Didnt Serenity died because its playerbase were all in the same alliance and there was nothing to do except mining? A big blue doughnut across the Eve.
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CorrectâŚ
Also, correct.
However, if you have to quintuple the number of bots in operation and that means more of your bots are caught and banned then you have to train up new characters and new equipment and if you use ISK to do that, that is a cost. It is a cost in that that ISK is not being sold, but is being plowed back into your operation to keep it up and running.
But what amount of the bots is actually banned before it earns on itself two, three times or more? We dont know. Would have to ask some RMTer.
Also, but the road to that went thu botting to get titan blobs and supremacy building. People were in null, basically all of them, PLEX was outrageously expensibe and the amount of players who accepted that craziness dropped so much it had to be closed in the end. The fact that the publisher there lost in court with botter did not really made things better.
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Doesnât matter, losing bots is a cost. Losing bots more frequently raises your costs.
Now, maybe CCP has backed off banning bots. IDK. And the costs have not gone up as much as this would suggest, but assuming CCP is still putting for the same effort/work to ban botsâŚit means higher costs.
I dont know why, but I always like to think about it as less profit. Maybe because I think its still profitable after all.
Take a look at the screen cap
Thereâs a heavy buyer right now trying to set the buy price at 3,780,000.00 ISK with multiple orders at 22,400. This is what would be deemed as a ârationalâ forced offer, because the volume of sellers has responded and has ticked up slightly. But itâs now a question of the matter if sellerâs volume will meet the demand of almost 224,000 PLEX. If not, either sellers are holding out or are exhausted of supply to meet the demand, which in either case will further drive prices upward.
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Higher costs implies lower profits.
Profits are defined as:
Profits = P*Q - C(Q)
If P stays the same and Q stays the same, and profits go down then C(Q) went up.
Maybe. But articulate how one would make ISK off of this strategy? Frankly, Iâm not seeing. Or Iâm seeing a very small return for a very big risk.
risking ISK to make even more ISK later probably if PLEX goes up (spoiler - it will).
It is not a bubble. We can see that PLEX can be sold for a lot more ISK, like on chinese server. History repeats itself. 
For the buyer their strategy could be to sell later at a higher price. (BTW 224,000 PLEX x 3.78M ISK = 846,720,000,000, almost a trillion ISK, thatâs a lot of ISKies!). But I am inclined to believe this buyer is not motivated in making ISKs.
For the seller their strategy would simply be to wait out the price believing a higher offer will come because of the new high at 3.8M ISK
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Will it? Please detail the process?
SoâŚI have a pile of ISK and I go in and set the buy price higher? The implication of the last several posts by Ronnie is that this will drive up the sell price. Which it could do. For example, suppose I set my buy price above the sale price. Now a player could buy from a sell order and sell to the buy order. Now if you did that enough you could force the price up to the buy order price you set. Now, if the price rises above that level you could then put up your own buy orders and sell PLEX at the higher price. But your margin would likely be fairly thin unless for some reason the price kept on rising. Which in theory could happen. But you are taking a fairly large risk. Remember, the action on the sell order market is with downward price movements. In the buy market it is the opposite direction. So unless you have very, very deep pockets and are trying to sell a massive amount of PLEX the amount of ISK youâd make would be small, and the return tiny. It would be tiny in part by the very buy orders you put up. They provide a lower bound on the price you can sell at. And you have no control over the other sellers. In effect, by doing this is are creating a kind of public good. Those higher PLEX prices can be had by any seller not just you.
WhatâŚto create a public good for ISK sellers? Is he going to make his ISK off of those who sell somehow? Some sort of backroom deal?
We are starting to creep into the land of conspiracy theories.
No, just buying High, to hopefully not sell it low ( like it sometimes can be 
)
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EvE has this pesky skill called âmargin tradingâ that allows to put buy orders without fully backing them with ISK.
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PLEX will go up anyway. 
Buy now before its too late.
No, the buyerâs behavior of PLEX matches that of someone dumping stock as in cashing out. In this case the buyer is âcashing outâ of ISK for PLEX. This is because of the sheer number of orders for PLEX placed, multiple times and from the same location. But it wonât work because orders for PLEX are already pouring in at higher prices again pushing the 3.8M ceiling, and with sellerâs volume down again.
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Oh yesâŚthat will work. 
Like I said, the idea of manipulating this market is not so straight forward.
Suppose I follow some strategy, call it S. Suppose also that it is successful. Suppose it results in a 20% increase in the PLEX sell order price. The problem is anyone who has PLEX can sell PLEX and thus take a share of the gains I was hoping to reap.
There is a tendency for people to look for a plan in the things they observe. There is only one problem with that for markets, especially thick marketsâŚthere is typically no plan. Nobody is in charge. Markets are often an example of spontaneous orderâi.e. the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos.
LOL âceilingââŚ
What? How do you cash out by putting up a buy order?
Why? The only reason I could see for this is an increased expectation for inflation.
WhatâŚthis doesnât explain why one would expect an increase in the rate of inflation.
I donât follow thisâŚwhat orders? Look if the guy wants to cash out of ISK into PLEX he is doing a pretty bad job of it by not keeping his buy orders at the top of the stackâŚand why even have multiple orders?
Thereâs one actor that would like to buy PLEX, and do so at a price that at least matches ISK inflation (so their offer will trend upwards): CCP. Their ISK is free, they donât have to use the PLEX, and there is definitely a scenario where this is good for their bottom line.
This isnât an accusation though - just an observation. I donât think CCP would ever do this. Itâs even possible it would get them into trouble with tax authorities if they got caught doing such a thing.
OTOH it would be a convenient way to ensure the PLEX market never went out of balance in such a way that CCP left money from âPLEX supplyingâ players on the table.
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I donât get why ccp doesnât just ban all accounts on a botâs ip. And then blacklist that ip. That should prevent a lot of bots from re entering no?
its not like dynamic IPs, Proxies and VPNs exist, right? Technically they can ban by HWID, but even that can be spoofed.
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