slot chars will have skillsets that will be useful for as long as i play the game even after i stop spending isk on them and so are well worth the price paid now. i imagine i am far from unique in this and in 2-3 months people like me will have stopped doing this entirely.

Incursions are just the most recent method creating bounce in players steps by introducing lucrative new things to do.

PLEX prices almost certainly will double in isk value every 3 to 4 years


detailed explanation of my reasoning for any that care below:

I might use the word "credit" to counter your "blame" however a sentence saying the same with "explain" in it in a neutral way is probably the most fair.

Two issues raised by the poster:

1) Why now ?

2) (perhaps implied) Why are plex prices going up more generally.


A1) the "now" as in September is more a matter of speculation. It did follow the same trend last year. A 5 year chart would be helpful to see if there are regular spikes seasonally. I believe there are.

A1a) Explanations about school are plausible although if you asked me to speculate without seeing the chart I'd have guessed that there would be less time to earn ISK through play during schoool. (perhaps though, play increases as there is more work to procrastinate which would certainly be an interesting psychology project to explore)

A1b) Perhaps there are waves of people returning to the game in summer (especially with an expansion this year realeased at the beggining of the summer. I would speculate there is a lag between people returning and people realizing full earning potential which allows more to plex accounts. I wouldn't be surprised that people are inclined to activate/reactivate more alt accounts the longer they play. As the school year wears on, perhaps they let those plexed accounts lapse or just pay a month or two when they're busy and come Winter break, start earning isk again causing another spike as they opt for that method

The two ideas run counter to each other but rely on the same underlying concept -- more play creates more demand .

Support for the later:
More players should also create more need for isk but the Volume of plex doesn't vary substantially. This sort of supports my theory in A1b -- with more active play there should be more people who never like PVE or farming using real $/E to purchase isk via plex as they lose more ships because of more play...yet the steady volume suggests they're offset by some players on the cusp of that group more able to earn isk for ship losses as they get back int the groove of the game after a month or two.

2) Prices of plex fundamentally go up as the center of the bell curve of players find ways to earn more isk per hour. (I'm tempted to say "average" but really the incremental buyer is probably better defined as "average isk/hour of players with over 4 months in game and throwing out the isk/hour of the top 5% and bottom 40% - top 5% might be hyper multi boxes and bottom 40% might not partake at all in PVE based isk earning which is my focus)

Incursions have a very high ISK per hour relative to past PVE for the subset of players I define above. To keep some excitement game developers really need to have some noticable increase in earnings each year.

Even though I would credit the average EVE player as being smart enough to know that if everyone is earning more they're not exactly "ahead" they're here to have fun. A game world requires some "suspension of reality" and people go with that to enjoy it just like not expecting Action movies to be realistic (how come the Hero manages to never get hit in that rain of bullets yet the villains do).

It is fun for people to feel like they're able to earn more isk per hour each year. I'd say a 15% to 20% is annually is the minimum rate needed for players to notice and appreciated... how they can rake in more per hour than they did before.

Plex prices have generally gone up at that rate... maybe closer to 15% . At 15% increase compounded, and amount would double at the end of 4 years, at 20% compounded an amount would double at the end of 3 years.

Knowing that game players want to feel "progress" even as they know they are "suspending reality" in not getting ahead relative to other players...

.... we should expect the isk per hour of the center of the bell curve to increase 15 to 20%....

... which should almost certainly lead to a plex increase roughly in correlation to that isk/hour rate,

... which should mean that PLEX prices almost certainly will double in isk value every 3 to 4 years

Incursions are just the most recent method creating bounce in players steps by introducing lucrative new things to do.

I think you're quite mistaken. CCP has no vested interest in how high minerals go. It doesn't really affect them. Crashing the plex market means the people who give them real cash no longer do. Your minerals, their cashflow. Yeah....

Mining is easy to do. It will always have a surplus of people botting it to pay for whatever portion of their plex they can. Mineral demand and supply will never affect the supply and demand of plex in the context you imply...

Of course CCP cares if Battleships start to cost 500m, because players WILL quit over that.

Nah they don't. And i'd say your implication is hyperbole and completely unfounded. People quit for a myriad of reasons but I've yet to see anyone make a real verifiable claim and follow through of quitting over ship prices.

I'm not sure I understand your clarification. The above points appear to be contradictory.

We do not know how many plex are currently locked. We do not know what CCP's target plex price band is but I am willing to bet it is somewhere between 'too expensive for most people' and 'not so expensive that buying plex with RL money will hugely inflate the markets'.

A market where plex is worth 1T in today's value would be, um, interesting.

That makes sense.

But why couldn't CCP seed more plex? Total plex numbers are currently decreasing due to destruction in ship ganks (I assume plex are actually destroyed if they don't drop) so eventually there will be no plex left. This is clearly reductio ad absurdum but you get the point.

Because you can not seed an item you intend to sell for real life currency. You're basically asking why they won't give away free subscription time. Seeding is just a mechanism for that process. How many people do you think are going to pay a sub or buy subs to resale if a portion of players are getting an absolutely free subscription?

Ah, OK. So a plex spawns in your inventory when you buy a time code? And then the way to increase supply and decrease plex prices is to have a sale.

Sounds about right. I remember converting a bunch of ISK into a pile of PLEX around this time last year as prices started getting closer to the 600M mark following the same speculation some here have (there was at least one thread on GD and market) about the prices going up. I believe the prices dropped to about 500m around January and I ended up down in net ISK value. It isn't that big of a deal though since I always consider PLEX value more static to the $ compared to ISK which tends to fluctuate over the years. For now though I will probably wait until January or so before converting large sums of ISK for PLEX.