As always, there’s not any specific information to share due to the confidentiality of the discussions.
May 8th, 2020
Discussed development cadence
Reviewed the DDOS attacks
Reviewed CSM elections and prep for CSM 15
Discussed the on-going login & celebration campaigns
Dunk’s Corner
The Plex Market on the EVE Portal app is now public and available.
Due to the CSM meetings, I’ve known about this for some time. But in that time, I’ve never been able to figure out who exactly is going to use this feature.
For those that don’t know, the Plex Market on the app allows trade on the Jita 4-4 market only. You cannot choose another location for the trading.
In buying & selling Plex there are few major use cases:
Plex traders – People who buy & sell Plex as a commodity, profiting by the arbitrage in buy & sell order and price trends.
People converting Plex to ISK – People who spend real life currency on Plex via the New Eden store and then sell it to get ISK in game
People “Plexing” an account – People who convert ISK to Plex to allow them selves to subscribe to EVE with Plex instead of real world currency.
There are a few other cases, like players buying Plex to pay for SKINs from the New Eden Store, but their are fairly minor in comparison to the other use cases.
In recent years, much of trade in Plex moved to player owned structures with lower tax bases. At the scale of value in Plex trading, even a single percentage of lower taxes has significant benefit.
With all Plex Market trade occurring in the Jita 4-4 market, a player is looking at being at a serious financial disadvantage by trading on a comparatively high tax market in Jita 4-4 as opposed to a player structure market.
So the question is, “Who will use the Plex Market on the Portal app?“
There is no way serious Plex Traders will use it. Every fraction of a percentage point matters, and they will always choose the most economically profitable method, which remains in-client at player markets.
The person selling Plex to get ISK is going to want to maximize their return, which means using a market with lower taxes, which isn’t Jita. Maybe they are in some sort of rush to get the ISK for some immediate need?
The Plexing an account person might try it, with the use case of not having a market character in Jita. Seems like an edge case, but who knows. Maybe you realize while sitting on the toilet that your account is about to go alpha and you want to keep it Omega, but are stranded because you are out of toilet paper?
CCP obviously put a lot of effort into this feature, but I’m just not clear on who is going to use it and if it will affect the Plex market in any measurable way. If you have some thoughts, I’d love to hear.
