Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The price of PLEX is constant - $19.95US with volume discounts and occasional sales.
The value of PLEX is constant - 30 days of game time

PLEX can be traded for ISK which allows wealthy players to pay for their game time with ISK but every PLEX was originally paid for with real money - including the PLEX being held by the New Eden Central Bank (confiscated from banned players)

In general new players tend to purchase PLEX from CCP and trade it for ISK to fund their in game activity. Older players want to purchase PLEX in game to fund their subscription.

The balance between these forces controls the price of PLEX - fewer new players means fewer new PLEX entering the market which results in competition and higher prices for the existing inventory.

To me, this looks like a healthy market working properly. If CCP breaks the link between PLEX and real world currency - how do you expect them to meet their payroll?

Really? Because your OP certainly looks like it's suggesting CCP take steps to reduce the value of PLEX because

Speculation against the 'poor sods' is what causes the bubble to pop. I have no doubt that people are pushing up their sell orders for PLEX each day to see if they can squeeze a few extra million out of their USD purchase. As the price goes up you'll eventually get so high that not all the PLEX are being sold any more. People who are only looking for a quick ISK injection will drop the price and the bubble will burst.

Maybe that puts the price back in the reach of 'poor sods' again, maybe it doesn't. And short of having NPCs sell PLEX directly for ISK, CCP can't directly control that.

As several have pointed out, if you want to drop the price of PLEX you need to increase the supply. There's a couple of ways you can try to do that but your OP isn't one of them. Petition CCP to drop the price of a PLEX a few dollars if what you really want is to see the ISK value drop.

So when you said
It wasn't the higher prices that bugged you, it was purely the principle of a flawed system.

And you are unhappy with speculationbecause it's keeping the price... down?

Of course, it's only natural to not want prices to fall when you're concerned about

Wait... sorry, you have the falling PLEX price listed under cons
I must be mistaken.

Okay, so I had this long post written, but then I thought, "No, too long winded and the point will get lost." So a shorter post with a question at the end.

First off, noting something is "always in demand" is not enough to induce speculation of ever increasing prices. Forks are always in demand, but we see little speculation there. Oil has lots of speculation though, and it too is also "always in demand". As such the "always in demand" is kind of a poor answer since it is common to a commodity that has little speculation and a commodity with lots of speculation.*

So what other factor is causing people to speculate that the price of PLEX will over time increase?

*The reason why there is speculation in the oil market is due to the things like supply shocks. Oil is prone to large and hard to predict supply shocks. Damage to a major pipeline, a hurricane, or the like can all send prices up quickly. The market for forks on the other hand is unlikely to have major supply or demand shocks. And by shock I mean a random event that is difficult to predict.

I disagree, it is that the amount of ISK entering the game and almost surely a large percentage of it flowing into the PLEX market.

The growth of the money supply in Eve is shocking, IIRC something like 1 trillion a month (net of sinks). We should be having massive inflation. The thing is we don't...except in the PLEX market.

Edit: Thanks for the kind words. And my post was kind of long and rambling, probably because I'd write something, leave the PC, come back and write more.

In fact the prices would more than likely go up RIGHT NOW or very soon, because around here that's how the stations treat the gas. The price might go up, so therefore we need to get ahead of the curve now! PLEX is never going back down unless CCP fixes it, new players that can't subscribe will never want to keep playing a game that costs them 300 hours a month in game to keep playing it next month (until skills catch up to increase their revenues), existing players that PLEX will "slowly" start trailing off [exponentially I might add], and owners of PLEX are never going to undercut their possible profits on such a hot selling item.

I find it highly unreasonably to say that your 1 hour of real life work is worth so many of mine in game. If I didn't have such important things to do in EVE I'd already have left when it went over 750-800m range. I've already cancelled off my other 4 accounts due to CCP's plex price negligence, kind of hate to cancel the last two just because it costs 12 billion isk per year per account to play EVE. Oh that's 12b a year right now. I expect it's really going to have cost me about 20 billion per account for this year by the time January 1 hits.

Here is the thing, people trade off their time between labor and leisure. And when it comes to paying with PLEX vs. paying with RL money it is also a trade off as well. You are basically saying you value 12 billion isk more than the $131.40 it would cost you to pay with RL money. That's fine, but there is a big problem here. This puts an implicit value on your time depending on how much ISK you can earn/hour in game. For example, if you can earn ISK at a rate of 100,000,000/hour the implicit value of that hour is $1.10/hour. Even if PLEX prices were to magically drop back down to 400 million ISK and you would happily PLEX an account that implicitly implies you value that time at about $2.75/hour. Granted there is the "it's a game and is supposed to be fun factor", but still this suggests you place a very low value on your time. Of course, maybe you make ISK very fast, maybe is it at a rate of 400 million/hour and you thus value your time a $11/hour.

Stop buying PLEX. If you are unwilling to pay the RL money costs...well sorry. But nowhere does it say you have a right to play this game via PLEX. You are not entitled to having your game time subsidized. And even if CCP were to say set a price cap, PLEX prices can go no higher than 500 million...you may still not be able to play. Because some people who currently buy PLEX and sell them may just stop figuring it isn't worth it anymore. Price caps/ceilings invariable create what is known as excess demand--i.e. demand is greater than the supply, but prices cannot rise to restore equilibrium.

And yes, the PLEX price in game suggests that yes, 1 hour of my RL time is worth considerably more than your 1 hour in game. I'll never PLEX my accounts. My time is to valuable for that given my sources of in game income (i.e. I don't want to spend more than 1-2 hours a month earning a PLEX...I can't with my current sources of in game income, so I wont PLEX my account) and my RL income (and no I'm not saying I make a ton of money, just that I make enough so that I don't want to spend so much of my free time grinding ISK to pay for a PLEX). Instead, I just pay with real world money.

Sorry, if this post annoys or upsets you...I'm just taking your statements and showing you what they mean implicitly from my view.

Oooh, I missed this comment. Yes, this could be one solution. The thing is though, if it is ISK entering the economy and going almost directly into the the PLEX market it might not work...at least not that well. Or your sink might need to be substantially larger.

Also, ISK sinks can be avoided, or people can seek to avoid them. For example, taxes...nobody likes paying taxes and the higher taxes go the more of an underground economy you'll get. My guess is that currently the underground economy is rather small.

Anyhow, while increasing ISK sinks could help, reducing the ISK sources would still be necessary.

"as per CCP" - CCP already opened that can of worms, they allow you to pay for game time and select goods, with an in game item, which can only be put into the game by being purchased with real world dollars. Once in-game that item can be traded for "real world" services.

Did you not read the post you responded to or are you saying it is all a lie - CCP don't accept plex as payment, they didn't give a "monetary value" of the donated plex to the charities.

The primary things helping to keep plex prices high - The cost in "real world value" of a plex - Whether that cost be time spent "earning" it in game, or $$$$ spent buying it from CCP.

Would you buy plex from CCP if it was being traded for 100 million isk on the in-game market?

If plex were being sold at 50% off, how many do you think CCP would sell? - Would flooding the in-game market with 50% off plex have any affect on its "real world value". Yes it would, by reducing CCP's earnings from plex sales - it has a real world value.

The price plex is brought and sold for IS its "real world value" and is initially set by CCP as real world income.

Can Plex be used to purchase something you can use outside of New Eden, giving it a real world value - Yes it can
You can quite easily work out the "real world value" of a plex ( as set by CCP) - Go to the fanfest booking site, or is Fanfest an in game item?


NB; 1 Plex is more valuable in "real world value" to me than it is to a resident of the US.
1 Plex for a US resident cost $19.95
1 Plex for an AU resident currently costs $27.06

Seriously ? You believe the ability to call police is a valid comment to twist the facts?
Try refuting the facts with facts - Show me how plex has no real $ value, when the company that sells them places a real dollar value on them.


I wonder why, after B-R there was a cost in plex = $ associated with the battle, when plex has no $ value? What was it, 350k USD worth of ships destroyed, based on the cost of plex to replace them?
But your saying plex has no real world value in monetary terms so how did they reach that figure?