Well I was thinking of a farm with a single character being farmed. With maxed out attributes and implants there is a maximal amount of SP you’ll get per day and thus per 30 day period, lets just call it a month even though a month is really 365/12 or approximately 30.4 days. So I need an upper limit of extractors and will produce an upper limit on injectors. So, assuming I buy the extractors with PLEX then I am not seeing how the presences of an SP farm would cause a problem with PLEX prices except for possible a one time bump in the price (when the farmer enters the PLEX market).
What we are seeing here is a steady trend in the price of PLEX. And it seems to me that the narrative it is SP farms is the cause would be dubious. It might cause this issue if (and only if) there were an increasing number of SP farms that are run purely off of the PLEX. For example, I have two characters I farm SP off of. I am happy with their SP in their current state so I extract the SP every 30ish days or so to sell for ISK. I then use that ISK for doing other stuff in game (that is, I do not buy any PLEX anymore with this ISK and I pay their subscriptions with RL money). This is possible, but I find it unlikely, or at least there is not much evidence for it. And no, the rising PLEX price is not evidence because then you’ve created circular reasoning. To see this is so…
- PLEX prices are rising because of PLEX SP farmers (PLEX SP farmers are SP farmers who run entirely on PLEX unlike myself).
- What is the evidence for this?
- PLEX prices are rising.
That’s a circle of reason. It is useless.
The actual run up in PLEX prices is likely due to the slow drop in the number of PLEX On the market in The Forge. I downloaded the market data for 366 days and did some regressions and yes, the number of PLEX for sale on the market has slowly been decreasing. By about 800-900 PLEX per day. I did three regressions with similar results for the trend variable (which is always statistically significant).
Now as to why there is this downward trend, I don’t know. I can think of two possible narratives.
-
We have momentum trading and as the price goes up players who might sell PLEX via sell orders are holding off from entering the market in hopes of getting a higher price (maybe even via buy orders–i.e. liquidating their position quickly).
-
The number of people who are buying PLEX for RL money and selling them in game via sell orders are buying and selling less PLEX. Why? I don’t know. One possibility is they don’t feel they’ll be able to recoup their “investment” so they have exited the market. For example, suppose they believe that CCP shutters its operations sometime in the next N months.
The two above narratives are just that though. They are both, IMO, consistent with what we are seeing in terms of the PLEX price. Both could even be true to varying degrees at the same time. And there could be other reasons too.
In a few more weeks, if I remember, I’ll get more data an append the new observations to the data I currently have and see if anything changes.