DUST Search - Pricing and economy in EVE vs Dust

Klivve Cussler wrote:

I really did my best to read through this thread thoroughly, since it is highly interesting, but if this has been mentioned already, I apologize:

It seems to me that we are missing key information regarding the Dust items needed to make a good estimate of the relative worth of the items in Dust vs Eve. That information is the materials needed to manufacture the items. Without the bill of materials we have no baseline for comparing the costs of manufacture, and therefore the minimum profitable selling price.

In addition to the size and role of the items, the complexity and scale of an item can also greatly affect the price. It may be that the items we are using in Dust are much more difficult to produce because they are small. Fitting a fusion reactor into a dropsuit might be as expensive as building one into a destroyer. We don't know the fiction CCP will use, but basically they can greatly affect the market value of items make making them harder to produce.

For example a Tech 3 cruiser is more expensive than a tech 1 battleship in eve, even if their relative sizes would suggest otherwise. All CCP would have to do to make Dust equipment more comparable to Eve gear is make it harder to build.


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Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.12 23:42:00 - [1] - Quote I tried searching the forums for this but came up blank. If my search-fu is weak, please link. At some point, the currently somewhat separate economies of New Eden will merge into one. We already buy our stuff from the same market that EVE players use to buy and sell. It stands to reason that at some point our LAVs and Mass Drivers will be manufactured as commodities and then sold and traded on the open market like all the other stuff. However, currently there is an enormous disparity in the pricing schemes... First, let me say that I think most of the pricing in Dust, generally speaking, is on par with income. The things we buy are, again in general, cheap enough to be used and expensive enough that we don't want to lose them, in scale with what they are worth and require. This is good. The pricing in EVE follows the same model. You should be able to afford cool stuff if you work for it, but it will sting when you lose it. This is the model that creates the excitement of combat in a persistent universe. Now, the problem comes in when we look at the relative prices schemes here. I have chosen, in my example, the Charybdis. The Charybdis is listed as a Caldari logistics LAV. When all is said and done, it's a two seat open top pickup truck with a shield generator and some cool hardware for remote repairs. Awesome piece of gear. Presumably these machines are not cheap, but still produced in million quantities for the various empire armies of New Eden. We don't have specifications for this pickup truck, but let's assume it's about 2500 kg, or the same as a low end military hummer. My visual judgement says it's roughly 4 meters long. The current hull price, without fitting, of a Charybdis is 84,000 ISK. Let's compare our Charybdis to an EVE counterpart, the noble Bantam frigate. The Bantam is a "Support Frigate" which provides bonuses (and good ones) to shield transporters, allowing Caldari pilots to remotely repair the shields of ships near them. It is small, humble and not very fast. What it lacks in speed it makes up for in ugly. Now, being an interstellar frigate, this ship, for all its ugly, is still a spaceship with capsule technology and a warp drive. When compared to a pickup truck, this is a massive piece of machinery. While it is small next to many of the other ships in EVE, it's still 52 meters long. While it is weightless in space, in standard gravity it would weight 1,480,000 kg. This means it outweighs the Charybdis by almost 600 times. Also, the cargo hold of a Bantam frigate, unmodified, holds about 270 cubic meters of whatever you want to throw in. If you stack them right, That works out to approximately 22 Charybdis...es... Charybdi? So, what will this massive warp driving hunk of shield repairing space metal badassery cost you? The current average hull price in Jita, without fitting, of a Bantam is 51,329 ISK. TL;DR In Dust, a sweet pickup truck costs 40% more than an interstellar spaceship in EVE that is 600 times heavier and can fly through stars. Discuss among yourselves!
Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.13 00:02:00 - [2] - Quote Kay High wrote: right now as far as I know the conversion of EVE ISK to Dust ISK is about 1/10 so using that logic, the Bantam Frig hull is actualy worth 513,290 ISK on the dust market while the Charybdis is worth 8,400 ISK on the EVE market. However this is only with the direct conversion of ISK. We have no idea what a LAV will cost to make or where the prices will stabilize. Since there currently is no conversion, what's your source for this?
Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.13 00:09:00 - [3] - Quote zeek1227 zeek1227 wrote: The pricing is temporary npc prices. Once the market opens so we can buy/sell with eve players, prices will change some will go down others will go up. Just depends how much people want something and are willing to pay. The pricing base line will be set by the material requirements, which are set by CCP. Generally speaking, when items are taken from NPC production into player production, the price doesn't drastically change unless there is a reason for that to happen. Again, CCP does set the basic price and that price is then affected by market circumstances. This is all moot though, because the price is currently, in my opinion, very good when set in relation to the income of a typical Dust merc. A massive (90%) drop in the price of a Charybdis due to production being moved over to capsuleers would require a massive restructuring of mercenary income lest every player on the field just pours Charybdises over everything like so much ranch dressing since they're suddenly expendable. Hence, the price we see currently in relation to our income is probably a good ball park indicator of the production cost + markup in EVE.
Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.13 00:18:00 - [4] - Quote zeek1227 zeek1227 wrote: This is not true. You have to mine from asteriods, use planetary interaction to get resources to make things. CCP doesnt set any prices Having played EVE actively for almost a decade, I am familiar with the mechanisms in which objects are produced in New Eden. If you go back to reading the post you just quoted, I said that the pricing base line is set by the material requirements, which are set by CCP. Here is an example. You need 20,271 units of Tritanium (among many other materials) to produce a Bantam. This number is set by CCP. While it is not a price, per se, it does provide a certain base line, since Tritanium is generally not free. You need 8,335,395 units of Tritanium to produce a Raven. This means that a Bantam is less expensive than a Raven. Obviously the somewhat fluctuating price of Tritanium (and other metals, etc) AFFECT the price, but the base production cost is still set by CCP. Clear?
Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.13 00:40:00 - [5] - Quote Malinche La Llorona wrote: So, to put my analysis in perspective, I have an economics degree in real life and am currently attending a Ph.D. program. That doesn't mean that what I'm about to say is correct or should just be accepted without question, I just want you to know where I'm coming from. Thank you for getting involved, your expertise is appreciated. EVE is based on a free market ideology, but the pricing schemes of free markets are and must be manipulated to avoid certain things. This goes doubly true in a game. Certain things regulate themselves. I realize you're familiar with this but I'm spelling it out so that everybody can follow along. Let's say manufacturing a Charybdis is not profitable, due to the cost of production versus what customers are currently willing to pay. Well, manufacturers will at that point stop making Charybdises. Those who want one will now have to pay higher prices in order to acquire one. Volume manufacturing will likely bring the price back down, and certain manufacturers will stop building them because of slipping profits. The cycle continues. However, two things are at play here. First off, manufacturing costs are to a large extent set by CCP. This is a necessity, because this is a game that takes place in a simulated universe. In real life economies, if the price of gold takes a dump, that's fine. Some investors lose some money, some new industries sprout up, things jumble about and then correct themselves. However, in our make believe economy, our enjoyment and thus willingness to pay our real world money for Dust 514 / EVE Online the product, is directly tied to the relationship between income and expense. If HAVs become too cheap everybody has them and gameplay suffers. If HAVs become too expensive there will probably be a correction based on manufacturing quantity, but even that has limits set by CCP through the mineral requirements for production. ADDED: Furthermore, the "free market" in EVE consists only of products that CCP have designed. These products may only be produced in facilities run by CCP. If I think pickup trucks are too expensive, I can't design a cheaper pickup truck and start selling it. The fluctuations of supply and demand absolutely affect pricing in EVE, but it's still very much a controlled system. Second, your focus may be clouding your common sense. There is simply no way that a pickup truck can cost more than a spaceship in a free market economy. It wasn't whittled out of a solid diamond the size of a house. It's a truck. It's not a one-off magic truck that flushes rivers of gold out the back end when you drive, it's just a truck.
Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.13 00:59:00 - [6] - Quote Malinche La Llorona wrote: I get where you're coming from. Let me make two points: 1. Whether the pickup truck or the frigate costs more is irrelevant. It might not be realistic for the truck to cost as much as two frigates, but the reality is that the value isn't based on real resources and real production. The value of a tulip bulb in Amsterdam at one point was higher than many houses. 2. The resources used to produce Dust gear is mined from planetary interaction. The ability of Eve players to mine those resources is tied to the value of service we provide. In this sense, it is a self-regulating system. That being said, I think the question is whether or not you have faith in CCP to set that system up in a way that lets it become a vibrant and functional marketplace or a stagnant pile of crap. So far in Eve I have not been confident in CCP's ability to manage these things as they have made many mistakes in the past. Still, eventually I think they'll get it right. First, please check back at my post as I added something right as you wrote this. To your points, as follows. 1) You example is not relevant to the market being discussed. We are not talking about unique luxury items, we are talking about mass produced trucks. There are t-shirts in EVE which cost more than battleships. This is because there is an inflated demand driven by vanity and a lack of supply in that they cannot be produced. People would not wear these t-shirts in battle. They are collectors items. A Charybdis is not. 2) Do you have any actual sources for this? I have seen nothing beyond speculation that speaks to what role PI will have in the world of Dust long term. Neither in the form of uses for PI materials in Dust nor in denial of PI access by use of mercenaries. Regardless, your point of self regulation here is valid, but only accounts for the use of these commodities in PI related scenarios. What would be the incentive to use mercenaries at all if the equipment of ground forces is more expensive than spaceships? For far less monetary investment you can simply shoot stuff from orbit or deny their transport of materials in space.
Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.13 19:05:00 - [7] - Quote Vrain Matari wrote: Interesting research and observations, Gullegubben. I'm just speaking out of my kittenhole here, because i haven't crunched any numbers to support what i'm about to say. I'm also an active long-time citzen of New Eden. Have mined/manufactured in depth, etc. I can't quote you any examples off the top of my head, but I know that if you compare physical characteristics(mass, volume, etc.) with the material requirements for items in the EVE database you can find many examples of things that are deeply irrational. One could always engage in developing rationalizations to make such disparities more palatable(eg. although that amount of mineral is used in the constuction of an item, it doesn't neccesaritly end up in said item), but I gave up on that a long time ago. The Charybdis/Bantam example may just end up being a particularly egregious example of this. Thank you for that point. Certainly the objects in EVE don't always make sense. I remember a happy time when the Chimera carrier was physically smaller than a Mammoth hauler, despite being able to hold a Mammoth inside its ship bay... But if we completely discount the mass listed in the object attributes, we still have estimations of physical size through the axis length as well as other traits we know about. The Bantam and Charybdis were chosen just because they have similar roles. This means that any huge increase in the price of a Charybdis attributed to the expensive remote repair systems would also apply to the Bantam. Certainly the physical size etc is vastly different. A rough guess at the volume of a Bantam leaves me with 41500m3, assuming it was a solid block. EVE claims the volume is about 20,000m3, which would make sense judging from how spindly the ship is. A pickup truck is about 12m3. Obviously the listed sizes in EVE are sometimes way off (Planetary Vehicles in EVE are both hysterically expensive and only take up 2m3). These sizes are based on known axis length of the Bantam and visual sense of the Charybdis (4x2x1.5m). This means the Bantam is 1,667 times the volume of a Charybdis. Assuming there is a lot more empty space in the Bantam this would put the mass in roughly the right ball park. Vrain Matari wrote: I would love to see the physical characteristics in the New Eden database rationalized, but it's not way up there on the priority list, however. For priorities, how about CCP man up and rewrite the core physics/celestial engine? I would love an actual planetary orbit engine, but I do realize that it would make bookmark handling extremely difficult, since it's currently a coordinate system and not relative.
Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.14 02:02:00 - [8] - Quote Klivve Cussler wrote: I really did my best to read through this thread thoroughly, since it is highly interesting, but if this has been mentioned already, I apologize: It seems to me that we are missing key information regarding the Dust items needed to make a good estimate of the relative worth of the items in Dust vs Eve. That information is the materials needed to manufacture the items. Without the bill of materials we have no baseline for comparing the costs of manufacture, and therefore the minimum profitable selling price. In addition to the size and role of the items, the complexity and scale of an item can also greatly affect the price. It may be that the items we are using in Dust are much more difficult to produce because they are small. Fitting a fusion reactor into a dropsuit might be as expensive as building one into a destroyer. We don't know the fiction CCP will use, but basically they can greatly affect the market value of items make making them harder to produce. For example a Tech 3 cruiser is more expensive than a tech 1 battleship in eve, even if their relative sizes would suggest otherwise. All CCP would have to do to make Dust equipment more comparable to Eve gear is make it harder to build. This is actually why I didn't select a dropsuit as an example. The theoretical complexity of a dropsuit may be enormous. However, that said, a dropsuit can't be that expensive to make, or they wouldn't be used. It goes back to the argument of using ground forces to do something that mostly could be done from orbit. One would only do that if there was a significant advantage to using the ground forces. One such advantage might be the ability to capture installations instead of destroying them outright. However, if the cost of capturing it is greater than the value of the installation, that equation goes out the window right quick. Another example (as provided by the novel Templar One) would be to capture an installation which by anti-ship weapons or physical location is resistive to orbital bombardment. Again, if ground troops cost more than spaceships, why wouldn't you just crash a bunch of cheap spaceships into the place? I would accept a Charybdis LAV being more expensive than a regular pickup truck due to all sorts of things such as specialized exotic plating, shrinking of systems and limited production runs. These things make military vehicles more expensive than normal ones today as well. But making them more expensive than giant, interstellar spaceships is just beyond the scope of those price increases.
Gullegubben Ginnungagaps Landsknektsgille 32	Posted - 2013.02.14 04:00:00 - [9] - Quote Vaerana Myshtana wrote: To go back to the OP's point, the Bantam (a Tech 1 frigate with logistics bonuses) is not a valid comparison to the Charybdis (a specialized logistics LAV). For starters, the Bantam is, essentially, Meta 0. It is the base model of that ship hull. The Charybdis is Meta 3, its base model is the Onikuma, which prices out at 27,600 ISK. So we are comparing the Bantam with the Onikuma. Of course, a jeep costing even half as much as a starship is still ludicrous. I did this to offset the fact that the Bantam has specialized shield transfer equipment. This type of equipment is also present in the Charybdis. Any huge increase in price due to this equipment on the Charybdis would also affect the Bantam to some degree.