Assembly Hall

As said above this would be a significant disadvantage for people who don't have access to market hubs. ATM I can keep 1 alt on one account in The Forge and buy PLEX for all my accounts.

You can add your plex to game time remotely from assets window no matter where it is.

In other words it is enough, if one of the characters in an account goes to corner of any region where plex is available in market. This has to be done only once in a month given that you buy only one plex at the time.

Sellers are still free to value their plex as they want and modify/cancel the sell orders.
Buyers are still free to set up buy orders or choose the place they buy their plex from.

Only real difference would be that when you do buy a plex, you commit to add it to your game time right away or later in the future. You will be unable to resell or redistribute that game time to anyone else or play market games with it.

I think we should artificially raise inflation on plex pricing...Oh, wait.

^This. Wild fluctuations in plex prices = unstable player base = bad for CCP's bottom line.

The whole point of PLEX is that it is a tradable item which the market will set a price for. The "bound to account on ISK purchase" item is the GTC. Once PLEX were introduced, the prices of PLEX and GTC increased: whether this was due to a general increase in the consumption of PLEX due to the ease of purchase, or due entirely to market manipulation is irrelevant.

It might be worth a statement from Dr. EyjoG about whether the introduction of PLEX increased the number of people buying game time with ISK. Perhaps a re-issue of the PLEX Devblog, showing purchase/use of PLEX and GTC from about three months before PLEX were introduced? Even at the time of that devblog, PLEX usage was increasing linearly over time.

The long term trending of PLEX is due to demand, not manipulation.



Probe launchers are not scourge missiles either: they have non-combat utility. Shuttles have non-combat utility. Many skill books have no utility in combat. PLEX are the same: they have non-combat utility, the closest EVE has to a purely speculative trade item.

Plex is gametime. Valdspar is valdspar. Wild fluctuations in valdspar price =/= unstable player base, which wrecks havoc on mmo. Learn the difference.

I can tell you from first- and second-hand experience that fluctuations in PLEX prices are met by players finding more ISK to buy those PLEXes with. In some rare cases, people will let alts go dark for a month while they grind up the ISK to buy that next PLEX. In the meantime, PLEX sales and consumption continue to rise steadily as more people realise what a challenging game the play-to-pay lifecycle is.

A rise in the price of PLEX from 300M ISK to 500M ISK simply means a couple of extra hours of Incursion time are spent paying for game time, so the acquisition of shiny ships has to slow down a little (after buying the Nightmare this week, I might have to wait an extra week before I can buy a Nightmare for the alt too - she won't be able to fly it for a month anyway, so no great loss there).

If the value of a PLEX is a significant proportion of your regular in game income, you are playing to pay with some other activities on the side. You are directly competing for PLEX with people whose main goal in EVE is playing to pay.

To put it into perspective: the mission-ganker who manages to loot half a dozen officer modules per month is not playing to pay — they are rolling in ISK, and trading ISK for game time is a perk. The low sec pirate who resorts to mining or incursion running in order to raise the ISK to pay for PLEX is playing to pay.

You're confusing PLEX with game time. That's the actual issue.

PLEX are a tradable commodity, just like scourge missiles. Game time is not tradable: once it's applied to your account you can't sell it to someone else for ISK. PLEX can be used to impact the game, just like scourge missiles can be used to impact the game.

That is exactly my point. How can "service", in this case "game time" be an "item" what you can use to impact sand box game.
The goal of PLEX is to give someone possibility to pay someone else's game time and gain in game currency in the trade. There is really no need to add any more variables to the equation.

If you want play more complex market games, there is plenty of real in game items available.
Only _direct_ supply and demand should apply to plex price and that happens if there is no "investors" in the equation.

- Because people make profit by trading with "service", an imaginary item which can not be generated in game but what some individuals still need to stay on-line.
- Because plex can not be generated in game, normal in-game supply and demand rules do not apply.
- Because supply is limited and not in-game dependant only way to guarantee that supply/demand price stays in "correct" level is to keep investors out from the equation.
- Because X amount of unused plex end up to some random hangar where they may be next 5 years and no-one know will they fund X amount of separate currently subscribed active accounts in the future or are they potentially gone for good. CCP has very hard time trying to predict how many subscriptions they will keep/loose because of this.

I can not find any positive thing market manipulation could do to this service, except increase the wallet size of people who try to justify the case.

edit:
...and I think I'm done with this subject now. If you don't want to agree with me, don't... You got right for your opinion.