Market Discussions

but also many have billions of SP, in old alts, old accounts. Characters bought from the bazzaar. The amount of SP at this moment is HUGE. But the demand not so much.

Many wanted those illusive comand ships. Or maybe that long marauder skill. But once you get those sought by skills. It's not convenient diminushing returns are quite bad. So the injectors will be used ocassionaly, by new players, or maybe for alts and so on. And i expect it only will scratch the surface of the pool.

As for farms, many have alts training already with perfect 2700 SP, with perfect 1year plans. But they arent profitable yet, and i think the margin will be very slim on those.

All want skills, but its more efficient to train them in time with plex. Injectors due to COST and HUGE diminushing returns, are very bad cost/effect ratio.

It was a great big deal yesterday, it can only settle down. People spent billions and billions yesterday because it was new, it was a great way to get social skills etc. But its not affordable keep the demand high.

How much SP you bought yesterday ?
How much today ?
How much will you buy in a week ?

Well, it depends on what you deem profitable. Five percent per month? Ten?

But yeah, I can see the margins being razor thin now that I thought about it.



And most of the people that wanted those new skills already got them. There was a huge consumer rush at the introduction of it, but most people are satisfied now and further purchases would be sporadic. The thing is that as a character ages, it naturally accumulates skill points, and coupled with diminishing returns, at some point people don't really feel like buying any more.

The market right now is new and will likely have a fair amount of volatility what you are talking about, IMO, is the long run vs. short run to a large degree.

Long run we might see SP farms and I would imagine, given the link between SP, AURUM and PLEX for the price of SP injectors to track PLEX prices. I doubt an SP farming account will make much ISK above the cost of a PLEX, but you can cover the sub and still use that account, given it has other skills for making ISK (PI, invention, trading, etc.) to make additional ISK.

As for a balance between supply and demand...well the short answer is it will always be balanced to a large extent via the price. Right now if lots of people are sucking out what they perceive as useless SP and dumping it on the market there is plenty of supply, so prices are low. When that initial "gold rush" is over the price may very well go up....but again it will likely move to a new equilibrium.

Supply contracting is NOT a price bubble. A price bubble is when the price of an asset becomes "unhinged" or "disconnected" from its "intrinsic" price. You yourself did some decent work on the "intrinsic" price as well in another thread. I believer your final estimate is that the price would be around 750 million ISK for an injector.

Further, if the price spikes due to a drop off in supply and we are still waiting for SP farms to start supplying the market that high price is an information signal. In fact, all prices are sources of information. A high price is sending the signal that the market supply is low and for people to "make" more of it. An extreme example that we often hear about is water after a catastrophe such as a hurricane or the like where water is like $5 for a small 12 oz bottle. What that price is saying (screaming really) is "Hi, more water here please...NOW!!!" Another example is in California which has a unique gasoline blend and a gas refinery goes offline. Because supply has had a sudden and unexpected negative shock the gasoline already in the tanks in the ground at gas stations is more valuable immediately. So the price goes up...which is sending a signal to consumers to conserve as there is not as much as was previously thought. The market working as intended.

Now, we could see a bubble due to a price increase. There has been some interesting work in mathematical models of speculative bubbles and they way they work is that there is an asset that is put on the market well below it's intrinsic value. People see this low price and buy it sending the price higher. The upward price movement induces more people to buy the asset as they see the upward price movement as a signal that the price will keep going up. So there is an almost self sustainintg upward trend in the price of the asset well beyond its intrinsic value and then...it all stops (usually because the asset has a limited life span) and the price crashes. However, the current prices while a bit low are not that low. Also note, in these examples (these are both mathematical models and experimental models) it would be hard to "spot" the bubble until after that fact or until you well into the bubble. The assets in question have a pre-defined value in the experiments. Then for some reason a player will put an asset up for sale at a price below the pre-defined value. So the initial price increases look sensible as the price moves back to the pre-defined value. The problem arises when the price goes past that predefined value. And in real life there is no pre-defined value...so bubbles are very hard to spot ahead of time, but very easy to spot after the fact and interestingly lots of people claim to have known it all along.

As for skill extractors they have already seemed to have settled near the price you estimated in that other thread I noted. I don't think we'll see much action there. We might see some in the injector market though.

Sorry for the long rambling post.

Agreed, it's the same for character farming. It always was profitable if you know what you're doing, and will remain so after this change, yet very few people actually do it. Those that do, do it on multiple accounts because if it's profitable on one account, it's 10 times as profitable on 10 accounts (as long as you don't saturate the market).

I'd also not forget to factor in the long term health of the game and also the ppl who may have unsubbed or are planning to as a result, the latter might not be no biggie but the former, well...

Those farms dont need to be made, they exist already. For example two of my alts are perfect trader another is a perfect tengu pilot . They both had plans for a year and best implants for focused training. They reached their target, i probably should stop paying but i feel its wasted time not training so they train even now (useless stuff for me atm) both of them can be used for skill extraction.

Many have 7-10 such accounts that train just in case.

I would also presume that there is only one initial spike and then an ongoing low demand. Whoever wishes to pay to win will do so in the first few days. The great majority who did not bother to buy SP yesterday will most likely not bother to buy tomorrow. So this leaves new players wishing to "gain" on established characters and veterans wishing to train a alt quickly on the demand side.

As you said. Time will tell.

Further interesting market developments.

Looking at the number of buy/sell orders, and price trends, there appears to be an over-supply of skill extractors while demand for injectors remains balanced.

Skill Extractors
Units for Sale: 6,093
Units on Buy Orders: 1,804

Skill Injectors
Units for Sale: 2,304
Units on Buy Orders: 2,353

The price of the Extractors is also on a significant downward curve, while prices for Injectors are steady. This may be due to the market being flooded with extractors but the amount of spare/unwanted SP available for extraction is, of course, declining as it is extracted in bulk.

If they are going to make a few billion wouldn't that mean you did too? If you biomassed the toon, isn't that what they are doing plus the 5.5 million SP that can't be stripped? You're just wasting as you'd be throwing away all those tasty SPs!