A lot of prices are in flux right now, The moon mining changes are filtering through the economy and most players aren’t sure where the prices will settle. This heavily hit moon goo, PI, and salvage. It’s possible that they bought materials and built the ship for 200mil, buy orders are 220 mil, and current build cost is 230mil. There’s a good chance they could hold the ship and sell it for 240 in a few days. A lot of speculation bubbles have also popped so if you bought high and were counting on selling that ship for 250 mil but you can only get 220 for it as people panic sell, or adjust to new prices.
there are also people that do the reactions, build the components, and then build the items maybe they would be better off just selling the components isk wise, but it may be easier to transport the built items so they do that instead as it uses most of what they are building. And if they are moving a ton of volume it might be easier to just dump to buy orders.
There’s also a bunch of people that just dump stuff to buy orders, so you put up big orders hoping to grab a few at a time and then once you have a bunch flip at build cost + profit margins. A lot of players will have a loot can and just dump it all, or maybe they need to liquidate some stuff to buy something else. Do I really need that stack of items I bought years ago and haven’t touched in that random system, nope, better to get some isk for it dump in jita.
it depends on the item and how much activity it gets, the increase in activity drags people out of the woodwork even when they dont usually buy / sell that item due to things like isk per hour.
how are you pricing your item? if its from station building then you need to get to a engineer complex since production is a lot cheaper there.
Also there was a time when there was a complete over supply of certain ships due to people mass producing before some changes were applied to the mineral cost on the bpo’s, I’m not sure how much of that stock is left over but there was a fair amount of them from what i remember
One really big difference between real life and EVE markets is that in EVE, most items don’t know consumption. Commodities stay commodities for the most part. Had I bought a ship 1 year ago, I can sell the very same ship on the market without quality loss or anything. Development in EVE is much slower and drastically simplified too (basically not player driven), so there will be no competition due to technological progress, allowing me to sell the same ship a year later. Apart from very specific markets this is not the case for real life and furthermore not everyone there can just “go to the market”. The fact that most in-game commodities know no consumption, leads to the question why people even buy more and more.
One reason is that they are traders, who hope to make %. While they can run on for a while, it will only continue if there are actually people buying stuff from the market to at least temporarily detract it from there, if not use it in game. Another reason is that they are players who want to use ships, modules, etc. for their game play. This is limited by the amount of players who actually undock and use stuff, as well as how much they lose stuff through destruction.
There are three ways of how any item disappears from the game and thereby as a potential commodity off the market:
Item gets destroyed (due to damage, self-destruct or trash, despawn of probes etc.)
Item leaves the game because of permaban or player permanently leaving the game
While 2. can happen all the time, 3. only happens to very specific items and 1. relies mostly on players losing ships to other players or the environment. If production is that much greater than destruction, the demand will go down, no matter what prices used to be. Theoretically that should mean people dropping out from production into other areas, but as you say, people do not act logically and also they gamble on still making a profit. As other people pointed out, the current production price is not necessarily the lower treshold people are willing to sell for. If they got it much cheaper, they’ll still make profit on their investment - if they really need the ISK they might be willing to sell for a slight loss, which is better than an empty wallet - if they fear the prices dropping further, fear sales etc.
I guess the lower treshold for ships is somewhere around the insurance profit from self-destructing it. People sell it for less, if they don’t think the 2 minute SD-timer is worth the ISK or if the ship is located remotely.
This way I can make the raw materials and do not waste isk buying. This lets me sell cheaper and still make isk.
I mined it so it was free.
The fact time required to source and mine the raw materials + the time and cost to refine and do reactions to turn those raw materials into usable products is not taken into consideration — This OP is the reason some buy orders are below build cost and still get filled - While ever there are people out there producing stuff and selling it cheap “because I mined the raw materials they were free, so can sell my products cheaper” others will profit from it…
No. The market in EVE lets the person setting up the contract set the price they are willing to pay. So if you built something that typically sells for say 100 ISK, I can put a buy order for 1 ISK if I so choose.
Nobody is making you sell to those buy orders. Put up your own sell orders at a price that reflects what you think is a decent profit margin.
The market in EVE is how RL markets work. The people selling put up sell orders for a given amount of a good at a given price. Buyers can buy from those orders, or put up their own buy orders for a given amount at a price they are willing to pay. If you set a ridiculously low price you may never fill that order.
as he said he is in null.
That means that exporting items to HS or buying them from HS makes a serious dent in your income. freighting services need to get paid for the time+fuell they use.
You will notice he didnt say they were free, he said they are cheap. materials are actually much cheaper in null than in HS, but the market is also less interesting.
Manufacturing isn’t the ONLY source of ships or modules; the tutorial and career agents are repeatable and give out “free” frigate ships, and some of the rat drops are T1 base items.
But that’s beside the point. Bottom line, manufacturing doesn’t exist in a bubble all by itself, it is intrinsically related to trading / sales.
The game allows you to research blueprints and reduce manufacturing costs / taxes, but the savings are minor, when compared to being able to buy minerals at under-market-value (or free), and sell ships at overpriced costs out in 0.0 or where there’s a war.
Trading affects the price more than manufacturing does.
So the question is, what do you do if you’ve wiped out all your ISK manufacturing 1000 Dominix battleships, and now you see that Megathrons are getting a huge un-nerf from CCP and will be overpowered next patch. But you have no ISK to get mats to start new production lines. What do you do?
People don’t play this game “perfectly” from an economics point of view. It’s a game. There are plenty of “poor decisions.” Even in real life people don’t act “perfectly”, even when day-trading stocks. EVE’s economy accentuates the imperfections because EVE is a game and nobody cares.
I couldn’t figure out why people build stuff at a loss etiher. Lots of great theories in this thread and I guess whoever can build them or just sell them at that price must be sitting on tons of minerals and assets bought from another time when stuff had a different cost. Plain old market PVP.
I think if you tried to build and sell the product somewhere other than the big hubs you could make more out of what you put into it - but then you’re dealing with your products moving slowly. Catch 22
One way to strengthen industry would be to introduce decay of materials or products. A booster should have an expiry date, just as any module, ship, rig or structure should lose quality and functionality over time which means necessary replacements or repair costs.
With the difference that RL markets work entirely different when it comes to market access and that there is people-driven competition based on more factors than in EVE, innovation being a major one. In real life not everyone can just go to a commodity market and start buying/selling. Patents, Trademarks and other such constructs, put a legal border to what you can sell or buy for re-sale. Also, you normally can’t just buy one item X and sell it for proft, not outside of Ebay and such at least. There are also countries which regulate who is even alllowed to do business and what kind of legal preconditions you have to meet in order to trade. Hence licenses, free trade “agreements”, wars (ending real peoples lives for economic interests), and so on and on and on. Also most items in EVE are not consumed. etc.
EVE is a simplified version of a subsegment of RL markets. I think that’s why RL market theorists like EVE, because some of their most cloudy self-confusing theories that are often so wrong in the complexity and the inner contradictions of the economic system in RL, seem to make sense in EVE.
I buy commodities all the time. I bought some the other night. Most consumers do not buy on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is true, but they do buy from various businesses…which can put any price they want on the products in the store. And in other stores people are free to make counter offers as well. Of course if a grocery store puts $100 for a loaf of bread that normally costs $4 nobody will buy it. In fact, they’ll go down the street to the grocery store that as the $4 price.
You are right that innovation is a bit more difficult in EVE in that you can’t innovate and find a “cheaper” BPO for T1 stuff nor come up with cheaper BPCs for T2 stuff. However, other forms of innovation could still take place.
All intellectual property rights…errr intellectual monopoly rights do that to varying extents. And these are open to considerable abuse in terms of rent seeking. The Mickey Mouse act is a fantastic example of nothing but pure rent seeking. This act basically retroactively extended copyright protections…there is no valid argument for doing this. The argument to justify copyright is that without them people could not realize the economic benefits of their creative/artistic endeavors and we’d poorer without these things so we’ll grant temporary monopoly rights to these creative/artistic products. But once those things are created, like Mickey Mouse, there is no justification for extending such protection. The product already exists, the creator already got his initial stream of benefits which were sufficient to produce the product. This is nothing other than using the political process to gain an wealth transfer.
In fact, given how far the intellectual monopoly rights have gone it is likely a contributing factor to the low economic growth since 2000. Patent trolls, obtaining patents on upstream innovator and thus extracting rents from down stream innovators. Weaponize patent portfolios. Copy right and patent all the things in an attempt to limit competition or create opportunities for rent extraction. All of these things will have indirect and direct chilling effects on innovation which is a major source of economic growth and economic advancement.
These are all examples of crony economic systems. Licensing is nothing short of rent seeking and a way of transferring wealth from one group to another with little to no gain in real terms. Trade agreements while directionally better than protectionism they still are subject to more subtle forms of rent seeking.
Comparing Eve’s ‘player-driven’ economy to the real world is laughable. A RL market operated like this would be impossible because you cannot buy high and sell low very many times before you are out of money. CCP has their hands in the game’s economy no matter how often they or their player-pets deny it.
Unless you have another income source. For example:
A guy earns say $10,000/year.
He buys high and sells low $2,000 of his $10,000 and ends up with very little.
The next year he can do the same again.
And again.
And again.
Granted it is not a strategy for long term wealth building…but you could do it.
Actually, unless you belong to a mega alliance it is still cheaper in many cases to source (T2) materials from Jita than it is in nul.
I manufacture a lot of items, from T1 frigates to faxes, dreads and carriers in nul.
My T2 manufacturing is done in highsec - Fuel costs + availability of materials = more profit in highsec manufacturing.
If there was an Ethereal currency that Aliens gave us that could buy dollars at a rate of 1,000,000 to 1 yeah, it would work just like Eve… But I don’t have Alien currency… yet.
Sure, people can buy for consumption, meaning that they can buy it to eat it, wear it, destroy it, give it away as a present and such. They can not however normally resell the stuff they bought in the grocery store, and even ignoring laws and licenses and such, they could only do so via a 2nd hand market, which - taken apart - would probably not be re-selling, but a self-organized leasing system in which A makes the initial purchase which takes the item off the market, uses it, gives it to B who pays the initial price minus the leasing rate of A and so on… maybe gets a bit too deep.
Anyhow, I would even argue that the moment the shop owner or the company that delivers to shop owners makes the purchase of amount X of item Y, the item is off the commodity market. Just because “supermarkets” have the word markets in them, doesn’t mean they work in any similar way to the actual market for comodities. If the grocery store doesn’t sell the milk to the final consumer, it won’t re-sell it on any other commodity market. Also try buying some cheese in grocery store 1 and try selling it to grocery store 2 - doesn’t work.
Mostly there is optimization in EVE. Given all the available mechanics, players will come up with different solutions to produce “cheaper”. There is however no higher quality Stabber Fleet Issue. Every SFI is the same. Players also cannot modify any ship, module or any item, they cannot change the slot layout, base attributes and such. They cannot invent completely new stuff, only “invent” in the sense of what is called invention in EVE: turning T1 BPCs into T2 or T3 BPCs, all of which have been pre-defined.
They can only use every item that has been given by the Devs, produce them, combine them, use them.
For quite a while I have thought about opening this up. Allowing for a much more complex production and invention system, would really really shake up EVEs economy and not only that: it would be a huge step towards the sandbox and it would give players quite a task to work with. For PVP this would mean no more classic solutions, no more A > B, but so many different options that it could actually make things complicated enough to allow for a self-balancing system in which the meta is constantly shifting because players came up with new solutions to beat the kite, beat the next meta and so on. Also it would be quite news-worthy @CCP_Fozzie pls?
Yup, I agree with the negative implications of patents and licenses. The fact is though, that these don’t exist in EVE which makes it very different from RL. In RL these things are almost as old as the currently predominant economic system as they are a tool for those already rich to make sure no one else taps in. While trading is PVP in EVE, it is even more so in real life. Most if not all wars, in which massive amounts of human beings find their death, are fought over economic control, market access and ressource control - no matter the concomitant music of justice/religion/peace/revenge that gives the people who lose their sons, brothers, fathers, friends an explanation other than: we are in global competition and we need mooooooaaar. Cause probably people would be rather unhappy with it.
It’s an undeniable fact that companies use their economic power to influence politics and have them make laws that suit them. Patents are one example. They won’t stop to exist, unless replaced with something more useful for the ones who got the money. Theorizing how fair this system could be without someone “abusing” it for their own advantage is sweet, but naive. It has always worked like that and only worked like that. There is no “fair trade”, no “fair capitalism”. It doesn’t always have to end in war, but it will always mean that the ones who have enough power (i.e. not my aunts little shoe company) will use it to gain ANY advantage they can get in ANY way that is legal or not too illegal.
Yup, just like the one we live in. The US right now is the place on earth where you’ll find the highest support for trade agreements, because usually they get the better end of it and can somewhat coerce some other countries into accepting specific terms. World trade is a complicated matter, but let’s just say what we both know: no countries economy is independant from other countries, other sales or ressource markets and so on. Every country uses protectionism and especially the US. It is not always called protectionism, but if the laws are done in ways that effectively mean the same, it is protectionism. The EU for instance has long struggled with bad meat and there have been many scandals - in exchange for free access to certain marktes in South America though, the EU is opening for meat import below the already insufficient standards. People simply do not have enough time to produce a public outcry everytime such a decision is made. Some of these might be stopped, but most will happen. It’s the result of economic analysis. Would it be the other way around and this analysis tells: close the borders for meat because it means less profit for companies who are paying their taxes here, they would use protective measures.
And who is the most protective?
P.S. It’s really fun discussing this stuff with you.
Lots of great theories in this thread and I guess whoever can build them or just sell them at that price must be sitting on tons of minerals and assets bought from another time when stuff had a different cost. Plain old market PVP.
