let’s be honest, yes we can do plex to in-game conversions very easily, and on more than one occasion it’s been done to bait media into thinking people dumped ludicrous amounts of money towards a giant fleet fight, but I’ m talking more linearly. from a timeline perspective.
I ended up finding something that can be used to linearly determine how much an isk sizes to a US dollar: Water.
water is, at least when i first checked, probably one of the only things that can be an accurate gauge for econmic comparisons, and here’s why:
it can be directly compared since it is an exact match, something i can pick up from both universes and say for certain it’s the exact same thing. (distilling water is an extremely simple process and it gives pure water)
they have an actual worth, since they are a P1 material they can be put to use, giving them a more accurate value than tobacco, dairy products and frozen plant seeds.
so the way the math starts is dealing with the fact a unit of water is 0.38 m3.
turn into cubic centimeters - 0.38 m3 = 380000 cm3
cm3 is one to one with milliliters, so divide by 1000 to get 380 Liters.
i’m sticking to american statstics so i have to convert to gallons, which 380 L is now 100.385 gallons.
following website was my provider of data, if you’re following along i should point out that they give the average monthly cost based on a family of four using x gallons per person. http://www.circleofblue.org/waterpricing/
TLDR got an average of 17.33 cents per gallon.
100.385 gallons X $00.1733 = $17.40 US.
Evemarketer comes back with a 400 ISK jita buy. this means that a US dollar converts to 22.99 ISK and 1 ISK converts to 4 cents US.
playing with those figures…
29,361,256,324.75 ISK X 0.04 = $1,174,450,252.99 US (water)
need a capital one so…
= $3,260,586,149.79 US (water)
and for my personal favorite…
= $4,874,342,699.38 US (water)
Bill gates has a net worth of 90 billion and he’s no longer richest man on earth, but he could fly a Chremoas if he wanted to.
I tried this before but had no luck but a bunch of trolls that convert us dollar to plex value.
A ISK is suppose to be some tremendous amount of currency, so when you as a pilot believe you are buying something super cheap, it is actually worth billions if not more in normal currency.
The problem stems from using a conversion rate based on a planet which is 70% covered by water, in the wealthiest country, which has ample supplies of fresh water, and where water supply is treated as a service and not a ‘product’.
Slightly more accurate comparisons would be obtained by pricing water delivered to the middle of the Australian outback, or the center of the Sahara. Or the cost of setting up a desalination plant on a small island with a smallish population and amortizing out the cost of the potable water it produces over 20 years.
Fairly more accurate would be the cost of a unit of water on the moon, or more likely, on an asteroid in the belt.
Your base comparison doesn’t involve water that was purified and bottled on an extraterrestrial planet, lifted into orbit, flown across 10 systems by a freighter, and sold in a space station - fighting off pirates every step of the way!.
I love how comparing PLEX to $ for value = stupid yet comparing USA ( my brief look on your website looked to be USA only) water cost somehow makes valid comparison? Value will vary greatly on the scarcity/ abundance in other countries and currency conversion. Although the USA in me says who cares about anyone else? Murcia!
EVE’s economic reports, last i checked only focused on relatively simple GDP statistics, which covers the production and consumption of goods. water in the eve universe, on the fact a unit is 400 isk, is relatively cheap in comparison, even if a long process is put into it, a side effect of it being a P1 material. 6 of 8 planet types can make water, and can do so at a relatively healthy clip.
You’ll be right that i could pick a different set of data to sample how much a unit of water is on earth, but not where you want someone to factor logistics into a price. it already is factored into the price.
Why not use a current currency standard, gold. Or even sterling silver.
Or if you want to stick with your water use… do it like the Japanese economy was once based on the Koku, which is the amount of rice needed to feed 1 man 1 day.
So let us go with the amount of water needed to keep one person alive and healthy per day. That comes out to about 3.7L per man and 2.7L per woman or about 3.2L per person average… I will go up to 4L per person per day just for ease of math. Using EVE Market… water is going for about 350isk per unit. So with your math… you can supply 5 people with 2 units of water in EVE for 1 day.
So 700isk/5 = 140isk per day in water.
Now 4L is roughly 1 gallon… or about 17c per gallon as you said.
350/4 = 175isk per gallon… so 175/17= 10isk per cent roughly…
Without factoring inflation or any other causes of economic hikes, ISK isnt worth a whole lot.
BUT seeing as we have a real exchange rate USD/EUD:PLEX:ISK.
except its still wrong, as I says 1 isk is suppose to be worth billions if not trillions. In lore the common folk and small companies make a normal currency like any of that you would find on earth, the large companies that trade offworld and deal in huge amounts of cash with those offworld items is in isk. when you buy something that sounds so simple and cheap as a pilot, a common man is no where near being able to afford that. a unit of trit for example, while cheap for us as a pilot, no so cheap as a common person.
People keep doing a “well if I buy a plex for 19.95 and turn it into isk at 1.6b, I get x amount isk per dollar.”
The biggest factor most people are not taking into account is inflation. The average rate of inflation currently is just under 1% per year for the USD.
So let us assume EVE takes place 10,000 years in the future.
Using the previous math using water as a base of value.
10isk per USD. So at the rate of 1% per yer for 10,000years. The simplest version (and is wrong) comes out to about 1000USD per ISK. The more complex version which takes the value and compounds it every year for 10,000 years is way more than 1000USD per ISK… but I dont have that kind of time right now. Then there is an online calculator which I am hoping is WAY wrong… saying the inflation rate in 10,000years of .10USD at 1% rate of inflation per year…
$1,635,828,711,189,040,000,569,104,340,328,246,467,887,104.00!!!
So if that were true 1 ISK is worth $1,635,828,711,189,040,000,569,104,340,328,246,467,887,104.00.
I think you missed the point. All those logistics are already factored in, in EVE. That’s why it is 400 ISK. You compared the price of Purified-Water-in-Space (logistics in) to that of ‘Water on a water planet, where you can pick it up in your hands pretty much anywhere’.
When you came up with 1 ISK = 4 cents is where you should have clued in that you had taken a wrong turn somewhere.
you can’t use gold or silver, because those aren’t readily available and 100% useful. an angel gold tag may be a LP store currency, but because there is not enough information to say it’s A - pure gold or B - 0.1 M3 exactly (probably rounded up so it actually takes up space in a cargo-hold).
this wasn’t the point, plex conversions aren’t a linear exchange.
