Market Discussions

Given isk is the unit we use to quantify stuff in eve it'll probably be worth about 1 each, unless you wish to propose another standard. I expect PLEX prices will continue to rise though.

I've always liked the idea of plex being dividable into a million microplex and used for currency.

One can only hope that the building of stargates in the future is a monumental ISK sink.

As virtually nothing else players build is. Faction ships are a little bit of a sink but not much,

if only there was a graph that clearly showed that there was no serious isk inflation

i guess we'll just have to take vv's word for it

How can you express a value of something in relation to itself? The only meaningful way of evaluating isk is in terms of its purchasing power ( be it PLEX or goods). I think the more intersting question would be the purchasing power of a PLEX over time but that topic has been beaten to death.

You mean, the items that had an explosive rise in farming, to the point it greatly surpassed the effects of ISK losing value?

You mean, the materials that were used to build hundreds of thousands tiericided ships for past patches speculation, and that some still could not manage to sell and thus they caused minerals pricing going down due to huge excess of supply?

1) You "forgot" to include PLEX in your arguments. "Tiny" oversight, eh?

2) When the author talks about PLEX, he mentions a decrease in rise, whereas if he used proper financial tools, he'd see he was analyzing a down swing, not a downtred. PLEX price is rising since March 2010.

2) That chart is made with moving averages, which don't tell a lot of stuff (and are a lagging indicator anyway).

3) It shows a 2007-2010 period that was exactly where prices should be. The big bad thing of that era was minerals prices, but those have been fixed with many changes (drones regions, L4 missions loot nerf etc), so once removed this defect, everything else was OK back at that date.
Also, nobody cares that 2007-2010 appear in that chart if the last chart bit show indexes sharply going up again and reaching warning levels.

Also, ever wondered why they stopped posting those nice economy data?
When somebody stops being transparent my auditor senses tingle and make me wonder: "what do they have to hide? Their lovely indicators proved to be as useless as I believe they are and now they don't dare to show that some super-important commodities are spinning out of control?"

4) If you spent the time to read the second part of the article you'd find the author spending 2/3 of the article explaining where he'd find faucets to cut and how.

And in the end, he poses the big question you skipped with both feet: "The other, often overlooked aspect of this discussion is, what is our target?"

Because it's true that we need inflation - unlike RL, ISK is not (often) passed to "heirs" when a player quits playing, unlike RL ISK that goes to NPCs is not going to "return to the source, ready to be reintroduced in the economy" like it'd do with a RL central bank and so on.

But we don't need so much ISK that it makes PLEX rise for years in a row.

We need inflation, but we need less of it.

yeah no

plex isn't an item that's scarce in the "universe" it is an item that can be manufactured infinitely by the application of dollars

plex is a measure of the value of real money versus space money, and is no more relevant to a discussion of inflation as the value of the dollar to the lira or some other joke currency: forex is not a measure of inflation

Well you have just to check my past General Discussion posts to see how I am often defending "little people" from the continuous attempts by large powerblock players to have them nerfed into extinction.

Said that, no serious talk about inflation can be done if the only ones with the data (CCP) went silent mode since a long time.

All what we have been left with, are commodities and ISK and their relative value.

Now, I'd rather not use minerals as a meter, because they can be professionally farmed (see the famous guy multiboxing 90 mining ships and stuff) and thus they suffer their own "inflation". Plus minerals were hit very hard by tiericide patches multiple speculations.

That is, minerals are an highly polluted sample to use as reference.
PLEX on the other side are manipulated, but manipulated to keep them low. So, if they fail to crash despite being manipulated downwards by CCP, it means there's a powerful pressure to buy them.

Why is there such pressure?

I think there are 3 main reasons to that.

- One is the fact that players feel entitled to not pay for MMOs with RL money any more. Since EvE has a mechanism to do that, players work towards such objective.

- The second is the fact that players are slowly getting disgruntled with EvE and thus think EvE does not deserve to be paid like it used to deserve in the past. Less players buy PLEXes for ISK as well, because there's too much ISK already. So the supply dries up, the demand rises.

- The third is the ever increasing efficiency at farming ISK which amplifies the existing ISK faucets.



In the end, people don't care that they can buy a ship for 20% less ISK, they care they have to pay a 10% higher price to keep playing, which is a premise to even care about buying a ship for 20% discount.

Oh please. When I hear that somebody is trying to help little people it is always going to get funny. When I get turned into a space communist arguing on the side of the space proletariat that is something.

You are arguing for lower pay for everybody. That is what reducing isk faucets means.

Who here wants missions to pay less? Who here wants rats to have smaller rat bounties? Who here wants to sell their salvage for less.

You are trying to keep inflation by cutting income. That is not helping little people. And yes that will work in slowing inflation, and protect the value of your already earned isk. In real life too. If we all make half in salaries that will reduce inflation or stop the "imminent" threat of hyper inflation from happening. This is how the man protects us the little people by doing what is good for us.

If you want to help people economics will tell you that the best most efficient way is direct money transfer. Help them out by flying through space and dropping off some cash to randoms. It is fun.

How about we do not try to fix what is not broke?