Player Features and Ideas Discussion

We currently have an unfortunate feedback loop with players hoarding and manipulating the price of plex, which imo decreases subscriptions and overall game content. The solution I submit is to bind plex to the first account that purchases it on the in-game market. This would allow for players to convert real money to ISK while eliminating the manipulation and the hoarding. The plex could still be donated to other players or consumed normally, but trading/hauling etc would have to be disallowed in order for this idea to work.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to put a ship in harm's way today :)

But this will limit supply, and thus push prices further and further up...

see, this here was your first mistake.

Do you have a single piece of evidence to back this up?

How?

People still need PLEX for all the usual reasons, and preventing the guys who have piles of them from actually servicing that demand is not going to do nice things to the prices.

At all.

Your friend who made 40 bill off of PLEX sure as hell didn't service the demand right...

-1 - plex prices are a player issue and we as players are the ones that can and should change it.

Personally I rather enjoy the plex prices I get a lot more in game for my $15.00 than I ever have in the past and that is really nice since my taste in ships has gotten rather expensive in the last few years.

If you are really all that concerned about hoarding and manipulation then you better spread your nets significantly wider.

Nul sec groups hoard and control access to many of the materials needed to produce T2 and T3 ships. By hoarding and controlling these they are manipulating the market and driving prices higher. Same can be said for the WH groups and the sleeper materials that are crucial to some ship productions so we need to get rid of that as well. Why are you only concerned with plex prices?

There is always plex on the market to buy so there is not a supply problem.

Setting all of that aside your idea ignores a fundamental fact of a free market.
Seller will raise prices as high as the markets will bear, so it is those who are buying plex who are driving the costs ever higher. So this brings the EvE market tip of the day, if you want lower plex prices then you need to get as many people as possible to stop buying plex and the prices will drop.

For what it's worth, PLEX are 1.25 bil. They haven't been 990 mil in ~4-5 months.

Your friend is exactly why we let PLEX be bought and sold amongst players.

If you want to see what happens to raw market manipulation, you can still see last November's selloff in the market history. Your friend will probably be less smug when he watches 20% of his PLEX hoard's value vanish in the space of 72 hours.

Your accusations of manipulation are missing the actual piece of information that lets us know whether or not there is an imbalance in PLEX consumption.

In general, we need to know:
A) How many PLEX are being created: bought for $, through subscription links and hacked into existence by rogue CCP employees.
B) How many PLEX are being destroyed: converted to game time, Aurum, multiple training and PLEX tanking.

From that we can say:
If A > B then prices go down.
If A = B then prices stay the same.
If A < B then prices go up.

If those rules aren't being followed, then it's market manipulation and somebody's in for a bad day when the market corrects.

--Edited!
Also, actually profiting 40B ISK off flipping PLEX requires selling hundreds of them, as they've only gone up something like 100-120M over the last 4 months. More likely their actual profit per unit is less than that, so that's going to be 500+ PLEX held. I'm not going to begrudge somebody who would otherwise be liquid to the tune of 500B ISK a profit of ~8% in 6 months on their investment.

You realize that this would utterly destroy the PLEX market and make it all but impossible for the players who keep their subscriptions going by paying ISK for PLEX to keep playing, right?


Not just no, but hell no. Market manipulation is part of the game.

-1

Not supported. I buy plex in game on occasion when I don't feel like going through alt reactivation by cc, however I use a purchasing alt account because I'm paranoid, then trade them in game to sit in inventory until needed. Sometimes hrs for plex gets you in the game and fleeted up a lot faster than entering info and going through the buggy cc verification.

I don't want that particular purchase in my main account history, for my own reasons.