Art by Empanda.
Editor’s Note: This article comes to us from Aryth, Goonswarm Financial Director
First, a quick primer for those of you that are new to EVE or just newer than some. Living in Null originally meant residing in one of 3 Conquerable stations per region. These were CCP seeded and served as the only place of settlement outside a POS available in old Null. Later on the line of history, players gained the ability to construct their own stations in Null sec. These were initially pretty rare as the costs in those days was significant for an alliance. Over the years players slowly developed Null with built outposts. However, for more than the length of time I have been playing since 2005, nullsec has been building up orphaned assets in these stations that had no asset safety.
Many times when someone is evicted from null they do not have the time or ability to evac all their assets. Even players with plenty of warning will often leave bulky low value things behind. Ships, stront, heavy water etc. The June 5th patch is going to be an earthquake across EVE as 10s of thousands of players will suddenly have assets available to them to reclaim. There will be a several week delay while these timer mechanics result in things appearing in lowsec consolidation points. Add a few more days for some portion of that to make the journey to Jita using JF services or someones own hauling.
This means that around the end of June, and into the first 2-3 weeks of July we are going to have a possible flood of items reaching Jita that had previously been excluded from the overall economy. For perhaps months people will be sending dregs to Jita but they are not likely to matter. What will matter is that initial flood. This will be capitals, t1 and t2 subcaps, freighters and JFs, Moongoo, Minerals. Think bulk or small amounts of items that add up to a huge wave. This wave does have a cost. People are going to eat 15% + transport fees. This should insulate Jita to some degree against a stront wave that collapses the market completely.
Since a day or two after the blog from CCP came out I have been telling Goondom to liquidate their holdings in preparation for gobbling these items cheaper. The CSM had no advance warning the date would be so close. Originally, I had thought we would get conversion at the end of the year. It was a large part of why I was going to run prices up until then. Since the blog I have been selling off massive stockpiles to free up ISK. Goons as a whole have been doing this. This is the entire reason goo has fallen since CCPs announcement. I am not re-buying large amounts of stock as we want ISK available and lower overall prices for our gobbling of the wave. Now that we have trillions liquid for the storm we can share the guidance a bit wider. Hey, we gotta get liquid first yo. Be happy you get any warning at all.
However, this isn’t a moon-goo story. This is an economy wide story. There is quite a bit of debate internally about just how many things are out there. We have no corollary in the history of EVE to judge this by. I tend to be on the more cautious side and think a lot is coming. Others think that players have been relatively tidy over the years. The fact is, we have no real idea. We can run API scans and see what the average goon has sprinkled around null and it is indeed significant. Even a few billion a player across 1000s of players is a huge shock to the economy. There are several variables that all mean things can go several ways.
Do people activate asset safety in the first few days? Almost assuredly anyone with large amounts of ISK locked up would.
Do those people leave it in lowsec? Do they list it in lowsec? Do they move it to Jita themselves or use JF services?
We could very well see short term mini-market garage sales in the major lowsec aggregation points.
What are people going to activate? Ships? Minerals? Their exotic dancer collection? Rare corpses?
We are playing it by putting up cheap buy orders across the impacted items that we otherwise want anyway. If you are a T2 ship maker i would advise being a bit more liquid than normal and not have some massive stock of ships. Again, we don’t know how much is coming. We only know what COULD come in a short period. If players are lazy and this is a damp squib we will holocaust markets with our trillions in liquid before anyone else can beat us to the punch. Either way, this is something we have never seen before in EVE and will never see again. History will be made with the largest garage sale EVE will ever know.
Or we are totally wrong and players are lazy as hell and we have a ton of ISK for nothing.
