Market Discussions

As a speculator, I cashed out during the obvious peak. Every pundit I know of called it as being overblown and likely to fall back to ~1.1B, as it did.

So the only speculators left with stocks were either asleep at the wheel or holding regardless with the intention of cashing out during the inevitable year end spike.

Why anyone would worry about propping up today's PLEX price, if it were to fall further, rather than letting it drop so that they could buy in heavily at the new floor, is beyond me.

PLEX is headed up to 1.3B-1.5B, regardless of this recent drop, it just outran itself with the recent spike.

I'm usually a bit sceptical of people that 'predict' things using secret sauce recipes that are too secret to divulge to the masses. After all, if you throw enough darts at the board you are bound to get 180 every now and again.

Quite logical, your behaviour seems more of a market strategy rather than speculation. Whilst some who wish to see it rise, manipulative speculators, if you will, are clearly putting in stop orders, in an attempt to prevent a visible sell off occuring, and thereby creating a panic.

The greater longer term pressure acting out, is the behaviour of those more major entities, who wish to preserve their much larger investment, that is probably too large to crash out without in turn damaging their investment returns as a result.

I do disagree with your projections as to long term values, I have previously explained why. We are in my opinion going to see one of two scenarios.

A hard reduction, either created by the action of EvE's economists, or a panic reaction, or both in combination, which may already be primed to occur, or the large Holders using market peaks, to divest over the longer term. As always leaving the less aware or less than competent speculators. and those who are blinded by the promise of historic safety, to carry the loss.

I fully understand the logic, where past performance and events extrapolated forward do support your projections, the graph wizardry is persuasive. However past performance, does not guarantee future performance, as we are very well aware of in the real world too. It is a mistake to place too much faith in them. After all I personally know experienced traders on major trading floors, who were convinced the only way sub prime derivatives would go was up. We all know the result of that.

Such peaks, have the habit of deflating in an untidy and extreme manner. The trigger may seem insignificant at the time it occurs.


It will be interesting to witness either way, and I am sure there will still be plenty of money to be made by an intelligent, and aware market player such as yourself, whichever way the market moves.

I think he actually provided support for his claims, it's just I can't make head nor tail of his posting.

For clearer predictions, complete with extensive graph porn of a type far beyond the limits of the in-game market browser, I'd refer you to something I included in my previous posts, in advance of the events predicted therein:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIJVf9qMO5k PLEX analysis starts @ 4:15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULyk4IryZ6k PLEX analysis starts @ 6:52

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOJIS5McFcQ PLEX analysis starts @ 6:54

I've given the times for the start of the PLEX analysis, but there is plenty of other good content in those videos.

Tbh, I don't think you needed to apply Lockefox's level of market voodoo and entrail scrying in order to predict what was going to happen. I had already made up my mind when I watched his videos on release and he just confirmed what I was already thinking and gave me some nice graphs, trends and justification for what I was already doing in the PLEX market.

I can't remember and am not going to go back and check, but I think delonewolf made similar, if less detailed predictions in his weekly market run down (EVE Talk).

I'd like to hear VV's view on all this.

[v] Remember me ?



I made videos of the PLEx trading Prices which I will edit before publishing to others.

Most of my videos are private on YouTube awaiting editing.

Many parts will be integrated into edited versions.

While past performance may be a strong factor in many people's thinking and it certainly helps to maintain the upward PLEX trend. This is not the only, or even the most significant factor in my PLEX investments or those of informed investors.

The simple fact is that PLEX is massively underpriced:

It's functional value and utility, is much higher than the price you pay for it. If you are a capable player, you will get more out of your 30 days sub than the isk you put in to paying for it. That's a fundamentally good investment for those that can afford to make it.

That functional value and utility is rising and has been rising for a long time. CCP keep adding new ways to make use of that PLEX and have short-medium term plans to keep increasing that utility. It's certainly consistent with their own financial needs to keep the utility of PLEX rising and thereby maintaining demand for it.

Aside from basic sales incentive for CCP to keep PLEX going strong, there is the fact that one of the main fundamental functions of PLEX is to combat RMT. In that respect it is performing well, in that the rate of exchange from RL currency to isk is extremely attractive and there is minimal incentive to take greater risks in the illicit RMT market instead of simply buying PLEX.

The recent past of EVE has been pretty poor:

We've gone through a period where 0.0 stagnated and bored PvP pilots were required (and were able to) tour the length and breadth of EVE in search of what content they could find. The totally solved problem that was Dominion sov was so long in the tooth that it held no surprises for anyone and a steady state had been established and cemented to a degree that had horrendous impacts on the game.

The fleet meta moved towards drone-centric setups that were quite frankly dull as ditchwater to fly in. I lost interest in fleet PvP and ended up leaving the loving arms of Pandemic Legion for the deeply questionable but relatively varied world of FW (seriously) which then lead me to become almost completely inactive in the game. CCP took to dancing around the issue rather than fixing it.

The evolved meta and the results of a succession of nerfs that had rendered capitals somewhat dull and pointless has led to much unsubbing or alts.

The cure to that problem was (and had to be) somewhat extreme and took a lot of us up to the edge. Nerfing capitals in to the ground. Removing the force projection that was needed to extract what little content remained. Leaving us with more or less nothing to do.

Aside from that, there were some pretty disasterous, or just plain painfull, changes in all other aspects of EVE.

They adopted the rapid release cycle and basically kissed goodbye to marketing, coherent complete changes and any project with grand scope to rival the most successful expansions that brought us things like wormholes. They also appeared to do a poor job of taking advantage of the benefits of that rapid release cycle and failed to hold back changes until they were fit for release and failed to iterate on disasterous changes quickly (or even at all in some cases).

All of this while their outward persona became a disjointed mess of random devs speaking about small parts of the game that they were fixing without the indication of their being a firm hand on the tiller with a solid achievable vision of the future. Several statements made by Seagull, who is certainly very capable but I fear isn't as good a spokesperson as the job requires, often pointed in one direction only to see the reality head off in a completely different direction.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that EVE activity and player counts had dropped massively.

But now we're through that dark time and everything before us looks pretty good:

They are replacing the structures they ruined in Crius with new structures that have far greater potential and appear to have far more work being put in to them.

They are re-working capitals and super capitals and the word on the street from CSMs who live and breathe capital combat is that we're in for moist underwear and dirty grins.

They are a long way through the process of making the majority of ships and modules in the game non-terrible, but are still clearly committed to this as an eternal struggle.

They are working their way through the issues with their new problem child sov system and the hope and expectation of many is they'll eventually get it to a nice state where we can enjoy a new shiny sov system that actually works for as long as it takes for us to bring it to the same totally solved state as we did with Dominion.

They have finally had the good sense to re-introduce expansions. So we can now have proper marketing, coherent complete changes and hopefully some new features with grand scope. We've also seen Seagull state that she's going to be more front and center in this and will give us the impression that somebody somewhere has a clue where everything is headed.

The future outlook for the next six months is one of increasing player numbers, increasing player activity and increasing demand for PLEX.

So please, tell me, why do you feel PLEX price should be dropping in the face of all this positive news and upward forces?

Why do you think that such a fundamentally daft and counter productive idea as an NPC order is needed?

Once again, my apologies for going hard against your ideas, but I'm hoping a little tough love from someone who hasn't yet put your back up may bring you back on to the reservation with the rest of us happy Indians.

Tbh, if they were to un-break industry by sorting out the terrible ranks system and the overly fast speed of production as well as doing some work on actually improving the overall EVE UI rather than degrading it, I'd be entirely happy with where EVE is and where it's headed.

Given that I'm pretty fussy and have zero tolerance for shoddy work, the fact that I can say that is a pretty impressive complement to CCP.

Oh and they could replace this terrible forum with something good, preferably restoring the features they threw out when they moved to it from the old forums.

I'm not going to bother asking for them to improve EVE PvE, because it's so hateful at the moment that there isn't really much worth saving. I've always advocated they just delete all the missions and non-sandbox PvE from the game and be done with it, but I know that focusing the game on the hard core sandbox player and away from the casual player isn't really a good idea. But seriously, missions are so embarrassingly bad for game content in 2015.

When I can say that CCP are doing a good job, that means pretty much everyone else that is less bitter and demanding than me must be dancing in the streets. When these promises turn into actual implemented, stable and iterated features then we're going to see a lot of re-subbing.

There is a desire there by the independent company that runs it to encourage numbers of subscriptions with little concern for the long term health of the game and a greater focus on revenue. (Possibly untrue but this seems to be the opinion of the playerbase)

Bots are technically still forbidden, but form a large majority of player action, the market is monstrously distorted and dysfunctional and is allowed to spiral into chaos.

Cost of plex in real currency is very different.

In fact it is a pretty good example, of what happens when you let an experiment run, when CCP do not give a guiding hand to the market.

Hardly a model of a long term profitable business.

And not something we should use to compare EvE as we know it to.
Truly apples to oranges.

This is where it is so hard, you are absolutely correct as to what is happening, but your conclusions assume that Plex is treated as a commodity, no different from Player produced items such as Ships or minerals.

Whilst this is what is currently happening, I argue this is NOT the real case even though the current trading sentiment is that it is no different.

CCP cannot allow this to persist in the long term, as it is having horrific results with retention.
A key and vital tool has been taken out of the hands of average players, and even more focused players are finding the grind required an unacceptable price in time expended to pay. It would be similar to gold being boosted to $10000 an ounce, whilst appearing great as a source of wealth storage, or investment, as the price component in industry, and jewellery becomes untenable, killing those markets for the product, alternatives are found. And the market purely existing detached from underlying consumption.
Unfortunately, however, there is no alternative to plex in the EVE economy, to encourage correction. So the only remaining options are economic warfare, however unlikely, or intervention to preserve the wider economy.
This can be short term management, or a clear seperation of the asset as a class.

Now Imagine the product is salt, rather than gold, and we see the real effects, without salt, members of the family sicken, and then eventually die.

Short term gain cannot be allowed to harm the long term viability of the game, and CCP always eventually come back to that conclusion.

We have discussed this at length, so just to pick up one point, regarding volumes, they are only indicative, that they are being bought and sold, the real metric is redemptions into pilots services.
Just how many of your friends have put alts into hibernation because it is too time consuming to grind for the cost of plex? and are unhappy with the loss of funtionality and fun that results in, even though they are still holding on to their main for now?