It follows on from the talk given at Eve Vegas which looked at the economic metrics for the month of September 2015 - that specific blog post also gave the definitions of each item of data.
Active ISK - and what it means for the price of Plex
The chart below shows the amount of ISK sitting in alts wallets (green line) and corp wallets (orange line) to give the total ISK just lying around as the blue line going back to 2012. In summary, there was 949 trillion ISK lying around by end of February, a rise of 13 trillion.
949 trillion is a lot of spare ISK to have lying around - but the question we could have is how much is needed to finance player operations (replacing destroyed ships and equipment, running war operations, running trade operations, etc i.e. in wallets and expected to be spent) and therefore how much is truly doing nothing and therefore can be spent on Plex.
To answer that question we need to use the "Velocity of ISK" graph below. The Velocity of ISK described how much of 1 ISK is used over a 30 day rolling period.
As can be seen above, the trend has been falling over time to now below 0.5x. The recent large spike was caused by skill extractors.
But lets stick with the 0.5x and indeed the long term decline. That tells us two things. Firstly, of the 949 trillion ISK lying around, only 475 trillion is actually used per month leaving the other 474 trillion just sitting idle. Secondly, that proportion of ISK and absolute value of ISK just sitting idle is rising each month and so can only be an upside driver for Plex prices - what else would it be spent on?
As i write the price of Plex is 1.13 billion ISK and is flat over 6 months having rising from 0.80 billion to 1.30 billion, breaking 1bn in June 2015. The recent move has been down but it feels like the ongoing rise of ISK coming into the game (mainly through bounty payments and NPC buy orders).
In a way, I would always expect the ISK coming into the game to exceed player requirements (i suspect CCP don't want people to leave because they can not get enough ISK to play - and the ease of getting ISK for you and me may not be the case for someone else, so the required ability to get enough ISK needs to be quite low). Hence, until a new Sink (method of taking ISK out of the game, such as transaction taxes) comes along we have an inbuilt upward driver of Plex prices.
Perhaps what is also interesting is that if we add up all the ISK coming into the economy and deduct all the ISK leaving the economy then we get a rise of 22 trillion ISK which therefore indicates that 9 trillion ISK (22-13) was held by characters that ceased their subsciptions - not sure how much Plex is also "retired".
I'll put it blunt. Its because most of the isk rich people plexed their accounts for years not months. Up to just a semi short while back, it was easy to make isk and plex your account. CCP systematically destroyed that with i.e. datacore research nerfed, T2 lottery nerfed (which btw, those T2 blueprints never got taken off. So whoever owns them now can own that production line), industry nerfed with massive tax increase (but hey people say...we got a nice new GUI out of it I guess), gas from wormholes became pennies instead of dollars, multiboxing nerf of ISBoxer etc etc etc. even when you look at citadels now...its a joke, a f'king joke they are. Old school people are leaving either because they are sick or bored or just simply got kicked out of the game by CCP for no reason. The game has turned to shit and CCP have gotten more real life money greedy whilst employing incompetent staff to even keep their servers online. They don't care about a fun game play, they just look at money now, that's why they also recently invented a 200 trillion isk citadel. Its to get rid off peoples isk and "force" them to play to farm for isk to buy plex to keep the game alive - cuz honestly, nobody wants to pay real life money for an internet game. At the same time they are gonna manipulate the market and jack up prices again. CCP pray on the addicted ones who pay real life money to play to win or simply because its addictive. That's why plex has risen 300 percent. Its got nothing to do with inflation and all that business mathematical spreadsheet babble that you read in blogs and see in CCP marketing scams. Think about it. You're the game developer. You can do whatever you want. With a push of the button you could do anything without anyone noticing it. Why do you think they fly around with Armageddon rigged capsules and level 20 augmentations. They can do whatever they want. They can manipulate whatever they want. What they want is your money. Nothing more nothing less.
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