EVE General Discussion

Because the sale has ended and the price OOG went back up and as a result the supply curve has shifted up, and quantity supplied in game goes down leading to a price increase.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion.

But ask yourself this. Why would PLEX manipulation by the EVE one percenters not happen when these same people manipulate every other commodity in the game? Or do you also not subscribe to the the theory that market manipulation is as common as PVP within a certain demographic of the player base?

I might even go so far as to say market manipulation is PVP in its purist form. Sitting on a gate shooting at haulers gets you a killmail. Sitting in Jita 4/4 lording over the Trit trade makes you king of The Forge.

Mr Epeen

in addition, the smaller plex makes it even easier to pay with plex. if for example you have enough isk for 400 plex, you could just on ccp's site. fork out a mere $5 and get the rest you need. giving you more options to pay less to play eve

Explain how you'd unwind that position without crashing the market?

Edit:

To be clear manipulation usually entails misleading people in the market. That is rather hard for a player to do. The easiest way would be to impersonate a Dev somehow, but we all know the risks inherent in that path. Really the only method I can see would be to try and corner the market. Such attempts have a rather dubious history...for those trying to corner the market.

In fact, suppose you are sitting on a veritable mountain of ISK, something crazy like 10 trillion ISK. You think, "I know I'll corner the market and anyone wanting to buy PLEX must come to me!"

So you go out and start buying up ISK like a mad man. The price starts to rise....now what is to stop people from buying PLEX and selling it for ISK at the higher prices you just created? Answer: nothing.

See, PLEX is not like say...gold or silver, which have been targets of attempts to corner. Gold and silver are not that easily produced. You first have to find a site then mine it. But PLEX....CCP can make as many PLEX as people want to buy. Strictly speaking the marginal cost is probably near zero. If somebody wanted 1,000,000 PLEX the could be made in just a few seconds. The point is, the IG price is probably a factor for OOG demand. A dramatically higher IG price will mean more people buying PLEX OOG and selling them.

So not only would you have to worry about selling all those PLEX you bought and not crashing the price, but you'll have to fight other OOG buyers who sell IG for ISK every step of the way.

And if CCP were to announce a sale as you are trying to unwind. That would not be unlike a sudden discovery of gold. That lowers the price of gold.

Sorry, just not seeing it here. It is very much like a martingale betting system. It works if you have infinite wealth...since nobody has infinite wealth it does not work.

Then there is the principle of parsimony, there are plenty of explanations for why PLEX prices have risen over time without having to resort and unverifiable claim.

That is a cartel and it has the same problem. You drive up the price by limiting supply. But that means you have a pile of technetium sitting there at the high price you don't dare sell lest the price crashes. Now at least with technetium they controlled production. And given that the demand for technetium is probably somewhat inelastic--i.e. you don't have much option if you are going to build T2 items that need technetium--they might end up with higher profits.

But PLEX is not like that. First the demand for PLEX is probably far more elastic. Price goes up, alot of players can switch back over to a paid sub. A paid sub for an entire year is close to half the PLEX price. Further, if the IG price goes up, players who need PLEX for things like character transfers can buy them OOG completely side stepping any sort of attempt to corner the PLEX market. Finally, even if you do buy up all the PLEX in game and set the price at 10 billion ISK, there is nothing you can do to stop somebody from buying PLEX OOG and putting them on the market for.....9.99 billion. To stop them you'd have to buy those PLEX for 9.99 billion each.

Other forms of manipulation do exist but are much more short term like churning, pump and dump, etc. These would not produce the long upward trend we have seen in PLEX prices.