TBH I would take it quite personally if Eve died the same month I rejoined after a 10yr break.
I’m also inclined to look at recent changes vs. long-term EVE trends and make guesstimates of what it might mean for EVE past, present and future.
However for the specifics of this OP, I’d just point out that there’s been plenty of Septembers through October (November even) where we didn’t get much of a ‘summer is over’ population bump. There’ve been multiple times when SP farming has been declared non-profitable. Plex prices have been ridiculously high (relative to previous trends) at times, then come back down.
I’d say Equinox reactions have mostly ranged from “meh” to “what is this crap?”, but that’s fairly par for the course for CCP. Equinox hasn’t really given players more reason to log in, but it definitely hasn’t killed anything.
3 Likes
2 Likes
I fail to see how PI mass-alts have any effect on plex price.
I agree that isk faucets increase (like CCP did recently and why they increased industry tax - but then reduced market taxes which is a complete nonsense) increases the plex value, but PI is not isk faucet (instead isk sink in HS)
Any Omega account will have an effect on PLEX pricing - along with all the other PLEX sinks.
yeah but then even if the alt does nothing, this still applies. That’s not specific to PI.
You’re right of course. I don’t know how prevalent PI farm alts are compared to SP farm alts. They’re not very profitable in high-sec, so I imagine most would be in null/low.
I mean, the activity itself does not impact the price of plex.
The SP farm, in addition to the plex required for omega, also needs plex for the extractor.
The bot farm, uses the isk faucet that is anom running and therefore adds isk to the game, which leads to inflation. Though we don’t see generalized inflation (only luxury for plex) so not sure if really impactful.
And yes PI si not really interesting in HS.
I’m not sure you realize what the sinks and faucets are, here. PI alts, SP alts, and multibox alts have been around for years, so they’re not driving price changes overmuch. Nor does “adding content to the game” somehow add more Plex into the system or change Plex pricing.
It sounds like you’re trying to peg unrelated effects to your personal pet peeves.
Plex is consumed by the people who would rather Plex accounts than pay cash, or buy other items from the NES store. So unless you’re positing that there has been a recent surge in Plex’d alt accounts, they aren’t driving the market higher.
It’s possible CCP has had a string of good NES sales so more Plex has been consumed, reducing supply. Or it’s possible (as in the past) that some very large buyers are buying and hording Plex to manipulate the market, as we saw back in 2019. I think this isn’t likely as the trend line has been stable for a fair while now.
The most likely reason for Plex price increases (which grew rapidly in 2022 and more slowly since then), is that the ‘faucets’ have slowed down and supply has decreased. That implies players who used to buy Plex and sell it for ISK to fund their playstyle have cut back.
Either a significant portion of those players have stopped playing, or find Plex too expensive for the ISK return, or switched to a less ISK-intensive playstyle, or are using some other game mechanic to supply their ISK needs.
So the actual question would be “Starting in early 2022, what significantly changed the incoming supply of Plex, and/or significantly increased the number of accounts using Plex for their Omega time vs. subscriptions, and/or significantly increased the spending of Plex in the NES store on other items?”.
That will bring you a lot closer to an answer than “SP farms and massmultiboxers must die!”.
5000+ active players that perhaps stopped playing and buying PLEX over the summer? (Equinox, loss of daily activities, initial reduced AIR rewards, lack of player events for the Empire days, unhappiness with initial SKINR rollout)
Or maybe the mass ban that recently occurred where a lot of ‘whales’ were (inadvertently?) swept up along with it?
Maybe a lot of players simply speculating on PLEX?
Excellent ! Along with the special deals, £100 will now buy 16.5 Billion ISK…compared with the 14 Billion or so this time last year. What’s not to like ?
Sure - if you’re converting cash to ISK higher PLEX prices are awesome (at least in the short term until everything in-game catches up in price). If you’re trying to PLEX your Omega, less so.
But for those who already have a large stock of stuff, the increase in prices is effectively an investment profit. My Nightmare, which I have not used in a year or so, sits in dock and has made me 400m ISK in that time, for example.
But that’s the inevitable consequence of trying to get for free something that those who are paying for it are getting cheaper and cheaper. The two have to balance out. If you are trying to get something purely at a cost in time, then the thing that increases is that time.
You have to try and look at the context. PI and massmultiboxmining are activities where players (real persons) have created lots of extra characters and accounts that otherwise wouldn’t even exist. Just like with the SP-farms. These accounts are created and maintained solely for the purpose of making profit with them and of course they are paid for with PLEX. Those setups are made to generate more ISK than needed to buy 500 PLEX to omega the account and everything beyond that is free cash. So you have people with 20, 30, 60 PI farms, people with 20 mining accounts, 5 homefront accounts, 10 ganking accounts, people with godknowshowmany SP-farms. All those eat up PLEX every month, they are creating a demand that pushes the price upwards. It’s true that these are around for years, but statistically the number of accounts per person is rising since the beginning of EVE. Thats a rather slow upwards trend indeed, but CCP even added another PLEX sink, which is the SKINR tool and I assume thats the reason for the latest short-term increase from 5M to 5.5M since the announcement of Equinox/SKINR. At least I can tell that I have already spent some PLEX on it and many other guys of my corp have too. Over the whole playerbase, I’d think that especially in the first months the amount of PLEX eaten up by finalizing skins is high enough to drive the price upwards. Multiplied by the speculation of those who anticipated this price-increase and have bought large stockpiles.
That being said, any change that makes mass-accounting unprofitable will lead to many of those accounts being dropped back to Alpha status, not eating up PLEX from the market any more and thus every massmultiboxminer that gives up helps to lower the PLEX price again. May all those SP-farms, multibox-miners, multibox-gankers, multibox-homefronters rest in peace and go back to 2 accounts only, I’d very appreciate that.
2 Likes
There are 30K online as I type this. Where’s this ‘missing 5k’ ?
It was closer to 35-36k pre-Equinox.
Methinks you are plucking figures out of the air to suit your narrative. I don’t think I have ever seen it at 36K. For a long time it was hovering around the 20K to 25K level…so the current figures are definitely an increase. Eve has to be the only game where the figures can go up and people complain about them going down.
1 Like
Look at the numbersf rom Jan’23 through Jan’24, then compare them to Jul’23 to Jul’24. This time last year we were averaging roughly 30k players daily and we saw a slight dip from last July through August. Compare this with the quite noticeable dip this July and August. For the better part of the year (January onwards) we’ve been averaging close to 35k active players.
Hopefully the numbers will start trending up. Fingers crossed…
What if PI toons would exist otherwise ? Like, PI + SP + scout + research .
Yeah that would be stupid otherwise.
That’s called scalability. As long as the isk cost of plexing is low enough, and the management cost is not too high, it’s worth it to increase the number of accounts. But this goes also the other way around : if the price of plex is too high ,they stop and therefore the price of plex should go down.
Also, they don’t use 500 plex. With a few alts ,going for yearly deals is way better (like 300 plex/month average)
{citation required}
Are you taking bots into account ?
Don’t do that. Compare for the same period, otherwise it’s meaningless.
roflol