Esan Vartesa
East Khanid Trading
Khanid Trade Syndicate
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Posted - 2011.08.19 19:22:00 -
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CCP has consistently warned players beforehand when they are going to remove NPC buy orders from the market. This makes purchases of these items for a trivial amount above the NPC price a 100% safe investment, with a tiny administrative charge.
If you have excess ISK, and want to speculate on expansion changes, this is actually a very good idea. All the CCP-driven RP going on right now is revolving around WHs, Sleepers, drones, and the like. There's also a new novel coming out, and all this story stuff is the setup for that book, and whatever expansion content will come with it.
These items have no purpose other than to be a reward for ratting in WHs. CCP could have just placed bounties on Sleepers and achieved exactly the same thing, but instead they chose to place item drops on them and seed NPC buy orders. They also invested in posting stories about how Concord had convinced all the Empires to buy up this material as a way of giving all 4 of them equal access to any discoveries made from researching the items. That's a lot of work that could have been accomplished with bounties.
Thus, although not certain, it is perfectly reasonable that these items will actually be valuable for something other than being sold to NPCs in the future. The Empires are willing to pay capsuleers 5m per unit of this stuff, and from an RP standpoint that means they're worth at least that much to them. Now RP considerations don't mean much to players uninterested in that side of the game, but many of CCP's design decisions revolve around Eve's story.
I personally have "some" ISK stored in the form of a stockpile of this particular item, purchased exactly as you have seen. If CCP warns about removing this item from the market before I find out if it will be useful for anything else, I'll dump it all on the NPCs. If they break with past behavior and don't warn me, I'll be sitting on a stockpile of now-rare, relic items that I'll likely be able to sell off slowly on contract. I may lose out, but nothing ventured is nothing gained, as they say.
If a new use for them is added to the game, the price will likely rise as a result, and my investment will have paid off. Opportunity cost isn't a large factor as I currently have difficulty finding opportunities for my ISK anyway.
And yes, I'm fully cognizant of the fact that your persistent questioning of "why" people are doing this isn't purely an exercise in curiosity. But I seriously doubt that explaining the above is going to affect the outcome of my investment, as I have no plans to add to my stockpile and CCP isn't going to modify their decisions based on the effect it will have on 1 player.
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