EVE General Discussion

Something like this? Nope, never happens...

There have been manipulation efforts. Creating sanctions is pretty hard to do in EVE. If there was a Corporate manufacturing system it would have some legs but the stacking system makes that difficult to implement.

The best they can do is create a corporate, distribution tag and associate that to who is selling it.

For any outfit bigger than a few hundred people it's mandatory.
I know a couple of guys it's all they do really. They get a charge out of buying up enemy markets and flipping, stockpiling, flooding, gouging, trolling and generally messing up the whole purchase and distribution of things.
You want to get things to your people you have to use contracts, this protects you from disruptive marketeers outside and selfish profiteers inside.
If you're playing pocket-change card games, the guy who brings the hat box full of coins is eventually going to absorb everybody else's money, even if the small fry get the occasional big win. It's a principle of how money works, large amounts attract and absorb smaller amounts, conflicts are rarely extended and the end result is one entity owning all assets and currency.

You'll also see groups manipulating the market in their favor by creating a demand for the stuff they produce. More than a few gankers have alts that produce both the ships they gank, and the ships they gank with.

Explosions drive sales.

Probably referring more to localised increases in demand and the subsequent volume that comes their way rather than actual price manipulation.

There are too many bots operating in the market to influence it manually. Ask some of the bot-hating upper ups who run bots on the market. They're in too deep, and have been at it too long for a mere "player" to make a significant difference. Oh. You can't gank a market bot! Where's this James whatever on this? Obviously oblivious, and naturally so.

I do this.

The most well-known ones are the Gallente Ice Interdiction and OTEC. There was an attempt at doing a Caldari Ice Interdiction but that seems to be regarded as a failure.

There are a couple of others that I can think of offhand :

* The Long Limb Roes story ( don't have a link but I saved the text of the posts in MD forum, OP was Dream 5 if I remember correctly). Someone is running a variation on this in The Forge at the moment. There is a further variation that involves Exotic Dancers but I haven't worked out all the details of that yet :)

* The manipulation of prices on Caldari Navy Ballistic Controls through an artifact in the way the contract system sorted contracts and prices. This was negated by a change to the contract and the addition of faction mods to the market

Ganking and ship supply tends to produce local spikes in demand as noted above but these quickly smooth out as ship production adjusts and traders move goods from areas of oversupply to areas of undersupply.

Apart from that there is some isk to be made if you know in advance about changes to the ship doctrines of the larger null sec blocs.

Funnily enough OTEC sought to do exactly nothing in the way of price controls or withholding supply. We didn't have to - the game withheld supply for us, that's why prices got so high in the first place. This is also partly why NOTEC failed. Organizing an artificial supply limiting cartel is actually fiendishly difficult in EVE when any and every participant can simply undermine you via selling by an alt, and all the moreso when there's already a naturally occuring supply limit as was the case with Technetium. The undersupply of Tech meant that there would always be a portion of Neo that couldn't be used, so to try to undersupply Neo you'd have to withhold that much more of it.

Of course, there may have been other efforts to undermine the concept as well.

These days the CFC holds a third to a half of the R64s in the game, and only a few scant drops of that actually make it to the market, at least in raw goo form. Instead it's reacted, either by alliance logisticians or after being sold to private members of the alliance. If you've ever looked at reaction profits lately and wondered why they often seem so low, that's it - 1800 reaction towers in Goonswarm Federation alone. There's nothing really all that organized about it (beyond structured sales of materials and guides on how to run a farm, anyway) so it might be a stretch to call it "warfare"...but it definitely has its effect on the markets.

People've already touched on the idea of relisting in staging systems and whatnot as well, though relisting right there in Jita and messing with key elements of hostile doctrines is a thing that happens as well.

The thing about market warfare is that while it does happen the effects aren't really flashy or obvious, which leads to questions like this thread. I've personally cost hostile alliances and players dozens or quite likely hundreds of billions of isk over the years, just not in any way that has a killboard record.


How naive you are. To anyone with a little bit of savvy, the bots - which are not nearly as prolific as you or most other people think - are just another tool to be used in manipulating the market.

I'm glad you've come to acknowledge the weighty Truth of our word.