EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi there,

I've started to play Eve few days ago, and I love it!
It's huge, has no limits and the audio/visual is nice.

So I decided to subscribe.

But then I've started to have doubts. As far, as I know you can buy PLEX for real money and then sell it for ISK. Isn't that spoiling the game economy? I've some bad experiences with other MMO's with that solution. Prices started to get crazy in short time.

Please tell me, that I'm wrong...:)

P.S.
And what the AUR currency is?

Also, because of supply & demand it is not possible to get infinite amount of ISK by selling PLEX. PLEX is only worth what others are willing to pay for it, and if many players start buying a lot of PLEX with real money and selling them for ISK, price of PLEX in ISK will drop because supply is greater than demand. (This has happened few times when CCP made PLEX-ads which caused more PLEX to be bought with real money.)

About AUR: AUR is separate ingame currency for NeX (Noble Exchange) shop which sells vanity items like clothes. You can exchange 1 PLEX for 3500 AUR. Price of items varies from 1000 AUR to 12000 AUR, so for new players they are far too expensive to even consider buying. Also, CCP is going to give some free AUR soon to all accounts (3rd and 4th reward from http://www.eveisreal.net/#!/sharing-rewards/) so if you do want something from NeX you might want to wait for that.

Note: I don't know if that free AUR is given also to trial accounts or only to paying accounts.

When the supply exceeds demand Sells drop Suppliers ajust the prices to increase sells the market ajusts the prices of PLEX PLEX becomes less profitable. It's a natural barrier that prevents abuse.

You not buying isk directly from CCP, you are selling the plex to a player that as a need for it. So you can't just buy thousands of plex and become Eve's top billionaire.

At the very best selling plex for isks will make ship losses more managable. 350M might look like much, but once you start loosing T1 BS or T2's that can evaporate very quickly.

Slightly offtopic, but since this is trial players section I want to add that buying or selling ISK for real money is against game rules and will get you into trouble.

Only exception to this is buying PLEX for real money and selling it for ISK which is what this discussion is about.

There are ways to earn a lot of ISK in short time. Selling PLEX is just one example, many scams are also extremely effective. But none of these changes the value of ISK since they just move ISK around and do not inject any new ISK into game.

It could be argued that some forms of botting (note: botting is against game rules) might be affecting value of ISK since they actually are injecting ISK into EVE, e.g. killing NPC pirates for bounties.

Also, if you are concerned about inflation, you could read price index dev blogs which are published regularly.
Latest is price indices - august 2011 (and I don't see any inflation there.)

And lastly, there is real economist working for CCP to analyze ingame market. So if there would happen to be serious inflation in EVE, I'm sure he would alert CCP to do something about it.

For any complex question there is a simple answer. And that answer is wrong.

If it would be so easy, why is there no inflation in the US with all those $$$ printed?

In EVE there are alternatives to print ISK (yes you can actually do that, the ink is kinda time consuming tho). And those alternatives are way more fun (to the hunter, they pray thinks different ofc). For any minute spend shooting NPCs there are 5 minutes of, well, mostly camping. But you can't fight without a good camp, can you?

There are further huge ISK sinks in the game. The return of investment on most BPOs is a *beep*ing joke. Any char will spend ISK on skillbooks. Have a look at the prices for the carrier skills.

And the most important factor is that there are plenty of idiots who spend their whole day in a belt. No ink there to be seen. But yet, they have to feed the sinks. Quite a lot of those quite the game, locking the goods away they spend so much time to get. One of those goods can even be ISK.

Or they just call it AURUM...

I wonder if it's noticable when it's a few dozen a day. So many people making billions of ISK with ratting, missions, incursions, insurances .. there's trillions of ISK spawning into the game every month.

Of course, there are also isk being destroyed every month. Ships and fittings that are destroyed in PVE and PVP are isk that are vaporized. They're gone and they're not coming back into the game economy.

I guess the only isk that are being created (as opposed to changing hands between players) are the isk from mining. Wait, and maybe agent rewards for completing missions. I suppose agent rewards and bounty prizes are isk that just spawn in-- i.e they're isk created out of thin air and injected into the economy.

It would be interesting to know what the overall isk created vs. isk destroyed balance is each month. Anybody ever see an sources on the EVE economy and how it really works?