Ccp response needed. whats being done to lower plex prices

:joy:

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I remember when plex were around 600-700 million isk. Its just inflation. The prices of everything have gone up.

PLEX price has far outstripped inflation.

No, they haven’t.
At the time when Plex was at the price ypou mentioned, you needed (almost) two of those to buy a pirate BS. Just before the recent nerf to the drop rates of corresponding BPCs, you could buy four Machs or Bhaals for the Isk from one old Plex.
There are many other examples where prices have gone down.

Regarding inflation in Eve, you should watch the economy presentation from CCP Quant from 2016.

depends how you look at it
for most things isk inflation is offset by resource inflation
and deadspace or faction loot became more common over the past years so there is inflation there too
plex isnt easily acquired through in game means and so it is hit most by isk inflation
because its not offset by resource inflation and only slightly offset by plex inflation through agency events and such which are hardly worth mentioning

everybody talking about inflation, I can see only one reason that this is true - bounties increase from nullsec farming. My income stay the same. Non combat exploration sites paying more or less the same. Combat exploration sites acutally decreased in payout due to changes few years ago. Sleepers caches are more or less the same since blue loot is bought by npc. Still lot’s of money to not care about PLEX prices only to farm more that before.

If null farming were the only way to make ISK, you’d have a point. Inflation means that activities that directly generate ISK are less valuable, while activities that generate ISK indirectly by providing value to other players (merc contracts, mining, production etc.) become more valuable.

I’d rather we had more activities that directly provide value to other players, and so would argue that inflation is a very good thing.

That said, I can see an argument to remove bounties in favor of LP rewards as a way of dis-entangling ratting from a fixed isk reward. Obviously this would need to also involve a shake up of what can be bought from npcs for isk vs lp.

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From what you wrote I should earn more because my income comes from non ISK generated activites I provide items. Now we have more ISK injecting into the economy (from anoms farming) and due to gameplay changes, like escalations, there is nothing to do with them because for example faction hulls are way cheaper than before.

Cheaper prices is not inflation.

So is it just your faction hulls that are cheaper or all products? I suspect its not everything, which means you should switch your production to something more profitable.

It’s not everything, I think the only item you’ll see price increase increasing is PLEX. So ISK supply on market increase but purchasing power of money will change only to PLEX not the whole economy, most of items stay at the same price or being cheaper due to mechanism other than inflation.

I run a small SP farm (mostly it is used to cover costs in order to keep utility accounts omega)
and I can confirm that the profits from a PURE SP farm are practically non-existant, especially compared to just about anything else you can be doing with the isk investment. they have a very high up-front cost, and the return on investment is abysmal, there is also not much flexibility, since once you have invested it can be difficult to recoup those costs for other things.

since people seem to think that its some sort of rampant cash cow, let me break down the numbers for everyone. (I will be using perimiter prices for all of these since that is the SP farming capital)

each SP farm requires 5mSP, and 2+5 implants to be viable. hitting that 5m mark takes ~2.something months. but for simplicity sake we will round that down to 2 months of omega training time. (yes you can do it with alphas, I trained up a couple that way just to see if its viable, but it takes 8 months of near daily babysitting, multiple remaps, a full extra set of +3’s and even then it falls short of the 5mil mark not worth the savings IMO)

Price to set up an SP farm farm without trading.
1000plex * 3,037,000 = 3,037,000,000
+5int implant = 120,000,000
+5mem implant = 110,000,000
total: 3,267,000,000

now that price can be brought down by using buy orders. and multi-character training certs.
so here is the bare minimum that an SP farm costs.
multi-pilot cert 485plex*2 = 970
970plex * 3,000,900 = 2,910,873,000
+5int = 107,000,000
+5mem = 104,325,000
total: 3,122,198,000

These numbers are relevant because they are the amount of isk you are needing to invest up front just to get a SP character running.

now for the montly profits and expense. each character should be able to produce ~3.9 injectors per month (i’m going to use 4 for this example). the total costs are 1 month of game time, and 4 extractors. For this part of the example rather than using buy orders for the extractors I will be using the plex - 10 extractor conversion for the “optimal” setup. I will also only be covering the least efficient and most efficient examples, since everything else will fall somewhere in between. I also won’t be covering small injectors since those move very slowly.

Without trading/aka sub-optimal.
1 month game time. 500 * 3,037,000 = 1,518,500,000
4 extractors * 341,399,000 = 1,365,596,000
total expense: 2,884,096,000

4 injectors * 772,506,000 = 3,090,024,000
total profit = 205,928,000

Optimal setup.
485plex * 3,000,900 = 1,455,436,500
4 extractors (using plex-extractor method)
1120plex * 300900 = 3,361,008,000 / 10 = 336,100,800 per
4 extractors * 336,100,800 = 1,344,403,200
Total expense: 2,799,839,700

4 injectors * 785,298,000 = 3,141,192,000
profits: 341,352,300

so those numbers might look pretty good right? 200-350mil per month “passive” income, thats almost as good as you can get from a single character doing PI in null-sec, but all you need to do is a little trading.
but lets look at the return on investment shall we, and we will just take the optimal setups from both for a best case scenario.

3,122,198,000 / 341,352,300 = ~9.2 months.

so its going to take 9 months just to earn back your original investment, add the 2 months to get the acct running in the first place. and thats nearly a year just to break even. if we extrapolate the profits out over a 2 year span, its only 4,437,579,900. or ~185mil per month after expenses on a 2 year investment… at those rates you may as well do HS PI, you will make more per month and the investment cost is much lower.

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Good, no idea why passive SP income should be possible in the first place. It’s not even playing, it so unbelievable stupid concept.
I thought PLEX was raising because of SP trading.

You know the funny thing…
Your maths proves it’s actually more profit to do it using an alpha character.
Since 8 months of training = 0 cost other than the +5 implants, meaning month 9 you return 110 Mil assuming you use the optimal method, while month 10 you turn 340. Month 11 is when the Omega character from the start finally catches up to making profit, but you are about 500 mil richer using an alpha after a year than an omega.
It’s a little more work too sure, but for anyone who remembers alarm clock training, or the 24 hour omega queue that won’t be that bad unless you are trying to scale it up to hundreds.

your right, it is, but having done it myself, its not a “little” more work, its quite a lot of work. slapping in some implants, setting a 2 month queue and then forgetting about it takes 10 minutes. alpha method has you logging in almost daily to update queues. requires a full set of +3’s on top of the +5’s, a whole bunch more skill books, and a lot more planning to optimize your remaps. (it almost reminded me of the pre-skill queue days since I started having to set alarms and reminders for myself for when I was at under 24hrs remaining)

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That is still the case or at least it contributes some part:

  • You have the people who started farming early and already recovered their initial investment and are totally satisfied with the now possible profit.
  • And you have those who extract SP just to keep expenses for their Omega status below the full price of 500 Plex.

Just starting new SP farms from scratch is work and require a lot of investment which isn’t necessarily worth it (as Bjorn Tyrson’s very nice calculations showed us).

If the price is being manipulated it is not being done so by speculators. Speculators speculate–i.e. they take risks based on information they do not think is incorporated into the market price.

As for PLEX there is no evidence of manipulation other than: Oh I don’t like that price.

What exploit is that? The PLEX market is very thick so for somebody to get in there and manipulate the price would necessitate enormous amounts of ISK.

Again…how would such manipulation work?

Suppose I have an Awesome Plan™ to manipulate PLEX prices. Lets not worry about the details, lets set that rather enormous part of this discussion to the side and just skip to the next step. So my Awesome Plan™ has driven up the price of PLEX. Now I have made alot of ISK on paper. How do I turn those paper earnings into liquid ISK? If I start selling lots of PLEX then I risk reducing the price and wiping out my earnings before I can sell all my PLEX? What is to stop other players from noting that price spike and selling into the bull market I have created reducing the price and wiping out my earnings? What is to stop other players from buying ISK for RL money and selling them for the ISK to take advantage of my hard work and the ISK I’ve put at risk? And last but not least, CCP…what is to stop them from saying, “Oooh, look a spike in PLEX prices if we have a sale now more people than normal might buy PLEX,” and thereby reducing the price and wiping out my earnings? What is to prevent all 3 of these things from happening?

What I’m saying is that even if we get the part of “How” there is still a fair amount of risk.

Market manipulation is part of the game.

Now, how would one go about manipulating the market?

Also, yes, one can say the CSM minutes hinted at manipulation, but given most people do not know what in the feck speculators do…why should we conclude the people in that meeting knew what was manipulation vs. speculation? The notion of offshoring is a type of speculation and in the long run it is NOT A BAD THING. It will, in the long run, reduce the price of PLEX.

Which is something I’ve been saying for awhile now. But everybody else is like, “No! It is free ISK!” and other idiotic nonsense. I’ve even seen it referred to as and ISK source.

Considering that inflation–i.e. the CPI–is a type of average…this is kind of a meh point.

Ahhh if only life were so simple and easy we’d all be billionaires IRL.

Nobody has really mentioned that the breaking up of PLEX might have had an effect by itself. Before you had to buy 1 billion worth of PLEX. That is a fairly high price tag. Now they cost about 3 million. That latter cost is one many more players can afford. So it is possible that some players previously locked out of the PLEX market due to the high price are now in the PLEX market as “small time buyers”. That would increase demand as well driving up the price all other considerations constant.

Funny how people often forget this part of things. “Well, that time costs you nothing!” Holy ■■■■ people really? So if your employer came along and said, “Hi Nevyn, just to let you know we’ve decided to wipe out all your vacation hours, thanks bye.” You’d be totally cool with that because leisure time has zero value right?

Feck me people. Value and price are not always the same thing, and things that have value may not have an obvious price.

I do need to call you out a little on a misleading answer. It is CCP interference that has exacerbated the issue.

It is CCP that created citadel markets with zero brokerage fees possible.
This enabled speculators to buy and sell vast quantities between themself to deliberately inflate the price for profit and wealth growth.

It is CCP that created an increased demand for Plex through skins, extractors, and other goodies.

It is CCP that issued a Plex split that makes it possible to manipulate the market and create Plex walls at extremely low cost, and brought more people into “amateur “ speculation.

Now What people are asking for is for CCP to balance their interference in the market (by altering mechanics) to return things to a saner level. Probably the last action you should take is trying to fix a price through putting a few Plex on the market (the speculators will just flood purchase any sensible amount you introduce).

A more logical course of action is to ease some of the pressures you have created. The most effective change would be to ensure Speculators have a cost to “flipping” at ever higher and higher levels. This would be through a minimum 5% Brokerage fee excess on Plex no matter where the buy/sell order is placed.

This will slow down some of the excesses, giving you time to have a more holistic plan.

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