Other than you can get it with RL money, PLEX is no difference than other in game item.
It does not generate or destroy ISK by itself.
PLEX market activities is actually ISK sink because tax is collected on all market orders.
So PLEX is not an ISK faucet.
Some major ISK sources(faucet) are:
Bounties
Commodity
Insurance
Incursion
Mission payout
PLEX It is not a cause of inflation, if that is what OP trying to target.
I am wondering why OP is not targeting bounty payout, which show the highest increase in the graph, instead on something that is NOT shown in the graph.
Commodity like blue sleeper stuff from wormholes and Overseer personal effects are worth a lot of ISK, but they are not as direct ISK payouts, because you have to store them, transport and sell them somewhere first. They have potential to generate more and better (explosions and looting) content than ISK bounties.
I too prefer the commodities and LP payouts over direct ISK payouts. LP balance out when to many players do the same thing and commodities can be blown up.
This suggests that the amount sold on the in game market would be unchanging, since this is not the case there is little reason to believe this claim that supply is fixed.
Letâs give you a very simple example ⌠you invest 10 bucks into a banana token which allows you to redeem 10kg bananas in your local food store ⌠today. The dealer gets your one banana token, you get the 10kg bananas and you are done with bananas for the next month.
Time has passed and banana inflation happened so you now get 20kg bananas for your one banana token you bought for 10 bucks. You go to your dealer, redeem the bananas and ⌠are done for the next two month. Hence the dealer gets only 0.5 token per month from you as 1 token before. The supply of tokens has decreased because itâs value in bananas went up.
Yes, demand goes down as price goes up (ceteris paribus). But on the supply side it is not as simpleâŚ
If I need X ISK and that translates into say N PLEX at price P and and price Pâ (which is higher) I might buy say N-2 PLEX, so yeah I might buy less PLEX to sell in game for ISK. However, there are other considerations, suppose the higher prices also induce another player to buy more ISK so that he wonât have to buy as many in the future. Also, there are those who might not have bought PLEX at the lower price, but now buy at the higher price. Additionally, those who are buying PLEX and holding them as investments might decide to cash out at the higher price and then wait to buy again at a lower price. So we have a number of effects that say more PLEX and really only one that says less.
Now, keep in mind the above is looking at supply and how suppliers will react. It is not meant to offer why the price goes up or down. The price goes up or down because there are changes in the supply and demand functions. For example, supply might go up in game because demand OOG goes up. Demand out of game might go up for a variety of reason the most common is a PLEX sale.
One should be careful reasoning from a price change. For example, what might happen to the price of pork is the cost of pig feed goes up? The typical response is that the price of pork would go up. But a more complete answer would be as follows:
The price of pig feed goes up, pushing the âmarginalâ pig farmers out of the market.
The marginal pig farmers slaughter all their pigs.
There is more pork on the market.
Price of pork goes down.
Once the marginal farmers are out of the market, the price of pork would go up, and most likely past itâs previous level since there would be less supply at all price levels than prior to the increase in pig feed.
So the typical answer is not wrong, it just is missing some of the more interesting things going on.
