Market Discussions

I never have been much for video games, and count count the number of games i played for more than a month on one hand, but Eve Online is the one exception. I love this game, i have been playing on and off for almost 5 years, it surprises me that any game can hold my attention for so long. The aspect of the game that keeps me logging in more than any other is the market. like i said, i play very few games, so i have very little knowledge about others, but is it safe to say that the Eve market is the most dynamic? is there no other in game market that compare?


I just wanted to make this post because i want to know more about it. what little known, or surprising facts do you guys know about the eve economy?

The one thing that comes to my mind is the fact that CCP hired a team of economists to monitor it.

please leave your 2 cents

EvE has a really nice implementation of a demand => supply chain, it marries very well with the sandbox model.

Having been given such an open sandbox, we are basically free to be "real", therefore you see a quasi-realistic market, including real demand vs supply, artificial demand vs supply, small and big market players.

The more you do not play EvE, the more you like it (seeing the other games being so much worse).

I would say EVE economy is what it is mostly by happy accident - some devs at the dawn of time of EVE accidentally just duplicated enough aspects of real markets into the economy of EVE so it become a beast that is far more than the sum of its parts. Yeah, they also did some flat out ****** things but most of those are already taken care of (NPC supplied goods on the market re-processable to raw materials setting a floor price of materials would be the most obvious one. Massive artificial production bottleneck with T2 BPOs would be the other one and once that got sorted, imbalances in moon goo usage - which is still there, I guess, related to technetium)

Considering how many problems CCP had with the Jita node (obvious predictable result of the market system - massive amount of different goods to be traded ensures trade gets concentrated on hubs), I'm fairly certain they had no idea what they were doing. Sometimes you get lucky breaks...

Still, it is pretty much the only economy/crafting system where the players do not simply go with full vertical stack of "dig stuff up -> sell advanced end product on the market". Okay, Tech 1 building is bit like that but even there the volumes of minerals needed for any large scale manufacturing are simply infeasible to mine alone and most T1 products are actually just intermediate materials for T2 production. Once you go Tech 2, Tech 3 or PI-derived building (POS modules etc), things get considerably more complicated and even with multiple accounts and alts, most do not even dream of doing a full stack from mining a moon/planet up to finished product. Plus it simply doesn't make sense if you actually want to optimize your ISK making.

This ensures constant healthy commerce in intermediate products - some specialize in making them, some specialize in building out of them. And since the end products are consumed (in FIRE) at a brisk pace and since the manufacturing capacity of a single account is fairly limited, there is room for a large number of players in the market.

Add in decisively non-instant travel and a massive universe and it becomes possible to also profit from simple trading and hauling.

All that together works fairly well. A happy accident.

Probably just means he can get his coffee without leaving his Desk

The Eve economy is so engaging because there is no economy without players and goods can be and usually are eventually destroyed. The vast majority of goods bought by players are produced, transported, sold and blown up by players. The prices are determined by player competition. The selection of goods available at any one station is determined by players stocking that station. Players need to buy individual items over and over due to losses.

This is not your typical MMO where there are NPC vendors everywhere selling basic goods and the player economy consists of mid - high quality crafted gear and reselling the rare gear that came from NPCs; usually all occurring in one market hub that everyone can access easily. Item destruction helps us out a lot too. If goods weren't lost or destroyed when you lose a ship, we'd be in the same boat as every other MMO. Everybody would just fly T2 or faction ships, equip officer and deadspace mods and there would be no market for the lesser goods. Fortunately we do destroy lots of gear which keeps the market running and creates demand across the spectrum of goods.

The team is the "statistics team" and monitors all game-related statistics. Arguably, the only economic thing the economist does is look at market-related statistics along with the rest of that team, not that they do anything interesting with this information.