Time is money?

One underlying assumption I have to make in order to do various calculations is to put a value on time. So I'm going to try and answer this basic question:

"How much is time worth in Eve?"

There are various ways of answering this. I'm going to examine the value in isk (the in-game currency) and dollars, which has the interesting side effect of allowing me to calculate an isk/dollar exchange rate.

One way is to look at subscription fees, which can be found here. This gives us an upper limit of $14.95 per month, and an upper limit of $131.40 per year. Most industrial processes in Eve (manufacturing, research and so on) are measured in hours, so let's convert to that. Note that for the upper limit I'm using the worst case scenario (28 day calendar month) and for the lower limit the best case scenario (366 day leap year).

• Upper limit: 2.22 cents per hour
• Lower limit: 1.50 cents per hour

Although this is useful, it's actually only useful for some calculations. The Eve server has downtime scheduled for one hour per day, so it is not possible to play 24/7. However, skill training and industrial processes keep going during downtime, so for the purposes of most of the calculations I intend to be doing, those are the right numbers.

I'd also like to be able to quantify time in terms of isk (the in-game currency). That's a bit more difficult, but since you can also buy game time for isk, we can do that calculation. However, like almost anything in Eve, game time is bought and sold in a free market, so the price fluctuates over time. Also, if you are buying game time using isk to buy PLEX (Pilot's License Extension) you can only buy 1 month at a time. It is possible to buy greater amounts of time using timecodes which can also be bought and sold for isk on the forums, but it's impossible to get good data from the forums whereas it's easier to get an accurate measure from the in-game market, so I'm going to base my calculations on the cost of PLEX.

That's what the market for PLEX looks like. Also, the lowest sell orders are 303m isk and the highest buy order 293m isk. So currently it's around 298m isk for 30 days (PLEX time is counted by days, rather than calendar months which is how subscriptions are priced). This gives us (at today's prices in the Sinq region):

413,889 isk per hour

We can see from the market graph that this is on a downwards trend, although there has been a slight uptick in the last few days.

Bureau de change

This can also effectively give us a dollar/isk conversion rate, in fact two different rates. Taking an average of the per hour rate calculated from subscriptions of 1.86 cents/hour and comparing that to 413,889 isk/hour we get:

$1 = 22.25m isk 

CCP also sells PLEX directly for $34.99, which gives this exhange rate:

$1 = 8.52m isk 

So which exchange rate should be used? CCP buys dollars in exchange for what ostensibly becomes isk at the latter exchange rate. For players buying PLEX, this is also the correct rate. For players buying subscriptions, they are on averge getting the better deal at a rate giving them game time worth 22m isk for the price of a dollar. Really I should do the calculation for each type of subsciption but this post is long enough already. Basic point is - subscriptions are better value than PLEX so if you are not struggling for real-life cash, then use real-life cash to pay your sub. You can play for "free" with PLEX but by the (somewhat artificial) measures economists use, it's worse value.

I am going to use the $/PLEX exchange rate for any real-money translations that I want to do, mainly because if you are a player considering some market activities such as trading and you want some in-game capital to get started, this is the rate at which you would purchase isk. It represents the dollar cost of buying your way into the in-game trade/industry/manufacturing activities. It's also a much simpler measure.

Incidentally, my own main character's current wallet has 2 billion isk (although there is more tied up in assets and investments) which gives my in-game wallet a dollar value of around $235. That's not a lot of wages for 5 years!

Note: Buying isk from isk-sellers is against the ELUA (End User License Agreement) and will get your Eve account banned. Also, I don't understand why anyone would buy isk from dodgy websites when you can buy it by purchasing a PLEX as described above. You risk a ban and having your Eve account hacked. Don't do it, kids. Srysly.