There are 2 NIC sources;

NPC buy orders
Missions

The NPC buy orders for mods have always been low, so low infact it was more profitable to recycle them for commodities. And the ore buy orders are much much below market.

Mission income was very good with the golden triangle, and with the level 4/5 transports. However with the triangles removal, the volume of NIC from missions is greatly reduced (even though the level 4/5 are active, there's just not many risking them).

This leaves Plasma as the best NIC faucet, even more so now that its a byproduct of farming beacons.

The only difference is that the income has now moved from the industrials over to the combat players.

Industrial players pushed this NIC back into the market immediately through buying ore and kernels.

Players in corporations are buy MOST of their items from the internal markets, so much of that NIC is not goint directly back into the market.

I doubt many indepenant ratters are earning 10M/hr, a few yes, but the majority are probably 2-3M NIC per hour, which is about what indy earned in the GTriangle. And independant NIC does go into the market.

So, while plasma may be generating more NIC now, the general economy/market is probably not going to see inflation; at least until the population increases dramatically.

Side note: Corps usually have very large wallets, if this NIC were to all flow into the market, that could cause inflation. Which goes back to the issue of not having any large NIC sinks for corporations.

But how much inflation?

First, lets make sure we are all taking about the same thing;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

The amount of NIC in the system is only indirectly related to inflation. The proposed relation, I assume, is that if players have more NIC demand on the market will increase.

If supply remains the same, but demand increases, then prices will rise. The change in pricing over a period of time is then inflation or deflation as the case may be.

The kicker here though, is we have a fixed number of goods that can be bought and sold.

So, although the NIC supply in the system increases, it will hit a ceiling where demand stops increasing because of market saturation.

A few players with large NIC balances will not cause inflation. Inflation is caused when everyone has excess NIC which they are willing to spend on items at ever increasing values.

When too much currency is added to an economy, inflation occurs. Plasma causes inflation.

All it's going to mean is that the people who know how to farm effectively will be considerably more influential (Even if only behind the scenes) because of the much larger capital.

I know there are people out there that individually have more assets than the entire corp they are in.

What it means in the short term is that the market is a risk. Put thing too cheap and someone just buys them out and re-lists them higher or produces something so cheap that very few can compete.

But that's life. New players get priced out of the market and have to rely on over-supply to keep prices down which doesn't happen because there is more than enough to keep every supplier busy or risk their enemies will buy cheap stuff so they avoid the direct market all together.

All it means is that assets are worth more than NIC but I see the opposite happening. When you do find something that is supplied the price is pretty low compared to about 12 months ago.

When we had triangle inflation (many items selling for double the prices they are now), the prices of all ores went down for some reason, but the prices of all goods was way up.

Any theories on this? Shouldn't the price of ore/commodities go up with inflation instead of down? After the triangle was ended, all prices on ore went up slightly and many items deflated price 50%.

correct me if I am wrong, but except missions, plasma buy orders are the ONLY other NIC faucets in the game. since we do not have direct NPC bounties, the general PvE crowd has no other income.

all other loot is regulated by player demand.

I don't think plasma was a good idea at all.
In my opinion, money should be gained through a missions.
Missions should be as much dynamic as possible.
Missions should be tied to global game state, f.e. current state of war with NIAns.

Profit: reasonable NIC grinding.
Negative part: You will be not able to grind stupid mob spawns for plasma anymore.

I've seen this many times in WOW markets, where someone buys up all the Iron, for instance, then turns around and sells it at a higher price.

This works as long as the buyer can afford to purchase the lower incoming iron sell orders, forcing buyers to pay thier prices, and the demand for iron continues long enough for them to realize a return.

In the case your talking about, the buyer had basically unlimited NIC, so there wasn't ever any risk of running out of capital to purchase Epitron; but that was an exploit and not normal market operation.

In the current market, without exploits, there are still players with very large wallets that could, if they wanted, drive the price of anything up. Epitron is now more freely mined, with the open Islands, T4 modules can be produced by many more players, and ore/plants are plentiful.

About the only thing out there to manipulate woudl be Norgalis, but even then if prices get too high players can plant that on alpha too.

tl;dr- Currently the market is too small for any large scale manipulation to be 'worthwhile'. Even if someone managed to raise the cost of an item, the demand would just fall off as other non-market sources where tapped. The only 'losers' would be new players without access to auxillary resources.