A Quick Look At The Second Week Of EVE Online's Global PLEX Market

With two weeks in the books, I decided to work on my tools and take another look at EVE Online's new global PLEX market. I think seeing an official RMT market in the game is of interest to some folks. But last weekend CCP Games threw in a twist: a 20% off PLEX sale. What did that do to the market?

First, a new combo chart displaying the average price of one PLEX each day since the market opened and the volume of PLEX sold each day. The chart shows both the decline in the price of PLEX over the weekend as well as the increased volume. Prior to the sale, the ISK cost per PLEX was already drifting downward from a little over 6 million ISK on the day the market launched. A summary of each day's trading.

• July 19: price per PLEX drops about 2.5% to ~5.85 million ISK as discounted PLEX floods the market.
• July 20: hits its low near 5.82 million ISK amid peak volume of 1.8 million PLEX.
• July 21: rises to around 5.9 M ISK, indicating sustained supply pressure.

The sale emphasized a natural dip in price that occurs on the weekends with higher player numbers logged onto Tranquility. One can see a much smaller decline on 12-13 July. Since the sale runs for a full week I'll be interested to see what the market activity looks like both the weeks before and after the sale.

The above chart shows the effects on the real world value of one billion ISK. The value peaked on Sunday at $7.72 per billion ISK. Of course, due to the sale, those with freshly purchased PLEX were actually paying an effective rate of $6.18 per billion ISK. A much lese expensive purchase than the average price of $7.56 per billion ISK on Friday.

An interesting statistic to possibly look at in the next week or two is the amount of PLEX up for sale in sell orders. The developers are attempting to get players to use their PLEX so looking for increases might help determine if CCP is achieving that objective. I have created files with the information from the market interface manually so far, but I would really like to generate the data automatically, or at least with a couple of mouse clicks without having to log into the game. But for now, I hopefully have given a useful glimpse into CCP's latest initiative.