Eve Online is often seen as having an economy that is comparable to the real world. When there are updates made to the game, they can have some vast long-term effects within the ecosystem. Despite the age of the game, they still have quite regular updates.

Over the past couple of months, since I've returned to Eve Online, they have had some interesting updates and even police stances that have had quite the influence on the ecosystem of the game. The game developers themselves are like a government, and the changes they make have rippling effects.

The updates that stand out the most have been dealing with inflation and deflation impacts within the ecosystem. Everything from the developers seeing Plex prices too high to there not being enough of certain minerals.

You can tell the developers don’t take making changes to such things lightly. They make small changes. They then come back, sometimes a month or two later, and make further changes as needed. Almost acts like a federal reserve in a way.

Once an area that has been seen is the price of Plex. Not too long ago, they declared that the price of Plex in terms of ISK is a lot higher than they wanted. So, they made some small changes and other things they wanted to try out.

It only makes sense. Plex has had to do a lot of heavy lifting over the years. From players being able to buy it to fund their Omega time, to it covering an ever-growing range of services and ship skins. There is a lot of pressure on Plex, and many players have been using it as a place to store value to fight inflation for a few years now.

You can now see some price action over the past months, having a downward effect on Plex itself. From small amounts being offered at events. There are more and even better

deals to get Plex. They are even starting to test Plex out as a bonus item you get when buying things in the store from time to time.

Naturally, once the price reduces, players start wanting more of it. At one point, I could not think of the idea of using Plex to fund, let’s say, an alt account. Now, as the price keeps going lower and lower. I’m starting to get that feeling of wanting an alt account and using Plex to fund its Omega time.

While the price of Plex going down at a decent rate over time was their way of being a bit more light-handed. There was also the not-so-light-handed moves of increasing sales tax in the game from 4% to 7.5% as a way of fighting ISK inflation back in March. Eve Online has a history of changing the tax rate at least once a year, but not more often.

While 7.5% sounds crazy to be charging for selling goods in the marketplace. There are other things to consider. Omega accounts can train a skill called Accounting that reduces the total tax by 11% per level.

That skill alone makes such an increase not felt so badly by those who have it trained and are an Omega account. Most players who subscribe to the game have a “trader” alt or main with trading skills trained.

This tax is, however, quite felt when on an Alpha account. I use some Alpha accounts for various reasons. I can tell you that 7.5% is quite a feeling any time I have to use an Alpha account to sell. It is quite a little ISK sink they have going to fight inflation.

As someone who, over the past few months, has been going heavy into manufacturing a change like this, it made me a little nervous. I don’t produce at a scale of what I expect to sell over the course of a couple of days. It will be months.

So if this change ends up having a huge impact on reducing the amount of ISK in-game and creating a decent amount of inflation. One would have been better off selling materials in the short term than manufacturing with them and selling them weeks or months down the road.

Thankfully, so far, the price fluctuations I've seen in the items I craft and sell. Seems to be just expected. I’ll sell off a portion of my stockpile of manufactured goods. Then the market gets flooded with everyone trying to make a quick buck, but being a day late. Then weeks or months later. I get to sell off the remainder of that stockpile at or better prices than I was before.

The only real impact this has had on my decision-making is deciding if an item does not have a high enough margin to want to risk manufacturing a bunch of that item. While with my skills, that change in margin is not huge. It has sometimes been enough of a deciding factor not to manufacture a certain item. As sometimes manufacturing is a game of 1% percentages, a change like this certainly plays a role in that.

Then you have the mineral sides of things. These are the very basic blocks needed to make things in the game. Due to quite a few prior changes, one of the minerals in practice, called Pyerite, was seen as reaching too high a price due to a lack of supply.

You can really tell this one, they are only slowly moving the scale on. We can see the price skyrocket up a bit and has now hit a leveling off stage. It’s, however, still slightly trending upward.

This one has been interesting to watch as they are trying to fight inflation of prices by increasing the supply of it on a few fronts. A rather fun one has been the Mordunium sites that can spawn in 0.5 systems in high sec. They have even increased the processing rate of Pyerite in Mordunium.

You also have Scordite ore, which also yields Pyerite when refined. That they also increased back in July. It was also interesting to see that even the developers are not expecting these changes to “fix” the issue. Just to try and stabilize things. I don’t blame them, as from past years, when you go heavy-handed on such things as this, it can go quite bad quickly for an entire industry in Eve Online.

I truly did not fully understand the issue till I joined a Null Sec alliance. I went out to mine in an asteroid belt to see if it just had some A, B, and C ores, and that was it. While they tend to do things a bit differently down in Null Sec. Such as getting Pyerite from certain moon ores that I have not had the pleasure of mining yet. They can also upgrade sov mining for those who own the system. That is, however, all a bit beyond my understanding.

It certainly starts to make sense why selling compressed ores that yield Pyerite tends to go quickly. Along with seeing a few freighters on occasion get ganked carrying a hull full of such ores.

What was most shocking to see recently was an attempt to balance PvP. This has always been Eve Online's sticking point. They sometimes just decide to nerf the daylights out of a ship or a way of doing things. The price effect of a particular market item can be devastating.

In a recent Legion update, they took a baseball bat, chainsaw, and a flamethrower to the Ferox Navy Issue. Nerfing everything from DPS, tracking, PowerGrid, and CPU of those ships. Making some of the stats the same as the non-navy issue, which is just weird.

Now this one is far too early, seeing the kinds of real impact that will have on the market. This ship is quite the favorite of certain Null Sec Alliances that use it as their doctrine. Even more so when two such alliances have been going at it for months now.

So, seeing a change in a ship that two large alliances have been going at each other with is a little disturbing to see. As you would think, with them trying not to cause shockwaves in the Eve ecosystem, they would wait for things to cool down a lot more. Before nerfing a ship like that. You can even see in a recent battle report of over 500 players how one side had quite a few of the ships fielded.

Final Thoughts

Normally, I don’t cover a lot of patch notes changes for a game like Eve Online. As a lot of the time, the changes are not meant to rock the boat. They also have weekly updates. The changes they make, though, tend to have quite a long-term effect on the ecosystem, even when they go light-handed with a change. This then makes you wonder when they go in heavy-handed, the kind of impact, like the last one, might have over the long term.

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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.