On February 20th 2008,
EVE Online's economist Dr Eyjo published his
fourth quarter economic newsletter for 2007. The newsletter discussed issues ranging from deflation to what ships players use and methods for estimating the total production of
Eve. Among the pages of the economic newsletter was a small section commenting on the purchases of shuttles relative to tritanium prices and the ensuing discussion seemed to focus on this. In his more
recent devblog, Dr Eyjo informed pilots that following a recent patch, the infinite NPC supply of shuttles was being removed from the market in order to alleviate what he calls
"an artificial price cap of 3.6 ISK per unit".
It's no secret that shuttles and tritanium prices are linked. The effect that the supply of shuttles on the market has had on tritanium prices is a well-known and well-documented phenomenon that was even included in the
second economist dev-blog back in September of 2007. If prices of tritanium ever increase above 3.6 per unit due to the laws of supply and demand in action, it becomes profitable to buy shuttles at 9000 ISK per unit and refine them into tritanium for sale or industry. The fact that there are people with perfect refine skills willing to do this for profit means that the price of tritanium can never rise any more than fractionally above 3.6 per unit before the shuttle-refiners push it back down.
Read on for a breakdown of the controversy and to find out how this change has affected the EVE markets.
Jun 7th 2008 at 3:00PM
We've featured Backward Compatible here on Comic Watch before, and the hits just keep on comin'. This episode is particularly timely, concerning itself with the recent speculation over the SciFi/Trion project.
