A while back I started a thread regarding my puzzlement at the massive drop in the price of Wrath cruise missiles. I was joking with FinnAgain about it because he had just written an article telling people how to trade so I was making a liberal media joke that maybe fell flat.
Regardless the source of the decline was steady deflation. In Eve Online the basic commodity is Tritanium. Essentially you can think of it as generic ‘metal’ like Iron/Titanium etc… It fills the role of all durable metals useful in the construction of spaceships/stations and other goods. Basically it’s in everything and is a significant portion of your cost no matter what you are producing so movement in the price of tritanium affects the price of everything directly, and not just indirectly in some kind of ripple effect. It’s like oil is in our society essentially.
The Donchian Channel for Tritanium in my main region of operation, Sinq Laison, has shown a pretty steady decline. What’s interesting is that the rate of the acceleration of the decline has been relatively steady so that it dropped slowly and steadily in June pretty dramatically in July (When I was away) and has levelled off in August.
The deflation caused me to lose money on my core business Wrath Cruise Missiles, which were easily 30% of my income when I was selling half a million of them per day at 135-175 isk per unit. Now they are between 110 and 135 isk per unit, averaging somewhere between 115 and 120. So I lost money because I was producing at a higher rate of Tritanium. It was 4.3 isk per unit of trit now it’s around 2.9. So basically I was selling the cruise missiles for the price that I had built them for or less as I had a stock of millions.
Now, the drop in the price of tritanium baffles me. And that is because of Operation Unholy Nerd Rage. This was an operation to stop Real Money Trading. Now here is what baffles me. If macro miners and mission grinders were banned then why doesn’t that reduce the price of tritanium? Tritanium is provided 60% by mining and 40% by melting mission loot. I can understand how banning macro mission grinders would reduce a demand for wrath cruise missiles. Basically a macro-er works by using a keylogger. They play the game for a little while having it record keystrokes and then after they have their macro recorded they just let it run. Using this method apparently they can generate a boatload of isk per day. It has reduced the price of Pilot’s License Extensions because apparently they were a big piece of the market on those.
So what I am baffled by is why this operation didn’t cause the price of tritanium to rise by reducing supply disproportionately to demand. The price of Wraths peaked the same day as the implementation of Operation Unholy Rage.
If anyone has any thoughts on this I would appreciate hearing them.
Less users macroing equals less tritanium on the market equals higher prices… But instead prices are lower.
Yeah, I’m baffled too. Maybe it’s because everyone has their shiny new expansion ships now so there’s significantly less demand? I know those ones that came out last spring took a ton of Tritanium.
I guess miners who were frustrated because of the depleted asteroid fields mined more because there was more to mine.
No, the T3 ships shouldn’t reduce demand at all, they take tritanium to build also, and they aren’t that prevalent. They are still losing T3 ships in PVP also so they need to be replaced and no one who has one has stopped flying other kinds of ships.
Just posting to let you know that some of us non-EVE players still follow these threads with great interest.
While the actual gameplay of EVE:O bores me to tears, I’m absolutely fascinated with the economic system. It’s dragged me back occasionally and even though I never progress beyond carebear roiding or L2 mission grinding before quitting in a fit of listlessness the game continues to astound me.
God, some of the graphs in the OP’s link are fantastic. Nerd economics are awesome.
My WAG is that the price reflects more of a trust-busting action than anything. More Joe the Feldspar Miners accessing resources that were previously bundled by in market-savvy keyloggers will probably depress prices for a while.
Why would it depress prices? That’s what baffles me.
What is interesting to me is that supply wasn’t really impacted at all. There was a dip THE DAY OF Unholy Nerd Rage, but it recovered immediately. Volume has slowly gone down but only ever so slightly, something that could just as easily be explained by summer vacations, as with any other industry.
People are saying that the price of the expensive mins are inversely linked to that of the cheaper ones. IE, Tritanium goes down Megacyte goes up. But I don’t comprehend why that is, it makes absolutely no sense to me.
As I’ve said my knowledge of EVE economics is pretty weak.
Volume is relatively fixed, isn’t it? In that the astroids get mined out more-or-less daily with the server reset. If things are getting mined to capacity as it is, changing who’s doing it shouldn’t impact that. I would posit that perhaps there are more mining neophytes who are all now furiously trying to undercut each other to quickly move product.
The inverse relationship I might attribute to the ‘big dogs’ of mining (I assume there are some ginormous carebear roiding corps) transitioning from tritanium to the lower-sec exotic materials when they present themselves.
Well apparently a lot of the macro miners were holding tritanium in reserve in order to maintain the high prices and that a bunch of that reserve got dumped either just prior to the ban hammer, or right after the temporary bans were lifted a la the memory implants that are shown in the graph in the link I posted.
And yes, the macro miners messed up asteroid belts in common systems, but at no time ever were all the belts everywhere mined out. Not even everywhere in hi-sec. I think the relationship there has more to do with the difficulty of transporting large amounts of minerals than anything else. I have an Iteron V the largest hauler in the game and I can only carry about 4m Tritanium or so.
Oh it’s really complicated and relates to the insurance price of ships in Eve capping the lower limit and the prices of NPC goods that can be recycled capping the upper limit.
It sounds to me like the situation you’d see with diamonds in our world if DeBeers were ever broken up. What we’re seeing now is the “true”, free-market price of trit, whereas before, the price was artificially inflated by a relatively small number of industry actors stockpiling it.
