Jita Park Speakers Corner

If I can ask a stupid question? What is the "PLEX Market?" Does it concern the strategies for controlling the ISK price of PLEX, and keeping it within a desired range? Is it about the real money price for PLEX? Is it about the alternative uses for PLEX: AURUM, resculpting, and dual character training? Finding more alternative uses? All of the above? None of the above? Some of the above? :-D

I'll throw one thought out on the table for the dogs to sniff:

Have CCP considered increasing the granularity of PLEX in order to fine-tune the value offerings?

For instance, instead of a single 30-day PLEX for your $19.99 (or 2 for your $35 GTC), what if you got 30 1-day PLEXes

This would then allow more gradiated pricing for PLEX-priced services - like character transfers which currently cost either $20 or 2 PLEX - and make it viable for CCP to offer much more minor services for PLEX.

It would also allow players greater flexibility to pay for game time through in game needs. A player currently needs a minimum ~550M ISK to extend his game time. Breaking the PLEX down to 1-day increments would (naively) reduce that minimum to about 18-19M ISK.

(It would be trivial to set a 30-day minimum to reactivate an account in order to prevent "hours for PLEX" abuse")

This is a good idea and I would support it. Or, heck, if CCP wanted to, you could even combine PLEX and AUR: 30 AUR can be converted either way to one PLEX, one AUR can be spent to extend your gametime one day (or your subscription is just counted in AUR, much the way certain 'minutes' in cell phone plans can be 'spent' on texts).

To clarify - are you suggesting Plex turns into a 24-hour product, and all existing plex would be converted into that format?

Or are you suggesting two types of plex, 30-day and 1 day?

I do think there is value for 1-day plex, but looking at it from CCP's perspective, I'm sure they'd rather sell a "30-day" to someone who only needs it for a day than a "1-day plex" to more people.

A counter to this would be inflated prices for a "1-day", where if multiplied by 30, would be something like 1.5x the cost of a 30-day.

People who buy PLEX for ISK buy them from other players, not from CCP. CCP can simply continue with their current model of selling 30 days for $19.99; the only thing that would change in game would be that when the purchaser redeemed their PLEX he would get a stack of 30 1-day PLEX. Which he could then subdivide into 7-day, 14-day, x-day stacks as suited him and seemed likely to give the best ISK return for his investment.

Since most PLEX are used by people to maintain an account indefinitely, in-game, the price needn't change very much. They'll just buy a stack at the price that's right, apply that stack and carry on.

In short, there's no need to enforce any price differential for 1-day and 30 day PLEX, any more than there's a RL need to give people a bigger sandwich for paying with a $100 bill instead of 100 $1 bills. The increased business you see from being able to sell a sandwich for less than $100 more than compensates for the trivial extra administration overhead.

You didn't know this?

CCP would have to somehow stop the AUR they gave away being used for this, or basically accept a massive reduction in income for 6 months.

I'm fairly certain that they gave away a total of 5500 AUR, so it wouldn't really be "massive reduction for six months."

At Ali's proposed rate of 30 AUR = 1 day, 5500 AUR = 187 days.

The current ingame exchange rate is 1 PLEX -> 3500 Aurum or thereabouts. There are also 1000-Aurum tokens. It makes sense to me that CCP would allow exchange with taxes, such that 4 x 1000 Aurum tokens can be redeemed for 1 x PLEX. This also paves the way for redeeming 1000 Aurum for 7 days of game time directly from the 1000 Aurum token.

Thus CCP wins, apart from the 1 month free time that players might get from the extant free Aurum, and associated market no sense. This could be mitigated by putting time limits on redemption of wallet Aurum to Aurum tokens (e.g.: one per month).

And then we open up the DUST/EVE economy so eggers and dust bunnies can exchange Aurum, ISK, or items as part of attack/defense contracts (items including PLEX, Aurum tokens).

So we get a once-a-month option to liberate Aurum from our wallet in the form of a 1000-Aurum token. Then LP or NeX stores (why aren't they the same infrastructure?) allow trade of 4 x Aurum token for 1 x PLEX in any quantity. Which can then be redeemed for 3500 Aurum directly in your wallet. Allow all the physical items to be traded, and allow Aurum to be used as a currency in contracts (in EVE and DUST and crossing between economies).

But I have probably left gaping forex holes in that scheme. I hoped to address the issues by implicit taxation, since we can't liberate ALL of our free Aurum, we can't liberate the 5500 all in one go, and there will be a more granular currency than 1 PLEX.

I don't see why CCP would reduce the PLEX prices of services to some number of Aurum tokens. The current prices are all free money for them, and the prices re set that high to reduce demand for the service in the first place.

With this in place, expect the price of PLEX to skyrocket. Just like the prices skyrocketed when PLEX were introduced, allowing speculation on game time.