Player Features and Ideas Discussion

PLEX prices just went up you say. Nice will liquidate some more plex, or perhaps i should wait a while for it to go up higher.

All the prices of everything (on average) is going up. Because there are more isk sources than sinks. Its really that simple.

Otherwise its probably caused by global warming. Or ISboxer. Perhaps ISboxer causes global warming that then causes PLEX prices to rise!

Why does the PLEX market need any special rules? Simply because you can't afford plexing your account(s) every month?

Determined people grind for ISK. Smart people make the former voluntarily give them what they've grinded, strong people take it by force. People who don't want to bother with any of these options buy PLEX and sell it in the market. By paying for someone else's game time with real-life cash, they reward their determination, cleverness, or strength.

Why are you biting the hand which is feeding you, OP? High PLEX prices make an incentive for your caretakers to buy more of them from CCP. And if others are using it them and you are not, it means you aren't determined/smart/strong enough compared to other players.

tl;dr - HTFU and don't be so selfish.

EDIT: Just to make it clear, I neither make ISK from selling PLEX nor pay for my accounts with ISK.

Taxing PLEX would just increase the cost of PLEX. When in real life has a new tax made anything cheaper for you to buy?

OP is Ed Miliband and I claim my £10.

In economic theory there is something called Giffen good (good, as in "goods and services"). These are goods which have a reversed supply-demand curve. That is, an increase in price results in a decrease in supply. It is possible that the PLEX is a Giffen good. To see how this could be, first let me recast what I mean by "the price of the PLEX".

Consider how much Real Money (RM) I need to buy, say, 10 billion ISK via PLEX. As the ISK value of the PLEX increases, the price, in RM, of ISK is decreasing. I need to buy fewer PLEX to get 10 billion ISK. Normally one would expect this to increase the demand for PLEX. As the RM cost of 10 billion ISK drops, more players will opt to make the purchase. But if the PLEX is a Giffen good, then the reverse happens. The mechanism may be:

The number of people who would want a supercap is limited by the number of characters who have skills to fly them, not the super's price. Dropping the price of supers will have only a small effect on their demand. (I'm assuming a player does not want spare supers sitting about, they want most every one logged off in space with a pilot sitting in it.)

A player with little ISK can buy a super by using Real Money to buy PLEX, selling the PLEX for ISK and buying the super. As the ISK value of a PLEX increases, the number of PLEX the player need buy goes down. Increased ISK price leads to a reduced supply of PLEX. (Or, to put it another way, the decreasing price of ISK leads to decreasing demand for PLEX). This makes the PLEX a Giffen good.

A numerical example:

Say the ISK price of the PLEX increases by 10%. Any player deciding to make a big purchase now needs to buy 10% fewer PLEX. Lets say as a result of the better price, 5% more players decide to make such a purchase. Yes, the total players buying PLEX increases, and the total ISK bought increases, but as each now buys fewer PLEX, the total demand for PLEX goes down. Again, we have a Giffen good.

What this means for CCP: The increasing ISK value of the PLEX would reduce revenue, and hence is not in CCP’s best interest.

Actually, if CCP wanted expiration dates, what they could do is have PLEX being bought now be "February 2015 PLEX" and they would expire at the end of Feb 2015. Next month they would be selling "March 2015 PLEX". and so on. At any given time there would be 4 different PLEX markets covering the current and next 3 months. Every month a new item would be added to the game, and an old one removed.

It's the way the futures and options market works, I could see it being used in Eve.

Remoooove PLEX, problem solved.

so you really think that market manipulators bought all of the PLEX and then they set high buy orders on PLEX?
As a "PLEX hoarder" i can tell you that you live in a conspiracy dream.

In fact... i still cannot believe that there are still a lot of people out there who dont hoard PLEX.

removed some stuff talking about space poor in your post to keep the essential,

and : "ahhhh finally, good news in the week"

That be it. Simple supply v. demand.

Maybe the more interesting question ought to be whether it is supply decreasing, demand increasing or both...and the natural question of *why*?