Telling you what you already know: The 1600 Index

Day 1,619, 03:03 • Published in USA Canada • by Wilhem Klink

Do you know what eRepublik lacks? A lot really, but it really needs a good financial index. You know, like the Dow Jones Industrials, or the S&P 500. Something we can just quote to show how well (or how poorly) the eEconomy is doing. While we all know how poor the economy is, wouldn't you be happier if you could address that in a number? I know I would.

For a while I've kept a Google spreadsheet with prices gleaned from the market at pretty much the same time every day (roughly 2:00 eRep time). Yeah, its based on one time per day, but its fairly consistent. Example: The following graph represents the cost of Q1 weapons (blue line) with a 5-day moving average of Q1 prices (red line).



If the 5-day moving average (again the red line) is above the blue line it means prices are trending down; if the 5-day moving average is below the blue, it means prices are trending upwards. As you might have already guessed, there's a whole lotta trending down over the past three weeks.

The 5-day Moving Average Chart for Q6 weapons looks fairly similar with the 5-day chasing the actual price steadily downward.



Rather than do a 5-day chart for every item, the crack staff here at 1600 Index decided to create an Index based off of Day 1600 prices. Why Day 1600 you may ask? A number of lame reasons, really: its a nice round number; its before prices went all pear-shaped; but really we just all felt it worked for us. The crack staff decide to equalize all the market items to a weighted standard. So a Q6 food price would be equalized to 6 Q1 foods. While this works evenly with food (there's no benefit of a Q6 food over 6 Q1 food other than inventory space) it bends a bit with weapons. Not only does a Q6 weapon last 6 times longer than a Q1, it hits 6x harder providing extra incentive over merely reducing inventory space.

With that limitation in mind here's the 1600 Index:



From that chart we can clearly see that while prices and wages have dropped gold has increased significantly (32😵 since Day 1600. Wages have dropped fairly steadily and are down 12.5%, Food prices, despite a small rally 1609-1610, have declined 16.4%, Weapons have a steady decline dropping to 19% off their Day 1600 price, while raw materials are off 40%.

What the graph doesn't show is the Q3 Training "Sale" starting on day 1618 which correlates to the huge jump in gold prices on that day (gold was up 13% on Day 1617). When the Q3 "sale" ends two days from now, we should see a drop in the relative price of gold. Or not. Time will tell.

Lastly, there are other ways to slice data to tell you what you already know. For example, the following chart shows the amount of weapons (standardized per hit) that 1 unit of gold would purchase.



So what can we gather from that? Since lower is better (if you are trying to sell inventory & buy gold, that is) Q6 weapons hold their value quite well, breaking from the pack more often than not. Curiously, Q4 weapons also seem to offer good value as quite frequently they are the lowest of the non-Q6s, offering their manufacturers (if one can call clicking on a button "manufacturing") the next best opportunity to make money.

That's all for this edition. There are lots of other ways to slice the data, but RL calls.

-Sic transit gloria mundi