Price of Plex - Market intervention Required from CCP

I suppose another thing to note is that Plex supply (people putting Plex on the ISK market) dropped fairly sharply a couple weeks before the PA buyout, kept dropping for a couple weeks after, and has stayed flat ever since. This coincides with a fairly normal dropoff schedule late in the year, but the drop was sharper, from a higher level, and has flattened out lower and lasted longer.

So it’s possible that what gets referred to as a ‘perfect storm’ of factors (3-4 factors coming together all at once); PA buyout, seasonal changes, supply/demand changes with Alphas etc. has come together to affect the in-game ISK price.

As @Evelyn_Saffron said though, the market will find its’ attractive price, and people will adjust their spending/buying to that.

Are you suggesting Modern Monetary Theory here?

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Hi!

As now pure ISK income rates will drop down with nerfed anomaly respawn time, I presume Plex price will fall down. Fewer ISK means deflation.

This only works when you have periods of higher and lower ISK prices for PLEX. But if PLEX is raising then it all breaks up. Why buy it today and get X ISK if you can buy it tomorrow and get X+1 ISK?
I think constant raise of ingame prices may make people wait with buying PLEX with RL money instead of buying more. Quite opposite of what you are saying.

Not quite. The changes will slow the rate of inflation, but that is not the same thing as an economy going into deflation.

Plex prices are always high this time of year. As Kezrai pointed out, this year just happens to have a particular combination of factors pushing it higher than normal.

Plex prices will drop, but not because of the ratting changes. They will start heading south again, probably end of this month or early next month some time, same as every year, likely it will be a plex sale (I’m betting for eve amsterdam) that will kick start the downwards trend.
Then they will drop to their annual low some time around July or August before climbing again. Starting in mid december-early Jan of next year your gonna see these plex is expensive threads pop up again.

After enough years the patterns become laughably predictable.

Check the in game market, not too long ago PLEX was worth much less.

The long term trend is upwards, but it does move around that trend. Much like the stock market. So…since people sell stocks, seem reasonable some people would sell PLEX. People have different rates of time preference.

No.

It’s obvious that fiat money has a value. It’s not magic. Its not a collective delusion.
I explained in simple terms:

  • Where that value comes from
  • What other conditions (in broad terms) are required for fiat currency to function well

The last part of the post, which I will repeat here, was the simple truth:
“You don’t have to understand (RL) money to earn it or to spend it”

You can write versions of that (you don’t have to understand X to use it) for literally millions of less-.abstract things and nobody is surprised or upset. Apply it to money and the results are unpredictable. I’m not sure why.

Note that I didn’t directly answer one natural (but distracting) question “where does the exact buying power of one unit of currency come from”? I can answer that easily enough, but it’s not a “forum friendly” kind of discussion. Here, it would be impractical.

Do the smart thing and only sell half, so you still have PLEX left in case the price goes further up. If it goes down then you only need to wait. Never sell all your stock all at once.

From trading I’ve learned that sell-half-at-double is a thing. Say you buy PLEX at 1 million and the price eventually reaches 2 millions. When you sell half you get your investment back and end up with “free” PLEX. It’s how you get “free” money from trading cryptos. :blush:

Sorry for wasting your time if you already knew. :slight_smile:

Good.

Fiat money has value because people use it and believe it has value…mainly because there is trust that the government won’t turn around and suddenly debase the currency–i.e. “crank up the printing press”. Otherwise the money has virtually no other use–i.e. has no intrinsic value. Gold, which was a commodity and also used for money had uses aside from money. Same with silver and other forums of commodity money.

Teckos

I agree with the main content of your post of course. It contains some of the details I left out of my two posts.

We have an interesting counter-example these days too: BitCoin. IMO the only actual value it has is that it’s a convenient “medium of exchange” for smuggling: i.e. tax avoidance and trade in illegal products.
Misplaced trust and greed have contributed to unreasonably high BitCoin prices for a few years, but IMO it’s a natural bubble.

Time will tell anyway :slight_smile:

The RL money/ PLEX/ISK market is weird, but IMO much less so than BitCoin.

Not entirely. BItcoin has value because because of its usefulness as a store of value, but also because of its scarcity. Bitcoin’s scarcity is absolute in that it is determined by something outside of anyone’s control. Fiat money’s scarcity is contrived in that, it is done so by basically a promise. This is why there cannot be competing fiat monies within a given jurisdiction.

The topic here is one of:

  1. Can and should CCP intervene in helping push the price of plex down?

  2. Is PLEX price too high? or too low?

  3. Who benefits from a high vs low plex price?

Teckos

We don’t agree on BitCoin, but it doesn’t matter much in an EVE forum :slight_smile:

On the other hand, your scarcity argument about fiat money might be relevant.

The value of fiat money comes from the size of the economy in which it’s used.
It isn’t exactly scarce (that can lead to problems), but the amount has to be carefully managed in relation to the size of the economy - not always a simple matter. This is an important government responsibility. And not one they always handle well.

From a very high level, a lot of the stupidity that’s happened since 2008 is connected to this …

… but not in a way that’s not relevant to EVE. A credit bubble isn’t practical. CCP could massively inflate ISK of course, but they won’t since it’s not to their benefit.

Really? Understanding basic elements a currency is critical. Is ISK a commodity currency? Well…in a way. Players convert time into ISK is how ISK is generally injected into the game. Is it’s scarcity contrived like with a fiat currency or is it absolute? It isn’t absolute, but it is also not quite contrived either. CCP provides the tools people use to farm the ISK, but the rate of farming is dependent on the players. The rate of money creation has been handed off to players.

While this is true, the way CCP has set things up the only way they could do this is in a rather obvious way. Make ratting ships far, farm more effective or the like. Everyone would see it. In a way CCP has kind of tied their hands in terms of money creation. They can’t just go ramping it up and down without anyone knowing.

Looks like 4 mil plex (jita average) this weekend. Purely a psychological milestone, as the inflation ramp still appears to be steady.

Teckos

I think CCP could buy PLEX with ISK they create for themselves, and report it as income from mining, ratting, etc. If they were careful I doubt anyone in-game would notice.
I haven’t come up with an easy way for them remove ISK, but I haven’t looked. I’d be surprised if they couldn’t figure something out.

I’d be interested to know if that kind of thing was legal in every country though. IIRC Linden Labs had to change some aspects of Second Life due to a new US law, or to the US IRS showing interest. ISK and Second Life’s currency aren’t exactly the same, but the IRS might think they’re close enough :slight_smile:

The big difference between Eve and virtual worlds like SL is that, unlike Eve, in some virtual worlds you can legally convert in-game currency to real US Dollars - many people make a very good RL living out of it, in fact (google ‘Anshe Chung’).
That’s what caught the interest of various tax authorities round the world. I can’t see them taking much interest in what are, to them, ‘toy currencies’ of no actual real-world value.

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  1. As usual, their intervention will probably be by a PLEX sale.

  2. Considering we have reached 1300T of liquid isk and the fact that there are no current vacations, I think it’s normal for the price to rise.

  3. Me and everyone else who stashed lower priced PLEX.

I was a new player back in 2008. There were people who were filthy rich already, so I could have complained about the GTC price or the newly introduced PLEX price.

Instead, I decided I’ll get rich enough, so PLEX price would never be a problem anymore.
Of course, 11 years later the situation has changed, nowaday gamers require instant gratification, they don’t want to work for something, like we, the older players did.

We are slowly becoming a spoiled community, where people demand things of CCP, instead of focusing on the game. People have said over and over again, that PLEX subscription is an option for the rich and should not become a mission for the rest, they can simply subscribe, it’s not that expensive even for the smaller countries.

That being said, I enjoy reading these threads, many people jump in, the usual graphs, hot debates, two sides for PLEX should be high vs low, real life economics being plugged in and you are right/wrong responses.

Every now and then we will see a new thread as PLEX reaches 2.5, 3 mil etc. It is inevitable. And it will. Like @Zahara_Cody said on the market forum: “Get ready for 5 mil plex”.

At 10m isk plex CCP will either introduce nominal charge for in game plex use ie $2 p.c.m or they’ll just make subs mandatory for all omega chars.

PA will not run the eve server at a deficit and their subscription liability is only increasing, 24 months worst estimate.

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It is in my opinion that if you cannot afford to pay for a monthly subscription at 15 bucks a month, this would be the least of your problems, and you should focus on IRL stuff! … also Plex / injectors etc etc are just fine where they are, and with a bit of luck and market adjustments Plex will reach 4 mill each