d4shing
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Posted - 2010.07.21 16:47:00 -
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Has anyone noticed, btw, that almost all datacore prices are way down in the past year?
Everything is down between 25 and 65%, except for Minnie Starship (I guess vagas etc have become more popular with players in the past year) and Plasma Physics (?). Caldari Starship cores more or less held stable, and everything else is way down.
My next thought is: what is the equilibrium price? Let's say you get an account, you RAF it and effectively get a free 45 days. You then have to pay (roughly) 600m for 2 more plex while you train up RPM 4 on all 3 toons on that account, a science skill to 4, negotiation+connections+social to 4. I assume you're running them through missions on an alt. It took me maybe ~40 hours (?, was a while ago) to run one of my alts up to 7.8 standing with Carthum, and that was in a crappy double LAR dominix with T1 drones. With a marauder or somesuch I'm sure it'd be much faster, but it's not like you're not getting paid for these missions, anyways.
The finished product should yield roughly 8 datacores per day per toon. 24 datacores per acct/day, that's about 700 datacores per month, with a startup cost of 600m and a 2 month lead time. You could probably train them up more (science skill to 5 or RPM to 5 or even negotiation to 5) but at these price levels it's not really cost-effective (though since this "feature" has existed for years, it probably was at some point, and over a sufficiently long time horizon you'd make back the extra isk).
If you buy 1 plex every 6 months thereafter:
Month 8: 900m spent, 4200 datacores = 215k/core
Month 14: 1.2b spent, 8400 datacores = 143k/core
Month 20: 1.5b spent, 12.6k datacores = 120k/core
It's difficult to say how big the impact of this activity is, of course, because we don't know how many cores are consumed per day. Nor do we know how widespread this activity is. Nonetheless, market prices generally converge to the marginal cost, and are determined by the lowest cost supplier.
I think it's pretty obviously bad for the game, but I also think it's bad for the game to take all the devs and put them on vampires of xbox, so what do I know? On the other hand, at least if I decide to cancel more of my accounts while the folks at CCP develop other games, I'll have datacores to come back to if I ever feel like returning.
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