EVE General Discussion

Just pointing out one of the more obvious flaws in your argument.

Not everyone earns their ISK farming as many rats as they can in a day, or mining as much veld as they can take in per hour. In fact, none of the wealthier players in game do.

I think most of us that have been around for a while know the frequency where those who scam or infiltrate often earn 10's or even 100's of billions of ISK in a single day.
Or market traders/manipulators that can achieve similar results.
Or alliance leaders that over time dwarf the overall income of either one of the previous examples.

Your income in EvE is limited by how clever you are, and your personal skills, not hours per day or the number of skills you have accumulated over time.


As for the "winning" part of pay to win, how exactly do you pay to WIN in EvE?

Lets say you are a wealthy and somewhat unbalanced millionaire with nothing better to spend your money on than a video game.

Do you win by throwing money at large numbers of accounts and the hardware to run them simultaneously? If so then how do you win even then?

Do you form your own mining fleets to accumulate more wealth to win that way? No, your average botter that only paid for his first account with money will outstrip you in income easily AND know how to avoid getting caught.

Do you form a fleet of Titans and go take power by force? No, you'll lock horns with a player that runs a powerful alliance according to his whims (and who is likely not spending a dime of his own money on his accounts) who will crush you because he is a superior player (with superior personal skills) that enable him to direct other players to stomp you. He is also likely able to fund as many in game assets as you are, even with your throwing huge amounts of cash at the game. The end result is you simply feed him your money in losses/loot.

Perhaps you seek to control the market or related payouts like FW payouts, to the extent where you WIN at EvE. Except you'll always find someone better at it than you and he'll simply take your money without even tipping his hat... or has been shown you'll get so carried away that it comes to CCP's notice and they'll pull the plug on your operation.

You see, there isn't a thing you can purchase in game with money that I can't buy with ISK. To be perfectly honest, there isn't a thing you can buy in this game with money that I can't take away from you without spending a dime.

If you find you need to throw tons of cash at EvE to succeed it is only because you already lack the personal skills necessary to do so... and that won't change no matter how much money you invest... because there are plenty of people out there that can succeed better than you without needing to blow the cash.

The simple truth is, when you get good enough at EvE to make a "reasonably" sincere claim as to having "won" EvE , you are a good enough player to not NEED to spend real cash to do so.

Since when can you log in a trial on the same PC as a paid account at the same time? That used to generate a nice big message that said pay for both or GTFO.

No, but one person dualboxing that way is not functionally or ethically different than pay to win in any way.

Would it be pay to win if, CCP sold drones for AUR that lets you look through gates and see what's on the other side? Doing this exists in the form of paying RL currency for a second account, why not scale price/functionality down and give us these camera spy drones thingies that look like this.

My argument implied that a player is playing by themselves doing normal activities such as mining, FW, and missioning and can only earn so much isk in a given period of time.

If a player leverages other players to earn isk such as corporate taxes, scamming, or just getting players to donate massive amounts of isk. Yes they can earn more isk than a single player playing by themselves, but I guess my argument was that a player can simply use their real world wealth to create items that are valable to other players.

The plex is created through other player's real world wealth. That item has value and therefore gives them an advantage over other players who don't have that item which is why people pay large sums of isk for it.

Whether or not that player can leverage that advantage is up to them and is not always a sure thing which is why its not really a big deal as millionaires don't seem to play EvE (well if they do they don't seem to come out on the forums claiming they purchased $100,000 worth of plex).

I'm not arguing that they should do away with plex. I just want people to acknowledge that it does give some advantage.

It is as you say a short cut to scamming or getting other players to randomly donante you money.

In effect you are paying CCP to create high value items out of thin air to give you a slight advantage in playing the game.

Its not really a big deal and is better than the alternative of RMT.

No, but one person dualboxing that way is not functionally or ethically different than pay to win in any way.

Scamming and corp management takes somewhat skill, time, and effort to suceed at where creating plex just requires money.

That said, you are assuming that skilled players who once had time to learn the game now no longer have the real world time to keep up with the Jones so to say.

Imagine a college student who plays EvE 80 hours a week and is really good. Then he graduates, gets a job, starts a family, and he no longer has the time to play EvE, but he wants to keep PvPing a few hours on the weekend which of course results in ship losses.

Since he no longer has the time to mine or PvE he is purhasing Plex with the money he earns from his job. I've talked to plenty of people who do this.

He doesn't magically get less skilled because he plex's. There is no coerlation between Plex purchases and skill. None.

In that regard, what if an unemployed player who runs a major alliance (I'm not saying neck bears that run alliances are all unemployed basement dwellers but sometimes they can be) and has the world's highest KM ratio known to man because he plays 80 hours a week. What if he wins the lottery? He could use plex just as well as the employed person. Again, he is obviously a skilled player and even though he probaly has trillions of isk due to his alliance, he could still leverage plex if he wanted to. He might want to manipulate the market for example.

Simply saying people who buy plex are less skilled has no basis in reality. Of course they can be unskilled newbs, but there is nothing in the universe saying skilled players can't buy plex.

There were some unsubstantiated rumors that certain Russian alliances actually paid real money to other alliance FC's for them to FC their fleets because they needed the skill.

One could in theory use plex's to bribe other players if you were that rich.

Say 1 plex per every six months you follow my orders kind of deal.

I'm mean EvE isn't profuse with bribery (well I suppose there are mercs), but the potential is there for corruption.

I'd be willing to post whatever you want me to say in forums if you contract me a plex for example.

And you can't create plex in game no matter how many hour you play. You can purchase it with isk on the market, but its depedent on someone using real world money to create that plex. That is why real world wealth has a somewhat advantage over in game wealth.

Though no one has tried to bribe me yet, I'm sure people of high importance have taken plex under the table in negotations. Who wouldn't.

Well technically you just paid some one $20 to win at a game of risk. I'm pretty sure that is "Pay to Win".

People generally don't do that, but if you were Mr. Moneybelt you could.

I'm not arguing that EvE is actually pay to win absolutley. It's not really. It could be, but someone would need to go crazy with their lottery winnings and I can think of thousand things to do with millions of dollars before I would spend it on isk. I am just saying the potential is there.

Someone in theory could use money to gain advantage and that is pretty much pay to win somewhat. The might not technically have the highest KM ratio or even own a large player alliance, but someone could walk in and simply give themselves the advantage of 1 billion isk instantly where a normal player doing normal activiies would have to spend time at it.

Time is an advantage somewhat and if you don't have time to spare, leveraging plexes is a pretty good way to catch up.

Are plexes and absolute advantage? No they are not. There are many factors that give players advantages over each other and generating isk is one of them. Creating plexes to sell on the market is simply an advantage gained by using real world money.

Its like mining but istead of a mining ship you have your dollars and it creates plexes which you sell on the market just like ore.

The isk per hour of creating plexes is much greater than isk from mining. So in that respect plexes have a greater advantage isk wise than mining.

But like time, people do not have infinite money to spend so its not really a big deal that a player who uses plex's has an advantage. Someone who scams may get more isk per hour than both the average miner and plexer so in that instance the scammer has the advantage unless of course the plexer goes mad and buys $10,000 worth of plexes.

It is an advantage though.

That is what I am trying to convince people into seeing is that plexes favor thos with money in certain instances. Therfore is is midly pay to win and if was ever abused would result in a major game imbalance.

But truth be told, if a lotto winning player was smart, he'd just buy CCP instead of buying a million dollars worth of plexes and just dictate game policy that way.

Then you could say "He beat EvE".

All he did was create a pile of ISK that can be accumulated in game (in many cases very quickly depending on the resources available to you) and even more easily taken away from him.