Market Discussions

It's all about the veldspar baby.

the fact that someone who could be considered 'space poor' can go to immensely rich just buy paying for a ton of plex and selling it makes me think that there really isnt much way of gauging classes in eve as it cannot be compared to real life

You're correct these things can be difficult to categorize which is why I was a little weary of calling it an "economy" to begin with.
Obviously categorizing someone as "poor"(with which I equated "neophytes" or new players) are not going to be a perfect correlation to the class of poor in the real world but for all intents & purposes it's close enough. Lack of knowledge, money & power generally = poor. Middle class would be older players that have built relationships, resources, skills and sometimes isk and have the ability to fan out over the galaxy and more successfully exploit resources having at least some access to all that eve has to offer.
The upper class would generally be defined as those who are in commanding positions, either literally or figuratively, and have mastered the art of exploiting various aspects of eve to maximum advantage.

I never said holding plex was a bad idea at all. In fact I offered no opinion on plex other than to acknowledge that it's a volatile investment. I think people who invest in plex tend to be hyper sensitive to any mention of the word.

Volatile Definition: Liable to change rapidly(Oxford Dictionary)

This is neither good nor bad but merely an observation and I definitely don't want to start any arguments about plex.
Plex is not the guage for anything but merely one part of the picture.

As far as liquidity goes there are only two ways in which it is important.
1: Having the available cash to run your business. Everyone understands the need to make sudden purchases be it for trading, building or whatever.
2:Liquidity is a form of investment that, in the case of inflation is bad, and in the case of deflation is good.

Not trying to force any arguments just looking for other perspectives and sharing my own.

Ok so you used PLEX as an example when you could of put in any item. The way you wrote the sentence I thought you were trying to make a specific linkage. The only thing I have found with increased levels of ISK is how to deploy it into new items. When I started out with a few million, expanded IIs were a great item due to high volume/return. Now they do not tie up enough ISK to make them worthwhile. Of course it helped that when I started they went for 1.2 million and recently were as low as 250k

There really is no way to preserve wealth any more other than to just horde ISK. While many of the changes might provide additional grind factor in terms of building on volumes, there are volumes of every item in the game to crash any market to 10% of its current value.

The game needs new decay. I pay by sub, I accumulate many things and no matter what Jita says my 'stuff' is worth, it's in my assets window and is building every day I log in. That's true for a lot of people in EVE. They have no war they feel driven to fight, they have no desire to play 'blow stuff up' just for the sake of blow stuff up. This would be solved in other MMO's because people would vendor it. That's not an option here, so they need to come up with a way for us to use stuff up. One people will actually go with. Ever since the reproc nerf, I haven't reprocessed anything. It just builds and builds.

That comes back to the preservation aspect. I always see myself as a small fish in EVE so if I can tank a market, there are people out there who can do it 1000 times better than me. Until that stuff is given purpose and removes it, everything is a log in away from being trash.

Premise: it's 3am here and I come from a massively tiresome day so please forgive me if I am going to write monstruosities.

---

You also put insight into Skydell's "Ever since the reproc nerf..." observation.

CCP nerfed reprocessing and dealt with "That said there is also 'overproduction' of liquid ISK." for several reasons.

In fact, before the nerf, you'd reprocess stuff and:

- overload the minerals markets

- get paid for doing so by the guys purchasing your minerals.

This perverse mechanism was a crack in the only "monetary control" that prevents EvE from burning into an endless flaming well of hyper-production of goods and inflation, the real one.
In fact CCP, since ever, are fighting hard to preserve the so called "wallets segregation", that is a natural but also artificial difficulty at passing wealth between players. Edit: this is a nice article talking about the whole matter.
The "EvE mistrust factor" is a great "wall". Removing opportunities to exchange lots of money is another big one. When you did a week of L4 missions and would melt pre-nerf massive amounts of drops (= minerals faucet= magically coming out of nowhere), you'd basically get freighter sized amounts of minerals which would flood the markets and would then get the equivalent ISK, "heating" the money exchange, chipping at the money wall. The heating was further increased by the ISK faucets provided by pre-nerf missioning.

CCP had to introduce artificial inefficiencies in order to keep this process under control. Past a certain point simple drop and ISK nerfs were not enough. So they had to directly alter the ability to efficiently reprocess stuff.

Same for ices: despawning belts would both make life harder for bots and put a ceiling to how much stuff would flood the markets.

This is why I stated having various ships. The reason being that when a ship gets nerfed and pilots turn away from it they're naturally going to turn to another ship. One has increased demand and the other decreased and therein lies the hedge.
The foundation of the hedge is rooted in the belief that, unlike many sections of the market in eve, CCP will always want to maintain ship value whereas they don't necessarily give a damn about moon goo, ore, salvage or ammo maintaining a pricepoint.

So much of EVE is built on artificial inefficiencies. It has come back to bite us in the ass.

We manufacture from a bottleneck. All manufacturing has it, looting has it but when that bottleneck becomes fleshed out it's no longer a bottleneck. If you need 6 ingredients and one is a bottleneck but you are getting masses of ingredients, you are creating gluts. One of the easiest examples available to show this is T2 salvage. If you want an Intact Armor plate or a Cap console you will be design gather huge amounts of current pumps getting the plates or consoles. Power circuit farming yields disproportionate numbers of ANN's. That's why they sell for 600 ISK right now. We get what we don't need to get what we do and the bottleneck has become mass glut.

In a player driven inventory system like EVE, everything needs an out point. Convincing us to throw stuff away is never going to happen. Something needs to be added to create those out points. Corporate disposal system where the items vanish maybe? In exchange for an index on corporate index. Large fluff projects for individuals, there are plenty of ideas but it's all vaporware until CCP introduce a way to balance off glut.

Eve lacks the ability to express unlimited demand in any other way except hangar bloat. This is not uncommon in games, the result is called mudflation.

As more of what is common accumulates, its realtive value has no where to go but down, even in environments of monetary inflation. Everyone has more of the common nick nacks; prices being some what sticky, why pay more for stuff I already have or can get easily, even if I do have more money than I need?

The new, the rare, and the tangible (PLEX) are the only things that can and will absorb the massive amount of idle ISK. When the new becomes common, when the rare are rereleased, their relaive value goes down to join the rest of the scrap heap, however useful that scrap may be for any particular situation.

Eve will continue to mudflate along as it always has, the names of items will change, CCP may toss in a wrench from time to time by restructuring production inputs, but that's about it.

I've been saying it for five years and will continue to say it: Eve needs more distinct divisions of labor, more specialization, more consumables, more expressions of vanity. (expressions of vanity that do not come from the nex!)

What's unfortunate is the level of creative potential in New Eden that is wasted because it doesn't directly promote the PvP agenda.