Could you explain this a bit more please, I'm not sure which things you recommend not connecting to the market? The idea that player trading become active is to A: remove the npc manufactured items and B: to allow players to get rid of the items they don't want or need. There would need to be a replacement for the npc market. The clear solution is to allow Eve pilots to build and sell the items to us or to allow us to build them somehow ourselves (extremely large addition of extra parts to this game, mineral extraction and industry to name a few). This produces a system where the supply must rise to fill the demand and make it worthwhile to have Eve allies.

The reason contracts would need to be in place is for people wishing to sell gear to specific groups who would place an order for say 50,000 Duvolle Assault Rifles. Rather than sell the rifles to everyone, they would be assigned a bulk cost and sold to the group for X amount of Isk through the purchase price of the contract. Ensuring that shipments need only go to one location for pickup and it allows Eve corps to help equalize the playing field or stack it in their favor, limiting supply to allies rather than supplying the enemies with arms.

Stabilizing the market is all fine and good but there will never be an entirely stable market and there will always be fluctuations in it as popular items sell faster and so less popular may be cheaper or non-existent in some areas. This is also normal and in the genre of game this is I see it as being vital for shaping the game and the way the meta game is played.

You are right, there is a plan for manufacturing but as of yet I have not seen any blueprints on the market for items which says to me that there is no plan in place yet for the fabrication process. In Eve when you build a T2 ship there is a good deal of research time on the blueprint that needs to occur before any manufacturing can be done.

This system is what I speculate would provide us with our Advanced and Prototype gear which I am sure there will be a good market for, and what worries me is that if tomorrow they were to put the market up for use, we would not have items we all like available for purchase anymore unless the NPC market would have an initial offering of items which we could buy up in a finite quantity to slowly remove the NPC market.

The solution is to add the blueprints to the Eve market for sale pre-market. This allows people to buy the BPOs to research them and start the manufacture process so that we can actually have player made modules, suits and weapons.

You're right we have stockpiles of weapons that we may or may not want to sell. I am not sure that one at a time would be better than all at once in this case though. I am talking about two systems at once, the player market and the contract market. These allow players to trade directly with other players and I feel like they are separate beasts enough in their own rights and able to stand alone but fail to see the benefit of doing them separately.

CCP already has a good deal of experience implementing the player trading system and think that it would be relatively easy to set up a system that would allow us all what we need without compromising one portion for a time until they see some stability. In the end dev choices will cause fluctuations and FOTM attitudes as well as war and peace. This game is built around offering mercs the ability to make choices that make a difference and some of those choices in Eve affect them economically, the one driving factor that should allow this game to rise from the ashes. There is no amount of time that can prevent devs and players from changing things and I don't think that we would need a cool-down period but rather expect prices to continue wild fluctuations for the first year if not more as there are many more items to add to game and fix.

You have hit the nail on the head. I have not had much use for LP unless I want faction ammo or implants, and see the bling ships as a big target to shoot at that looks good on a killboard. For instance, Megathron vs Vindicator, I would pick the Vindi as my target rather than the Megathron. There is way too much value put on the faction items without having a way to sell them are we going to actually want to buy them?

In the case of Dust, with current TTK being rather high I would think that adding a faction mod market would be a bad idea (TTK=2-3 s for the toughest fit available). Combined DPS should be a concern for people considering using faction weapons, tank and gank mods and so we are back to what is better right now, an Isk sink or a resource for mercs to make a bit more Isk before getting geared up with Faction everything.

I saw/read somewhere recently (I want to say it was the Dust panel at EVE Vegas, CCP LeKjart speaking) something along these lines:

"We could come up with a reward system for FW that we'd want to change once the in-game market was available, which we expect to be soon (but not as soon as FW changes), or we could implement a long-term solution that assumes the presence of the market now, and let things be a little akward in-game for FW while the market is missing. To save dev time in the long run, we decided to go with the latter option."

All terribly paraphrased, but that's the gist of it. So, they know it's an issue, but consider it to be the lesser of evils. Personally, I tend to agree, as I hope that an extra isk sink will reduce proto-stomping for a while. That could just be a pipe dream on my part, though -_-

The market is something that's being pushed for heavily. We probably won't see it in 1.7 but it is something that is *apparently* under active work (IE: NOT on the backburner), judging by our chats with CCP.

So, fear not. CCP knows the market is a big deal and wants to deliver. As far as when? No idea.

I saw/read somewhere recently (I want to say it was the Dust panel at EVE Vegas, CCP LeKjart speaking) something along these lines:

"We could come up with a reward system for FW that we'd want to change once the in-game market was available, which we expect to be soon (but not as soon as FW changes), or we could implement a long-term solution that assumes the presence of the market now, and let things be a little akward in-game for FW while the market is missing. To save dev time in the long run, we decided to go with the latter option."

All terribly paraphrased, but that's the gist of it. So, they know it's an issue, but consider it to be the lesser of evils. Personally, I tend to agree, as I hope that an extra isk sink will reduce proto-stomping for a while. That could just be a pipe dream on my part, though -_-

Now that is a proper isk sink, play the accelerated week, log in the next week for the black eagle suits, skip the event, login the next week after, play with a Toxin fit BPO suit in that week to win proto weapons, I like the plan already. BTW are there any Black Eagle Logi suits?