Q1 2020 Economy Review

Thanks for the dev blog. I’m interested in how CCP sees the T2 and T3 market with the changes they’ve implemented. I think that changes will need to be made to T3 (either through new mods creating demand or supply being reduced) but if CCP is waiting for T2 to settle before looking at T3 then that’s understandable.

I used to rat in a supercarrier. That is no longer viable because of the nerfs to resistances. If you get dropped on, you cannot stay alive long enough to get help and there is no way to get enough income to replace your ship when its destroyed. Of course you can still rat in small, inexpensive ships, but the income level is only a fraction of what it is with a supercarrier. Basically, what it looks like to me is that they forced an economic recession which caused the price of PLEX to go down and then they say “look! the economy is better because PLEX costs less!” Its a bunch of BS.

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Just keep a FAX alt next to you while you rat.

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This was a great write up. Mineral depletion was such a great idea, and Im glad you guys believe it! Value of labor is very important in a game where ISK is the grind.

I do feel you’re are reaching when you talk about the positive outlook of lowsec. You guys made good strides on the FW arena and thats great, but you guys really need to focus your attention to the trends during the moon wars pre-athanors. If you could do something to give lowsec pirates the tools to replicate that era, you would be seeing some pretty crazy login numbers, and maybe give the desire for smaller entities to start recruiting and make more competition in lowsec.

The end game of lowsec shouldn’t be join FW or GTFO.

I hope we will see something when the trig invasion is completed that is going to give us to the tools for lowsec moons wars 2.0. Passive sun mining and passive asteroid belt mining structures look to have some potential.

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Lowsec definitely needs something.

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CCP you guys must be crazy!? The markets are trash and have been since I started Eve three years ago. 65% of all items being sold on the markets are selling well below mineral worth. As for isk being stronger to buy plex, all I hear is that players are getting less value out their money spend to buy plex from you. Which should mean that less players will be buying plex to sell for isk.

CCP needs a REAL ECONOMIC department or even a real economist and not the guy that drove Dust 514’s economy into the ground.

CCP has driven the Indy, market and miner play styles into the ground this year. If CCP does not want indy, miners, or market player for the love of god just say it.

In closing CCP this years sucks. Every single sheople and dev that had a hand in doing this to Eve sucks. CCP/Eve have lost paying customers and players because of the indy/miner/market changes this year.

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65% of all items being sold on the markets are selling well below mineral worth

Where are you getting these metrics? I have many spreadsheets calculating post ME bonus and structure bonus profit margins and I’m not seeing these numbers. One major issue with manufacturing for the new beans is that if you don’t live in 00 and have access to top tiers rigs and citadels, you are at a deficit right out the gate.

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I think you answered your own question.

If an item is selling below perfect ME minerals counts, then that would fall into the category of being sold under mineral value. This also doesn’t take into account market manipulation that is actively happening by market traders.

His comment is hyperbole.

You’re talking out of your arse.

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This is 2020, we use feeling-driven analysis. Fact checkers have proven data to be systemically biased towards the truth. Get with the times morons.

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ccp ignores anything end everything that they are to lazy to deal with
the only RMT problem is ccp

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What a load of crap. I am so glad I stopped paying again.

66.9% of players believed botting to be a serious problem in EVE, but today that number is 52.6%.

This has an obvious explanation - because there are BIGGER problems than botting that got introduced into the game.
Blackout is a bigger problem than botting. Does nothing to botters, completely guts players not in a super under umbrella. Is it a bigger problem than botting? Definitely is.
Filaments are a bigger problem than botting. Before filaments? Forming against roamers made sense. Now? They just filament out the moment they have a chance to lose a ship. 100% decrease in interaction, 100% decrease in amount of people forming for roamers.
Congrats CCP, you made it so bad that 14% of players don’t care about botting anymore!

  • There was a 14.5% improvement between quarters in how difficult players found it to find other players
  • 6.1% improvement between quarters in how much players felt player conflicts were lacking
  • 7.9% improvement in how difficult players felt finding content was

Lies, damn lies, and statistics. But oh well, at least that is easily explainable. People who were giving negative answers did what I did: QUIT.
So now you’re getting more % of positive answers, obviously, but doing an incredible feat of thoughtless optimism, interpret that as a good thing.

All I can say, congrats on failing as usual.

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Lawl I still make around 150mil a day in high sec between mining ice and normal belts.

ccp greed what other reason

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Thank you for sharing all this info.
If you want feedback: “Connectivity is increasing - The Friendship Machine is getting hotter” is a confusing topic for me. CCP Hillmar discussed Friendship a few times and quoted stats about people getting friends in Eve online. That, I think, differs from what is covered in the Blog under this topic.
But again: thanks for sharing info on this awesome game.

This doesn’t negate your other complaints, but - that ended after about 2 months. It was clearly not popular, and one can see a “V” shaped recovery in player logins on this annotated graph.

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I got a chuckle out of the new “fairer” economy. The broker relations update crushed two play styles, the pure regional trader and the courier contract hauler. CCP caved to the weak and whiners by adding a ridiculous relisting fee, which punished an active play style.

The only question I have is “When was EvE ever supposed to be fair?”

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Correct me if I’m wrong.

What I see on that graph (which does not specify neither data source nor methodology, but let’s put that aside for a second), is that blackout recovery never happened!

The numbers were corrected by influx of koreans, but if you discount that, meaning by the end of a period displayed by that graph, original numbers still didn’t recover.

Me and my group couldn’t bounce back after it either. We only still have null space because, well, we’re in no umbrella region, and it died so hard that there simply was nobody left to take it from us. Any serious sov attack by dudes with a single super (since we can’t form more than 3 dreads anymore) would be successful, it’s just there’s nobody to launch it.

Out of everything else, the market changes weren’t as bad. They punished short-term profit seekers, won’t deny that. But the evolution of long term marketing meta has been so far pretty good, the share of people who plan ahead has increased.
And there’s still short term tactic available - just don’t list your entire stack! List a new small package after the previous one got sold. The price of relisting a small package, should you do so, is much more affordable, and there’s less need to do it, since it’s not like there’s a fukton of bots 0.01-ISKing you all the time.

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Hello,

I feel that the Market anyalysis is not complete or transparent and that the main conclusions are wrong.
The biggest downward pressure on the price of Plex on the market is the amount of Plex being bought with RL money. If we were to see this graph I would imagine that it is the highest it has ever been in terms of RL money being exchanged for Plex.

The amount of Plex being bought with RL money will also mean that people have more ISK in their wallets.

So the conclusions that the economy is healthier by the balancing tweaks you have applied cannot be drawn without this information being added and considered.

A correct statement might be that “Mining is no longer as profitable in certain areas and now people are buying plex to prop up their incomes.” This seems like a far more likely scenario than the one you have painted in your report. However both my premise and your premise cannot be analysed until the Plex bought data is made available.

I understand why you have made the changes and they are more to do with preventing afk bot mining to buy plex and thus play the game for free. If this is the direction of travel you want to go then just be honest about it. If the desired results you want is more RL money purchasing Plex to add to the market then fine just be honest about it.

i feel I do need to clarify some points before the trolls decend and that I do not mine and I have no axe to grind here. I just like data to be transparent and complete and then the correct analysis from it drawn.

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