Disclaimer: This is part 2 of a series written by Alyxportur. To read part 1 click here
There are two interrelated problems with EVE’s current economy:
ISK-printing involves the faucets of currency-creation within the game. There is no bank or government in the game to regulate currency value. The closest things to this are CCP and PLEX. CCP has in both fact and space legend modified the economy by selling confiscated PLEX, seizing RMT’d ISK and items, and on occasion modifying the current ISK faucets in the game (NPC bounties, mission rewards, etc.) which actually create additional ISK.
PLEX is the gold standard of EVE. If a player plans on a sabbatical or knows he won’t be able to login to the game for a while, he wisely converts his ISK into PLEX. Why? We all know why. ISK continues to lose its value. If you buy 10x PLEX at 800mil and come back to play when they’re later worth 900mil, you’ve gained 1bil worth of ISK. EVE players operate on the assumption (and fact) that PLEX value increases over time.
The increasing value of PLEX is actually the effect of a cause: ISK is worth less—-not to be confused with worthless—-over time. On account of this, PLEX is the item through which in-game items and ISK are valued.
Assuming that someone loses a 36bil Nyx+fittings, that PLEX are worth 800mil on the Jita sell market, and that the best US dollar price one can purchase PLEX at is ~$17.50 (the top three group rates are all the same per PLEX at the moment) then he’s lost ~$787.28 worth of durable goods. If PLEX are worth 900mil on the Jita sell market, then his loss is only ~$699.80.
Bluntly, the higher the price of PLEX on the market, the cheaper it may become for a player to replace his losses with US dollars by buying PLEX and selling it on the market. I say ‘may’ because the assumption depends on the ISK-price tag for a Nyx and the fittings to stay the same and supercapital hull prices seem to have been relatively stable since the last ~1.5 years that I’ve been familiar with them.
From a meta-game perspective, higher PLEX prices can be a good thing for CCP. As in-game prices climb, players buy more PLEX to sell on the market and get ISK to fuel their addiction—-‘hobby’—-except that such a balance doesn’t seem to have been happening. PLEX prices have climbed and the amount of PLEX actually listed on the market has decreased.
Less PLEX are making it onto the market. Yes, that’s right! Fewer PLEX are making it onto the market. Thanks to eve-marketdata.com and some spreadsheet charts, it is possible to know for a fact that fewer PLEX are making it onto the market [period]
This means that BEFORE players purchase market PLEX for any of those five other activities, there’s fewer PLEX to buy at all. I believe that this—-in part—-is what has led to the rise in PLEX prices, and while I have no idea what the statistics are on players doing:
I believe that most of the remaining blame can be accorded to ISK-printing. Nullsec NPC bounties are likely the biggest contributors to the manufacturing of money in EVE. The mechanic is a process without much regulation on the part of CCP. Whether it is purposeful or CCP misunderstands economics, the unregulated printing of money is bad. The mentality of a player who needs to buy a PLEX is: rat more until I can afford the PLEX. This is currency printing outsourced to ratters. The more they rat, the more ISK there is in the game and it is only drained/balanced by the amount of items destroyed within the game.
A Ferengi may say that ‘war is good for business’ but ‘Peace is good for business’ also, and a lot cheaper to deal with both in time and ISK. Fozziesov intended to shake up the proverbial ‘blue donut’ but misjudged players. Bitter enemies signing truces is nothing new, but unlike the Ferengis’ love of risk vs. reward, nullsec does not need to risk the stability of space. Non-interference pacts and non-aggression pacts ensure greater stability for all parties involves. Consider the income an alliance might have when it owns a whole region or two of space in Fozziesov and has very little to pay out in SRP compared to Dominion sov? Yes, the monthly value of undisputed r64s is great, but the cumulative amount of ISK ‘printed’ in an alliance’s secure space via ratting can easily dwarf that in a week.
Part of the extended problem involved with the ‘faucets’ for ISK that exist in nullsec and the rest of EVE is that destruction is not matching income. A player, whose carrier is tackled and killed after earning 8bil in a month, has 5bil left after replacing it and buying a PLEX to keep his account going. The price of PLEX itself it not a solution to the problem either. One player pays 900mil for a PLEX, but that money is not gone (unless CCP starts selling off confiscated PLEX, and there are a finite number of those).
Consider that it is very easy for current nullsec ratters to make ISK. If they want more, they rat more. Now consider a miner. If he wants to make more ISK, he has to mine more, but there has to be someone who wants to buy his ore/minerals. A ratter doesn’t need to worry about anything beyond directly earning the ISK he needs, and buying the PLEX he wants. Do you see now why the price of minerals can drop? Worse, do you see why the price of PLEX has risen and will continue to rise?
In the mechanics of Fozziesov, ratting and mining have become valuable to the defense of space. This is terrible. It encourages ratting and mining to occur even more than in Dominion. While the first layer of Fozziesov is easy enough (a single, simple reinforcement with an interceptor) capturing sov is certainly NOT simpler than Dominion, just easier for smaller group to attempt versus a larger group. The new mechanics have reduced a simple target, shoot (and rinse repeat in a few days) mechanic to a myriad of capture-flag-objectives better suited to Faction Warfare than a doughnut of space where political power and overriding greed—-remember, peace is best for business—-still determines the shape of things.
To prevent harassment as much as possible, every system you own needs its index max’d out. Now, as noted before, mining carries with it some measure of check/balance. The value of the ore you mine is dependent upon the demand for the minerals used to build things. If nothing needs to be built because of no large-scale sov wars, you will need to mine more to buy your PLEX. There is a cap to how much each individual can mine though. You can’t mine 24/7. This is the same cap placed on ratters. They can’t rat 24/7.
As mentioned before though, the increasing amount of ISK from more ratting, and a possible downturn in the mineral market are not the sole threat to/driving force behind PLEX prices. Abundance has decreased. Fewer players are actually buying PLEX with US dollars to put on the market and sell to everyone else.
While fixes to NPC bounties and mineral consumption/demand are possible within the game mechanics (though likely more interruptive than a new sov system), there is no patch that will make players spend more US dollars on PLEX.
(This ends the second part in a series on the EVE economy, its effects, and the driving forces behind it all.)
My economic charts used eve-marketdata.com via: http://eve-marketdata.com/price_check.php?type_id=29668
