Market Discussions

I am in the process of selling this character on the market bazaar and I have got a little bit of flack on the price. I'm new to selling characters and I had some questions about determining fair market price for characters and since I'm not allowed to 'discuss' in the market bazaar I thought I'd ask here how one comes up with the fair market value of a character for sale.

My opinion is that it is like everything else, it's what people are willing to pay but I see posters using character pricing tools such as http://gemblog.nl/skill/ which I think largely undervalue characters. In fact it got me thinking that if you were a regular buyer/seller of characters you could use one calculator to under value and then another to overvalue a character.

Any thoughts on character pricing?

Surely you can auction the toon, just set a reserve that you wouldnt sell the toon for less than and a sniper rule

I have sold and bought a few toons.

1. the auction of toons are the same as any of part of the game.
Scams, and people saying stuff and not doing it when it comes down to it.

2. so when sell (or buying) - be patient, and reserv the right to cancel auction.

3. I have used the tool, and never sold as low as that price, but also bought below :) (Trader at heart)
BUT it is not cos it is too low or high - it is cos it is a pointer at what MIGHT be a fair price - not the precise worth

All the best with the sell :D


(Sorry about my english)

1. the auction of toons are the same as any of part of the game.
Scams, and people saying stuff and not doing it when it comes down to it.

Not really a truth.
Scams in Char Bazaar are not allowed as every buy - sell transaction is made manually by GM and in case of SCAM will result with BAN.

The fact of the matter is, certain characters sell at certain times, and others become unpopular.

3 months ago, Gallante characters where Not popular at all, 30M SP chars where barely fetching 5 mil ISK while Minmitar toons where fetching top ISK

there are many factors that can influence the Demand of a certain group of skills to be trained, the latest expansion and the constant news about capital ships being nerfed then buffed then nerfed then buffed have made them very popular right now, obviously people know something we don't (faction wars)

you best chose to take it slow... put the char up for sale, see what people say, maybe your character has a horible gap somewhere that you will have to train to make it a Nice toon for some one to use, maybe people will love it.

First time, try not to get ripped off and learn as much about the art of buying and selling as possible, its mostly about the character skills and what people want in what order.

also remember, if you dont have the ISK that you have fully agreed to, you can always turn around and just say, IM NOT SELLING THIS CHAR, I dont feel comfortable, something smells fishy, goodby and no sale.

I see you have but 2.5m SP under your characters belt, anything under 7 mil SP is a HARD sale and will yield only a slither of profits.

remember PLEX prices are almost 500m per unit right now and it takes 2 of them to transfer a character.

If I where you, I would train Jump drives jump calibration etc, basically make it an orca slash Jump freighter character, that would look much better.

To elaborate or maybe just restate a few answers in a slightly differently flavored way:

At some point there is a corelation between the price of Plex, and the number of skill points accrued... there is a "cost" to creating an incremental character for the express purpose of sellinig the chracter and because we see many people enaged in that practice we know that without their parctipation in the market there would be insuficient characters for sale to meet the demand

- cost of plex x number of million sp that can be trained a month , plus a profit margin to pay for the time and effort of training
FOR a pilot trained with the EXACT skills sought after

- training in area's outside of what a buyer is looking for will be worth pennies on the dollar(isk). 1.5 million sp in planetary interaction migth have cost another plex (450 million) to construct yet those points might not even add 50 million of that 450 million to a jump freigher pilot if buyers of those characters have no intention of using those skills or those that do want PI skills also demand other production orienated skills if they're the type that wants the PI

- Shortages due to fads/popularity can create premium pricing a type of chracater that took 18 months to train became popular in a way that outstripped the supply of natural sellers before there was time to produce or add to exisiting chraracters to meet that demand... the fleet doctorine tied to working around lag mechanices made the minmatar Maelstrom alpha battelship suddenly rise to dominance during a certain period over a year ago and pushed prices up dramatically but there has been plenty of time since then for entrepeneurs to shape as many characters as needed to meet that demand and, the supply could easily over shoot demand and crash the price to below reproduction costs potentially

As I alluded to in my second bullet, trainined skills in any area outside what a buyer is looking for will be worth less to them than the ideal cost to produce them...

... there are certain classes of characters that come to market with general skills strewn accross many areas... logically what a newer player to the game would create for themselves in the first year and a half as they dablled in various aspects of the game...and either lost interest or found interest in specific areas... so not only do those characters suffer from buyers only wanting to buy 60% of the trained skills they have, there is a glut of chracters in that style , and even with the general skills they're often still missing the last millions of sp to immediately meet a specialty role that spark buyers to go to the market to aquire with isk rather than taking time to groom a character to meet the role themselves.

a 14 mllion sp character with general skills divided between pvp , pve and industry could likely be purchased for 1 billion or so isk even though a plex*spell point model might suggest 4 billion isk and characters with a focus training and only 6 million sp might sell for 2 or even 3 billion to a hastey buyer with specific desires. The 14 mllion sp character woud suffer from not really meeting many peoples shopping goals allowing people to do things well immediately and a degree of oversupply making it even worse.

Eve search has 79,000 hits for toon, some of the posts date back to 2008. Not sure when this "toon is a WoW word" meme got started, but it's a recent thing. Toon has been used in game and on forums for years. It's a pretty common word in MMOs in general.

I like new words entering the language.. both to keep us on our toes, but most particularly when there aren't other adequately nuanced words that handle both definition and carry with them in their sound and ties to other words a greater sense of what it is people are trying to convey.

Avatar, is far too formal and it also carries with it more of a statement that it is a symbol for yourself in another world rather than a newly created fictional entity with which one may or may not identify with one's self and it also suggests something more singular, whether or not the word formally means such.

Character is not a bad term, but it does suffer from some formalness itself and it's hard to utter the word in a flippant way. It also lacks an easy to say diminutive form and we use the diminutive in many ways that generally carry with them a bit of affection and even without affection, the diminutive can knock the stuffing out of something a bit .

"Char" just doesn't come off the lips well... and doesn't fit a standard diminutive model either. In English we most often put a "y" at the end, As in Thomas -> Tom -> Tommy . ... "ola" or "ette" , or "alicious" are a couple others. Without delving into the “why’s” worlds like “money” tend to gather collections of other ways of expressing it beyond a perfectly clear original word . Moola, bread(out of use), coin, cash, bucks, quid…. Etc . Marijuana has got to be weed or smoke or bud or the other common words which are eluding me at my quick dash through this.

Toon, is more appropriate to the other game where its use is prevalent for the avatar/characters in that game are very nearly depicted as is common in cartoon books. Toon, being a shortened version is an effective means of the diminutive to make something more informal and connected.

Cartoons of course are also something playful in themselves and carry with them a sense of "***** and giggles" along with belonging to an imaginary context of no lasting value. Characters can be in a comedy too, but very often we think if the word being used in a formal critique and very often in literature dealing with serious human behavior.

Toon isn't perfect for EVE but we need a flippant easy to say term that reinforces our at least feigned indifference to its RL value, a reinforcement that it belongs to a recreational realm in which we act far differently than we would in the real world, and yet also carry with it a bit of affection as to a puppy or something.. even a bad puppy.

My CharChar or my racter or my charola or my Charry just aren't comfortable. Toon isn't perfect, but it works better than the next alternative in getting at the general way many of us want to reffer to the many characters we have in the game.

It seems like only some visceral desire for people to distance themselves from that other mmo occupying a different genre, with a PVE dominance, and vastly different average demographic of player have a distaste for the word Toon. I respect there desire to distance themselves from being associated with the other game if they feel strongly about it but, the word "Toon" really doesn't need to be that firmly associated with the other game and I think is generic enough to be used across all MMO's

I think only Eidolon would be high-brow enough to satisfy my vanity.

(imho wikipedia over-emphasizes the whole "ghost" thing a little, eidolon can just mean "image" or "reflection" without any necromancy involved^^)

I know that character evaluator severely undervalues cap characters, I sold my char for 7 billion more than that site said it was worth. (was a carrier 5/dread 5/SC pilot)


But a lot of trolls will try to lowball you by saying there is something wrong with your char when they just want to resell it for an even higher price.