For those of you who live under a rock, ISboxing has now been effectively banned by CCP and accounts still using the software will start being banned as of the beginning of January 2015, although they will not take any historic uses of the software into account. You can read the full announcement here.
The effects would seem to have already hit the EvE online markets, as the Jita PLEX market is down 100 million (or roughly 10%) since the announcement.
How low will it drop? Who knows. I forecast that people will now start to rush to offload their PLEX before they are left on the wrong side of the curve, IE having paid more for them than they are now worth. If the PLEX market is now indeed on the downswing, after many months of being in an unprecedented upswing, then now will be the time to dump your stockpiled PLEX. However this could just be a temporary lull in the market and the prices may go back up just as quickly.
The current downswing is good for Eve as it makes PLEX’ing ones account more realistic, as people start to re-evaluate the time to grind for the ISK vs the real life cost of subbing in out of game currency.
I also expect PLEX prices to eventually even out as the in game purchases start to decrease due to many unsubbing ISboxing accounts. The price will also start to decrease as less people buy time codes to convert into PLEX to sell on the open market.
Another effect we may see is the increase in the cost of ships and modules, as ore increases in price due to all the ISboxer miners unsubbing or becoming less efficient due to the controlling player having to actually CLICK on each screen (shocker!).
We will keep you up to date with the prices and effects of this announcement as they roll in.
You can follow the PLEX market trend here
UPDATE:
PLEX prices continue to drop as people start to dump piles onto the market, one can only assume these are speculators looking to drop their previously acquired stock before they lose to much. Sell prices are at 845 mill (155 million lower than after downtime today) and buy orders have dropped to 840 mill.
UPDATE 2
So it would seem some brave souls have bought up a huge amount of PLEX pushing the price back up. This is a interesting move as the demand will effectively be halved, not to mention the increase in supply with the spike in new players joining since the latest trailer.
UPDATE 3
So it would seem besides the best efforts of the speculators to buff the prices back up, they still continue to drop. There is no getting around simple supply and demand, unfortunately people are pumping Isk in trying to save their investments none the less.
