PLEX, SP farming and many charts...

PLEX is always in discussion. Almost always “too expensive CCP do sumfing, me no can play”. I won’t be discussing the price as in whether I think it is to high but simply the data in front of us.

Below is a chart showing “Average” profitability from skill extraction. By average I mean average prices of plex, extractor, injector and MPTC. Dedicated skill farms would use specific buy and sell orders to maximise margins. This data/chart is for the average Joe making some money on the side.

• Profitability Plex (Blue): is one character maximum training paid via plex (500plex).
• Profitability MPTC (Red): is as above but for second character on account so using MPTC.
• Full Account (Yellow): Is full dedicated SP account so one character on plex and two on MPTC.

So in this chart I have marked in green periods of peak profitability with Green circles. Negative profitability with Red circles.

You can see that these peaks coincide with sharp drops in PLEX price. 2018 was a great year for PLEX sales. This makes sense as PLEX is the largest input to the SP farm process.

“you stupid what about extractors and MPTC!”

Yes OK you also need extractors and MPTC as input costs. Both of these can be gained via the NEX store by swapping for PLEX. The timing of when to profit from this is another subject for another post maybe.

So PLEX price drives everything.

Again this is all showing the “Average prices” the “average player” how many were keeping track of all these prices? This forum in the past was full of economic discussion on all the moving parts of Eve’s economy. I think this does still go on but more likely takes place on Alliance forums.

We had a glut of injectors we were swimming in the things for a while.

Prices were driven slowly lower due to oversupply. That is because the “average player” didn’t notice this on the next chart.

Profitability was driven over time to zero. Remember this yellow line shows profitability from extracting and selling SP from all three characters on an account. Sticking with the “average player”. What if you were using the spare two slots on an account with one main character?

1 main 2 sp (Green): Shows exactly the above example. One main character and two extracting.

You can see that the Green line is close to zero until the start of September. This means that extracting two characters would pay to PLEX your main character.

This is important. From this point profitability slowly drove lower.

This period marked in red was a shock. “Average player” at this point when he was happily extracting his second and third characters was -1.5billion isk down once finished. Poop!

Going from minimal cost and occasionally being in profit, to losing 1-1.5b a month!

And wouldn’t you know this “shock” month showed us the bottom in injector prices.

Going from oversupply to undersupply. The negative shock stopped people extracting on second/third character slots.

There is more to come but I need to do some work which actually puts pennies in the bank.

I only have about 400days of data, back to Feb '18 so if anyone could share any extra data? Looking at some of the guys that host eve data online i.e. evemarketer or evemogul etc.