Market Discussions

At current rates, I earn just a small smidge under 4 plex per hour in my real life job, but I'll round it down to 3, to avoid any +/-

800m isk per plex, it's about 2.4bn isk an hour, 74/7, since I get paid monthly.. 2.4bn isk an hour when i'm in bed asleep (infact an 8 hour sleep is worth 19.2bn isk)... 2.4bn isk an hour when I'm with my girlfriend and my 3 year old daughter on the beach.

My point being.. why the hell would I consider farming in game for an hour to earn 100m isk? I guess the only reason would to make that hour income 2.5bn isk. Maybe watch an episode of Big Bang theory and earn 1.6bn isk...


The more PLEX prices go up, the more value is added to my hourly ISK income - if I were to substitute real life earning to buy plex from CCP, and sell it on the eve market.

Yes it's trivial for some to buy plex from in game isk faucets, and the cost of PLEX will adversely affect these players. Where as, someone like me enjoys life and times in the real world, with a healthy job etc, buying a plex when ever i need an isk injection is trivial as well. BUT the massive PLEX prices benefits me hugely.

Interesting lastly, it devalues ships as well.. always a real life value on eve assets through the value of PLEX, so, a couple of years ago, I'd have to sell 2 or even 3 PLEX to buy my Marauder, yet, now, only takes 1.

To me, TIME is everything.. Farming in eve is boring as hell, and very time consuming. Why spend so much time being a robot, when buying and selling ONE PLEX is the same (for me) as about a week of tedium (I play casually). I'm lovin it.

But i do feel a bit bad for those reliant solely on PLEX to sub their account though.

Additional thought: I'd bet right now, that CCP are actually selling more plex codes to people like me cashing in on the great PLEX value vs in game farming 10x more for the same amount.

Here's the thing:

1. Buy PLEX
2. Use PLEX to run account, training up some specialised char in a free slot.
3. Sell char for more than the cost of the plex you've used to train them.

= Free sub to eve* and get a little extra isk for the trouble of managing a skill queue.

* Assuming you don't want to train any more on your main(s)
* Oh, and the character transfer fee ofc. forgot about that. Still $20 or whatever it is for the 18 months or so it takes to train a super char seems alright to me.

I agree with you. I also have dropped some subs. I don't pay with PLEX, I had up to 13 subs running on my various MMOs. So it's not even a problem of money.

It's a problem of: "why?"

I hoped CCP would revamp its markets UI making it modern. Or that CCP would finally allow people to get a real time market data stream (after all they want to forbid cache scraping). Or upgrade charts from 1985 wintage to 2000 (not asking for much, eh?).

Nope.
I hoped one day to see EvE economy evolve and some embryos of finance appear (say: automated tellering for who wants to start something that needs it), binding contracts, maybe contracts to honor in the future... all bricks to pave an evolution from the static, firmly stuck at 2003 situation.

So, is it worth for the likes of me (and maybe Flakeys once he got tired of ships PvP like I did) to keep half a dozen subs? For what?

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On an unrelated matter, EvE HAS a number of issues that imo are serious:

1) Past a certain thresold, the correlation between (the) ice and PLEX becomes co-causation. Worse, self-amplifying causation (positive feedback). Given the amount of miners this can cause trouble, the more they pay for a PLEX the higher the price they CAN demand (as ice is a finite resource now) and this causes a waterfall effect everywhere.

2) Certain kind of expansions don't warm up the biggest PLEX => isk convertors (typically, alpha mentality people with RL money to use to "shortcut" in game grinding say for their elite PvP).

3) The decision (imo bad) to water down EvE expansions. With that way, EvE becomes a dull, very slow progress change game. 2 expansions a year - expecially 2 "flashy" ones, give much more OOMPH to subs. Sure, they spike and then fade throughout the year, but with no OOMPH all we'll see is a slow hemorragy of people who get bored seeing "little changes, so little we don't feel them".

4) The non decisionist direction EvE has taken in the last years. From "Jesus expansions" they went all the other extreme and now give droplets of improvements spread over months.
As they say, it makes more noise a tree falling than a forest growing. People don't have the sensibility to sub to see a forest grow over the decades.


All of this makes me think that the above is changing EvE fundamentals,
During the summer, PLEX (and ices) demand usually drops, that's why in the past the smart players would buy a year worth of PLEX and POS fuel in the summer.
I have a feeling, this year demand went down BUT supply dropped even more.

PLEX is a thermometer of what's going on. If supply stops, it's because there's less "game drivers" willing to invest in EvE than before. There's less motivation to pay with cash and this happens when statistically there's a perception of the game being less worth paying for than before.

Anyone who wants to read in what I have written, feel free to.

Some interesting points.

Also, some players may well have bought a bunch of PLEX with RL money but have not yet traded it within the game - therefore the bought PLEX has not made any impact: a pile of PLEXes sitting in the inventory floor doing nothing while the player hopes for even higher PLEX prices before selling for max profit, temporarily, also adds to the many issues driving whole situation.

CCP would have gained from such sales but the effect would not yet have been felt within the game

Once players start suspecting that PLEX prices may have reached their pinnacle there will probably start a rush of sell offs and prices will fall, drastically. This is obviously connected to many other mechanics within the game as well.

I for one suspect the bubble may pop rather soon. I don't see it reaching the 900 mill average mark with the fuss being generated as it stands now*




*but maybe that's just me hoping to get players paranoid that they'll loose out on a bullish market and trigger a mass sell off before prices drop, thereby triggering the fall of PLEX prices...

No

No, please read my post above, it describes what *should* happen if markets in EvE are still "realistic".

Price is nearing a strong resistance (a trend line). If it closes below by end of July then price can follow its natural course and create a "breath" swing.

Long term we are in a multi-year (rare) pattern called "Gramophone", with the obvious future consequences on price. IF EvE markets are still "realistic" that is. Time will tell.

I had enough money in eve ,so I dont care about the price of PLEX

Correlation != causation. If anything reducing the vast ice mining bot fleets has reduced PLEX demand.

Quick question that has been bothering me.

Why do people consider PLEX to be the "endgame" when it comes to traders. I was studying them and they seem to be a really terrible item to trade. Margin trading them makes peanuts, difference between buy and sell is 10millionish and they only move between 2k-3k a day. Investing 800M in that margin after taxes/fees just doesn't make sense. You could effectively invest that money elsewhere. So I looked at the long term investment. If I bought one at 715M 3 months ago and sold it today for 85M profit that is a terrible return. Less than 30M per month. Okay it is end game and I have billions or trillions to invest to multiply my gains PLEX still seems like a terrible choice for investment either through margins or speculation.

Can someone enlighten me please?

Its not the 500m+ its the 10m margin. Flipping battleships nets roughly the same margin and are sub-200m.