Inflation & Changing Ship Selections

An interesting thought crossed my mind tonight while updating some market orders. Its getting to be pretty common knowledge that there has been some massive inflation in New Eden over the past year. Jester wrote a great post about the potential stagflation that could occur over the next year, and if you haven't read it you should check it out. Besides the obvious market impact of inflation, I began to think that it could have a significant change on what people choose to fly over the next year or so.

I've never really been one to fly very expensive ships. For the first two years in Eve, I missioned for everything I had. Its not a great experience, and I wouldn't recommend it to most people. Even with a pimped out Kronos or Machariel, I couldn't make much more than 40-60 million isk per hour. That's not bad, but it makes losses sting a lot when a fitted Drake translates to an hour of your life spent missioning. Since I started trading though, isk is much less of a problem. As a result, I'm much more inclined to fly something in the couple-hundred-million-isk range. Let's take a look at what that buys you, now and last summer.

Last year, a Dominix was 50 million isk. With the current levels of inflation, you're looking at closer to 90+ million, and all of that is before fitting. This is characteristic of all T1 ships. Not every curve is quite as sharp as the Dominix, but its the same general trend. Starting around the November/December time frame, all prices started to rise.

 

The same meteoric rise hasn't occurred as uniformly for T2 ships however. Its not really worth posting a graph because there is so much variance between ships, but suffice it to say that inflation hasn't affected them as strongly. The interesting thing that comes out of this is that T2 ships are becoming less of a mental obstacle in terms of price. T2 frigs can be fit for around 30-40 million, max. T2 cruisers are well under the price of many battleship fits at this point. This is all due to the fact that mineral speculation is driving up the cost of many ships and moon goo is not driving up T2 prices in the same fashion. I'm curious to see if more pilots begin flying T2 more regularly. I know I will for PvP outside RvB. The relative shift in prices will almost certainly drive up usage on all T2 ships.