EVE Economy - 2015 In Review

Getting quite a few requests to talk about 2015 as a whole this season.  Being news/short-term minded, I wasn't prepared to talk at length about the year in review, but I adjusted some scripts and pulled the data for you all.  This is meant to be a look at our forced core-basket products for Prosper.  A greatest-hits blog will take some more effort, but be sure to leave a comment if you want to see more!

And if you want to skip straight to the graphs, I've put together an imgur gallery

PLEX

I have been cutting my teeth on PLEX all year.  It's the first product people want to know about, and there are a lot of people shilling opinions of wildly varying quality.  I said at the start of the year that 1B PLEX should be expected in 2015, but I missed the timeframe.  Originally, I was expecting 1B PLEX by fanfest, but a mix of ISboxer fallout and extended out-of-game sales on PLEX kept the lid on the market.  But the summer showed sustained growth that suddenly exploded in September, rocketing us past the 1B price to a steady state now around 1.2B.  

I still believe the price of PLEX is overvalued, but the current dip down to 1.15B looks to be a local minimum, and it's a really great time right now to stock up for the year if you're looking to replenish your stocks.  Also, I expect the prices of PLEX to have less positive-volatility with the release of skill packets or brainmeat, but CCP has been quiet on details since fanfest.

Minerals - High Ends

CCP Fozzie has been touching the mineral equations a bunch this year.  The biggest news was at fanfest where Megacyte/Zydrine consumption was announced to be doubled across the board, and nullsec ore yields would be adjusted to better balance the ISK/hr equation for miners and local supply of raw minerals on the frontiers.

Though prices dramatically reset because of the news, we've seen a slow and steady erosion of value over the summer.  This goes back to my opinion that "[isk generation] will always grind away their margins".  In this case, miners just want to get paid, and will supply the market with as much material as they can produce, and unless there is production demand to absorb it, we will see an imbalance trending downward.  Since the actual supply of minerals is not hard-capped like moon materials, we should nearly always expect high-end minerals to be in oversupply.

Minerals - Low Ends

Where high-ends went up, low-ends went down.  Part of the yield update was a generous improvement in Trit/Pyre availability in nullsec.  This bump in supply was seen as a slump in final demand for these products.  Though, with the hype around Capitals/Citadels this fall, we've seen a recent bump in prices.  When these products actually hit in the spring, I expect some more strength in these low-end materials.  

Minerals - Mid Materials

Going to keep this to Mexallon, because it's really the interesting piece of the puzzle.  For the uninitiated, Mexallon tends to be the chokepoint in really heavy industry operations (capitals).  It doesn't compress well, and it isn't sourced well in nullsec.  Therefore, it's a bit of a canary in the coalmine for me around speculating in the mid term around capitals and citadels.  

Also, Mexallon is a particular bright spot for the show because I managed to forecast the climb before EVE Vegas.

Fuel Markets

I expected more action in the fuel markets over the year than we actually ended up seeing.  To the point where I considered pulling the fuel segment from the show a few times.  With Phoebe and Aegis reshaping the map in such significant ways, I expected big moves as capitals had their roles revisited and as the map reshaped thanks to new sov.  We just have not seen the kind of behavior I really expected.

Specifically, I've found the behavior on Caldari ice products to be weird, outstripping other flavors by a large margin.  I expected prices to trend more toward equilibrium around 700/unit rather than stratifying the way they have in the last few months.