Market Discussions

I think that was the figure I was failing to recall earlier.


I'm inclined to think that eveboard's numbers would be on the high side because it will have a disproportionate number of older players, because new players would have no cause to use it.

I am very poor by MD standards but a large part of my NAV is tied up in my characters, not in isk or ships (as a rough estimate - I think my characters would sell at at least 5-6x the value of all my other assets combined).

Characters are bought and sold frequently to the point where trading them is the focus of an entire mini-profession, in this sense they are no different than any other items (maybe collectible items) and it would be hard to justify not inlcuding them into a NAV calculation.
Even players who don't trade in characters professionally do in my experience often end up using an alt which they may have started for completely different reasons as a savings fund (and sometimes as an oblique dollar -> ISK conversion device) which they liquidate when they are looking to buy their first supercapital.

I'm not sure I like the idea of using plain NAV as a measure of wealth - I think having different metrics that are grouped by liquidity would be a more interesting approach.
The problem is that most assets in EVE are technically liquid and can be sold on very short notice (with appropriate discounts if necessary). However, there is a subjective element of liquidity that makes NAV numbers misleading - you might just not be willing to sell your main, the BPO collection that forms the basis of your industrialist efforts, your only mission ship, ... no matter the circumstances.
And should assets that you can't liquidate at any price (even if that is due to self-imposed restrictions) be considered part of your "wealth"?

Yes, I think the "average" player who doesn't focus heavily on building up their wealth will find that the value of their characters will overtake the value of all their other assets early on in their EVE careers and dominate their NAV from then on.

Wealthy players will often invest in additional characters and accounts, including a high-sp main if they are a younger player that doesn't have one already. So I'd expect to see characters make up a large chunk of the NAV of the majority of players.

I'd guess that characters are about 15% of my NAV. I don't have a super high SP main (90m), but I have a lot of alts in the 20m-60m range. I also take your point about characters not being something that everyone is willing to sell, I do a fair amount of character trading but you'd have to pry my original characters out of my cold dead hands.

NAV basically equals assets (cash and items) minus liabilities (loans mainly).

Eve Marketeer has a tool that would offer some assessment of item values but I think the site is down and right off the top of my head I can't think of another utility specifically (though there are some). Any of them (and this includes the new feature in the game client itself that estimates item values) will always be a bit unreliable and the only way to know for sure would be to check prices yourself.