The 20kg for $10 suggests deflation not inflation. With inflation my $10 would buy say 5kg.
As for buying enough for 2 months when there is a price decrease that is true. However, that depends. Why not buy enough for 3 or even 4 or more months, especially if I expect the price change to be temporary. Granted, bananas are not a great example as they are not easily stored…
Lets use some numbers here. Suppose PLEX are worth 100 ISK. Then the price changes to 200 ISK. And I am looking to finance whatever in game and it costs 2,000 ISK. Yes, before I’d buy 20 PLEX and with the price increase I’d only have to buy 10. However, for the same price I can fund my project AND have an extra 2,000 ISK as well. So it isn’t clear I’d just buy 10. Interestingly we see this with energy usage. For example, suppose you buy a car that gets 2x the gas mileage. Does your gasoline consumption go down by half? Usually not. That increased fuel efficiency often leads people to drive more and thus not see the naive energy savings. In fact, this rebound effect can be so strong that energy consumption actually increases leading to Jevon’s Paradox.
Second, if I expect the price increase to be temporary I might buy more to take advantage of the current higher price.
Further, my buddy @Cade_Windstalker might look at PLEX and say, “I’ll buy me some too and sell them as well.”
And then my pal @Scipio_Artelius sees that high price and says, “Time to cash out my PLEX investment, and wait for the next downswing to reinvest.”
So we have a number of reasons to expect supply to go up when the price goes up…and only one instance for it to go down.
For some reason it is believed that people buying PLEX just because they can and not to buy something in particular in game…
As result some believe that if someone can get more ISK per RL money they will do spend more RL money.
For me it looks quite the opposite: if i need some amount of ingame money and i can spend less RL money for it i will spend less RL money.
Bananas are the currency inflating and the token is stable (in Tipa’s example)… and typing this makes me feel really stupid.
There are different approaches when it comes to spending money: You might look for the currently best option within your budget, the best option mid-term or the cheapest option available that gets you what you want. It depends a lot on the personal situation: how you weigh the importance of things and how much money you can spent.
Buying Plex is of course a totally optional expense. This normally means that if you are seriously considering buying some, you have money to spare. If not, there is something not quite right. (Side note: I saw an offer for financing plans for supporter packs (vanity items only) for another game. Who is really going in debt for things like this?)
Buying virtual goods (in this case even a generic one) is probably one of the expenses that people normally reflect the least upon, at least when it comes to the decision whether to buy or not. Which offer exactly, may be a different matter as long as there are offers of really different things and not just more or less of the same. In case of Plex it’s probably mostly about how much they are willing to spend at that time.
well thats a whole different discussion but it does happen and its a real issue of business ethics in the modern age
its the same reason people have gambling addictions
I will concede right from the start that you are of course correct if PLEX supply is completely elastic, but while you say there is no reason to believe it is inelastic, there is also no reason to believe it is perfectly elastic.
Let’s compare Eve to a theme park (yes, I know blasphemy for a sandbox game), one where you like to go every Friday night to play games and ride rides with your friends. You can buy a season’s pass for the park and some of your friends do, but you can also buy a pack of 10 tickets for $20 to pay for rides and games and you prefer to do this for your night’s entertainment.
If the park management decides to change the ticket price and double the number of tickets to 20 per $20 pack, you are not going to spend twice as long at the theme park with your friends spending tickets. Sure, you might take an extra go on the bumper cars, or play an extra game or two, but since you are there to play with your friends you are likely going to keep on doing what you were doing and just buying a pack of ticket half as often.
Yes, other people might start coming to the park because they get more value for a ticket, and over time you might increase your usage of tickets, but on the surface, per existing customer, the theme park is getting less money from you by giving you more tickets than before. So a priori, there
is no way to know whether such a change will be a net benefit for the theme park owner or not as it depends on unknowable and unpredictable changes in customer behaviour, both existing customers and potential. Certainly, if you push the thought experiment to the extreme and have the theme park sell a million tickets for $20, they would just go out of business as one person could supply the ticket needs of every potential customer within driving distance.
With PLEX, the situation is made more complex as some people are unwilling to pay and are only in the theme park because they are good at earning ‘tickets’ by playing the games. If you kick them out by raising the price of entry using tickets, other customers might decide an empty theme park isn’t as fun and stop showing up and buying season’s passes and tickets of their own.
We clearly lack the data to answer these questions, but to me it is not at all obvious that an increasing PLEX price is somehow automatically good for CCP’s bottom line. In fact, at some point it is obvious to me that is in fact detrimental as the weekend warriors who buy a PLEX or two to whelp some ships on the weekend need less and less. I don’t think the supply side of PLEX is as elastic as you do, and I don’t think there is a large cadre of Eve players who don’t buy PLEX with cash because they don’t trade for sufficient ISK. In fact, I think that majority of the market is supplied by players who use PLEX to fund their weekend explosions and while some might start flying more expensive things, most fly whatever the FC tells them and they will just buy less and less as the ISK:PLEX ratio increases.
Ah well, CCP won’t tell us the data we need to figure this one out so that means we should also probably not worry about it too much. Still, I view PLEX prices going down as the PCU is going up the sign of a healthy game and we seem to be trending that way now that the summer is over. Of that I am glad.
ccp can supply as many plex as is required
there is no limit to the number they can sell or the number of people they can sell them to
ccp arent selling 1 million plex for $20 dollars
but if they needed to they could
i think this would only happen under extreme circumstances like in zimbabwe where inflation rose by 500bn% until they scrapped the local currency
Of course CCP can print as much PLEX as they want. It is the $$$ out there to buy those PLEX I am discussing. I am assuming CCP is not going to print PLEX without selling them for real money to a player as they claim to do.
I think you are missing the point though. If PLEX prices went to 1T ISK per PLEX, most players would just buy one, sell it for ISK and never buy one again - they could fly whatever they want for years and years until they quit. Of course that is silly and never would never happen, but using it as an extreme example of the inelastic nature of the PLEX supply I think is instructive. Just making ISK cheaper is not necessarily going to result in more PLEX for cash sales.
what kind of player can sub with plex for 1tn a month
the price wouldnt go that high unless players had the means to generate the isk to support that cost
the market balances itself
the plex can only sit at a price level which demand can support otherwise the plex seller will see no return on his cash investment
they have to meet in the middle
Yes, I agree, but again, you are missing the point. The point is there is a value of ISK:PLEX exchange where players will have sufficient ISK for their in-game purposes. Increasing the amount of ISK you give a player at this point only serves to make them buy less PLEX, or PLEX less frequently, rather than increasing demand for people buying PLEX from CCP.
I won’t claim to know what that price is, and maybe it is so comically large that it isn’t even relevant, but it exists and it is even plausible to me that we are already in that range. Dozens or even hundreds of the smaller sub-cap ships can be bought with a 500 PLEX now, so giving real-world PLEX buyers more ISK for their PLEX at this point only will decrease the amount of money they give CCP, not increase it. Maybe that decrease would be offset by new PLEX customers enticed by the higher amount of ISK they get per PLEX, but then again, maybe not.
The good news is PLEX prices have stabilized and are down from their summer highs while inventory on the market has crept back up from the near-zero we saw at the low points in the summer. This suggests to me that more PLEX is being bought from CCP and finding its way to the in-game market which I take as a sign player interest in the game is increasing and thus is a good thing.
okay lets talk in hypotheticals for a moment
lets say i buy 1 plex from ccp per month to buy 10 ships
that is my staple playstyle
now if one plex buys me 20 ships i wont buy a plex every month
ill buy one every 2 months
because it buys me 2 months worth of ships
but if all players do this we essentially halve the demand for plex from ccp
so they only sell half as many plexes
this also means that half as many plexes are being supplied to the market
which means the cost goes up to a price that the non-paying player can’t afford
and so we have to lower the price on the isk market to a point where we can sell it again
bringing us back down to 10 ships a month
this is obviously a very basic explanation and doesnt account for intricacies at all
Ok, but…
trade volume doesnt seem to change, as buyers and sellers volume doesnt seem to change. Price does seems to change (up), so imho it could be related more to increased availability of cash than scarcity of PLEX.
I’m reusing a link from this thread: PLEX
Yes, I am referring to the sell offer volume. It is up to about 4-500k on offer from the dangerously low sub 100k we saw multiple times over the summer.
Only 500k on offer is still low by historical standards, but at least it is moving in the right direction as compared to June/July along with the PCU.
i thought we were talking isk PLEX price…
can you offer any trend-data for the second statement? PLEX prices are been going up, while carrier ratting (for instance) its being nerfed for a couple patches…
you can check ccp devblogs for economical data concerning ratting bounties
carriers arent the only ratting ships though
also have to consider the viability of subcaps such as marauders
pirate ships mach and rattle
and of course ishtar and navy vexor
