Market Discussions

No.

Why are you asking if they'll drop? They need a reason to and they tend to go down when we have more people playing.

Even though there will be more people playing with the FreeToPlay change, they will be the type of player that does not want to pay cash for a subscription (otherwise they would not be F2P to begin with). I suspect overal, they would rather grind IKS for a plex instead of pay cash. Because of that, I assume that the IKS price of Plex will go up with this change and not down.

I hadn't seen the new dev blog, I thought you were talking about SP farming.

I agree. Although I wouldn't be surprised if they limited this in some way.

People panic

CCP has thought of the farming aspect. You will not be able to extract the skills that can be trained on Alpha clones. The are also very limited for industrial use. It appears to be an extended trial - let people play long enough to get familiar with the game without the pressure of "do I like this well enough to pay a subscription fee"

They can get involved in PvE, FW and entry level PvP but anything that can be farmed by experienced players doesn't seem to be part of the package.

I agree these players are unlikely to buy PLEX unless they subscribe but I think they will be more likely to hang around long enough to learn the game and choose to subscribe.

Industrial Arrays will also be part of the November patch - people will raise cash to build them and that should put downward pressure on PLEX.

Conceivably, Russians farming FW plexes to raise ISK as they already do is going to lose its PLEX overhead too. What a time to be subscribed.

I don't think you are right to assume the size of the playerbase necessarily affects the PLEX price - up or down. If the playerbase doubled overnight by adding a duplicate of every existing player with the same real-world assets and propensity to pay for gametime, the PLEX price would have no initial reason to change at all - twice as many whales would be buying twice as many PLEX to sell for ISK and twice as many poors would be grinding the ISK to buy PLEX with. [1]

What matters is the propensities of the new players (or the players who leave if the playerbase shrinks). Initially, of course, they'll be neither buying nor selling PLEX, but what will they want to do if they stay? F2P does attract whales, that's why anyone does it, but of course EVE already has an option to get whales' money.

[1] Of course, in the medium term all kinds of things would change because EVE itself had not doubled in size - but that's not what I'm taking about.

I fully expect plex to go downwards because of this. Would guess a long term downward trend to plex prices.

I could speculate that if there is any sudden drop it is caused by people panicking about alphas. People have known that industrial etc. arrays are coming soon (TM) so they should not be surprised and start selling stuff only now.
Of course some might do it, but should be minority.