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FanFest 2013: CCP PLEX market intervention

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D Nightklirik
Dark Forge Enterprise
#21 - 2013-06-05 07:13:03 UTC
There is literally zero difference between CCP running a PLEX sale which encourages people who would previously have bought X PLEX for Y money to buy 1.25 X for Y money and CCP just giving their market alt 0.25 X PLEX to right click sell. None. All PLEX are always created out of thin air, they are a virtual good, that is how they come into being. The only meaningful metric to measure PLEX by is their exchange rate with real money which is a rate CCP plays with when they want to seed more of them into the game.

The "we get them from banned accounts" thing was evasive, deliberately confusing and meaningless. They don't get the PLEX from banned accounts, it wouldn't make any sense, botters don't hoard PLEX, they get isk and then they sell it, what CCP do is get isk from banned accounts. If all they're doing to control the PLEX market is buy PLEX low and sell them higher then there are thousands of people in Jita already trying to help.

All PLEX have always been created out of thin air and CCP have been directly interfering in the PLEX market ever since they started running sales and that's the way it has always been.
RAW23
#22 - 2013-06-05 07:38:49 UTC  |  Edited by: RAW23
D Nightklirik wrote:


The "we get them from banned accounts" thing was evasive, deliberately confusing and meaningless. They don't get the PLEX from banned accounts, it wouldn't make any sense, botters don't hoard PLEX, they get isk and then they sell it, what CCP do is get isk from banned accounts. If all they're doing to control the PLEX market is buy PLEX low and sell them higher then there are thousands of people in Jita already trying to help.

All PLEX have always been created out of thin air and CCP have been directly interfering in the PLEX market ever since they started running sales and that's the way it has always been.


A few years ago, back before CCP had screwed up their business model by releasing Incarna and investing vast resources in questionable non-eve-related projects, they used to occasionally run activities that seemed designed to remove PLEXes from the game. The most noteworthy of these were the PLEX for good charity drives and they caused a lot of discussion about how PLEX fits into CCP's real world accounting. I remember a number of eve players, at least one of whom I knew to be a retired senior accountant in real life, suggested that whenever a PLEX is created it will appear on CCP's balance sheet as a liability. They pocket the money but the other side of that equation is that they have released into the wild an obligation to provide 1 month's gametime to whoever redeems the PLEX. I'm not entirely sure that this is right but it certainly seems plausible and would explain why CCP would not want to simply create PLEX out of thin air. It might also explain why they would want to get them off banned accounts and back into circulation rather than simply destroying the contents of banned accounts (accountant: 'So, I see your liabilities have dropped by a few thousand euros this month but I can't match that up to any increased income.'; CCP: 'Yeah. We had our Gamesmasters destroy our liabilities.'; accountant: 'Gamesmasters? Hmmmmmmm ....').

Edit - If I remember correctly, someone explained how PLEX would be dealt with by analogy to normal accounting practices used with tokens or coupons that can be redeemed for services.

Edit2 - Looking up the old threads, it seems the discussion was more equivocal than I remembered:

http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=1541148&page=4

http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=1538313&page=3#62

There are two types of EVE player:

those who believe there are two types of EVE player and those who do not.
D Nightklirik
Dark Forge Enterprise
#23 - 2013-06-05 08:07:46 UTC
Scenario one
1) Hey, we need to reduce the price of plex, let's create some obligations that we don't need to by handing out PLEX.

Scenario two
2) Hey, we need to reduce the price of plex, when people we normally sell obligations to get them let's give them some more for the same amount of money.

Both create obligations that CCP wouldn't have otherwise. It really isn't any different. Also I'm assuming CCP have concluded that if the price of PLEX gets too high people will unsub various alts etc and therefore keeping it low by running PLEX sales is worth the loss of income per PLEX for greater overall sales of game time.
RAW23
#24 - 2013-06-05 08:31:48 UTC  |  Edited by: RAW23
D Nightklirik wrote:
Scenario one
1) Hey, we need to reduce the price of plex, let's create some obligations that we don't need to by handing out PLEX.

Scenario two
2) Hey, we need to reduce the price of plex, when people we normally sell obligations to get them let's give them some more for the same amount of money.

Both create obligations that CCP wouldn't have otherwise. It really isn't any different. Also I'm assuming CCP have concluded that if the price of PLEX gets too high people will unsub various alts etc and therefore keeping it low by running PLEX sales is worth the loss of income per PLEX for greater overall sales of game time.


I'm not sure where you get the creation of new obligations when moving PLEX from banned accounts. They already exist and moving them from banned accounts provides the potential for them to be redeemed and removed from the books.

Edit - See Edit to previous post.

There are two types of EVE player:

those who believe there are two types of EVE player and those who do not.
X ATM092
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#25 - 2013-06-05 10:02:58 UTC  |  Edited by: X ATM092
I'm just not buying the "PLEX from banned accounts". I think it's much more likely some kind of unmentioned switch like "resources from banned accounts" is really meant here. Your typical bannable crimes are botting and isk selling. Your botter is either botting as a safer alternative to buying isk to fund his main in which case he probably has a monthly cash subscription or is plexing his account monthly out of his botting profits or is botting to RMT the isk in which case he plexes each month but would have no reason to hoard PLEX. Likewise the RMT seller isn't going to be hoarding PLEX which have a very obvious paper trial, he'd want to keep his isk in smaller cells due to the threat of being banned and would probably transfer it around through fake character bazaar topics or market mispricing scams. A big stack of PLEX being held for contracting to strangers just doesn't make sense.

While I'm sure some people were banned with a PLEX or two we're talking about thousands being amassed and dumped on the market with potentially thousands more being held back for future manipulation if needed. Either CCP banned someone with a huge stack of PLEX for some reason, or they're banning tens of thousands of people or what they really mean is that they used capital from banned accounts to acquire PLEX for their intervention.

I know what CCP said but I think they probably stretched the meaning of "we got them from banned accounts" to clarify that they didn't create isk or PLEX directly without specifying what they got. Doesn't add up any other way.


Also when I said creation of obligations I was comparing PLEX sales which stimulate the creation of extra obligations for the same amount of $ with creating extra PLEX during the time when sales aren't running to illustrate that there is no meaningful difference between the two.
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