EVE General Discussion

Lin I understand the points your trying to make, for the most part, I agree.

However

One of the major draws to eve, in my opinion, is the possibility that if you make enough isk, you can play the game for free by buying plex. But the plex has to come from somewhere, and it's not coming from some npc service, it's coming from someone who paid for it with actual money. Likewise, when someone buys plex, there's no galactic bank of eve to cash in your plex for isk, you need an actual willing player to buy it off of you, and the fact that people continue to buy plex hints that people for the most part have no problems with this exchange, or at the very least think it's somewhat fair. It is players after all that determine how much plex is worth.

Now yes, there are people who blow hundreds of dollars buying tons of plex, selling it and go roll around in a pool of monocles in their officer fit nightmare, but there's also the person who's too lazy to grind the missions for the isk to buy the hac he just got the skills to pilot, or the people who are just bad at managing or making isk in general. But in the end, their paying to give someone else a free ride on their dollar. No isk is being generated, just circulated, while very real wallets are emptying.

And for those that are rolling around in monocles in their officer fit ships, the fact of the matter is that while you can essentially "buy" ships and modules, something that you cannot "buy" is capability, or ̶s̶k̶i̶l̶l̶p̶o̶i̶n̶t̶s̶ (I'm a moron). A group of players, or even a single one, can still blow your trillion dollar butt out of the sky in ships that cost a small fraction of your own.

I'm sorry I dragged this out, I'm not the greatest at organizing my thoughts. I just wanted to say that, while yes, you are kinda right, there's another side to things, and people buying plex has the potential to benefit more than just the person who paid for it.

Edit: Whoops, completely forgot that you can "buy" skillpoints by buying a character.

It depends on how you look at 'pay to win', everything in eve can be brought with nothing more than a subscription and if your good enough at eve in terms of making isk you dont even need that. That doesnt mean you couldnt buy your way to the top either as you can buy countless PLEXs to buy a very high skillpoint character on the character bazaar and oodles of isk to go with it but it still doesnt mean they'll have the experience gained in that time training that character as countless faction fitted faction battleship killmails with terrible fits have shown over the years...

Most of my points have already been made, but it seems a clarification is needed.

The simplest way I can understand it is that while traditional Pay 2 Win setups act at the expense of other players, PLEX and alts (which can theoretically be powered by PLEX) actually offer value to both sides of the equation. The $ PLEX buyers get ISK to reduce their grind, while the ISK PLEX buyers get their play-time paid for by in-game money. $ buyers can only get as much as the ISK buyers will support/demand.

This is facilitated by the fact that PLEX is sold on an open market, rather than being used to acquire otherwise unobtainable and combat relevant equipment. Because both sides benefit, neither side is really offended.

No your paying to get your ship blown up eventually there is no such thing as pay to win in eve as that would indicate being able to get a over powered item you couldn't get in the game unless you pay RL money for it that will give you a huge advantage over everyone else such as a mod. that give you a 99.99% resist in everything or a battleship doomsday auto cannon that can do 30k damage every 3 sec. from 300km away.

Now does alts give a player an advantage as far as skill training yes it does since you can specialize each one in certain areas for example this is the only account I have and I got him mostly trained in pvp skills but also trained up in industrial,mining and tradeing aswell now if I would of made a alt and focused my main on pvp and my alt on trade my skills would be alot higher in both those areas.

Same applies to ALTs - having them is pretty convenient (as in nearly every other MMO I ever played) but I can't see how they should be an 'I win'-button. Dual-boxing is hard, multi-boxing even harder.

I'm ok with that, now what do you think if I just get my credit card out of my pocket and get enough plex/convert it in to isk to buy that new Cloacky Basilisk, am I paying for the win or not?

The border line is crossed the moment you can buy in game currency with real money, doesn't matter if it's 5 bucks or 1000.
Now let me turn this in to your own words and tell you for sure not everybody can afford to buy plex for in game currency, but can use in game currency to buy plex and pay with it for gaming time.

The way it's done is a little proper than RMT sites since it's CCP who makes the transaction but is still pay to win, we can play as much as we like with words and use as much arguments as each one likes to support his own vision, but plex on it self is somewhat already pay to win.

What players don't like is the idea that real currency can buy items you couldn't have any other way in game just by playing, and it's a fair statement, however it's well known only a few can afford to buy unique ships giving tremendous advantages over every one else and this doesn't bother any one (in game currency having a real money value, therefore they pay for an advantage most can't afford to and it's exactly pay for the win, like it or not)

On topic:
-when you pay real money to buy some Command or T3 boosting alt, you're paying for the win.
-when you pay real money to buy some logistics or ECM alt you are paying for the win

These are just two examples how to use/abuse words to get a clear advantage with real money over majority of players you'll cross. So yes, pay to win already exists, those using it just don't like to talk about or will ever admit because it's not in their own interest this gets changed.